The Military Revolutionary Committee in charge of the rising addressed an urgent appeal to Lenin: "Being unable to repulse the attacks of the united bands of the internal and foreign counterrevolution by our own forces, the Military Revolutionary Committee offers the government of the Russian Soviet Republic a fraternal alliance for the common struggle against world imperialism. We request. . . aid." Aid was quickly forthcoming. The Red Army overran Azerbaidjan and established the Azerbaidjan Socialist Soviet Republic.

Armenia came next. In late November of 1920 another Communist rising was contrived on the border between Azerbaidjan and Armenia, and again the Military Revolutionary Committee in charge invoked the aid of the "heroic" Red Army. On December 2, 1920, the new Armenian Soviet Republic was recognized by Moscow; it was badly shaken by a revolt in mid-February 1921, in the course of which the anti-Bolshevik rebels seized Erivan and a number of principal towns, but the Red Army again came to the rescue and saved the new Soviet regime.75

The events in neighboring Georgia were even more instructive, because a number of treaties (embodying the slogan "peaceful coexistence") had been signed with Moscow. In the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly, the Bolshevik party in Georgia had obtained 24,500 votes out of a total of 892,000 (about 3 percent). In 1918 Georgia constituted herself an independent nation with a democratic political system, a free press, and free elections. In 1920 the Moscow government recognized Georgia's independence, and on May 7 of that year a treaty was signed by the two nations which started as follows:

R.S.F.S.R. on the one hand, and the Democratic Republic of Georgia on the other, moved by a common desire to establish a firm and peaceful coexistence for the good of the peoples inhabiting their lands, have decided to conclude toward this end a special Treaty.

76

In this treaty Georgia's right of secession from Russia was elevated to the status of a holy principle, "first proclaimed" by Soviet Russia :

I. On the basis that all peoples have the right to free self-determination, even so far as a complete secession from the state of which they form a part-first proclaimed by R.S.F.S.R.-Russia unequivocally recognizes the independence and autonomy of the Georgian state and freely gives up all the sovereign rights which belonged to Russia as regards the Georgian people and land.

II. On the basis of the principles proclaimed in Article I of the present Treaty, Russia shall undertake to abstain from any interference in the internal affairs of Georgia."

The Georgian government also signed a secret supplement-obviously a precondition for the concluding of the peace treaty-which made Communist activities easy:

I. Georgia undertakes to recognize the right of free existence and activity of all Communist organizations throughout her territory, and in particular the right of free assemblies and free press (including press production).

In any case there shall be no judicial or administrative repression against private persons as a result of public propaganda and agitation in behalf of the Communist program or from the activity of persons and organizations working on a Communist basis.78

In May 1920 Georgia signed a treaty with neighboring Azerbaidjan, which had already been reannexed to Soviet Russia. In the same year foreign troops which had been occupying certain areas began to withdraw. On January 27, 1921, the great powers gave de jure recognition to Georgia.

Two weeks later the Red Army started its invasion. A Communist "Revolutionary Committee" issued a proclamation to the "workers, peasants, and all toilers of Georgia" in which it announced that it was seizing state power in Georgia. The small Communist groups of Georgia, which were not strong enough to overthrow the government, were aided by Red Army troops. On February 25, 1921, the Soviet army entered and occupied Tiflis, the capital. Sovietization of Georgia followed the suppression of the political parties; in December 1922, after a few transitional stages, Georgia was incorporated into the Soviet Union and the general economic, political, and police system was extended to cover the territory.

A strong popular uprising in Georgia which started in August 1924 was suppressed with exceptional severity and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of insurrectionists were executed."9

This, then, was the area of Soviet Russia in the ensuing relatively peaceful era, from 1921 to 1939. Having lost extensive areas in the West, Soviet Russia was still able to keep a number of subjugated nations under her rule and even to extend her realm in the East, at the borders of China and at China's expense.

The traditional Bolshevik theory of "national independence" and "right of secession" was not abrogated, however. Made ineffective inside Russia, it was to have a strong appeal for the nations of the East against the West and was to help in the disintegration of the other empires. Stalin was frank about this hypocritical course:

"D. Charachidzé, H. Barbusse, Les Soviets et la Géorgie, Préface de Karl Kautsky (Paris: Editions Pascal, n.d.).

We are for the secession of India, Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and the other colonies from the Entente, because secession in this case would mean the liberation of those oppressed countries from imperialism, a weakening of the positions of imperialism and a strengthening of the positions of the revolution. We are against the secession of the border regions from Russia, because secession in that case would mean imperialist bondage for the border regions, a weakening of the revolutionary might of Russia and a strengthening of the positions of imperialism.so

At the present time, however, when the liberation movement is flaring up in the colonies, that is for us a revolutionary slogan. Since the Soviet states are united voluntarily in a federation, the nations constituting the R.S.F.S.R. voluntarily refrain from exercising the right to secede. But as regards the colonies that are in the clutches of Britain, France, America and Japan, as regards such subject countries as Arabia, Mesopotamia, Turkey and Hindustan, i.e., countries which are colonies or semi-colonies, the right of nations to secede is a revolutionary slogan, and to abandon it would mean playing into the hands of the imperialists. 81

The annexation of the non-Russian areas and their subjection to control by agents of Moscow aroused a new wave of Russian nationalistic sentiment so strong that Lenin deemed it necessary to try to stop it. His statements made in this effort and his conflicts over it with some of his closest collaborators, Stalin among them, are referred to below.

7. The Civil War Ends

The civil war and the foreign military intervention came to an end in the fall of 1920. Admiral Kolchak's forces in the east collapsed in the latter part of 1919; General Denikin's armies in the south disintegrated early in 1920; at the end of 1920 Denikin's successor, General Petr Wrangel, had to evacuate his forces, along with thousands of civilians, by

sea.

On the Petrograd front Trotsky repulsed the Yudenich offensive. The intervention of the Allies in the Russian civil war which had started in 1918, likewise came to a close (except in the Far East) in 1920. Britain withdrew her forces from Siberia and the north before the end of 1919; she had earlier quit Russian central Asia. The Americans, too, withdrew from Vladivostok, and the French withdrew from the south. The Japanese stayed on in the Russian Far East for 2 more years, and the independent new nations of the Caucasus, with some protection from Britain and the United States, remained independent for a short time, until the Red Army marched in. On the whole, the Allied intervention in Russia had not been successful; it did not achieve its aim of subverting

50 Stalin, "Author's Preface," To a Collection of Articles on the National Question (October 1920), Works, vol. IV (1953), pp. 385, 386.

"Stalin, "Report on the Immediate Tasks of the Party in the National Question," Delivered March 10, 1918 at the Tenth Congress of th R.C.P. (B.), Works, vol. V (1953), p. 43.

the Soviet government. But it had another phase, namely, to prevent a Soviet offensive against Poland, Germany, and Hungary and to assure the independence of the Baltic States, and in this phase it was effective.

... A breathing space of inestimable importance was afforded to the whole line of newly liberated countries which stood along the western borders of Russia. . . . Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and above all Poland, were able during 1919 to establish the structure of civilized States and to organize the strength of patriotic armies.82

It was lack of strength, not lack of will, that prevented them [the Bolsheviks] from supporting Bela Kun in Hungary and apostles of social revolution in other countries as energetically as Great Britain supported Kolchak and Denikin.

When Kolchak made his thrust toward the Volga in the spring of 1919 he unconsciously sealed the doom of the Soviet Republics which had been set up in the Baltic States. When Denikin's Cossack cavalry pierced the Red lines in May and June, 1919, they put an end to revolutionary dreams of moving westward into Bessarabia, with a view to linking up with Soviet Hungary. The issue of the battle before Warsaw in August, 1920, might have been different if the large forces which were concentrated against Wrangel had been available on the Polish front.

So, while intervention did not overthrow the Soviet Government, it did, in all probability, push the frontier of Bolshevism considerably farther to the East.83

The period of the civil war had coincided, as has been indicated, with the experiment of a lightning-like and integral communization of Russia in the economic sphere. Having brought about a terrible catastrophe, starvation, and misery, the leadership, viewing the state of affairs at the end of 1920, was convinced of the necessity to retreat and make concessions to private economy. The preceding period of sweeping experiments was now officially termed "War Communism," to indicate that detrimental effects were due not to communism as such but to the "aggression" on the part of the enemies in the civil war and the intervention of the "imperialists."

$2 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, The Aftermath (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), vol. V, p. 276.

Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921, vol. II, pp. 171, 172.

Chapter V. The NEP Era

1. The Peasant Movements

The turn from "War Communism" to the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) early in 1921 was motivated by four factors: First, the peasant uprisings all over the country; second, the mutiny in Kronstadt; third, the threatening famine; and fourth, the growing disorder in the ranks of the ruling Communist party.

The peasant movements in these initial phases of the Soviet regime, after the political parties had been suppressed, were disorganized, lacking in leadership, and without a definite political program, but, arising as they did out of starvation, humiliation and despair, they were violent and extensive. They took the form of a multitude of local guerrilla wars against local Soviet officials and detachments dispatched to requisition grain, meat, and dairy products for the cities and the army.

The largest and most typical of these uprisings was that which occurred in the Tambov province under the leadership of Antonov.

.. Antonov had spent many years in exile for some act of violence which he committed during the 1905 Revolution. Set at liberty after the downfall of the Tsar, he returned to his native Tambov Province, where he called himself a Socialist Revolutionary and became head of the police in the town of Kirsanov, a post which he continued to hold for some time after the Bolshevik Revolution.

... by the autumn of 1919 Antonov was already head of a terrorist band, recruited largely from deserters from the Red Army and from peasants who resisted requisitions. In the beginning he confined himself to small activities, such as assassinations of particularly unpopular local Soviet officials and raids on state farms. His movement gained in strength during 1920; it is estimated that his bands killed about 200 food collectors in Kirsanov County alone up to October.

A widespread uprising broke out in the southeast corner of Tambov County in August 1920; and from this time until the spring of 1921 the whole Province, along with some districts of the neighboring Saratov and Penza Provinces, was the scene of fierce partisan warfare. A Chekist who took part in the operations against Antonov estimates that at the height of his movement, between January and April, 1921, about 20,000 insurgents had taken up arms.1

1 William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1957), vol. II, p. 437.