Civil War, War Communism, NEP, and the 1920s

In the Civil War period, the Party put an end to its experiments with popular sovereignty at the local level.   The soviets lost their independence and influence, worker control of factories subsided, and an officer corps reemerged in a professionalized Red Army.  War Communism helped the Reds to win the Civil War, but extreme centralization decimated the Russian economy, leaving the cities barren and devoid of adequate food.  In this period of plague and famine, the harvest almost completely collapsed.  Peasants refused to plant for want of incentive, and many turned to open revolt against the Bolsheviks.  Peasants frequently attacked grain requisition teams sent from the cities.  Then came the Kronstadt Rebellion, in which radical sailors now turned against Bolshevism in favor of a free, collectivist, decentralized form of political organization, and the emergence of the Workers' Opposition movement, in which proletarian leaders advocated for a form of democratic centralism.  Then came a series of workers' strikes.

In response to these political challenges, Lenin wisely coupled political coercion with N.E.P., or the New Economic Policy of the 1920s.  During this period, the Party loosened the reigns on economic control and the economy quickly rebounded.  During the mid-1920s, trade revived, shops proliferated, cities grew, cafes and services sprang up everywhere, grain requisitions ended, and economic activity finally reached pre-war levels in 1926.  The Party's stated goal in this period was to control "the commanding heights" of industry, including banking and large-scale manufacturing and international trade, but leave the local merchant or small-time manufacturer relatively free of governmental interference.

Bukharin, "the Party's darling," advocated policies that were roughly commensurate with NEP assumptions, which favored market surpluses, the production of consumer goods, gradualism, and evolutionary socialism. According to Steinberg, Bukharin offered economic, political, and even ethical objections to more radical Leftist currents in the Party.  Bukharin wanted to avoid violent class struggle.  The goal was a "bloodless path to socialism."

Notwithstanding the economic successes of N.E.P., the country's new found freedom led to widespread discontent in the Party.  Old Bolsheviks were appalled at rampant crime, which Steinberg reminds us, orthodox Marxists could only attribute to the reemergence of capitalism.  The Bolsheviks also resented widespread prostitution, which they also believed resulted from exploitative economic relationships.  Party members generally believed that NEP had been a necessary evil, but it had to be overturned if the country ever hoped to become truly communist.  The majority of Bolsheviks believed that Russian backwardness needed to be forcefully overturned by an aggressive and intrusive state apparatus

Although Soviet institutions were affected by the violence of the Civil War, Bolshevik thinkers of the 1920s remained sincere about the transformation of society and they therefore pursued a wide variety of radical artistic projects and anticipatory social reforms.  These reforms included granting women equal legal rights, making divorce and abortion freely available, organizing communes, and vigorously attacking domestic abuse.  Steinberg even mentions Soviet "belt burying ceremonies" in which peasants publicly committed to end domestic abuse by turning the burial of peasant belts into a public ritual.  The Soviets didn't stop there.  In the 1920s the Party faithful and communist sympathizers launched a whole series of social projects, including campaigns to reduce swearing, drinking and fighting.  Steinberg even mentions one campaign to get Soviet citizens to eat with proper kitchen utensils.

Steinberg's overall take on the 1920s was that it was a time of experimentation, when the Party's overall direction had not been completely determined.  Could the Party contain any seeds of democracy?  How much discipline was required of Party members?  Could factions exist in the Party? How coercive should the socialist state be?  What was the right balance between the urban and rural economy?  In other areas of social life, debates about the communist future were even more speculative.  What did a liberated man look like?  What were the hallmarks of a newly free Russian society? The 1920s were an even more experimental time for the arts. The future seemed unlimited.  In this era, an avant garde still hoped to use aesthetic innovation to reflect social change and, more importantly, encourage it. Plans for a "Monument to the World's Suffering" would have made this edifice the tallest building in the world.  Musicians organized "an orchestra without a conductor" to express egalitarian principles in music.  One group attacked the convention of wearing clothing.  Others experimented with urban planning, factory production, and a hundred other things. In summary, Russian communism between War Communism and Stalinism remained surprisingly fluid, creative, and open-ended.

A Ukrainian Alamo

"But you are Ukrainian aren't you?" "Yes, [but] a worker."

Without commentary from Vance Kepley, noted film historian, Alexander Dovzhenko's Arsenal, a film that depicts a heroic encounter between doomed Bolsheviks and their Ukrainian nationalist opponents, is a difficult film. Created in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Dovzhenko's silent film--which Kepley tells us met with critical acclaim despite its sometimes bleakly neutral depiction of the human cost of civil war--intentionally departs from conventional narrative film-making strategies in favor of allusion, ellipse, and montage. The film has a proletarian hero, Timosh, who realizes that the Bolshevik Party is his friend and soon decides to help that cause. But Dovzhenko often strays from that hero's journey of understanding in favor of interesting if confusing visual and narrative digressions.

The film's story isn't impossible understand. Dovzhenko, who originally supported the nationalist cause, explains the Bolshevik cause in the following way: World War I decimated the country--wounding or killing millions--and clarified the class warfare that pitted peasants, proletarians, and ordinary soldiers against tsars, officers, churchmen, and the bourgeoisie. (In one scene, the director contrasts the difficult life of a munitions worker with the frivolity of Nicholas I who, notwithstanding his supreme authority, is lazily writing in his journal: "Today I show a crow.") After the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian nationalist party cynically attempted to use national and religious sentiment to prop up a regime of bourgeois exploitation. Finally, the workers--led by party workers and proletarian martyrs like Timosh--take a stand against capitalism's apologists and die in the process, only a short while before red partisans might have come to their rescue.

Dovzchenko's artistic vision fell into disfavor soon after this film. Vance Kepley reminds us that his next film, Earth, was harshly critiqued for ideological and aesthetic reasons. Who could ever hope to keep up with the Party's erratically shifting positions? Neither its political message, not its non-narrative style, were quite correct in the context of unmitigated Stalinism.

But even in this film Dovchenko's propaganda film featured some moral ambiguity. One understands from this film that revolution is made from the ground up. It's not party leaders that play a part in Red Ukraine's Alamo. Indeed, none of the Party's leaders warrants even a cameo in this film. Moreover, war, and the Civil War in particular, has obviously destroyed men and women, despite the Red Victory. Men are maimed, machinery falls into disuse, women are listless, and the economy in general is clearly decimated. Kepley tells us that this lack of clarity may mirror the political history of Dovchenko and countless other Ukrainians, who vacillated and switched sides in the shifting and chaotic political landscape that emerged at the end of the First World War.

The film's mythical was more acceptable to the Bolsheviks. The worker hero Timosh takes on the marauding nationalists and, echoing Cossack folklore of the seventeenth century, the bullets bounce off his chest.

E.H. Carr

Is a blogger who deals with the Russian Revolution obligated to read E.H. Carr’s massive treatment of the 1920s? As Carr doesn’t actually cover the Revolution or the Civil War, I have a plausible if not persuasive case for amnesty. However, Carr has dealt with this period of the consolidation of revolutionary energies in more detail than any other author, and by a wide margin. Carr has in fact written over 4000 pages on the subject, and this count doesn’t include any of his other smaller studies of men like Bakunin or Herzen. He’s covered NEP, Socialism in One Country, and many other key Russian events with patience and diligence. (For Carr, Stalin’s approach to the challenge of Trotsky and others was extremely practical: could Communists be expected to wait for the global revolution rather than advance Russia’s national interests in the meantime?)

I’m not about to take on this monumental task of reading a large portion of Carr anytime soon, so I’m thankful for Laqueur’s short overview of the work, written over two decades ago. Back then, the jury was still out on E.H. Carr. Carr has a lot to recommend him. He had a rich diplomatic past and excellent command of the primary sources available in the West. He is also relatively objective, if such a thing is possible, and knows how to write, as evidenced by his wonderfully comic treatment of Bakunin’s strange career for instance. He also appreciated the gravity of what was happened in the Soviet Union. This really was an experiment without parallel in modern history. However, E.H. Carr’s heroic attempt to turn his long series of books the post-revolutionary era doesn’t quite measure up to Macaulay’s treatment of Rome, which remains as a profound work of literature even if its historical explanation are often out of favor with professional historians.

If Laqueur was critical of Carr he was not yet prepared to past judgment on Carr’s project. It was, he thought, too early for that. By now, Carr’s mistakes loom larger and his enormous oeuvre is only sometimes seen as useful let alone authoritative by the present giants of Russian history. Laqueur naturally found fault in Carr’s decision to omit the Revolution and Civil War, since the policies and structures of the 1920s only make sense if one understands how and why they were first created. Laqueur also finds fault in Carr’s claim to impartiality, which admittedly waxes and wanes which each book, according to the shifts in modern European experience. For Laqueur, objectivity can be a mask for insensitivity to human suffering, or a mask for one’s hidden but also present viewpoint and prejudice.

The fascinating thing about Carr is that he wrote a history that left out most personalities and focused instead on legal, political, and economic structures. This approach helps Carr to overlook dramatic stories that didn’t really make a difference in the bigger life of the Soviet state. However, Laqueur says Carr often overlooks the reality behind formal structures. The Soviet Constitution, for instance, is really not very important. It reads surprisingly well, but since it was never implemented, the real story of Soviet jurisprudence is that it never evolved to protect the most fundamental rights of Soviet citizens.

Carr’s major response to his critics was that he was attempting to do a kind of history that made few moral judgments. As he said on some occasions, it would be inappropriate for historians to judge the morality of players in the English or French Revolutions, so why do so now with the Soviet one? Moreover, what’s true of France and England may not be true of the Soviet Union. If the Soviet government would look brutal if it appeared in the West, it’s not quite so unusual in terms of Russian experience. As the facts are now known, this seems to be a woefully insensitive to the millions of Russians whose lives were ruined or ended by Stalin’s police state.

Mongolian Helter Skelter

Everybody says Russia is a unique for a European power in that it is also an Asiatic or Eastern country. External and internal commentators claimed this to be true, and yet few books about modern Russia have very much to say about the Far East. James Palmer’s book, the Bloody White Baron: the Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia, helps to redress the balance.

Although the subject of this biography was an ethnic German from the Baltic provinces in the far western fringe of the Russian Empire, this book follows his notorious career in Russia’s Far East during the Russian Civil War. The Baron Ungern-Sternberg epitomizes the bizarre nature of the Russian situation. He hailed from an ethnically German family that had served the Romanov tsars loyally for generations. He fought Germany heroically, with complete disregard for his personal safety, during World War I. To say that his temperament was a product of a bipolar disorder seems a gross understatement. Reading the book, one can only think of Charlie Manson by way of comparison.

The Baron was charismatic if not mesmerizing and completely unfit for anything outside of war. He was, according to Palmer, a brave and brilliant military leader, but one who was not suited to high rank by virtue of his unorthodox disposition. His true niche was as a guerrilla leader or ruthless bandit. The Baron fought well in the First World War, but truly came into his own in the chaotic and desperate circumstances of the Civil War, where unorganized groups of irregular soldiers clashed with local populations and each other with ideological fanaticism and often resembled bloodthirsty criminals as much as they did legitimate combatants.

Ungern-Sternberg’s participation in the Civil War highlights some of the reasons the Whites lost. His military force was only nominally allied to other White forces that were resisting the Communists. Moreover, the Baron was so brutal to local populations that the Communists could increasingly rely on the assistance of anyone who had dealt with his murderous regime, unless they were so terrorized that they refused to risk his displeasure. Strangely, the Baron was a Buddhist with deep strains of mysticism, anti-Semitism, and occult belief—as well as an inclination to adapt to Mongolian language and culture.

Palmer notes that the Baron’s Buddhism was more compatible with violence than one might think. For in Mongolia—where the Baron eventually retreated to set himself up as the protector of the Mongolian strand of Buddhism (an offshoot of the Tibetan variety)—Buddhism is intertwined with a host of fearsome deities and forbidding holy sites. The Baron’s forces were eventually overrun. Communism triumphed in the West and then slowly eradicated all resistance further east, especially after the Japanese and other allies had stopped protecting White clients. But before the Bolsheviks triumphed, the Baron killed and tortured local populations, visitors, and many of his own men. Palmer’s epitaph is a sad one.

Despite the final defeat of the insane Baron-- who succumbed to his own troops only after evincing superhuman energy and diabolical cruelty to his own followers--the Communists eventually proved almost as destructive to Mongolia, although in a less frenzied and capricious way. The Communists went to war with Buddhist religious culture, which under girded almost every aspect of the Mongolian way of life, and killed many priests and anybody else who even allegedly collaborated with the Baron, including whole tribes of people. They also destroyed the vast majority of Buddhist temples, exported or melted down most Mongolian art, Mongolia was Stalin’s first client state, and suffered for it.

Why Now?

I don’t know why I first became obsessed with Russia. I really have no connection to the country. I’ve never visited for example; don’t have ancestors from the area, etc. I took an undergraduate class, so I think my current obsession might be a form of nostalgia. And of course there are a few things about Russia that are almost intrinsically interesting.

It’s massive, for instance, and stretches many time zones, possessing untold natural riches, and a huge citizenry. The fact that it straddles both East and West is interesting too, as is its brutal past, historic ties to Mongol invasions, and relatively unique religion, being neither Protestant nor Catholic. What is more, Russian history is the history of so many other things, since Russian history is inter-tangled with the history of Eastern European states, Baltic states, Transcaucasia, Turkish states, and China, Japan, and the general European balance of power. The supremely good literature would make it worthy of an obsession as well.

However, it’s probably communism that makes for the obsession. Real revolutions are rare. The French Revolution of 1789 would have been a good subject for a blog. And when one happens it’s worthy of prolonged study. 1917 was a fascinating year. When rich people are exiled, killed, humiliated, forced to do manual labor, forced to share homes with their servants, or excluded from political power—something unusual has happened.

There is probably a lot of unrecognized continuity between pre-and-post Revolutionary Russia. However, the economic, political, cultural, artistic differences were profound. So it’s interesting to see what happens next, especially since Russia experienced no Thermidorean reaction, and never saw the overthrow of the Revolutionary tradition until the better part of a century had passed.

Even the French had nothing similar happen: first Napoleon, then the Bourbons again—and certainly no sans-coulette government. As a true crime aficionado, I’d say that modern Russian history is without parallel too. If you study British history, you must look for grave crimes abroad for the most part, in Ireland, or in more distant colonial parts. With Russia, you’ve got czarist crimes and pogroms, 19th century terrorism, then you’ve got revolutionary violence, and Stalinist purges, the Gulag, and the world wars, which were obviously ten times more bloody than anything experienced by Britain. And obviously, Russia too had all of the violence of colonialism, even without the overseas empire.

The other factor in Russia that makes Russian history interesting is its history of serfdom, which can in some respects be compared to American slavery, both ended in the same decade. Maybe the bourgeoisie is equally interesting, but it seems more familiar and therefore less interesting than Russian aristocracy and Russian serfdom.

There was a time when I was bored by the Cold War, bored by the decaying bureaucratic structures of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, for example. I’ve moved away from this because I’m now interested in the question of how something as evil and dysfunctional as the Soviet regime could transform itself into something so banal (if still evil). But I understand people who are bored of the Cold War. I myself sometimes think of Cold War history as something akin to 1970s music or episodes of some no-longer-relevant sitcom like Welcome Back Kotter. Still, this is a good time to study the Soviet Union. With capitalism experiencing another wave of severe setbacks, it’s important to look back at the only other distinct option that modernity apparently produced.

Russian Power in the 1920s

At the moment, I'm reading a lot of Bruce Lincoln's excellent books on modern Russian history. Three of these books focus on the Revolution, or the time immediately preceding it or following it. That is to say, I'm immersed in Russia's experience with World War I, the February and October revolutions, and the Civil War. I suppose one of the questions that these books provoke is how Russia could possibly have remained a great power in the 1920s and 1930s after having survived these devastating experiences.

I suppose the same question could be asked of any of the main belligerents in World War I, since they all squandered so much property, so many lives, so much wealth. But Russia obviously suffered most, and suffered most by an order of magnitude. And this of course was well before the Revolution itself destroyed what was left of the economy, before Germany robbed Russia of some of its border states, and before the Civil War re-duced the standard of living even further.

There was a time when contemporaries believed Communism was responsible for raising Russia out of this desolation, but even acknowledging that slave labor and iron discipline and targeted investment might well have rescued targeted sectors of the economy, it seems that Communism could only have further retarded Russia's efforts to re-claim its Great Power status in the 1920s.

Admittedly, there is a precedent here, insofar as Russia overcome the Napoleonic invasions and seemed, in most observable ways, stronger than ever despite the dislocation and destruction and death that the French brought. Even so, I find it hard to explain Russia's reemergence in the 1920s. One might even wonder a related question: how is it that Russia could lose a war to the still-emerging Japan in 1904-05 but then fight both Austria and Germany, with some notable successes, during World War I.