(15) October Revolution: scope of the civil war

The Treaty of Breast-Litovsk in March 1918 was concluded at Lenin's insistence on peace. That insistence was partially political, because anger at the continuation of the war had been a major reason for the fall of the Czar's government in 1917 and then Kerensky's government later that year.

It was also plain realism. The Russian army had largely collapsed. They couldn't maintain the resistance against the German forces. It was a plain matter of national interest to cut their losses in a war that was clearly lost. The cost was high (Ralf Zerback, "Land in Blut and Feuer" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmach/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):

Die sowjetische Regierung schließt im März 1918 den erniedrigenden Frieden von Brest-Litowsk - mit dem Regime des kaiserlichen Deutschland. Es sind verfreundete Halbverbündete, ein Teil der Bolschewiki spricht von einem „unverschämten Frieden". Russland verzichtet auf Finnland, das Baltikum, Polen und die Ukraine - und damit auf ein Viertel der Bevölkerung, ein Drittel der Textilindustrie, drei Viertel der Eisen- und Kohleproduktion. Lenin will Frieden um jeden Preis, weil er ihn versprochen hat und weil die Armee auseinandergelaufen ist.

[The Soviet government concluded the humiliating Peace of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918 - with the regime of Imperial Germany. They are friendly half-allies, a portion of the Bolsheviks talk about a "shameless peace." Russia gave up Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and the Ukraine - and thereby a fourth of the population, a third of the textile industry, three quarters of the iron and coal production. Lenin wants peace at any price, because he had promised it and because the army has come apart.]

Zerback notes that 14 different foreign powers were intervening in the former Russian Empire during the civil war, including five thousand Americans along with some French and British troops. The opposition included 20 regional governments, who were unable to ever unite into a single command.

Given that the Russian population was exhausted by three years of war in 1917, it is remarkable that the Communist government was able to keep the war effort going to victory in the civil war. How they did it involved a combination of persuasion, inspiration and coercion. It included a Red Terror, which in that context meant giving a great deal of leeway for arrests and punishments to the government, on the model of the Terror during the French Revolution. "Terrorism" today generally refers to attacks on civilian noncombatants but the older meaning of state terror was much more familiar a century ago.

Trotsky, then the head of the Red Army, published a tract in 1920 called Terrorism and Communism, a polemic against a leading German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky, who was criticizing the Soviet government for dictatorial methods. Trotsky:

The man who repudiates terrorism in principle – i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism. ...

If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and continued for four years, in spite of democracy, brought about a degradation of morals and accustomed men to violent methods and action, and completely stripped the bourgeoisie of the last vestige of awkwardness in ordering the destruction of masses of humanity – here also he will be right.

All this is true on the face of it. But one has to struggle in real conditions. The contending forces are not proletarian and bourgeois manikins produced in the retort of Wagner-Kautsky, but a real proletariat against a real bourgeoisie, as they have emerged from the last imperialist slaughter.

Trotsky was engaging in a polemic within the socialist movement in the common vocabulary of that movement at the time. But he was making an argument that, in different terms, almost any governing party fighting for its government's survival in the middle of a civil war against both foreign and domestic enemies would make, that martial law or emergency measures would be justified. For that matter, any government in peacetime would use "suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed" opposition forces engaged in anti-government violence or imminent preparation for it.

That doesn't exhaust the very important question about the effect that the desperate circumstances and avowedly dictatorial measures to which the Communist government resorted immediately after the revolution and during the civil war had on the nature of the later peacetime government and, a decade and a half later, on the Great Purge. Such measures don't take place only in the abstract, but with very specific actions and decisions. The actions of the national police, the Cheka, during that time provide many specific targets for criticism. (The Cheka is usually referred to as the "secret police," though its existence was hardly secret.)

(13) October Revolution: the Big Three (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin)

Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better know to the world by the last name he adopted, Lenin, was by all accounts the most important leader of the Russian Revolution in the 1917-1922 and in the years leading up to it. Albert Resis in his biographical sketch of Lenin for the reliably staid Britannica Online (accessed 09/23/2017) writes:

If the Bolshevik Revolution is — as some people have called it — the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1916)

He fell seriously ill in early 1922, possibly due to the effects of a failed assassination attempt on him in 1918. By the end of that year, he was no longer active in leadership. A stroke in March 1923 left him without speech, and he passed away in January 1924 at the age of 53.

Spiegel TV has a two-minute video of silent clips of Lenin, apparently all from the time of the revolution, although it does not include commentary or captions: Lenin - Führer der Revolution.

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879-1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was one of the two major contenders for the Communist Party leadership, along with Josef Stalin, after Lenin's death. Trotsky advocated a different development policy and international political strategy than those identified with Stalin's commitment to "socialism in one country." Up until Trosky's death in Mexico at the hands of an assassin wielding a pickax in 1940, Trotskyism was the most important dissenting ideology that identified itself as part of the Communist left.

Leon Trotsky (1918)

In the later ideological disputes, Stalin and Trotsky and their partisans did their utmost to boost the importance of the one during the 1917-1924 period and to denigrate that of the other.

Trotsky had been a visible if erratic figure in the Russian revolutionary movement prior to 1917, sometimes finding himself in agreement with the Bolsheviks, other times not. He was the only one of the three who ever visited the United States, from January to May of 1917, when he returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in August. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a decisive role in directing troops loyal to the Bolsheviks in the October 25-26 (Old Style) seizure of power. He later became Foreign Minister responsible for negotiating peace with Germany and the leader of the Red Army during the civil war.

When Lenin fell ill in 1922, the Bolshevik leaders elevated a troika composed of Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev in preference to giving the central leadership position to Trotsky. Stalin had a established himself as the main leader by 1923, a status he retained until his death. In 1926, Trotsky would join with Kamenev and Zinovyev in what was called the United Opposition to Stalin. He was exiled from the USSR in 1929, and in exile formed the Fourth International, a collection of rival communist parties to those of the Moscow-led Third International.

Trotskyism has been a persistent strain in left thought ever since. Trotskyists are known for presenting themselves as the most uncompromising of revolutionaries while also at times taking positions that echo those of rightwingers and counter-revolutionaries. I once heard a useful definition which said that the Trotskyists are people who support revolution everywhere except where one is actually taking place.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin, aka, Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was named General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922, soon becoming the main political leader of the Soviet Union and remaining so until his death in 1953. Though he is widely remembered today as a villain, he was also one of the few most consequential political leaders of the 20th century, leading the USSR in the rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s and during what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. And his role during the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 has also been contested in great detail, both by his partisans and his enemies.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin

Stalin was from Georgia, then a part of the Czarist Empire. He studied at a Greek Orthodox seminary, where he became attracted to Marxist revolutionary ideas. Which were definitely not part of the seminary's preferred outlook! He joined the Russian Social Democratic party in 1898 and left the seminary the following year, devoting himself to revolutionary political activity. Among other things, he pulled off robberies to fund party activities, notably including a spectacular robbery of a shipment of money to the State Bank at Tiflis in 1907.

Stalin's role during the Russian Revolution itself was significant, though not as visible as that of Trotsky.

Uwe Klußman writes in "Der letzte freie Leser" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016:

Im März 1917, kurz nach dem Sturz des Zaren, schloss sich der aus der sibirischen Verbannung heimgekehrte Stalin in Petrograd seinen bolschewistischen Genossen an. Im April 1917 wählten sie ihn zum Mitglied des Zentralkomitees. In dieser Funktion bereitete er den Aufstand der Bolschewiki vor. So wurde Stalin Teilhaber der Macht, als Mitglied der von Lenin geführten Regierung, des „Rates der Volkskommissare". Dort war er zuständig für Nationalitätenfragen.

[In March 1917, shortly after the overthrow of the Czar, he [Stalin] joined up with his Bolshevik comrades in Petrograd after returning from Siberian exile. In April 1917, they voted him to be a member of the Central Committee. In this function, he prepared the uprising of the Bolsheviks. Thus Stalin became a holder of power, as a member of the government led by Lenin, of the "Council of People's Commissars." There he was responsible for nationality questions.]

In the Russian Empire, the nationality problems were extremely important ones. Russia ruled various non-Russian nationalities and was known as the "prison house of nations." During a stay in Vienna to acquaint himself with European Social Democracy, Stalin prepared his best-known theoretical work at the time of the Revolution, Marxism and the National Question (1913), in which he advocated for the right on national self-determination on the part of the nations of the Empire. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and various nationalist groupings made cause with the Whites in the civil war, they were forced to take a more, shall we say, nuanced view of those nationalist movements.

During Stalin's stay in Vienna for six weeks in 1913, two other men who would become major antagonists of his later in life: Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. There is no evidence that Stalin's paths crossed with the impoverished young rightwing fanatic Hitler, who was then living in a shelter for homeless men who had been surviving on the margins of society. However, Herbert Lackner ("Stalin unser" Der Erste Welkrieg-Profil History April 2013) recounts that that Stalin did meet Trotsky for the first time in Vienna at Trotsky's apartment at Kolschitzkygasse 30 in the Wieden district. In an account written many years later, in 1939, Trotsky described his first impression of Stalin as not very positive. It was also during his stay in Vienna that he started using the name Stalin, first as a pen name on an article of his that appeared in the newspaper, Der Sozialdemokrat.

Klußman writes further about Stalin's role in the Revolution:

Lenin schätzte Stalin als Multitalent der Machtsicherung. Während des Bürgerkriegs sandte die Partei ihn daher an verschiedene Frontabschnitte zwischen Perm am Ural und Petrograd. In Zarizyn an der Wolga, der Stadt, die später als Stalingrad weltbekannt wurde, zeigte er seinen rigorosen Führungsstil: Stalin ließ Getreide requirieren, Gegner hinrichten und Kritiker unter den aus der Zarenarmee übernommenen Militärberatern einsperren. Für seine militärischen Leistungen verlieh die sowjetische Führung ihm 1919 die höchste Auszeichnung, den Rotbannerorden.

[Lenin valued Stalin as a multi-talent for the securing of power. During the civil war, the Party sent him {Stalin} to different portions of the front between Perm on the Urals and Petrograd. In Tsaritsyn {Volgograd} on the Volga, the city that later would become world famous as Stalingrad, he showed his rigorous leadership style: Stalin had grain requisitioned, enemies executed, and critics among the military advisers taken over from the Czarist army imprisoned. For his military services, the Soviet leadership awarded him the highest recognition, the Order of the Red Banner.

Order of the Red Banner