The Russian Revolution

What did Lenin do for us? The welfare state, that’s what,

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He is widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. Yet whilst his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, and a century of sanctification and vilification.

Lenin speaking to a crowd in Moscow’s Sverdlov Square with Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev beside him, May 1920

In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history. So, we couldn’t resist commemorating the centennial of Lenin’s death.

I first became acquainted with him in the fall of 1968 whilst reading politics at Reading University under the tutorship of émigré academic and historian of Russian and Soviet politics Tibor Szamuely. For a while,

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

Szamuely would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

He believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure. See The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely. 

Studying Soviet politics, I read quite a few of Lenin’s writings – the mercifully short paperbacks like What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1901), Imperialism, the highest state of Capitalism (1917), and The State and Revolution (1917), and Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), the best title of them all. They cost very little at a Communist Bookshop, in Soho, I think – a source also, of posters from the Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In my Russian phase, I’d even bought a balalaika – though admittedly my purchase was inspired more by its use by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull in a great concert in our hall of residence. I never did much with it and saw it last on the sideboard of my late mother’s house in Birmingham.

I still have those books, in addition to the panegyric 1942 edition of The Truth about Soviet Russia, by famous British socialists (and Stalinist apologists) Sydney and Beatrice Webb, which was everything but the truth, posing the rhetorical question “Is Soviet Communism a New Civilization based on the ethical principle of ‘From each man according to his faculty to each man according to his need’. 

Better Read than Dead

Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist and indeed other historians for he was that rare thing – an individual and singular instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue to pouring off printing presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. Even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.

The principal protagonist of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the brutal and bloody civil war that followed, Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his additions to the ideology earned their own title: Leninism.

There is near universal consensus that Lenin had no use for “liberalism” in any form, or democracy which he regarded as a bourgeois delusion. He closed down the elected Constituent Assembly, when elections to it rejected his party, at gunpoint. He then proceeded to ban all other parties. He instigated the Red Terror via setting up the Cheka, the prototype KGB and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands, establishing the apparatus and mechanisms of terror so definitively exploited by Stalin. His administration laid the framework for the system of government that ruled Russia and the USSR for seven decades and provided the model for later Communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century.

As a result, Lenin’s influence was global. A controversial figure, he remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolized and demonized. Even during his lifetime, Lenin “was loved and hated, admired and scorned” by the Russian people. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarized along political lines.

Back in the day, I admired him for the smooth operator that he was, though I was shocked by his cold-bloodedness. No matter what his sophisticated musings in exile or during 1917 told his readers, he conducted the civil way to à l’outrance. See: Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. Today, I come not to bury Vladimir nor to praise him – Wikipedia provides a good overview of his life and times, and his legacy. It’s a good source for further reading: HERE

Detail of Man, Controller of the Universe, a fresco by Diego Rivera in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City

I republish below and interesting article from Unherd, my favourite e-zine, on the debatable influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in British politics.

In the immediate wake of World War One, and the outbreak of civil war, Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the conflict was ambivalent. Many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. After the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in.

Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.

The concern of His Majesty’s Government with the the Bolsheviks is the theme of series three of the superlative British crime saga Peaky Blinders. It is set in 1924, three years after the civil war, and not long after the fabricated Zionoviev Letter implicating the British communist party and by association, the Labour Party in a seditious plot, instigated a “Red Scare” that saw Britain’s first Labour Government defeated in a general election. Home Secretary Mr WS Churchill employs the services of Thomas Shelby and his Brummie brethren in a devious plot to fit-up and compromise the Soviet regime. The White Russian èmigrés, a cabal of revanchist aristocrats that Tommy has to do business with are an unsavory, unprincipled, bigoted and amoral crew.

The fear of this “Red contagion” after  Revolution, saw conservative British governments preempt insurrection by mollifying, co-opting even, and caring for the workers and the disadvantaged. The interwar years saw major strides in universal education, healthcare, and insurance Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge.

I qualify this by noting that the article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century.

Historian Anil Pratinav’s writes how paradoxically, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay.

Lenin might’ve said there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happens – but “these days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved.

Lenin’s funeral, as painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925

Other articles on Russian and Soviet history is In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history: Ghosts of the Gulag; The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter; Stalin’s Great Terror; Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism:The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism

How Bolshevism built modern Britain

Lenin still haunts our welfare state

Pratinav Anil Unherd, 15th January 2024

Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist historians, many of whom generally — and with good reason — attach odium to Great Man History. For he was that rare thing: an individual instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue pouring off presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. But even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.

Yet there is another achievement that Lenin was inadvertently, indeed perversely, responsible for: the Western welfare state. That we rarely recognise this owes to a common misperception. Very many of us regrettably buy that Labour conceit, hawked by spin doctors and court historians, that celebrates Clement Attlee and William Beveridge as the co-fathers of our welfare jstate. But as the historian David Edgerton reminds us, it is in fact the Liberal-Tory coalition of David Lloyd George in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that we ought to be thanking. These were the years when the major strides in education, healthcare, and insurance were made. Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Beveridge.

More importantly, it was neither paternalism nor prodigality that prompted these early stirrings of dirigisme. Rather it was red contagion. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something. That nothing came of it was down to Lloyd George’s unsentimental pragmatism. Many of the workers’ demands were duly conceded, taking the sting out of union radicalism, even as many leaders were put behind bars.
Two years later, Lloyd George’s Bolshevik bugbear was to return with a vengeance, when shipbuilders stormed the Glasgow City Chambers. With hindsight, it is obvious that “Red Clydeside” was never, in any meaningful sense, a harbinger of “Red Britain”: the radicalism of Glaswegian trade unions on either side of the River Clyde was never going to spread to the rest of the country. Yet at the time, the red threat was all too real. “This country was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any time since,” Lloyd George would later recall of the police and prison officers’ strike. London and Birmingham were spared, but Merseyside had rocked to the sound of rioting and looting. Violence was brought to a halt only when the army was brought in.
It is difficult for us to conceive what the “peace” after the armistice actually looked like. Yet Simon Webb’s 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolutions reconstructs a society teetering on the brink of collapse: soldiers roughing up workers; martial law in Luton; tanks cruising the streets of Liverpool. The Italians call the two years immediately following the war the biennio rosso, and it seems fair to speak of a red biennium in Britain as well. For one thing, it would be impossible to understand British domestic and foreign policy without reference to that singular neurosis of the interwar ruling class. While cavorting with the antisemitic Whites to crush the Reds in Russia, Westminster and Whitehall were at the same time crushing the unruly bolshies back at home. Churchill, then minister for war, put forward the government line with characteristic crassness: “kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.”

As it must in democracies, with the stick also came the carrot. Yes, the workers were brutally put down. But they hadn’t protested in vain. Gone were the Gladstonian days of cheese-paring Liberalism. Lloyd George’s Liberals were an altogether different beast: by turns technocratic, interventionist and ambitious. They were, no doubt, building on pre-war precedent, in particular the health and insurance schemes of 1911, and making good on wartime promises, but they were above all trying to make peace with the bad, mad and dangerous Brits on the streets.

To begin with, they gave a great many people a greater share in government, shepherding them from the barricades into polling stations. Universal male suffrage in 1918 enfranchised unpropertied men — that is, two in five men — as well as propertied women over 30. The same year, the Education Act, lobbied by Lancashire unionists, raised the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 to forestall cotton bosses from battening on benighted boys. And in 1919, the Housing and Town Planning Act put in motion the construction of what became that instantly recognisable feature of the British urban landscape: the council estate.

Bettered by Attlee and Harold Wilson, battered by Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the early interwar consensus around the welfare state survives to this day. Both under Labour and the Tories, truculent workers with ideas above their station have been shown their place: from Ramsay MacDonald’s disciplining of the “communistic” trade unions in 1924 through Thatcher’s thwarting of the miners in 1984 to Keir Starmer’s disavowal of organised labour in 2024. Likewise, since 1945, both parties have shown a general commitment to public spending around the 40% of GDP mark. Creaking, underfunded, “our NHS” continues nevertheless to be spoken of only in hallowed whispers.

Time and again, our rulers have let slip the real reason why welfare matters. Here’s Attlee in Margate in 1950: “our policy of democratic socialism is the only dynamic alternative to totalitarian communism.” Is it any surprise that two of the most robust welfare states across La Manche were created in societies that boasted a formidable communist presence? The Parti Communiste Français in 1946 counted some 800,000 members, and the Partito Comunista Italiano nearly two million. It is true that the Communist Party of Great Britain never had much to recommend it, but the strength of the post-war British Left — independent of Labour — is undeniable. It was the miners who brought down Edward Heath in 1974.

As with the British welfare state, so with British intellectual life. Our republic of letters would have been a dreary landscape of conformity were it not for the Russian Revolution, which fired three generations of Anglo-Marxists. The interwar years were a time when communists could rise to the very top of the cultural establishment. E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning and conciliation with Stalin. His monumental History of Soviet Russia — running to 7,000 pages and 14 volumes — remains the best account of the early years of the revolutionary regime.

Even such a sceptic of the state as George Bernard Shaw was swept away by Russomania. By 1931, with Britain reeling from the Depression, he was singing Stalin’s praises. Fabian gradualism, his old creed, wasn’t going to cut it in the 20th century. MacDonald’s Labour had evidently failed, he reflected in a new preface to Fabian Essays in Socialism. What was needed was “swift effectiveness” — Soviet-style. A trip to Moscow was written up in glowing terms in The Rationalisation of Russia.

In a manner of speaking, the remoter reaches of the ivory tower, too, succumbed to the Soviets. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix inaugurated what was by far the most arresting development in classical studies. A child of empire born in Macau, “Croicks” turned his back on his “thoroughly Right-wing upbringing” on the “lunatic fringe of Christianity” — as he later put it — in the Twenties. A romp across the Soviet Union in 1937 with Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, left him critical of Stalinism but committed to Marxism, on the strength of observing the peasants of the Caucasus. Thereafter, he became a “thoroughgoing Marxist”, tutoring a generation of students at New College, Oxford, who, in their own writings, were to remain alert to class in the classics. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World appeared in 1981.

Such profiles can be indefinitely multiplied. Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left. This would soon change with the emigration of Eastern and Mitteleuropean conservatives to Britain — Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, Ernest Gellner — producing a more balanced intellectual division of labour. But before that, Left hegemony was unrivalled. John Strachey was undoubtedly among the most important political commentators of the Thirties. His father was the editor of The Spectator for nearly 40 years, and Strachey’s best man was Oswald Mosley, then still on the Left. When Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, Strachey led some of the largest demonstrations against him.

As it was, the Marxist Strachey lost the battle of ideas to the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, who famously had no truck with communism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” Yet Keynes could do little to prevent one of his Cambridge protégés, Maurice Dobb, from taking up the cudgels for the boorish proletariat.

Communism gained a bridgehead in Cambridge thanks to Dobb, who edited The Plebs, a Marxist magazine, in the Twenties. He extolled Lenin as a “stern realist” blessed “with all the Jesuit’s sincerity and idealism”. By contrast, “non-Marxists” were “as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists”. He helped found the Communist Party Historians Group, and set up Kim Philby — of the Cambridge Five ring of spies — with the NKVD. Later students included Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, whose own Oxbridge appointments were blocked by Tory dons.

Paradoxically, then, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay. These days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, Bridesheady (Saltburny?) nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.

Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Other articles by Anil: The Marxism of Horrible Histories, and Gandhi hasnt aged well. Both are good reads.

I wrote on Facebook regarding his article Horrible Histories, a Marxist plot?,:

“I am a lifelong history tragic and I’ve degrees in history and politics. Now I’ve heard about horrible histories, I’ll have to look further. All history is, in a manner of speaking, storytelling, its validity and verification changing with the perspectives, perspicacity and prejudices of the storyteller. And on a potentially controversial tangent, all history is political – exhibit one is the proliferation of the culture wars and their corollary, the history wars.

If HHs can bring young folk to history and encourage them to learn more, so much the better. From what I read here, the histories are a more detailed and graphic version of that old, corny chestnut 1066 And All That. Which I still dip into now and then, for its perspective on what we’re owecievd back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. Bad kings were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few bad things. I share the view of one commentator – that Deary is probably no Marxist, but was taught by a history teacher with Marxist leanings. History can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics and history snobs and culture warriors.

There’s a Canadian writer who tells similar stories about world history called Sweary History or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift. By the way, I highly recommend Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s excellent podcast  The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving. Solid and well researched stories from history’s back pages with bad impersonations , lots of friendly banter, and loads of humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows”.

Sleeping still, in Red Square

Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

… as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol. 

She’d come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.

Yevgraf Zhivargo, in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Some books can be unrelentingly bleak and brutal, so grim and graphic in fact that you have to push yourself to finish them. Cormac McCarthy’s odyssey tale The Road is one such. But one doesn’t often say that about history books. Usually it is time, ennui or both that cry “enough, already!” You set it aside, promising to return to your bookmark – but you never do. I persevered with English author and historian Anthony Beevor’s latest foray into Russian and Soviet history, a veritable catalogue of the horrors that men can inflict upon their fellow humans (and yes, the perpetrators are apparently exclusively male and the victims are males and females of many ethnicities). His previous, highly acclaimed books Stalingrad and Berlin 1945 are chilling, but Russia – Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 takes top prize. And finish it I did …

The following is not a review of Beavor’s grim opus as such, but rather a thematic compendium of thoughts and observations derived from or inspired by the book.

Most academic accounts and university courses focus on the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the origins, rise and consolidation of the Soviet Union, and its ultimate disintegration seventy years later. General public knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed it is relatively limited and cursory, often derived and books like Mikail Sholokhov’s saga of the Don Cossacks, Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home To The Sea, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Indeed, it was these novels and David Lean’s powerful adaptation of Doctor Zhivago that first attracted my interest in Russia as a school student in Birmingham. I majored in Politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and Soviet history and politics were an important part of my studies. Between those days and today, I’ve read widely about Russia’s history, past and present, and I am familiar with the events, ideas and personalities, their role in the broader and longer tableau of history, and the reverberations that are still felt today.

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. My tutor in Soviet Studies at Reading was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919 and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918


Contemplating civil wars

A civil war can emerge from the ashes of a wider, ongoing conflagration when factions or parties dispute the nature and terms of the post-bellum status quo and fracture along political and ideological lines. Many civil wars have arisen from the ashes of a prior war when there are what are perceived as existential issues unresolved and the availability of weapons and materièl and experienced and discontented men to use them.

There is a view that civil war can retrospectively be seen as a crucible of nation, a fiery furnace through which the righteous must walk – an ex post facto rationalization of the Nietzschean paradox of “that which does not kill us makes us strong”. Abraham Lincoln verbalized this in his Gettysburg Address in 1863 on a battlefield where the fallen had been only recently interred. Franco made a similar play as he laid claim to the wreckage that was Spain in the wake of three years of carnage, but then petrified his riven, country in autocratic stone until his death many decades later. The Russian Civil War was not accorded such a nation-building ethos as it was viewed by the Bolshevik victors as the crushing of a counter-revolution against a new world already being born.

Given Russia’s vast expanse, long history of restive regions, and large non-Russian ethnicities – all a result of centuries of imperial conquests – there is always the potential for the disintegration of centralized control and fragmentation. There is a rich history of state collapse following wars, revolutions, system breakdowns, economic crises, and other epochal events. Napoleon’s empire collapsed after his disastrous march on Moscow and subsequent defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1918, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires all collapsed in military defeat. Of course, people, decisions, and policies played a role, but ultimately it was war and the attendant economic and social crises that pushed these states over the edge into political chaos and often violence.

Once thing for sure, civil war, the Hobbesian “war if all against all” (Hobbes was thinking England’s) is undoubtedly the saddest, bloodiest and most visceral of all conflicts. I leave the last words to WB Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

See: In that Howling Infinite, A House Divided – the Nature of Civil War

All fall down …

Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-by shootings and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”

When the Tsarist Russian empire collapsed halfway through the First World War, it was the first of four great empires to disintegrate. By war’s end, the conflict had destroyed the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. But unlike these three, though the imperial house perished, the empire it ruled did not disintegrate. A handful of national movements, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian succeeded in breaking free, but most of murdered Tsar’s realm emerged from the convulsions of world war, revolution and civil war within a new Soviet empire, one that still ruled millions of square miles and a multitude of peoples.

The Russian Revolutions – the two in 1917, and a failed rising in 1905 in the wake of the disastrous (for Russia) of Russo-Japanese War – and the civil war that followed can be said to have defined the contours of modern European geopolitics, setting the stage for the Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war. The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.

The USSR was officially declared in the Bolshoi Theatre on 30th December 1922. Most people find this slightly surprising, because we assume that the Soviet Union must have been proclaimed immediately after The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In fact, it only came into existence after a horrendous civil war that killed an estimated 10 million people, in which the deep national and ethnic tensions inside the old Russian Empire had been laid bare for all to see.

Historian Orlando Figes says in his seminal book about the Bolshevik revolution, A People’s Tragedy, that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and what had started as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.

In Russia, the revolution of February 1917 did not provoke a counterrevolution. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back was illustrative not so much apathy, as a feeling that there was very little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending. The overthrow of the czarist regime prompted a variety of reactions amongst the former ruling class: a resignation to events, bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the Imperial Court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together.

Soon after the November 1917 revolution, Lenin made it clear to the Bolsheviks that civil war was necessary to cleanse Russia of reactionary forces and old ways and to rebuild as a communist state and society. Moreover, he was confident that the Bolsheviks’ example would ignite revolution in the countries of Western Europe. German and Hungarian communists obliged, establishing people’s republics, which in turn invited counter revolution, the ousting of the revolutionaries, and reactionary military and police exacting bloody revenge on any leftists that could find.

The determination to resist only crystallized when the Bolshevik programme in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 polarized opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the Civil War itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12,000,000 people, the impoverishment of the whole country, and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

In June 1918 the Bolshevik regime was enjoying a brief respite from the rigors of revolution and civil war. Although surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, the Bolsheviks were in no immediate military danger. This welcome hiatus, lasting from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) to the collapse of the Central Powers at the end of the year, allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their political and military strength.

In an uneasy alliance with the Bolsheviks were leftwing Socialist Revolutionaries who still dreamed of a constituent assembly and the anarchists who regarded Brest-Litovsk represented the watershed of the Revolution. In coming to terms with the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks had paid a staggering price in territory and resources. But, more importantly, they had preferred to make a pact with the imperialists rather than attempt to propagate the Revolution through popular initiatives, in particular, by partisan warfare.

Shortly after Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks turned against their erstwhile allies. The Cheka (the successor to the Czar’s Okrana secret police and the precursor to the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB) ostensibly created to suppress counterrevolutionaries, was unleashed on the Bolsheviks’ critics on the left. There were fierce battles between Chekists and anarchists in Petrograd and many other Russian cities.

It was game on.

It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the civil war that broke out in Russia in terms of its territorial extent, the numbers of nations and would-be states engaged in the conflict, and the destruction and carnage it wrought to soldier and civilian alike. Nor the ongoing relentlessness. Western European invaders had been defeated in the past (and indeed, the future) by what Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who defeated Napoleon, called General Winter, but within the empire and its Soviet successor, weather did not stop play. Certainly, it complicated military operations, played havoc with logistics and supply-chains, and inflicted indescribable suffering upon soldiers and civilians. And the war went on …

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918

Revolution and reaction

If Lenin was politically flexible with foreign powers, he was ruthless with his own people, including rival parties on the left. He grabbed power when the hapless provisional government lost its way in setting up a constituent assembly that was intended to be a democratic representation of all Russians. Lenin initially paid lip service to the assembly, while calling for power to go the “soviets” – people’s councils. In reality he had no intention of allowing any diminishment or oversight of his control of the Bolshevik party and, through its Council of People’s Commissars, the battered Russian state.

But no sooner had the Bolsheviks cemented their rule than they were fighting a civil war on multiple fronts against a mind-boggling array of enemies, stretching from revolutionary socialists  and anarchists to unreconstructed “White Russian” tsarists, nostalgic for a corrupt and flagrantly unjust regime and in between the Reds and Whites were the Greens or Partisans, mainly deserters from all sides who hated both Reds and Whites and attacked both, increasingly so as the war continued. And a range of foreign powers dealt themselves into the game to further their own strategic and ideological interests. [the featured picture of this piece is an idealized manga depiction of charismatic Ukrainian anarchist and Green Nestor Makhno, a larger-than-life figure who miraculous survived the civil way and died in his bed in exile]

The Whites were a confused, fractured and often dysfunctional coalition with rapid changes of command occasioned by personal ambitions and fluctuating military fortunes. White generals were committed to restoring the integrity of the Russian Empire, a self-defeating handicap that alienated potential allies on the fringes, like Finland, the Baltic states and Poland. Churchill underestimated this imperial obsession which prevented the alliances he wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks. The Greater Russia obsession also hampered efforts in the Caucasus where Georgians stirred regions like Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, giving Britain nightmares of Bolshevism spreading through Central Asia towards India, an obsession that continued through the twenties as described in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze – Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia.

Out on the edge of the old empire, White warlords endeavoured to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Many commanders spent more time terrorizing locals than fighting the Red partisans who were operating behind enemy lines across the war zone, creating a legacy and tradition the persist to this day.

The diffusion of opponents played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as their differences were so extreme that a unified opposition fighting force was never a viable option. But if the battle lines were often blurred, the hatred felt by the combatants for each other was nightmarishly vivid.

The White’s defeat in the civil war wasn’t for lack of outside moral and materiel support. It was due largely to their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late, and their refusal to grant any autonomy to nationalities of the Czarist Empire. Their administration was so useless that it’s barely existed. Paradoxically, they lost for reasons very similar to the way the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War two decades later. In Spain, the antifascist alliance of the Republic could not prevail against Generalissimo Franciso Franco‘s disciplined and militarized regime. In Russia, the utterly incompatible alliance of socialist revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists didn’t stand a chance against the single-minded Communist dictatorship.

A leftist libertarian with St. George’s Cross, and a Sister of Mercy nurse, 1916.

World War 1.2

It in many ways it became World War 1.2. The idea of a purely Russian Civil War is misleading simplification, prompting one historian recently to describe it instead as ‘a world war condensed’.

It was waged across European and Asian Russia, including present day Belarus and Ukraine and the successor states of the Soviet Union in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – from Warsaw and Eastern Europe to the Urals and eastwards through the vastness of Siberia’s forests, deserts and tundra to Vladivostok in the Far East, from the arctic north to Crimea and the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the borders of what in 1918 ceased to be the Ottoman Empire. Fronts stretched for thousands of miles and advances and retreats likewise. The Trans-Siberian Railway, stretching the length of the former empire from Moscow to Vladivostok, was almost six thousand miles long, and it’s tributary lines served as strategic and logistical thoroughfares for all protagonists who weren’t mounted like the innumerable Cossacks tribes and the nascent Red Cavalry, bringing to prominence the armoured trains that became a symbol of the revolution.

It drew in most of Russia’s contemporary neighbours and more far-flung nations, including The USA, Britain, France, Germany Italy and Japan – the latter providing the largest contingent, estimated by British Intelligence as some 85,000 soldiers, more than many of the various White armies. Combatants included soldiers from these countries, the British dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India, and Chinese and Mongolian troops. And a multitude of ethnicities fought for their own warlords, their national place in the sun or else their very survival. Caught up in the transcontinental maelstrom were Slavs, Cossacks, Tartars, Turkmen, Arabs, Azeris, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Buryat Mongols, Kalmyks (Europe’s only Buddhist nation) and Jews. White divisions were augmented in Siberia by Mongolian, Chinese, Uighur and Kirghiz mercenaries.

Various nationalist movements arose, successfully and unsuccessfully in all parts of the former Russian Empire. The aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire saw Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and myriad other nationalities fighting for disparate sides, and Beevor skillfully frames the bizarre impact of this on the ethnic nationalist dimensions of the conflict.

The scale of military manoeuvres was unprecedented, as were the physical and supply difficulties over vast distances, and the extremities in climate, particularly the bitter Russian winter. The conflict became very much a cavalry war and indeed, a “railway war” notable for its armoured trains and the logistical lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway, protected for much if the conflict by the Czechoslovak Legion, a force of Czech and Slovak nationalists who having fought in the Czarist army, joined the Whites who controlled many towns in Siberia.

In addition to the Czechs, there was also a Polish Legion operating in the Far East. The commanders of both forces became increasingly disenchanted with the White officers who refused to countenance the independence of the border states and who shocked many with their brutality towards prisoners and civilians, and though thousands of miles from Europe, demanded repatriation – ostensibly by sea from Vladivostok.

Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the civil war was ambivalent. Though many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. In the wake of the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.

British regiments were nevertheless deployed in Siberia and in the Far East as well as the Arctic and Caspian Sea. Royal Navy flotillas blockaded Petrograd in the Baltic, floated up the Volga in the south and down the Dvina in the arctic north, and controlled the Caspian Sea and the waters around the Crimean Peninsula. The Royal Air Force deployed Sopwith Camels and sea planes in surveillance and surveillance missions against the Red forces, who British officers called the “Bolos”. And artillery units and armoured car squadrons were attached to the various White armies.

Wider imperial concerns were in play too. Churchill rang alarm bells as the Reds pushed the Whites back in Siberia and Central Asia, alarming even his reticent cabinet colleagues with prospect of Reds on the borders of the Raj. The Great Game still had over a quarter of century to run before the final whistle blew. In the Far East, Britain and the US, and Reds and Whites alike, were nervous about the designs imperial Japanese was revealing with regard to the resources and the empty lands of eastern Siberia, the island of Sakhalin, the pacific littoral and Manchuria. Intelligence reports revealed that Japanese forces in the region exceeded all others involved, including the warring Russians.

Pogrom

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of the lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions which they engender. The fighting ranged right across the Eurasian landmass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of the Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that archconservative politician VV Shukgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the whites what is a “moral collapse” – that they behaved as badly as their enemy.

There was nevertheless one subtle yet important difference. All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. It has been said that their ruthlessness has few parallels in recorded European history up until that time – believing that history was on their side, and that a new world was being created. The almost religious zeal with which they brutalized and killed combatants and innocents alike could be likened to the Albigensian Crusade in the early thirteenth century. [The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric. According to accounts written decades later, as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars. Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”]

The focus on ordinary people also means their suffering is brought to the fore. And Beevor is unsparing in showing the chaotic violence of the conflict, and unrelenting in showing the sheer violence of both sides. Reds and Whites are both revealed as more than comfortable burning villages, shooting traitors, suspected or real, and torturing and massacring prisoners, and men women and children caught in the crossfire.

There were many instances of racist violence mainly on the White side – particularly towards Jews. The Whites’ antipathy towards Jews was to some degree due to their perception that most senior Bolshevik were Jewish, but mostly it was that old devil that never went away, antisemitism. The fall of the Romanovs and the ancien regime and the anti-Semitic pogroms they perpetuated continued. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. Playwright And author Isaac Babel, attached as a correspondent and propagandist to the Red Cavalry on the Polish Soviet front in late 2020 posed the question: “what sort of person is our (Red) Cossack? Many layered: looting, reckless daring, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty. The population await their saviors. The Jews look for liberation – and in ride the Kuban Cossacks”.

It is estimated that there were some 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50000 to 60000 killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus also, but these were not nearly as murderous as in Ukraine. A Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.

Churchill was well aware of the effect of the pogroms on public opinion in the West and sought in vain to exert pressure on white leaders to restrain their forces.,

Terror begat terror, leading to greater acts of conspicuous cruelty. After a particularly hard-fought battle in early 1919, a young White horse artillery officer recalled “for the first time since the start of the civil war, prisoners were not shot. There were too many of them”. This did not happen often – and such was the brutality meted out to captives on both sides, shooting was actually a blessing. An Odesa women witness after the fall of the city to the Whites, “Urrrraaa! Four and a half months under these five-pointed star oppressors”. Two days later, Beevor notes, she noted that all the Jews were in hiding. When a city held by the Reds fell to the Cossacks, a a female surgeon observed that fearing a program, two Jewish doctors in her hospital wisely ran to hide in the attic.

Bolshevik leaders and commanders on the field eventually realized that brutality did not endear their cause to the general populace and moderated their behaviour. Some Whites too came to that conclusion, and sought to prevent it at least limit atrocities, but reactionary officers and uncontrollable Cossacks persisted in burning, looting, torturing and murdering, inflicting irreparable damage to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Beevor reports instances when allied forces actually fired on Cossack perpetrators.

The End

As the whites retreated, support for the red army amongst the populace grew, as did its numbers as deserters returned to its ranks encouraged by the announcement of an amnesty and as defections from the White forces grew. Peasants grew less reluctant to serve in the Red Army Fear that with white advances and victory, old landlords would reclaim their land. Success bred success. The Whites’ ranks thinned with desertions defections and the need to transfer troops to defend its rear from attacks by partisans and freelance militias units. The Cossacks, disappointed and tired of war, turned about and headed home to their stanitsas laden with loot. The size of the frontline Red Army was eventually twice that of the Whites, as it eliminated the White armies in the north and east and closed in on the last remaining area under White control, Crimea, where rearguards held out long enough to ensure the evacuation of 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea protected by the British and French navies.

In the aftermath of total Soviet victory, starvation struck the towns and cities across the land. Food requisitioning detachments scoured the countryside for supplies, their rapaciousness and brutality igniting peasant rebellions from Belarus to Siberia; tens of thousands of peasants rose in revolt, dealing brutally with any Bolshevik that came into their hands. The Red Army and Cheka reciprocated in spades with burning and looting, rape and torture, execution and exile to the emergent Gulag. Workers went on strike in the starving cities, and with the Whites vanquished and the civil war won, the call for democratization of Soviet rule grew louder.

And then, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet at the Kronstadt naval base, who’s guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and whom Trotsky had called “the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution”, rebelled. The regime responded with lies – that the sailors had been suborned and were now Whites – and that White forces in Finland would be crossing the ice to help them. When this didn’t work, I resolved to crush them without mercy, dispatching trustworthy forces against them.

At the end, of 16000 sailors and their families, most were able to cross that ice to final and. But some 3000 fought a last stand and died by assault or firing squad. One of the last cries of protest by the Kronstadt sailors was “All of Soviet Russia has been turned into a Russian penal colony”.

Thus ended the Russian Civil War in November 1920.

… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.
British war and foreign correspondent Robert Fisk

Evacuees board ship in a Crimean portEpilogue

Epilogue … history repeats

Whilst there were many active fronts during the civil war, often simultaneously, extending for thousands of kilometers, around Archangelsk and Murmansk in the arctic, along the great rivers the Volga, the Don and the Dniester in the south, in the Baltic provinces, and in Belarus, and along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway. And as during WW2 and the present-day Ukraine war, opposing armies advanced and retreated across Ukraine. Kiev was occupied, often several occasions, by Reds, Whites and Greens, and finally, the Polish Army which invaded Russia and Ukraine in 1920 to reclaim and defend the independence of the onetime Polish state, long divided between the now destroyed Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The names of the war-torn cities are today tragically familiar. Mariupol and Melitopol, Karchiv and Kherson. Kiev, Odessa and Lvov are now Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe:

Большой террор … Stalin’s Great Terror

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God…
The cold of an icon was on your lips
A death-cold sweat on your brow –
I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. Once in another lifetime, I read politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.  My tutor in Soviet Studies was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathiser and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retired an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe. 

He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

A few years back, I retrieved from my archive a dissertation I wrote under Szamuely’s supervision in 1970, entitled How Rational Was The Great Purge? Reading it fifty years later, I was surprised to observe that my writing style, the content and the conclusions I drew have changed little over the years. In retrospect the tenor is somewhat naïf but it foreshadows a perspective that I’ve developed over the years of “walking in the shoes of others – contemplating what might be going through the heads of the protagonists, be they the Old Bolsheviks who became the sacrificial victims or Stalin himself. Fathoming the mind of “Uncle Joe”, as the Allied PR departments dubbed him during WWII when he was deemed a friend and indeed a bulwark against Nazi aggression, was a bit of a pretentious stretch for a twenty one year old, even though I did only have an audience of one – and did earn a “first” in Soviet Studies.

A couple of days ago, I pulled it out again to show Adèle, and discovered to my horror that the handwritten foolscap roneo had faded almost to the point of vanishing. In a bright light, I managed to recite it into iPad notes and transcribe it into a fresh document and have now the privilege to publish it in  Into That Howling Infinite.

Privilege not pleasure, I must note. It does not make for easy reading.

When it was conceived, my dissertation was written with academic grades in mind, and particularly for Szamuely’s assessment alone. There is little explanation of context and of the events and personalities referred to therein (ironically, in the light of contemporary events, many of whom were Ukrainian and many, Jewish), and chronology was less important than argument. There was a word limit and also no need for explanation as my tutor knew, from his own academic and personal history, what had happened, who was what and who was who – and what became of them.

Most, sadly, did not die comfortable in their beds surrounded by family and friends, and more often than not in dark execution cells or in fields and forests beside their own graves. He was was also very much aware of the victims of the Great Purge and it’s many siblings, so many of them nameless, who perished during the Soviet Union’s two decades of terror, and for the millions – from the Baltic to the Crimea – who were deported en masse from ancestral lands to the Siberian or transported to the labour camps of the distant Gulags, to work, to starve, and to die.

The ordinary reader, of this blog and of world affairs generally is not very acquainted with the  history and politics of Russia and the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Much of what casual observers know is learned from wide reading and often filtered through the distorted lenses of unreliable and potentially misleading and false analogies and partisan preconceptions, or worse, uninformed and prejudiced certainties. We see these in full flight in mainstream media commentary and particularly in social media with respect to the current conflict between Ukraine and its powerful neighbour. This article does not discus that conflict, although the reader will certainly see patterns, hear echoes and feel reverberations, for the consequences of events which occurred down the foggy ruins of time do indeed ricochet through history to strike us today.

And so, then, to my resurrected dissertation, which I have edited to include the full names of the principal actor. But first, some historical background to put it into perspective.

‘I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol, Yevgraf Zhivago”

The Great Terror 

By strange symmetry, when I retrieved my now faded dissertation, I’d recently reread historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror, a relentless and harrowing narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Josef Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a twentieth century socialist state.

It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms in the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (there were two revolutions that year) and the bloody civil war that followed, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – the latter being a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.

An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB and present day FSI) covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936-38, or “the Yezhovchina”, named for Victor Yezhov, head of the NKVD and Stalin’s lord high executioner, stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.

But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.

The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable. as the Yevgraf, the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie):

“Indeed, as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol”

… and

“She (Lara) had come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days”.

There are a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells:

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt: but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raised the dark pistol barrel?

Both  books are cited often in my dissertation.

As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. And I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.

And there was the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose words open this piece, bearing sad witness to the imprisoned, the deported, the disappeared and the dead – including in their number, two husbands and her only son – memorializing the suffering of herself, her family and millions of her compatriots in her tortured testament, Requiem. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, she died of natural causes in March 1966. Russian born philosopher amd historian Isiah Berlin described the impact of her life: 

“The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure …  not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in (the twentieth) century”.

Anna Akhmatova, by Amedeo Modigliani

Russia’s Stations of the Cross did not cease with the end of the Terror. Three years later came Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the rapid blitzkreig that took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and the bloody clawback that brought the Red Army to Berlin and to take captive the peoples of Eastern Europe.

Over twenty five million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War, of which just under ten million were military. Most died as a direct result of the military conflict that ranged from the Baltic to the Caucasus. But miilions also perished at the hands of the NKVD and in the forced mass deportations of “suspect” peoples, including the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars.

At wars’ end, the Terror rolled on, albeit at a lower setting. Josef Stalin remained suspicious, vengeful and paranoid, and the purges continued right up until the moment he departed this mortal coil (as depicted in dubious slapstick in Armando Iannucci‘s recent The Death of Stalin).

Many, many Red Army soldiers who had been taken captive by the Nazis were arrested on their return from captivity. Many were shot for ‘desertion’, and thousands sent to the Gulags. Whether they had surrendered or had been subdued and taken captive, often as fast-moving battle fronts left them stranded, abandoned and entrapped behind enemy lines, they were deemed cowards, traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union and its people. They were moreover doubly damned. Whether from behind the wire of concentration camps or as slave labourers in German mines, fields and factories, they had witnessed, come into contact with, and had been contaminated by the world outside.

In one of his most cited poems, The Caucasus, written in 1845, Ukraine’s national poet, the 19th-century bard Taras Shevchenko, who’d helped build national identity through his verse, which he composed in both Russian and Ukrainian, ridicules Russian expansionism and mourns the immense loss of life it had already wrought. He could have been writing about tyranny, repression and violence all around the world and through the ages:

“We groan beneath the yoke of hangmen while drunken justice sodden sleeps”.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved, adapted from Ghosts of the Gulag,© Paul Hemphill 2018 

See also. The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter; Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism ;  TheRussian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely; and The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism

How rational was the Great Purge? 

Paul Hemphill, Reading, 17 June 1970

When veteran Bolshevik leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had demanded reprisals against their comrade Leon Trotsky, party secretary Josef Vissarionovich Stalin replied: “a policy a lopping off heads is fraught with danger … you chop off one head today, another one tomorrow, still another one the day after – what in the end will be left of our party?” (Deutsche, Stalin, 344). Lenin himself and warned “let not blood flow between you” (Ibid 377). Yet in 1932, Stalin was forced to back down when having advocated the death sentence for oppositional activities, he met the opposition of Sergei Kirov and the party. And in 1938, Trotsky was to proclaim that “Stalin is like a man who wants to quench his thirst with salted water” (Fainsod 356j). But not, in Stalin’s view, without reason.

Old Comrades Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev

“We are a country surrounded by capitalist states … The internal enemies of our revolution are the agents of capitalism of all countries. In fighting against enemies at home….fight the counterrevolutionary elements of all countries”. Thus, Stalin attempts to rationalize terror. In his grim novel Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler described “how there were two elements in our party. One consisted of adventurers who wanted to risk all we had won to promote the revolution abroad. We recognized this current to be dangerous and have liquidated it … We stand alone … We have only one duty: not to perish”. The survival of the week and embryonic socialist state in a hostile world depended upon the strictest unity within that state, and no oppositional tendencies could be tolerated. “We have only one duty: not to perish”.

Victor Hugo once wrote: “ Mr Bonaparte’s crime is not a crime it is called a necessity. Mr Bonaparte’s robberies are not robberies, they are called measures of state. Mr Bonaparte’s murders are not murders, they are called public safety”. Here then was Machiavellian rationalism in action. “As long as the capitalist encirclement costs, there will be be wreckers, deviationists, spies, terrorists” (Stalin in Fainsod ibid 356 … and an endless host of counterrevolutionaries, bourgeois nationalists, kulaks or German and Japanese agents plotting the demise of socialist Russia.

Before 1917, the purge been excepted within the party. “Unity of Will” and submission to central authority being vital in the face of Czarist repression. Compromise was comparable to treason, obedience, the highest virtue. After 1917 the need remained in order to overcome inertia, suspicion and ignorance, hostility, subversion and sabotage. Lenin had stressed “better fewer and better”, and the consolidation of the party by the constant self purging of fellow travellers. The class struggle did not cease with Red October.

Indeed, as Lenin had prognosticated in “State and Revolution”, it intensified, as external enemies would find allies in the party. Every step towards socialism met with fierce resistance from within: the trade union dispute, the polemics of Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. When “enemies” infiltrate into the ranks of the vanguard itself, their suppression is not so easy as envisaged by Lenin’s ideals. In the years subsequent to the Civil War, therefore, constant vigilance and battle was all important. Yet the gradual liquidation of the old Bolsheviks in the years 1936 to 1938 pointed to less exalted motives, those of Stalin, using terror as a means for maintaining a monopoly of party leadership. The problem of reconciling this with the class struggle was solved by identifying any form of opposition to his rule with counterrevolution and espionage.

He effectively wrote the script that others followed. At his trial in August 1936 Kamenev confessed how “we have become fascists, we have organized counter-revolution against socialism. Zinoviev likewise: ”my defective Bolshevism was transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through anti-Bolshevism, I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism” (Deutsche, The Prophet Outcast 333).

Having seized power after Lenin’s death, Stalin had to reconquer it again and again. Endless struggle will be terminated by the physical elimination of all whose party past or present attitudes made them potential opponents. Expulsion, Lenin’s penalty for “factionalism”, had been ineffective. Men who represented the potentiality of an alternative government of rival power centres had to be destroyed, be they active leaders or impotent symbols of opposition like Kamenev and Zinoviev. Reason justified the swift, merciless and all embracing preemptive strike to paralyse and to deter. Potential leaders, the men they influenced or were likely to influence, and an ever- widening circle of associates, friends and relative, who by the very nature of design were implicated. Vengefulness could engender opposition. Oppositional leaders had trained or promoted party man administrators and soldiers – in short, numberless alternative power centres.

The determining reason for Stalin‘s decision on his “final solution” lay perhaps in the realization that the mood of the Old Bolsheviks was one of hostility towards him, having remain unreconciled to personal dictatorship since the Kirov purges. Hostility could erupt into open challenge , and both he and his old comrades remembered the dying Lenin’s s pronouncement: “I propose to the comrades that they consider a means of removing Stalin from his post and appointing to it another person more patient, more loyal, more polite, and (relevant in this context) more considerate to his comrades” (Conquest 537)

When  the “Trial of the Sixteen began in August 1936, Trotsky wrote how “Stalin is staging this trial in order to suppress discontent and opposition … (he) treats every criticism and every form of opposition as a conspiracy”. (Deutsche, Outcast 322). Yet, in 1932 Trotsky himself had recognises the need for “unity of will”, “the upsetting at the bureaucratic equilibrium would benefit the forces of counter revolution” (Deutsche Stalin 344). But times had changed, and for the type of man Trotsky represented, there was no place in the party.

The reason for hostility perhaps lay in the basic psychology of the Old Bolsheviks. Nikolai Bukharin told historian Boris Nicolaevsky in 1936 that “we had all been trained in the psychology of oppositionalists … we are critics, destructionionists not builders” (Nicolaevsky 60) Soviet Russia wanted builders, not idealists. Stalin needed therefore to eliminate this millstone, to bring a new ruling class aimed at positive construction and not schismatic criticism. The theorist and the visionary were being supplanted by the young , hard and ambitious New Soviet Man, sincere communists holding key posts which merged political and professional leadership. The integration and stabilization of the regime necessitated increased centralization and the concentration of power in the hands of a select elite. The growing stability called for greater efficiency and control, the crystallization of totalitarianism demanding authority and obedience, and the accountability of the citizen for his inability to adjust to the new pattern.

Economic and social change that was not spontaneous as a product of attitudes and social relationships needed terror as a motive force. The men of the old revolution with the old ideas and ideals were liabilities to the new revolution. The “new man” created by Stalin’s regime, without a revolutionary past or tradition, ignorant and suspicious of intellectual arguments propounded by the oppositions, they were Koestler’s “Neanderthalers”, the generation “that started to think after of the flood … a generation without an umbilical cord”. Provided by Stalin with guidance, nurtured on Stalin’s Marxism- Leninism, and on the concrete achievements of the Five Year Plan.

Bukharin, in Nikolaevsky’s interview, and Koestler’s Rubachov see the new man as their creations, inevitable to socialist progress. They realise that survival depends upon success, and if they fail, they can no longer serve the revolution. History absolves those who are right – but those who are wrong must pay. Tthey understand the mechanics of the system. They share to some extent the values of the rulers. The process of selection is vital to stability and progress. And they are fatalistically determinist, agreeing to fabricated confessions because there was no existence outside of the party. Stalinism was the acceptable alternative to the counter-revolution.

“In a war which may be only a few months away”, Gletkin tells Rubachov in Darkness at Noon, “such currents (that is disaffection and popular dissatisfaction) could lead to catastrophe … the party must be cast in one mold, filled with blind discipline and absolute trust”. In 1936 the chances of agreement with Germany were slim. Cases such as “the homosexual conspiracy” of 1933-34 gave substance to fabricated charges of treason and espionage.

The threat of war and undoubtedly heightened Stalin’s fears for his political survival. He remembered how the Bolsheviks has seized power in such conditions after 1914. It certainly gave him a pretext, and legitimacy sanctioned by popular patriotism, for what Deutsche called a “perverted psychological truth” which instigated a pre-emptive strike to prevent instability and collapse during a national emergency. Yet, wouldn’t a conciliatory policy aimed at creating voluntary, popular and national cooperation and solidarity have been more logical than the disorganisation and demoralisation which Stalin had invited? Purges are deliberate and planned, and Stalin in no doubt realised their consequences if not their scope.

The motive for the Yezhovchina, named for Victor Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, does not hold its own independently. Neither does that of protecting the revolution. Bukharin in 1936, and Nikita Khrushkev in his groundbreaking Secret Speech to a closed plenum of the Central Committee in February 1956 claimed that Stalin had used too extreme means when the economy had been strengthening, the exploiting classes destroyed, and the party consolidated ideologically and numerically. Stalin himself would not have downplayed his achievements merely to attack his enemies. In reality, the new range of the charges brought against the “enemies of the people” avoid the question of a specific motivation, whilst not once did the chief victim of so many conspiracies. and yet the author, manager and producer, appear in court as a witness. Once again therefore, Machiavellian motives appear to predominate – those of Stalin consolidating his personal power. Potential opponents must be kept in a state of permanent insecurity so that all embracing terror by the “lopping off of heads” of possible alternatives to the regime. The party is cleansed of infiltrators and careerists, opening channels for new blood more loyal and more efficient. Individuals, uncontrolled and undirected, were susceptible to intrigue, and hence the unreliable need to be replaced.

The Nikolaev case following the assassination of Kirov by Leonid Nicolaev in December 1934.  Nikolaev and several suspected accomplices were convicted in the Moscow Trials and executed less than 30 days later, with complicity as a common charge for the condemned. Kirov’s assassination remains controversial and unsolved, with varying theories regarding the circumstances of his death., and provided a blueprint for discovery of accomplices and instigators, and the investigation of “ideologically undisarmed oppositions”, for “capacities for mischief” (Nicolaevsky 60), and for the punishment for the negligence of security and party organs for tolerating oppositional circles in their midst. In 1934, harmless Leningrad dissidents became terrorists; and in 1934, “Trotskyists” and ”Zinovievites” were tried, being told that by admitting complicity and condemning terrorism, they would check their own supporters.

The trials of 1936-38 merely keynoted the purge, the grand design finding full realisation in prisons and camps. The slaughter of the Old Guard showed that their day was gone, that resistance and opposition to the new regime was futile. Their fall, in a power struggle which had been waged since Lenin’s death, had been completed after Kirov’s murder, yet they were now called upon to justify the purge, to vilify the victims to publicise and popularize the forthcoming purges.

The trials of “the sixteen (August 1936 – Kamenev and Zinoviev, and others), of “the seventeen” (January 1937 – Pyatkov, Sokolnikov and the so-called anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre), and of “the twenty one (March 1938 – Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and the so called anti-Soviet Bloc of the Rightists and Trotskyists), saw the extermination of the Old Guard, and with it, the reputation of Trotsky, the arch-instigator and defendant in absentia. In colluding with Trotsky, the greatest “enemy of the people”, they were accused of treason, espionage, diversion, terrorism, and wr cling. They had plotted disrupt the economy to betray the Soviet state; they had plotted Kirov’s death, and had conspired to assassinate Stalin himself, together with others of his inner circle.

The case was different with popular national figures, and hence trial and publicity gave way to secrecy and speed trial “in camera”, illustrating Stalin’s determination bypassing even superficial legality. Hence, in secrecy, the party itself was purged by “electoral defeat” and arrest, by vigilance and police infiltration. 4434 Of 11,017 Moscow committee members were in 1937 new replacements, whilst elsewhere, 50 to 70% renovation was quite common, introducing new and ideologically pure cadres (Z Brzezinsky The Permanent Purge 94). Public trials would have strained loyalty and discipline.

This was also the case with the military, a fair accompli being necessary. In June 1937 civil war hero General Mikhail Tukachevsky and seven others were executed for treason and sabotage. Only by purging potentially disloyal or unduly independent commanders like Tukachevsky, who opposed politicisation, could be army be absorbed into the totalitarian system, and hence removing its strength as an alternative source of power while simultaneously developing its efficiency and its potency as a subordinate weapon. Whether a conspiracy existed or not is questionable, but but facility of suppression suggests the negative. Elimination would have been inevitable in order to insure full control in the event of war.

The purge of the Nationalities shows similar motivations. Nationalism had been contrary to the socialist ideals of international totalitarianism and international economics. Growing national resentment towards Russian central control had led Moscow to believe that national cadres and local leaders were responsible, whilst the atmosphere was highly conducive it the wide discovery of plots and conspiracies among the Nationalities. More objective reasoning saw the necessity of solidifying central control by removing sources independent national leadership, and hence, throughout the USSR bourgeois nationalists, deviationists, White Guards, kulaks and spies were exposed, the purges extending from the elimination of identifiable opponents to the impersonal elimination of thousands of suspects.

“Unity of Will” was all important, and all subsidiary elements had to be subordinated. Even the Comintern had to be cleansed to provide uniformity of policy in accordance with Soviet national interests, as opposed to Communist international interest. Soviet diplomats were removed. German, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian communists domiciled in the Soviet Union including former Hungarian strongman Bela Kun) were liquidated. Even in Spain, the KGB successfully purges the extremist left wing. Not even the KGB remained immune, Genrich Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov both falling to their own terror.

Stalin and Yezhov

In the industrial and agricultural sectors, also. the politically unreliable became scapegoats for failure, and inefficiency, to be replaced by the new generation of graduates in technical and professional fields. Technicians holding key posts in the economic structure, and intellectuals – natural critics – had to be submissive. Socialist competition being achievement orientated meant that failure to produce and to fulfill norms was tantamount to wrecking and sabotage. Failure demanded retribution: to deter, and to provide additional stimuli for greater endeavours. Yet, Stalin’s prime aim was total control – imprisonment have have been deterrent enough to encourage efficiency, whilst a general improvement in the standard of living was beginning emerge, giving little cause for such repression. Physical liquidation was primarily a means of control and not of production … as Lazar Kagonovich failed to note when, at the 18th Congress, he proclaimed: “ we have now cadres which carry out every directive of the party, of the Central Committee of the Soviet power, every directive of Comrade Stalin” (ibid 90).

Isaac Deutsche describes “Trial of the Sixteen”as “so hallucinatory in its masochism and sadism that it seemed to surpass human imagination” (Deutsche Outcast 332)…The defendants were made to crawl to their deaths amidst denunciation and self-derision. Although this justifies the character rather than the reason behind the Great Purge, it’s illustrates an all important function of the Purge as an institution – what Fainsod calls prophylactic and preventative.

The first Five Year Plan had brought a degree of stability, but the regime could not afford to let stability lapseinto inactivity. The messianic and totalitarian nature of the regime, demanded further goals, and further fervour and enthusiasm, to avoid the degeneration of party and the state. The internal emigration of the silent majority was synonymous with negation and opposition; and hence participation was vital. The policy of critique had originally been intended as an instrument of improvement, of exposing inefficiency, and error, but now, Kritika was associated with denunciation and Samokritika, with confession (often false), mutual suspicion, and fear of denunciation for lack of fervour, providing mass participation, synthetic enthusiasm, and Revolutionary, Watchfulness”… Legitimacy and consensus was thus created whilst also serving to crystallise and dramatise the policies of the government… The success of propaganda campaigns was shown during the public trials when frequent and hostile emotional outbursts often provided an ex post facto rationale for physical liquidation. State Prosecutor Andrev Vyshynski was symptomatic of the popular hysteria generated… “These mad dogs of capitalism, tried to tear limb from limb the best of the Soviet land… I am joining my angry indignant voice to the, rumbling voices of millions… I demand that dogs gone mad should be shot, every one of them … “ (Conquest 335)

Propaganda campaigns were aimed at dehumanising the enemies, and developing an atmosphere of hostility that stifled resistance. The supreme correctness of the regime was asserted and failings were attributed to the accused, who would be charged with conspiring with hostile powers (Germany, in particular) planning to destroy the fruits of the revolution … their fate was pragmatic; resistance was useless; the system is unchallengeable; the leadership is in fallible. Confession, wrote Koestler in Darkness at Noon, is “to gild the right to blacken the wrong … to make the opposition appear contemptible, to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime… Sympathy and pity for the opposition are danger to the country…The can be no martyrs or heroes – no potential focii for factionalism … they must die as degenerate traitors, and this must be impressed upon the uninformed, easily influenced masses … Hence the victim is often called upon to collaborate in his own moral and physical destruction, often willingly, as a final service to the party and to the revolution …his duty is “to gild the right, to blacken the wrong” … his wrong – he must pay!

To Soviet leaders, the purge is an instrument employed in a rational and predetermined fashion, cleansing the system of undesirable elements, and streamlining organisation, revitalising the system and eliminating alternative power centres. Such motives, provide rationalism enough – but Stalin perhaps sinned in his excess … If his fear of war and collapse had precipitated his actions, then disaster of 1941 revealed his folly. In advancing and preserving the revolution, at face value, the immediate consequence was of detriment. The liquidations had outstripped available replacements, whilst privation and hardship, damage and hatred amongst the influential sectors, severely hampered the development of Soviet society … Yet, the dynamic momentum of industrialisation had been maintained, and “new men” quickly adapted to their new responsibilities, whilst fear of an rest had led many to great endeavours in all fields of production … Yet, the economic and social needs of the Soviet state could not justify the bloodshed … When Stalin told the 18th Congress that “we shall have no further for resorting to the method of mass purges” (Deutsche Stalin 381), he was, perhaps primarily reviewing his own position, firmly established at the apex of a hierarchy of power of his making. Frederick Engels may have told Karl Marx that “terror consist mostly of useless cruelties, perpetuated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves” – and Stalin was certainly in need of reassurance in 1934: but on the eve of the great purge, Stalin had held a position of strength, his opposition defeated, his Politburo hand-picked. Yet, the very nature, personal dictatorships necessitated control at all levels of the system – supreme control, unlimited and in divided. His aim was total control, the vanguard of the revolution personified – and all other aims, all other motive were subordinate and indivisible from this. It is therefore rational to secure complete personal power? Khrushchev condemned Stalin as a mad man – but was not Stalin his teacher, and the teacher and mentor of the Soviet leadership after his death – and no one would obviously seriously admit that his creator (for this was just what Stalin was) was a madman …

The question invites to consideration whether the acquisition and the maintenance of power is rational, or whether, in Stalin’s case, it was a men’s to an end escapes explanation, whether power was his aim – and this he had achieved – or whether power was a necessary means of strengthening the Soviet state and economy, for despite failure and setback he did create a major industrial power. Totalitarian purges are unnecessarily carefully planned, and controlled from the centre. In Stalin’s case the purge was perhaps carried too far, and with detrimental consequences, by the sheer force own momentum, but the fact that Stalin had maintained control was demonstrated by the facility and efficiency which the purgers themselves, and in particular, Yezhov, of were also purged after 1938, Stalin’s targets within the party, the nationalities, the economy, the intelligentsia in the army, were categorised and identified. Potential enemies and obstacles to his total control were officially eliminated. From the Machiavellian standpoint, this was more rational than Hitler’s “Final Solution”, although in both cases, pretexts were created, whether sabotage or treason or “lebensraum”. But once again, subjectivity is strong when a word such as rational is employed. “Expedient” would perhaps be more applicable. Innocent victims were numberless as the circle widened, yet even then, the psychological and deterrent effect on the population was beneficial to the regime. The toll and ensuing atmosphere of insecurity in the wasteland called peace induced submission and facilitated control, necessitating only occasional and selective terror, such as employed during 1939-41 in the newly sovietised Baltic states… In its way, the Great Purge was in fact a “final solution”, ridding the regime of opposition, and the disunity it brought. To Stalin, unity was essential to progress, and perhaps, like Peter the Great, it was necessary to employ barbaric means to modernise a backward, and perhaps in western eyes, barbaric state, and to ride roughshod over all obstacles to achieve this end …

The Old Bolsheviks. Most perished

Bibliography

I Deutsche, Stalin
I Deutsche, The Prophet Outcast
M Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled
A Koastler, Darkness at Noon
H Finer, The Man in Horseback
R Conquest, The Great Terror
H Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite
Z Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge

The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

In a televised address on September 30th last year, Vladimir Putin said: Russia is a great, 1000-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules … What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow?”

Now, one might not agree with Putin, and today, he is certainly persona non grata in Western forums, but one thing is for sure: Russian history mines its own unique seamWe republish below an article by American author, journalist and editor Christopher Caldwell. He advocates that we adopt a cautious and open minded perspective on historical memory, contemporary perceptions, lexicological differences, the dangers of making assumptions, and coming to conclusions and adopting opposing positions on the basis of incomplete and inadequate knowledge of other countries than our own with their distinct but not hermetically sealed histories and cultures.

Caldwell’s central focus is the colourful life and legacy of exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely.

Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

He taught at the University of Reading in England and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.

Szamuely taught me Russian and Soviet history and politics at Reading University. Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathizer and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life).

He he would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

From medieval times, autocracy has coexisted with a revolutionary traditionalism – a contradiction in terms as only Russia could sustain, a unique Russian capacity to seek revolution and discover regression, to invoke liberty merely to reinforce repression. if he were with us today, Szamuely would explain that the Soviet Union under Lenin and his successors and the Russia of Vladimir Putin bears so disconcertingly close a resemblance to Russia under the most savage of its tsars. His people, it turned out, had wanted freedom but wanted to retain the idea of their old Russian empire more. They ended up with the would-be czar, Vladimir Putin. And so the world turns.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe: The Roots and fruits of Putin’s irridentism; Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism; Ghosts of the Gulag, The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter, Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life, 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1), 17th September 1939 – the rape of Poland (2)  

You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918

You Are Needed In Kiev 2014

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin divide Europe at the Yalta Conference in Crimea, 1945

Why is Russia obsessed with slavery?

Tibor Szamuely: ‘The Russian Tradition’

Christopher Caldwell, UnHerd, 23rd august 2022

There’s nothing wrong with being cautious. Since 1709, when Peter the Great routed the troops of Swedish King Charles XII at Poltava, smack-dab in the middle of modern-day Ukraine, Europeans have understood Russia as a military threat. Never has this required us to close our minds to the glories of Russian culture or to forget that Russia’s strategic posture always has an explanation — and sometimes even a rationale.

But what was intellectually possible for Westerners in the winter of 1943, when Hitler’s troops and Stalin’s were killing each other by the millions on the Eastern front, is apparently beyond our powers today. In the wake of Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, many Europeans will not be content with anything less than wiping Russia and its culture off the map. In April, novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, writing in the TLS  that it was the morality of Tolstoy and other Russian writers that “wove the camouflage net for Russia’s tanks”, urged us to “take a long, hard look at our bookshelves”. In early August, the Russian-language novelist Wolodymyr Rafejenko declared he now felt a “revulsion” when he conversed in Russian, and vowed never again to write in it.

These are Ukrainians — one can understand their anguish and rage. But Western Europeans, who are not even at war, have been even more zealous. A Milan university cancelled its Dostoevsky class last spring. The EU and UK have blacked out the Russian internet channel RT. Russians have been declared unwelcome at venues from Wimbledon to Estonia.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, when Russia was capable of far worse, the Russian-born historian Tibor Szamuely wrote an extraordinary book. The Russian Tradition explained how Russian political behaviour (about which Szamuely was wary to the point of hostility) arose from Russian history and culture (about which Szamuely was respectful to the point of reverence). This is the right balance. It has not been struck so well since. Too bad the book is out of print, because it is strangely relevant to a lot of this decade’s preoccupations: slavery, political correctness and Ukraine, for starters.

Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, which is really saying something. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. In 1964, Szamuely, then nearing 40, was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England. He taught at Reading and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.

The simple question that animates it is how Russia came to be the centre of Marxist revolution and late 20th-century totalitarianism. Did aggressive Communism subvert blameless Russia? Or was aggressive Russia using blameless Communism as a pretext?

The beginnings of an answer lie in geography. Lacking frontiers, Szamuely writes, Russia has faced “a history of armed struggle against invaders that, for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation”. That is a large claim. Russia is always vulnerable someplace — at least for as long as it takes to gather and concentrate its killing power. And it is always fighting for its life, which tends — at least in domestic Russian debates — to empty of meaning our concepts of just and unjust war. “Despotic government,” Szamuely writes, “was the instrument she shaped to cope with the everlasting emergency.”

For Szamuely, the central problem in Russian history is slavery. Yes, slavery. Using the word “serf” to describe its put-upon agricultural workers leads us to think of the society as merely backward, quaint, feudal. But this is wrong. Russian slavery was a creation of modernity. Once-free agricultural labourers somehow got buried under debt about 500 years ago, and in the mid-16th century the government bound them to the land, the better to tax them. The owner of the serfs was the state, not the notables on whose land they toiled. There was an equality in this, for the notables were beholden to the state, too. The upper crust owed the tsar military service. Until recent centuries, Russia was one of the rare countries where nobles could be publicly flogged.

But this changed, as Peter the Great tried to modernise the system — Russia got rum, minuets, a navy and of course St. Petersburg. For aristocrats it meant Western connections and new opportunities, for serfs an overload of labour and hard discipline. That was an end to society’s old “mystic unity” and the mumbo-jumbo that had surrounded it. Serfs could now be sold or lost at cards. Russia now had not one people, Szamuely writes, but two: “the Westernised upper classes, and the masses, whose way of life became ever less distinguishable from that of the population of the great Asian empires.” As middle classes in America and France were forging republics, aristocrats were living a Golden Age under Catherine the Great (1762-95). “The most striking feature of 18th-century Russian social history,” Szamuely writes, “was the great expansion and intensification of peasant bondage at the precise moment when, with the emancipation of the nobility, it finally lost any vestige of moral, political or legal justification.”

Szamuely’s preoccupation with slavery anticipates a lot of the “woke” discussion of our own time. If slavery warped the development of the United States (which was one-eighth slave at the start of its civil war in 1861), Szamuely asks, then why has there been so much less soul searching about Russia (which was seven-eighths slave at the time of emancipation that same year)? He may misunderstand the parallel: The difference lies not in the size of the enslavement but in the identity of the rememberer. Progressive white America is wracked by guilt over what it did to “them”. Russia feels no such guilt because the misdeeds were done to “us”. The moral tenor of its soul-searching is more like that of Sicily, or Ireland, or black America.

But it is not as if Russia had no reckoning with serfdom. As access to higher education and newsprint spread, “gradually the idea began to sink in that every Russian of education and leisure was an accomplice in a crime unparalleled in its enormity”. This was the cause around which a revolutionary and often violent intelligentsia arose in the late 19th century, a class unique in Europe until the rise of political correctness. “The Russian intelligentsia was an instrument of destruction,” Szamuely writes. “Unlike the European bourgeoisie it had no constructive purposes, neither was it equipped to fulfil any such tasks.”

There was something Messianic in the intelligentsia’s role. Szamuely recognises that it used others’ suffering as a rationale for autocracy. But he never entertains the idea that the intelligentsia was an outright racket. He even praises the “intellectual honesty” of the critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who saw that equality would be won only at a very steep price in liberty: “What a contrast he provides to certain Western ‘progressive’ intellectuals, who worship at the altar of egalitarianism yet refuse to recognise that their dream… can only be realised by an arbitrary dictatorial government. Chernyshevsky and his followers, down to the present day, have never harboured any illusions about this.”

He is nonetheless struck that the great 19th-century Russian novelists (“men of sensibility, compassion and humanity”) were almost unanimously contemptuous of the intelligentsia (“with their joyless utilitarianism, their dogmatic intolerance, their fanatical devotion to a messianic vision”).

The modern enslavement of Russia’s peasantry was not, strictly speaking, a capitalist project. But it felt like one. More than the exploitation undergone in advanced industrial countries, it resonated with the exploitation Marx described. In the end, the Russian revolution was a matter of adjusting Marx’s teaching to powerful Russian folk-institutions, above all the autonomous peasant cooperative known as the obshchina. Marx himself wound up backing peasant “populists” against his own more orthodox followers. It actually turned out to be a piece of good fortune for the revolutionaries that the Marxist spark caught in what Szamuely considers the most conservative country on earth.

That is where Szamuely’s book ends. It is a shame he was never able to write at book-length about the 20th century, of which he was a passionate chronicler. He considered Lenin “the supreme political genius of the century”, and was impressed with the way he and his followers allied Russia’s interests abroad to Asian and African nationalism, not Communism. It was, in a way, the same judgment Marx had made in backing the populists.

Szamuely was fascinated with Ukraine. “Perhaps no other historical experience,” he writes in The Russian Tradition, “has left as lasting an impression on the folk-memory of the Russian people as the horrors of [the] interminable struggle against the slavers and killers of the south. For centuries the steppe remained a source of constant menace, a land of terror, death, destruction and degradation. It was called the Wild Plain, or, as we would say today, the Frontier; the greater part of this region is now called the Ukraine…”

He was highly sympathetic to Ukraine’s modern struggles. In 1968 he wrote a fascinating and well-informed account of the nationalist protests and ensuing prosecutions that had then been going on in Ukraine for much of the decade. While granting that the Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators in June 1941, he wasn’t surprised by this nationalist sentiment, given the decade of famine and purges they had endured. He noted, too, the “methodological dilution” of Ukraine’s ethnic composition by Russia, insisting that Russian dominance of the country’s high culture was a recent and unnatural phenomenon. Only 41% of books published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, it is true, but in 1930, before Russification and famine, that figure had been 84%.

Szamuely never let justified fear of Russia drive out justified fascination. Vastly well read in the country’s history, he still found it ambiguous, describing the policies of Ivan the Terrible at one point as “a strange mixture of farsightedness and paranoia — a combination frequently reproduced by his successors through the centuries”. Few historians have been better equipped than Szamuely to understand the paradoxes of Russia, where the novelists are sublime and the politics are unendurable, and often for the same reasons.

Tsar Nicholas the Last

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918