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Why does Putin blame this infamous Russian revolutionary for Ukraine’s independence?
More than a century after the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin’s decision to organise the Soviet state around national republics continues to shape political arguments about Ukraine
When Vladimir Putin speaks about the origins of the war in Ukraine, he often reaches back into history for his justifications. In speeches and essays, the Russian president has repeatedly argued that modern Ukraine is an artificial construct that was effectively created by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of 1917 – and above all by their leader, Vladimir Lenin. According to this interpretation, Ukraine has never been a serious, distinct nation from Russia, but a political idea that emerged when the new Soviet regime reorganised the territories of the former Russian Empire into a federation of republics. In Putin’s view, by granting Ukraine formal status as a Soviet republic, Lenin unintentionally laid the groundwork for Ukrainian independence decades later. It’s a disputed version of history, to say the least. Read more | Why does Putin think Ukraine should be Russian? It’s partly to do with the Vikings Many historians argue that Ukrainian cultural and political identity long predated the Soviet Union. Ideas of a distinct Ukrainian language, culture and political community had been developing since at least the 19th century, alongside nationalist movements across Europe. But it’s impossible to understand Putin’s version of history without coming back to Lenin. Historian Dr Lara Douds reflected on Lenin’s life and legacy on the HistoryExtra podcast – and explained how he’s become Putin’s bogeyman. Lenin’s revolution “The boy who would become Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in a provincial town in the Russian Empire,” explains Douds. The town was Simbirsk, about 400 miles east of Moscow on the Volga river. Simbirsk was a modest administrative town in the interior of the empire, far removed from the political centres of St Petersburg and Moscow. At the time of Lenin’s birth, the Russian Empire was one of the largest political entities in world history. It stretched from eastern Europe across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Its political system remained rigidly stuck in the past. Read more | The founding and fall of the USSR “The context he is born into is one of a Russian empire characterised by autocracy,” Douds says. The tsarist regime was “absolutist and repressive,” with political power concentrated in the hands of the emperor. The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia since the early 17th century, and the tsar governed with barely any constitutional limits. Nevertheless, Russia had begun to reform in limited ways. “Economically, it’s coming out of serfdom, but very slowly,” Douds explains. A small noble elite controlled land and political power, while most of the population were peasants. By the late 19th century, these tensions were producing political opposition. “In the couple of decades before Lenin’s birth we see the development of a revolutionary movement in the Russian empire,” Douds says. When he was born in 1870, in many respects, Lenin’s upbringing was privileged. “It seems as though Lenin had a wonderful, almost idyllic childhood,” Douds explains. He grew up in a close-knit and intellectually engaged family. His father, Ilya Ulyanov, was a state official who had risen steadily through the imperial bureaucracy. Originally a teacher, he eventually became a school inspector. “He’s promoted to the point that by Lenin’s birth he has the right of hereditary nobility in the Russian empire,” Douds says. This status placed the family within the educated professional class rather than among Russia’s peasantry. The family was socially ambitious and culturally active. “It’s a family on the make in many ways.” The household included six children – three boys and three girls – with Vladimir in the middle. “They all play together. They are very cultured. They enjoy reading, music, painting, walking in nature,” Douds says. Lenin himself was an exceptional student. “He has glowing school reports.” The Ulyanov family tragedy In 1886 Lenin’s father died suddenly while still relatively young. The loss was devastating for the family. And an even greater shock followed the next year when Lenin’s older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was arrested in St Petersburg. Alexander had become involved in an underground revolutionary organisation known as Narodnaya Volya – ‘The People’s Will’. This organisation had already gained notoriety for assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The group believed that eliminating key figures in the tsarist government could trigger a broader uprising. Their next target was Alexander III. Read more | Rasputin: the 'mad monk' who became a friend to the Romanovs After being identified as an involved member in this latest plot, “Alexander Ulyanov becomes one of the young people, aged about 20, to be hanged at the Peter and Paul Fortress,” Douds says. “It’s a hugely traumatic moment in the life of the young Vladimir Ulyanov,” she says. “The family is shunned by polite society, which they had been part of up until that point,” Douds says. Lenin himself rarely spoke publicly about his brother’s execution. In his writings he preferred to present his political commitments as the result of careful intellectual analysis rather than personal trauma. But many historians suspect the episode left a profound mark. “It is very much a moment that defines Lenin’s feelings about tsarism,” Douds explains. Beneath the rational framework of Marxist theory, she suggests, there may also have been “a lot of repressed anger that defines his career”. Whatever the exact psychological impact, Lenin immersed himself in revolutionary politics and socialist theory, which would eventually bring him to the leadership of the Bolshevik movement. The Bolsheviks were a radical faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party that advocated for a tightly organised revolutionary party to overthrow the tsarist regime. The making of a revolutionary icon After Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power during the Russian Revolution, his image was carefully cultivated by the new Soviet state. In November 1917, Bolshevik forces seized power in Petrograd, overthrowing the provisional government that had replaced the tsar earlier that year. In subsequent decades, Soviet propaganda presented him as the founding father of a new socialist society. Read more | The death of Lenin, a century on: the long afterlife of Russia’s pre-emiment revolutionary “The cult of Lenin had taken over Soviet society in many ways,” Douds explains. Schoolchildren learned stories about ‘Grandfather Lenin’, portrayed as wise, compassionate and morally flawless. “It reached a sickening degree.” It was only after many decades that that narrative began to change. “After the collapse of communism there was a great appetite to criticise him,” Douds says. His status as a leading figure of Russian political intellect had faded. Lenin’s political return Now, ire directed toward him has returned. “We can see Putin recently blaming Lenin for the creation of Ukraine,” Douds says. But why? Read more | Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower The Bolsheviks reorganised the former Russian empire into a federation of national republics after the revolution. In 1922 this structure became formalised as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), composed of multiple Soviet republics including Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. These republics – including the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – were formally granted limited autonomy within the new Soviet system. In Putin’s interpretation, this arrangement artificially created Ukrainian statehood within the Soviet framework. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those republics became independent states, including modern Ukraine. Lenin’s decision to structure the Soviet Union as a federation of republics did indeed shape the political map of eastern Europe for much of the 20th century. In that sense, it’s Putin’s stated view that Lenin bears much of the responsibility for the conflict between the two countries. Danny Bird was speaking to Laura Douds on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Hotel Lux: the guesthouse of world revolution
Maurice J Casey explores the history of a Moscow hotel that hosted revolutionaries from every corner of the world in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution
History is often told through the epic struggles of famous personalities or grand movements. Yet sometimes the voices of ordinary people break through. In this episode, Maurice J Casey speaks to Danny Bird about his new book, Hotel Lux, which follows three connected families through the upheavals of the 20th century. Bound by idealism, friendship and love, their journey begins in 1920s Moscow, inside a hotel that was once a sanctuary for international revolutionaries drawn to the Soviet Union’s bold vision for a better world. Maurice J Casey is the author of Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals (Footnote Press, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon
Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
The hammer and sickle is one of the modern world’s most recognisable symbols. It instantly evokes the former Soviet Union and communism. For some people around the globe, it remains a beacon of hope for a better tomorrow. But for others it is a painful reminder of totalitarian oppression and terror. What’s the history behind this revolutionary symbol?
What is the hammer and sickle? The symbol of the hammer and sickle is typically presented in a two-dimensional format, with the hammer crossed over the curved blade of the sickle (a tool traditionally used for harvesting crops, which has a curved metal blade often set on top of a wooden handle). A red star often – though not always – appears just above the tip of the sickle. The hammer represents the working class engaged in industrial production, who, according to Marxist theory, are destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class under capitalism. The sickle denotes the peasantry, the toilers of the land. Though the symbol denotes solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers, the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, whose works were foundational to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, had dismissed the peasantry as a vestige, leftover by the epoch that had preceded capitalism: feudalism. Marx regarded peasants as an instinctively conservative class that would likely prove hostile to a workers’ revolution. The adoption of a visual expression of unity between worker and peasant shows the Bolsheviks’ adaption of Marxism to their homeland’s specific circumstances, referencing the socio-economic reality of Russia, which was still a predominantly agrarian society with little industrial development, at the time of the October Revolution in 1917. When did the hammer and sickle first appear? In early 1918, Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the regime’s Commissariat for Education (known as ‘Narkompros’) – launched a competition for artists and designers to create an official seal for the nascent Soviet state. The entries were a diverse assortment that spanned everything from striking avant-garde forms, classical imagery such as overflowing cornucopias, and even a double-headed eagle shorn of its feathers and regalia (the double-headed eagle had been adopted centuries before by the Russian tsars to symbolise their link to ancient Rome via the Byzantine empire; the regal title ‘tsar’ meaning ‘Caesar’). Read more | The last days of the Romanovs: could George V have saved the family? The winning entry (by an unknown artist, though it has sometimes been attributed to one Alexander Nikolaevich Leo) featured a crossed hammer and sickle, sheaves of wheat, a rising sun and a vertical sword. However, this was just weeks after Soviet Russia had negotiated its withdrawal from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin, determined to maintain the regime’s peace-making credentials, vetoed the inclusion of a sword in April 1918. While the government debated the state seal, artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin created the template of a crossed hammer and sickle that would later become famous throughout the world. Read more | Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower Kamzolkin’s stark design was originally produced for a poster celebrating 1918’s May Day festivities in Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye district. On 10 July 1918, the Soviet republic formally adopted its constitution, which officially proclaimed that: “the coat of arms of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic consists of a red background on which a golden sickle and a hammer are placed (crosswise, handles downward) in sun-rays and surrounded by a wreath.” Beneath this design was a slogan in Russian Cyrillic that paraphrased the last sentence of The Communist Manifesto and affirmed the Bolsheviks’ commitment to a global socialist revolution: “Workers of the world, unite!” What other symbols did the Bolsheviks use? Among the rejected entries for the state seal was an illustration by graphic artist Sergey Chekhonin, of a peasant woman holding a sickle and spade, facing a male worker holding a sledgehammer and a caduceus. These gender roles – the countryside as feminine and nurturing and the city as masculine and assertive, endured in Soviet inconography. Some of these symbols also showed links to the classical pantheon. The caduceus is a staff wielded by the Greek god Hermes (also the Roman god Mercury). As well as a divine messenger, Hermes was the patron of commerce. His caduceus and other paraphernalia, such as his winged helmet, often appeared on the banners of trade unions across Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Also, the sickle is associated with Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture. Lenin and his comrades understood the power of symbols and revolutionary heraldry. Further classical imagery appeared on the frontispiece to the first Soviet constitution, which featured fasces (a bundle of wooden rods with an axe) behind the hammer and sickle. Fasces exemplified authority in ancient Rome and were revived during the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century. How is the hammer and sickle used today? Just over a year after the October Revolution, leading Bolsheviks formed the Communist International, better known as the ‘Comintern’. This global body aimed to promote the cause of worldwide proletarian revolution through kindred communist parties in every nation on the planet. The hammer and sickle quickly became the symbol for world communism. It adorned the Soviet flag until the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, undergoing slight modifications to its design over the decades. To this day it remains the symbol of many communist parties, including governing ones in the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam. On the podcast | Professor Lea Ypi reflects on living through the fall of communism in Albania Across present-day Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, the symbol remains ubiquitous on buildings and monuments. Aeroflot, Russia’s de facto national airline, has retained the winged hammer and sickle logo designed by artist Alexander Rodchenko. Is the hammer and sickle used in former Soviet states? In 2010, several states in eastern Europe that had once been within Moscow’s orbit called upon the European Union to ban the hammer and sickle as a symbol of totalitarianism and crimes against humanity. This was ultimately unsuccessful and was left up to the respective member states to determine their own approach. Following the escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has moved to obliterate traces of the country’s Soviet past. In August 2023, the Soviet coat of arms on the shield of the Mother Ukraine statue was replaced with the country’s tryzub (‘trident’) emblem. How else has the hammer and sickle been used? Given its striking imagery, the hammer and sickle has also found an audience beyond its explicitly political context. During a holiday to Italy, pop artist Andy Warhol was inspired to create a series featuring the tools in 1976 after being confronted with ubiquitous graffiti of the symbol while touring Italian towns. George Orwell’s 1945 fable of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, in which animals revolt against their human farmer, features the so-called ‘Hoof and Horn’ flag in an apparent parody of the Soviet banner. By coincidence, and in a non-communist rendering, the Republic of Austria’s coat of arms consists of an eagle grasping a hammer and sickle in its claws. What symbols did the Bolsheviks use prior to the hammer and sickle? Before the hammer and sickle there was another Bolshevik emblem – the plough and hammer, set within a red star. As the American journalist John Reed conveyed in the title of his eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in autumn 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, the October Revolution was a seismic event. As the ancient double-headed eagle of Russia’s tsarist past came crashing down amid the aftershocks, the country’s radical new leaders turned to face the future. Unlike its European neighbours, Russia had retained an autocratic monarchy into the 20th century. Having only abolished serfdom in 1861, the vast empire was still largely defined by a feudal social order where illiterate peasants made up most of the population. Generations of them had been raised to revere religious icons and the tsar as a ‘little father’ to his people, a living intercessor between their everyday lives and the divine. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware of the authority that visual motifs and symbols commanded in the land. They set about cultivating a new revolutionary culture soon after the October Revolution. Tsarist flags and iconography were outlawed, while statues of emperors were toppled on a wave of iconoclasm that swept through the major cities. Yet before the hammer and sickle emerged, the new regime’s earliest symbol arose amid the Russian Civil War that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster On 19 April 1918, soldiers of Soviet Russia’s Red Army were bestowed with a breast badge that depicted a plough crossed over a hammer, contained within a red star. Although its designer remains a mystery, the plough’s association with agriculture functioned as a precursor to the sickle, symbolising the peasantry in union with the industrial working class, embodied in the hammer. As for the red star, its origins as a socialist symbol are also unclear. Five-pointed red stars had first appeared on the uniforms of tsarist officers during the early 19th century. Its martial use was a nod to the Roman god of war, Mars. Similarly, its adoption by the Red Army evoked this meaning. However, it may also have been a salute to the 1908 novel, Red Star by Russian writer, Alexander Bogdanov, a work of science fiction that imagined a communist utopia on the red planet, Mars. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now Why is red associated with communism? The Bolsheviks considered themselves the heirs to the European revolutionary tradition. To that end, in 1918, they adopted the red flag and renamed themselves the Communist Party as a homage to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Prior to that brief insurrection – which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had highlighted as a glimpse of the workers’ revolution they envisioned – the red flag had been adopted by radical republicans on the left during the 1848 revolution in France. The use of red by the Soviet state also tapped into centuries of Russian tradition. In the Russian language, krasnyi (‘red’) is related to the word krasivyi, meaning ‘beautiful’. Red corners were (and remain to this day) features of Orthodox Christian homes where residents displayed their holy icons. Similarly, Moscow’s Red Square became the focal point for all national celebrations in the decades that followed the October Revolution.
Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower
Stalin is widely regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history. From his childhood in the Caucasus to his career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Robert Service explores his life and explains why he was constantly underestimated by his contemporaries
Josef Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union, one of the principal architects of the postwar order and among the most ruthless tyrants to have ever lived. Undoubtedly, he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Robert Service explains how the young Stalin had been seduced by revolutionary ideals of the age and ultimately joined the network of Marxists operating both inside and outside the territories ruled over by the tsar. As a Bolshevik, he played a key role during the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen. During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power. Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945. By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors. Where and when was Stalin born? Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time. However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about most of his background”, says Service, choosing to indulge an aura of mystery. When did Josef Stalin pick the name ‘Stalin’ – and what does it mean? During his initial foray into radical politics, Stalin, like other revolutionaries, adopted a series of nicknames. One of his earliest ones was ‘Koba’, inspired by the bandit protagonist in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel, The Patricide. ‘Stalin’, meaning ‘man of steel’, was a revolutionary nom de guerre he adopted in 1912. It spoke to his desire to be considered formidable, as well as being, says Service, “a Russian name, not a Georgian one”. That was important because “he was increasingly identifying with the wider Russian revolutionary movement”. Read more | Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century What was Stalin’s childhood like? Stalin’s upbringing was rough, “involving fist fights in the streets and little gangs of boys,” says Service. Nevertheless, he was a precocious child and an adept student. This convinced his mother that he should enrol at the Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) Theological Seminary and train to become an Orthodox priest in 1894. How did Josef Stalin become a revolutionary? It was via Georgian nationalism that Stalin first embraced radical politics. His teachers at the Tiflis found him to be increasingly rebellious and he quit the seminary before he could qualify as a priest. “He was a rebel and he turned from faith in God to faith in revolution,” says Service. At the turn of the 20th century, while employed at the Meteorological Observatory, Stalin began to immerse himself in key Marxist texts and the Caucasus’s revolutionary scene. His activities soon attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. “Georgian Marxists were notorious for blackmailing and intimidating industrialists in the Georgian capital,” says Service. “He got involved in all of this and [therefore] wasn’t quite as clean-handed a Marxist as other young revolutionaries were in Russia itself. He had a reputation for combining being a Marxist with being something of a Georgian patriot, and he was definitely someone who was involved with gangsters”. When did Stalin meet Lenin? Stalin met Vladimir Lenin in 1905 during the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist organisation, in Tampere, Finland (then part of the Russian empire). This occurred four years after Stalin had joined the party. In 1903, the party had split along ideological differences, into Mensheviks (the ‘minority’) led by Julius Martov, and Bolsheviks (the ‘majority’) headed by Lenin. Both factions would later form breakaway parties during 1912. Over the following years, Stalin’s revolutionary activities would lead to him being arrested and exiled to the far-flung reaches of the tsarist realm several times. What role did Josef Stalin play during the Russian Revolution of 1917? Stalin, like many Bolsheviks, was living in exile (in his case Siberia rather than abroad) when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The collapse of the Russian monarchy followed. Though nobody knew it at the time, this February Revolution was just one of two major convulsions that would take place that year. Émigrés and internally exiled radicals (meaning those detained in Russia’s bleak hinterlands) flocked to major cities like Moscow and the then-capital, Petrograd (now called St Petersburg). Stalin was among them. Read more | Books interview with Robert Service: "Nicholas II brought the Russian Revolution upon his own head" Upon his arrival, Stalin “barged into the leadership that already existed in a small kernel of men and women in the capital,” says Service. “He basically took over the central Bolshevik party apparatus until Lenin [who had been living in Switzerland alongside other revolutionaries] returned in April 1917. “When difficult jobs had to be done throughout that year, whether it was running the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, or helping to set strategy in the central committee of the party, Stalin was there. He wasn’t a man who ‘missed the revolution’, as his enemies always later claimed”. Later that year, after the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution, Lenin made Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. This post gave him responsibility over the new regime’s governance of the non-Russian peoples living within the wreckage of the former tsarist empire. What was Stalin’s relationship with Lenin like? Their working relationship following the October Revolution was relatively fruitful, though not without some disagreements. “Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing,” says Service. “Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership”. By the 1920s, Lenin’s health – and his ability to engage in statecraft – was increasingly debilitated after a series of strokes. This would leave him largely bedridden until the end of his life in January 1924. Before Lenin's death, he recognised that both Leon Trotsky – architect of the Red Army and a convert to Bolshevism from the Menshevik faction – and Stalin, were emerging as likely successors to his leadership. “Lenin found that the man [Stalin] that he had promoted to high party office had ideas of his own. Now, he had always had ideas of his own, but Lenin had been able to control him, moderate him when he thought necessary,” says Service. By late 1922, the two men fell out over the position of Georgia within the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This vast new multinational polity, spanning northern Eurasia, fused the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) on 30 December. According to Service, Lenin “decided that if Stalin ever got into a position where he might be his successor, that would be a disaster for the party as a whole, and for the revolution itself”. Therefore, Lenin dictated a so-called ‘testament’ that urged party comrades to remove Stalin from the post of party General Secretary. Its contents shocked Stalin and it was subsequently suppressed from wider circulation. How did Stalin come to preside over the Soviet Union? Following Lenin’s death, the factions within the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party hardened. Trotsky rallied party officials against what was perceived to be the creeping bureaucratisation of Soviet politics, which became synonymous with Stalin himself. As well as Trotsky, a contingent of leading Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin also looked down on Stalin, says Service, because they thought he was an “ignorant provincial”. One contemporary, Nikolai Sukhanov, famously dismissed Stalin as “a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace”. Stalin, for his part, played up to this image. While the others pushed for worldwide revolution, Stalin struck a much more cautious tone. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster Service says that “this appealed to numbers of Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War who were war weary and shared Stalin’s zeal to make the revolution a success at home first before turning their eyes towards Europe”. By the late 1920s, Stalin had outflanked his rivals within the Communist Party by forging and betraying alliances with key party figures and playing each group off against the other. Eventually, his greatest adversary, Trotsky, was ousted from the Soviet government and first subjected to internal exile, before banishment overseas. Stalin’s rise to power also hinged on his canny self-appointment as ‘high priest’ of the emerging cult of Leninism after the Bolshevik founder’s death. Although Stalin’s eventual mastery of the Soviet Union was contingent on this policy of ‘socialism in one country’, Service maintains that Stalin really did believe in spreading the revolution once the USSR was in a strong enough domestic position to coordinate such an offensive. What is Stalinism? Stalin’s dictatorship would lead to the emergence of his own cult of personality, as well as a new ideology: Stalinism. This new phenomenon, says Service, was “a brutal extension of Leninism” and he acknowledges that “for some people this is controversial… they think that Leninism and Stalinism are totally different things. I don’t.” Service affirms that Stalinism consolidated Leninism’s commitment to a one-party state premised on state terror and the ultimate objective of communism’s victory throughout the world. It is synonymous with the dictator’s ubiquitous presence in official propaganda, the system of state surveillance, detention and mass murder, as well as the demonisation of ‘Trotskyite’ subversion. As a totalitarian ideology, it permeated every facet of life within the Soviet Union, from literature and painting to architecture and the naming of cities, prompting Tsaritsyn to be renamed Stalingrad (today it is Volgograd). What was the Five-Year Plan – and how did it lead to the Holodomor? In 1928, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan – a colossal effort to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and bring agriculture under state control and central planning. This latter aspect, known as Collectivisation, marked a definitive break with the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1921. The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy. Adopted in March 1921, the NEP marked a tactical retreat from the Bolsheviks’ socialist measures. It held sway for much of the ensuing decade and reintroduced limited private ownership and commerce under the supervision of the Soviet state to bolster the economy. Always envisaged as a temporary measure, Service points out that by the late 1920s, the regime believed that the NEP had enabled “too many nationalists, street traders and priests” to gain influence within Soviet society. Part of the Five-Year Plan entailed individual private farms being consolidated into larger units under the supposed collective ownership of peasants known as a ‘kolkhoz’. Similarly, ‘sovkhoz’ were farms under the direct control of the state. This also enabled Stalin to bring the class struggle (fundamental to Bolshevik ideology) to the countryside, as the previous better-off peasants – known as ‘kulaks’ – were pilloried for exploiting the poorer peasants and thus became the subject of intense persecution, including deportation from the village and, in many cases, execution. In Ukraine, collectivisation led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants – a famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian). Although the policy also led to famine conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, “the Ukrainians felt, with some reason, that they were being punished for being Ukrainians, as well as for being peasants,” says Service. Why did Stalin launch the Great Terror? The Great Terror (or Great Purge) began in 1936 and ran until 1938. It was a period marked by high profile show trials of the leading cadre of Bolsheviks that had been active during and since the October Revolution. The suspects were accused of conniving with Trotsky to sabotage the Soviet state and murder Stalin. As Service explains, the Great Terror’s “main purpose was to annihilate any kind of opposition, real or potential”. Confessions were typically extracted under torture and the guilty were subsequently executed as ‘enemies of the people’ or sentenced to long periods of servitude in labour camps. The wave of terror later spread to the Red Army and members of the intelligentsia – the educated group of Soviet society. Stalin was a deeply suspicious individual by nature. He was also aware that the violent methods inflicted on the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans, had made some of his comrades within the Communist Party deeply uneasy. In December 1934, one of Stalin’s most loyal comrades in the regime, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. His murder was blamed on a Trotskyite plot whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Stalin himself. Some historians have suggested, however, that Kirov’s murder was ordered by Stalin who had come to regard him as a potential rival. Kirov’s demise also provided Stalin with the pretext to point the finger at alleged traitors within the state apparatus. Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode. “He thought that he could replace them with a new young elite that he would train to fulfil the industrial, agricultural, commercial and political tasks of the new Soviet state”, says Service. Furthermore, Service explains that the Great Terror was a reflection of “the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country… and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient, and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world as offering a vision of the communist future”. The latter half of the 1930s became “a very gruelling period, a tormenting period in which nearly all the close associates of Lenin were exterminated… Trotsky was the last” – he was assassinated in exile in 1940. But the Great Terror was not solely reserved for the party’s upper echelons. Wherever you were in the party, you stood a high chance of being arrested and thrown into a labour camp, or shot after being beaten up, tortured and forced to sign a confession. At its height, an estimated 2.5 million people languished in the Soviet Union’s extensive penal system – the notorious ‘Gulag archipelago’. Gulag is the Russian abbreviation for the Main Administration of Correctional-Labour Camps. This supplied a constant stream of slave labour to the state’s industrial and economic drive. How many people perished under Stalin’s rule? The precise number of people who were killed during Stalin’s rule is difficult to ascertain with any precision, but Stalin is acknowledged as one of the most brutal leaders in history. “It’s in the tens of millions,” says Service. “It’s a staggering number of people, and it’s not just those who were executed or thrown into the Gulag. There are also people who died as a result of the catastrophic effects of the economic and social policies that he unleashed from the end of the 1920s onwards”. Why did Stalin sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler? In summer 1939, Stalin shocked communists around the world by signing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The years leading up to that point had seen Stalin increasingly perturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazism, and its overtly anti-Bolshevik agenda, was of acute concern to the Soviet Union’s security. Stalin had aided and abetted the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), who were fighting a military rebellion backed by Europe’s fascist powers. When it became apparent that the Spanish Republic was doomed, he estimated that his best chance of avoiding trouble with Hitler lay in diverting Hitler’s focus westwards to the capitalist states. Read more | Hitler and Stalin’s utopian dreams A key part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact entailed the two powers invading and dividing Poland between them. Just over two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, triggering the Second World War, the Soviet Union began annexing eastern Poland on 17 September 1939. As Red Army forces surged into the occupied territory, they began targeting leading Polish intellectuals, army officers and other luminaries. “Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, [had] concocted a plan to round them all up,” explains Service. This led to the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, during which approximately 22,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia were systematically murdered. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves inside the Katyn forest. How did the Second World War impact Stalin? When Hitler ultimately acted on his ideological conviction of attacking the Soviet Union, and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin was stunned. “He would not take advice in 1941 that Hitler really did mean to launch an invasion,” says Service, “He thought that he was being misled either by Western powers who sought to involve him in their war against Hitler, or there were just saboteurs inside the Soviet Union against the communist leadership. He got it catastrophically wrong”. After initial paralysis and the loss of vast swathes of territory, the Soviet elite persuaded Stalin to lead the fightback. He was forced to forge an alliance with his sworn capitalist enemies – notably the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans Appeals to Russian nationalism suffused wartime propaganda, while many of the Soviet Union’s great cities – from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to Kyiv and Stalingrad endured staggering hardship at the hands of Nazi aggression. The Nazis’ discovery of the mass graves within the Katyn forest in April 1943 was used by Hitler to try and drive a wedge between the Allies. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, and the atrocity was later covered up and blamed on the Nazis themselves (a line that Moscow stuck to until 1990) once the Red Army had wrested back control of the area. Although the Soviet Union had lost over 27 million lives since 1941 and was among the most battered powers to have fought Nazi Germany, on 9 May 1945, it proclaimed victory over the Third Reich, with much of Eastern and Central Europe now under Stalin’s control. What role did Stalin play during the Cold War? The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two new superpowers that would hold sway over the world for the next four decades. Initially, Stalin hoped that the wartime alliance would somehow endure. According to Service, Stalin anticipated that the Soviet Union “would be allowed to more or less do as it wanted in Eastern Europe without interference from the Western powers, and he hoped that he might get economic assistance from America in the short term, even though he expected there to be trouble with the United States in the longer term”. However, by the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan – the US aid package designed to revive Europe’s post-war economies – was quickly perceived by Stalin as a threat to the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe. “From that point on, there was a clash between the US and the USSR [but] both sides wanted to avoid a hot war,” says Service. “Stalin then put his foot down on the throat of all the existing half-freedoms in Eastern Europe and fully communised those countries in a brutal period of trials, arrests and the suppression of rival political parties across half of the European mainland”. How did Stalin die? In the early hours of 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke while staying in one of his dachas (a countryside retreat) in Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. His staff, who were too frightened to disturb him, eventually found Stalin unconscious, lying on the floor. High-ranking members of the Soviet government such as Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov, flocked to the dacha. “They decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him,” says Service. The rationale behind this was that, if by some miracle, he recovered, then none of them could have been accused of having held a gun to his head or of having plunged a knife into his back. Despite this, rumours that the dictator was poisoned persist today. Stalin dwindled over the next few days before succumbing on 5 March 1953, aged 74. His death triggered a surge of grief within the Soviet Union. “As much as many millions of people hated him, perhaps the same people also somehow thought that something had been pulled out of their lives, too,” explains Service. He was embalmed and displayed alongside Lenin’s preserved body in the mausoleum on Red Square. In 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the Soviet Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin’s murderous excesses and cult of personality, led to de-Stalinisation. Finally, in 1961, Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum and buried in a grave along the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Read more | A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends
The West’s attempt to crush Bolshevik Russia
Anna Reid discusses how armies from Britain, France, America and Japan invaded Russia during the First World War in a bid to topple the Bolsheviks
Following the October Revolution of 1917, Russia's nascent Bolshevik regime acted on its word to take the country out of the First World War by brokering peace with Germany. Speaking to Danny Bird, Anna Reid explains how this prompted Britain, France, America and Japan to launch a joint 'intervention', by invading the vast terrain of the crumbling Russian empire in support of anti-Bolshevik forces. View Green Video on the source website
The death of Lenin, a century on: the long afterlife of Russia’s pre-emiment revolutionary
Lenin was a towering in figure in life, but in death he became larger still. Danny Bird explores the final months of Lenin’s life, the long debate over what to do with his body, and long tail of his legacy over Russia
Born on 22 April 1870 as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin was raised within a comfortable, cultured family in the Russian provincial city of Simbirsk. Later, he would become the architect of the Soviet state and the leader of the Bolshevik party, who shot to global attention as the driving force behind the October Revolution of 1917. Most of Lenin’s adult life was spent living in Western Europe. There, he fostered ties with fellow revolutionaries and cultivated his interpretation of Marxism. Central to Lenin’s ideology was the need for a ‘vanguard’ of professional revolutionaries to guide the working class towards the destruction of capitalism and the dawn of socialism. His decisive role in the Russian Revolution came during the febrile months following the collapse of the Romanov monarchy in March 1917. A provisional government of liberal politicians replaced the ousted tsar, Nicholas II. Read more | The last days of the Romanovs Little more than a fortnight earlier, workers and soldiers in the capital, Petrograd (now St Petersburg) established a representative council to advance their demands – a council known as a ‘soviet’. Lenin’s moment came in April 1917, when he returned to Russia and exclaimed: “All power to the soviets!” to a jubilant crowd that greeted him in the city. Against the prevailing opinion of his comrades, Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government and seize power that autumn. The result was the founding of the world’s first ‘socialist state’, Soviet Russia. A brutal civil war then engulfed the former Russian empire. The Bolshevik regime eventually emerged triumphant, and, in December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born. At the same time, however, the health of the Soviet state’s founder was beginning to fail. Lenin’s death: how did he die? Lenin died of a stroke aged 53 on 21 January 1924 in the village of Gorki, to the south of Moscow. His comrade, Nikolai Bukharin, witnessed the death and later wrote that Lenin’s “face fell back and went terribly white. He let out a wheeze, his hands dropped. Ilich … was no more”. The Soviet leader’s constitution had always been robust. He had made a swift recovery following an assassination attempt in August 1918, and was soon back at the helm of the regime’s political machinations. He demonstrated that vigour again in spring 1922 when one of the bullets from that attack was finally extracted from his neck. A month later Lenin suffered his first stroke and was left temporarily unable to speak or write. His comrades in the Politburo – the nerve centre of the Communist Party – ordered him to recuperate at his dacha (a country house) in Gorki. Furthermore, they instructed his entourage, which included his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, not to agitate him with any talk of politics. Isolated and conscious of his mortality, Lenin turned his attention to the next generation of Bolshevik cadres and found them wanting. Despite his crackdown on factionalism within the party the year before, he foresaw a gulf beginning to open around the followers of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin. The latter rapidly became an object of suspicion and annoyance to Lenin during his convalescence. By autumn, Lenin had recovered enough to participate in plans for the composition of the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). However, days before the USSR’s formal inception in December 1922, he suffered another health crisis and was sent back to Gorki. While gravely unwell, he began dictating a series of texts and letters that later became known as his political ‘testament’ to his secretaries. Later, he urged the party to revoke Stalin’s position as General Secretary, rebuking him as “too coarse” and “capricious”. Despite Lenin’s demand for confidentiality, one secretary sneaked a copy to Stalin, who was dumbfounded and ordered its destruction. Instead, she made an additional copy and secured it as Lenin had instructed. After suffering an additional stroke on 10 March 1923, Lenin was left unable to talk and completely paralysed on the right side of his body. The Communist Party of Great Britain shipped out an electric wheelchair, but the right-sided configuration rendered it useless. Did Lenin beg for death? That spring, tormented by sleepless nights and headaches, Lenin begged for poison to end his suffering. With their leader’s ability to directly influence statecraft at an end and his death seemingly imminent, the tensions among the Bolshevik grandees in the Communist Party sharpened. Lenin dwindled at Gorki for another 10 months. His final stroke caused him to fall into a coma during the afternoon of 21 January 1924. His wife and sister were present when he breathed his last at 6.50pm. What happened at Lenin’s funeral? The Soviet government formally broke the news the next day and dignitaries from the Communist Party descended on Gorki to pay their respects. On 23 January, the coffin was taken from Lenin’s dacha through a crowd of local mourners lining the snowy route to Gorki’s railway station. Once it arrived in Moscow, it was taken to lie in state within the Hall of Columns at the House of the Unions. Despite below freezing temperatures of –7°C, an estimated 50,000 members of the public from across the Soviet Union, including foreign diplomats, filed past the open coffin over the next three days. Yet behind the solemnity, Stalin was already manoeuvring to consolidate his power base. On the eve of the funeral, at a special Congress of Soviets held in the Bolshoi theatre, he delivered a eulogy. Pledging to uphold Lenin’s example, he vowed “that we shall not spare our lives in strengthening the union of the working people of the entire world”, thereby obliquely staking claim to Lenin’s legacy. On 27 January, Lenin’s coffin was carried the short distance from the House of the Unions to Red Square. One notable absentee among the bearers was Trotsky, who was resting at the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi following the defeat of his bid to redress the growing Soviet bureaucracy earlier that month. Trotsky would later claim that Stalin had deliberately sent him a false date for the funeral to make his absence look disrespectful. It was such a cold day that musicians rubbed vodka on their brass instruments to prevent their lips freezing to them. At 4pm, after they performed the Soviet anthem, the Internationale, a gun salute rumbled, the Kremlin’s bells chimed and factory whistles across the Soviet Union sounded a tribute as Lenin’s coffin was interred within a custom-built shrine bearing his name in bold Russian Cyrillic characters.'. Why was Lenin embalmed? Chief among those within the Politburo who advocated for the body’s preservation was Stalin, who saw its potential as a tangible symbol of the October Revolution’s significance to the workers of the world. Lenin had been the public face of the Soviet state and was by far its most popular figure. His death threatened the regime’s legitimacy and viability. Shortly after his death, Lenin’s body was subject to an autopsy by Professor Alexei Abrikosov. He also performed a routine embalming procedure to ensure its temporary preservation while it lay in state prior to the funeral. The vast crowds that queued to pay their respects during the lying-in-state had not gone unnoticed by the Politburo. Amid the ongoing freezing temperatures, it was decided to leave Lenin’s body on display until the onset of spring. In the meantime, vast numbers of people continued to pay their respects long after the funeral. As winter dragged on, the idea of preserving the body for even longer began to take root. Some, like Trotsky and Bukharin, rejected it out of hand as anathema to Marxist beliefs, transforming Lenin into an incorruptible saint for pilgrims. Others proposed placing the body in deep freeze or suspending it in embalming fluid. Professor Vladimir Vorobiev and biochemist Boris Zbarsky were recruited to see if they could preserve Lenin’s mortal remains for as long as possible. Later that summer they informed the Politburo that they had successfully developed a process to do just that. Their technique meant that Lenin would need to be subjected to regular and ongoing maintenance. This included submerging the body in chemical baths for long periods and replacing fluids and organic matter with artificial substances. Furthermore, mildew and other superficial blemishes could be treated, and the body ‘restored’ to its original appearance. The Politburo was delighted with the breakthrough and, contrary to sanctifying Lenin’s mortal remains as a holy relic, the Communist Party extoled it as a testament to the prowess of Soviet science. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, was aghast at the decision but her protestations held little sway. Lenin’s mausoleum: where is Lenin’s body now? Lenin’s body was originally entombed inside a simple wooden box-like structure that stood before the Senatskaya Tower, along the Kremlin’s north-eastern wall in Red Square. Its architect, Alexei Shchusev, was given the nail-biting task of crafting this in the days between the death and funeral. Later that summer, it was replaced by a grander pyramidal structure. Still in the same location and still made of wood, the new mausoleum featured a tribune from which members of the Communist Party could see and be seen by the crowds on Red Square. A competition for a permanent tomb on the same site was announced the following year. The party received more than a hundred applications but ultimately commissioned Shchusev to construct a third mausoleum out of stone, based on the aesthetic of the second. Fusing ancient mortuary architecture with the modern dynamism of Constructivism that was popular in early Soviet Russia, Shchusev incorporated marble, labradorite, porphyry and granite into his design. Completed in 1930, the striking black and ruddy sepulchre became one of the Soviet Union’s most iconic and visited monuments. In 1941, the body was evacuated to Tyumen, east of the Ural Mountains, as the invading armies of Nazi Germany threatened Moscow. Soviet victory over Hitler’s Reich saw Lenin restored to the mausoleum, whereupon Nazi banners were tossed unceremoniously at its base during the USSR’s victory parade on 24 June 1945. At its heart, inside a dimly lit chamber, Lenin, seemingly glowing under spotlights and wearing a suit and tie, lies as if asleep behind the bullet-proof glass of a sarcophagus adorned with Soviet iconography. What is Lenin’s legacy? Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lenin’s legacy has all but receded. Many of the world’s communist parties that adhered to his ideology fell into obscurity. In 2017, the centenary of the February and October Revolutions was met with little fanfare in the Russian Federation, the internationally recognised successor to the Soviet Union. Yet, for much of the 20th century, the impacts of the October Revolution and the Leninist heritage had a profound effect on global politics. Even before his death, Lenin had been elevated into an illustrious figure by his comrades in the Soviet government. His ailing health and isolation at Gorki enabled the Kremlin to lay the foundations of the emerging cult. His demise and corporeal preservation became potent sources of propaganda. In 1924, a line from the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem Vladimir Ilich Lenin encapsulated the new omnipresence of the recently deceased: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” That same year, Petrograd, the cradle of the October Revolution, was renamed Leningrad. Lenin’s likeness became a familiar presence in everyday life – appearing in paintings, on buildings, and even adorning the mastheads of Soviet newspapers including Pravda. The party codified his writings and expounded a new state ideology, ‘Leninism’. His face, tilted confidently towards an unseen future, often appeared alongside that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as he assumed the status of a secular demigod presiding over all aspects of life within the Soviet Union. Following Lenin’s death, Stalin, in connivance with the Politburo, suppressed his political testament. As Lenin had foreseen, animus between Stalin and Trotsky soon broke out. By 1929, after being stripped of his various roles within the regime, Trotsky was banished from the USSR. In August 1940, a Stalinist henchman murdered him with an ice axe in Mexico City. Yet despite his burgeoning tyranny, even Stalin was ultimately subject to the Leninist cult he had helped raise. When he died in 1953, he too underwent the same embalming technique and was placed beside Lenin in the mausoleum. Nikita Khrushchev’s exposure of Lenin’s testament during a secret session of the Communist Party in 1956 stunned those in attendance. With his posthumous reputation in tatters, Stalin’s corpse was removed from the mausoleum in 1961. Lenin’s influence, however, remained as ubiquitous as the statuary raised across the cities of Soviet Union. The mausoleum became an altar from which the party’s leaders would review the annual cycle of parades marking May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution. Nevertheless, the tomb’s aura also made it a target for the regime’s detractors, and there were numerous attempts to desecrate it over the decades. The glass sarcophagus was shattered several times by daring assailants, while two explosions in 1967 and 1973 killed and injured bystanders. By the 1980s, while Lenin's body remained supple, the Soviet system had begun to creak. Ironically, the self-proclaimed Leninist, Mikhail Gorbachev, unveiled a series of sweeping reforms – perestroika and glasnost – which he believed would restore the USSR to Lenin’s original vision. Instead, they hastened its demise and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991. Although Lenin’s legacy melted away, his embalmed body remains a popular if not macabre tourist attraction. The method used to preserve him – a closely guarded secret to this day – was applied to other Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Calls for Lenin to receive a proper burial have often been made. The mausoleum has become something of an awkward relic in post-Soviet Russia and is frequently hidden behind elaborate stage sets during national events in Red Square. Nevertheless, the process of preserving what is now a 100-year-old corpse is ongoing and remains unique in history.
Britain’s Russian fiasco: Allied intervention in the Russian civil war
More than a century ago, British troops were engaged in the maelstrom of the Russian civil war. Their campaign against the Bolsheviks, writes Nick Hewitt, was a bloody debacle that enraged a restive public back home
In 2018, the world marked the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War. But for thousands of British soldiers, the fighting went on. On 11 November 1918, Thomas Dunlop, from Newton Heath, was part of a 400-strong garrison shivering in improvised trenches around Tulgas, north Russia. As Dunlop’s comrades-in-arms on the western front laid down their weapons, the 19-year-old private in 2/10th Battalion, the Royal Scots, was in a vicious firefight with 2,500 Bolsheviks, supported by gunboats. For four days Dunlop’s company, alongside American riflemen and a few Canadian field guns, defended their nondescript piece of Russia. The Bolsheviks finally withdrew, leaving hundreds of dead behind, but victory came at a price. US sergeant Silver Parrish recalled how “we licked the Bolo [Bolshevik] good and hard but lost seven killed and 14 wounded, and the Canadians lost quite a few and the Royal Scots lost 36 men”. In context: The Russian civil war The Bolshevik Revolution of 7 November 1917 was followed by a wave of armed insurrections across the former Russian empire by anti-Bolshevik factions loosely characterised as ‘White’ Russians. At the height of the civil war the Whites appeared to surround the Bolshevik strongholds of Moscow and Petrograd, but in reality they were a disparate group of moderate socialists, ethnic nationalists, Romanov loyalists, proto-dictators and bandits, and never really formed an effective opposition. In Siberia the Whites were led by their self-proclaimed ‘supreme leader’, the former tsarist naval officer Admiral Alexander Kolchak. The Allied intervention in north Russia was partly intended to link up with Kolchak, but his regime was corrupt and unpopular and he lost the support of his most formidable force of 40,000 former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war and deserters, known as ‘the Czechoslovak Legion’. Kolchak was captured by the Bolsheviks and executed. Around the Baltic coast, Estonians and Latvians were fighting for independence alongside the former tsarist general Yudenich’s White Russians, who were trying to seize Petrograd. To further complicate matters, German troops and the paramilitary Freikorps were still trying to seize territory. The Germans left and Latvia and Estonia secured independence, but Petrograd remained defiantly ‘Red’. In southern Russia and Ukraine, the Whites coalesced around General Anton Denikin’s ‘Volunteer Army’. Denikin won a series of early victories but, as well as the Bolshevik Red Army, he also had to contend with Ukrainian and other separatist forces, ethnic militias and even the Turkish army. Although the British sent Denikin millions of pounds’ worth of arms his army still disintegrated; the remnants were destroyed in Crimea in 1920. The Russian civil war effectively ended with the founding of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922, although some insurgencies continued into the 1930s. In total, the conflict may have cost as many as 12 million lives. Thomas Dunlop was one of them. His body was lost, but his name appears on a lonely memorial at Archangel. One hundred years on, it’s perhaps appropriate to ask, what was he doing there? Dunlop’s terrible fate was partly the result of what today’s military might call ‘mission creep’. At first, Britain’s primary motivation in its dealings with Russia was to keep it in the First World War: to prop up a leading ally in the fight against the Central Powers. Yet, by 1917, that strategy was unravelling. Russia’s tsarist autocracy had been tottering for decades. In 1917 it finally broke under the pressure of a world war for which it was ill-equipped to fight, and growing demands for greater freedom by a resentful and hungry population. Tsar Nicholas II’s regime collapsed in March, to be replaced by a Provisional Government. The new administration, however, failed to extricate Russia from the war, and paid the price when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the capital, Petrograd, on 7 November 1917. Less than three weeks after the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin began negotiations with the Germans, which ended with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. But no sooner had Russia quit one conflict than it entered another. Counterrevolutionary armies and alternative governments, known collectively as ‘White Russians’, now began to form all over the country. They were soon posing a serious threat to Bolshevik authority. By July 1918, Nicholas II and his family had been executed, and Russia had disintegrated into a chaotic civil war. Russia’s collapse was a catastrophe for the Allies, as it offered Germany an opportunity to transfer millions of troops to the west. Allied policy makers also feared that Germany might gain access to Russian oil and grain, and that German troops might seize nearly a million tonnes of armaments, munitions and other stores, now piled in great heaps on the dockside at Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Siberia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/GettyImages-588227462-20d0d74.jpg" width="4611" height="3028" alt="Japanese soldiers and sailors disembark at Vladivostok, 22 August 1918. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="Japanese soldiers and sailors disembark at Vladivostok, 22 August 1918. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" /> In a desperate attempt to forestall this nightmare scenario, the Allies decided to hurl troops from Britain, France, the United States and a dozen other countries into the middle of the bloody maelstrom that Russia had become. Most had little idea what they were doing. Among them was 18-year-old Bob Vincent of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who, despite serving in southern Russia for nearly a year, later wrote that he “never really met any Russians at all or had any idea why I was there”. If Vincent failed to grasp what he was fighting for, he was far from alone. But that fact didn’t stop the British government despatching troops to combat zones across the massive Russian landmass – most notably in the north. One of the most significant deployments came in August 1918 when Allied troops landed at Archangel in support of the White Russian ‘Northern Regional Government’. Over time the British-led force expanded to include US, Canadian and French troops, and pushed south along the Dvina and other rivers to secure the railways. Supported by aircraft and the Royal Navy’s improvised Dvina River Flotilla, the Allied Expeditionary Force made unexpectedly good progress against the Bolsheviks, but many of its soldiers were old or unfit and they were dreadfully exposed. Their Russian allies were unreliable, and winter was approaching. Read more | Has Russia always played by its own rules? Elsewhere British warships operated against the Bolshevik Baltic Fleet, losing more than 100 sailors and several warships in the process. The Royal Navy also scored the intervention's most unlikely success, when Lieutenant Augustus Agar's tiny torpedo-armed coastal motor boats penetrated the heavily defended Bolshevik naval base at Kronstadt twice, sinking the cruiser Oleg and a submarine depot ship, and claiming two battleships damaged. Agar was awarded the Victoria Cross. Smaller British expeditionary forces and ‘military missions’ were sent into Siberia, the Caspian and the Caucasus. In the latter, ‘Dunsterforce’, a few hundred soldiers and some armoured cars under the command of Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, worked with local nationalists and other counterrevolutionaries – but found that they often hated each other more than the Bolsheviks. Siberian landgrab The underlying politics of the international intervention was incredibly complex. Britain and France actively supported attempts to overthrow the Bolsheviks, with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States in reluctant support, against the advice of his own War Department. Yet by far the largest intervention force was the 70,000-strong Japanese one, and their crusade was anything but ideological. The Japanese government had an eye on seizing territory in Siberia, and the behaviour of their troops, according to one British Foreign Office memorandum, “was… that of a people who intend to annex what they have occupied”. They cared little about keeping Russia in the war or who governed it afterwards. Even within the British government, there were hawks and doves. Prime Minister David Lloyd George wanted to keep Russia fighting, but was perfectly happy to work with the Bolsheviks if necessary, telling his war cabinet in early 1918 that “it was of no concern to the British government what socialist experiment or what form of government the Bolsheviks were trying to establish in Russia”. On the podcast | Russia’s national past: unpicking history from propaganda In contrast Winston Churchill, Lloyd George’s war minister after January 1919, was a zealous ideological crusader against Bolshevism, who declaimed in a speech in Dundee that “civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims”. Churchill even argued for rebuilding the defeated German army as a bulwark against Bolshevism. These internal contradictions were reflected on the ground, to the detriment of military cohesion. At one point, the British were operating in a notional partnership with the Bolshevik administration in Murmansk (which sought Allied help in facing down the threat of a Finnish attack) while fighting against Bolshevik forces elsewhere in the country. By the time Churchill had become war minister, of course, the First World War had ended, and the only comprehensible motive for intervention had disappeared. A war-weary British population now started to question exactly why British soldiers were still fighting and dying in Russia. With democratic socialism gaining traction, many people opposed making war on communists to restore tyranny. In January 1919, the Daily Express reflected popular opinion when it paraphrased Bismarck, writing that "the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier". British opposition coalesced around the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, which was launched by prominent socialists in January 1919. The Socialist Labour party politician William Paul, a founding member of the movement’s National Committee, summed up its motives when he wrote that “the sheer savagery of these [White Russian] usurpers has only had the effect of driving honest moderate socialists and non-Bolshevik elements into the camp of Lenin and Trotsky”. The communist firebrand Harry Pollitt described how the ‘Hands off Russia’ message was promoted in London’s East End by a now-forgotten evangelist, “Mrs Walker”, who roamed the streets “talking to groups of women, telling them about Russia, how we must help them, and asking them to tell their husbands to keep their eyes skinned to see that no munitions went to help those who were trying to crush the Russian Revolution”. 'Hands Off Russia' scored its most celebrated success on 10 May 1920, when dockers in London stopped loading a ship, the Jolly George, when they discovered it was carrying munitions bound for Poland, the latest British anti-Bolshevik proxy. By now, government enthusiasm for intervention had waned and the cargo was unloaded. 'Hands off Russia' went on to provide a strong nucleus for the Communist party of Great Britain when it was founded a few weeks later. With the fighting against Germany over, opposition to a new war that nobody understood spread to the troops in the field. One Royal Engineer serving in north Russia wrote that it was “simply scandalous… to be fighting now and under such conditions when there is peace on other fronts”. Meanwhile, Major EM Allfrey of the Royal Fusiliers recorded a rumour in his diary on 2 July 1919 that “the coal miners have threatened that unless the British force in Russia is home within 40 days, they will all come out on strike… in other words, they too are Bolsheviks”. Brutal little battles Many members of the British forces found themselves living in squalid conditions, fighting unacknowledged but brutal little battles against a determined and ferocious enemy. There were too few troops, and many were second-rate and desperate to get home; even the Royal Marines embarrassingly experienced a mutiny in Russia. The White Russian troops were even more prone to mutiny and desertion; many were also Bolshevik sympathisers. Lieutenant Brian Horrocks of the Middlesex Regiment trained some of them: “The filthiest and most unkempt mass of humanity I have ever seen in my life… the dregs from all the call-up depots in Siberia.” There was almost no chance of unifying them into an effective opposition. One regiment of British-trained White Russians went over to the Bolsheviks en masse on 21 July 1919, arresting their commanding officer, a Colonel Laurie, and the other British officers. “At the British offices the day was passing in its usual way,” recalled one of the ring leaders, Viktor Schetinin. “We rushed in and… pointed our rifles at the colonel. He was so surprised he just sat there as if he was nailed to the chair…” By now, it was rapidly becoming evident that the British-led force was too small and its Russian allies too unenthusiastic for the intervention to end in anything but failure. In fact that had been the case since at least the spring of 1919 when the British commander-in-chief Brigadier-General Edmund Ironside, who had led his multinational army in the north with skill in the face of a ferocious enemy, decided to carry out one last offensive to buy time to withdraw. To help him, strong reinforcements – the British North Russian Relief Force – arrived in May largely at Churchill's instigation, commanded by General Sir Henry Rawlinson. The British launched a series of attacks then retreated, fighting all the way. "As we fought our way up the river," recalled Lieutenant-Commander Kenneth Michell of the monitor HMS M.33, "the Bolshies… drifted down all sorts of mines, frequently covered by brushwood". On 26–27 September the British evacuated Archangel, and Murmansk two weeks later. By the spring of 1920 the British and most other Allied contingents had departed Russia altogether. Only the Japanese force remained, finally withdrawing in 1925. The Russian civil war came to an end in 1922. But the legacy of suspicion caused by the Allies’ military support for the Whites, and their associated spying and sabotage in Moscow and Petrograd, lasted long after the last soldier had left. This might help explain Stalin’s difficult relationship with Churchill during the Second World War, and even the well-documented grudging reception received by Allied convoys to the Soviet Union. After all, the last time some Murmansk citizens had seen western ships in their harbours, the same countries had been trying to destroy the revolution, not defend it. For James and Jane Dunlop of Newton Heath, however, undoubtedly the most significant consequence of this ill-judged decision was to condemn their son Thomas and hundreds of men like him to a lonely death in the snow. 6 lessons from the Allies' failed intervention in Russia's civil war Nick Hewitt examines six lessons that can be learned from the Allies' failed intervention and argues that the case has much to teach today’s policy-makers After Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia on 7 November 1917, toppling Alexander Kerensky’s short-lived Provisional Government, the country descended into chaos and civil war as a wave of counter-revolutionary movements sprang up, from Siberia to Ukraine and from the Black Sea to the far north. Faced with this anarchy, Russia’s former Allies in the First World War opted to intervene on behalf of the counter-revolutionaries, collectively known as ‘White Russians’. The Allied intervention utterly failed, costing a fortune in blood and treasure which the exhausted Allies, Britain and France in particular, could ill afford, and leaving a legacy of bad feeling between Russia and the west that arguably still persists today. Disjointed and incoherent strategy Different nations had different goals: from simply maintaining a fighting front against the Germans and keeping essential war material out of Bolshevik hands; through ‘regime change’ or the restoration of the Tsarist autocracy; to defending existing colonial possessions or seeking territorial concessions. Even within individual countries, policy makers often failed to agree; in Britain, Prime Minster David Lloyd George was ambivalent at best, but Winston Churchill, his War Minister, was a committed, almost fanatical interventionist. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson opposed intervention, but also authorised the deployment of US troops. The development the Allies feared the most – and the only goal which united them all – was a separate Russian peace treaty with Germany. But when this actually happened on 3 March 1918, leaving the Germans free to move thousands of troops west to attempt a knockout blow against Britain and France, the resulting German spring offensive made no difference whatsoever to the eventual outcome of the war. Once Germany had been defeated, the only goal which made any kind of sense became redundant. Inadequate resources The Allied commitment was never properly resourced. If the Germans had failed to conquer a disintegrating Russian empire with more than a million men, the Allies were never going to defeat the Bolsheviks and occupy such a vast country with a few scattered penny-packets of troops. The largest deployment, in Siberia, was no more than 100,000 strong, most of which were Japanese soldiers making a blatant land grab on behalf of their government. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops. Weak, corrupt or unpopular local forces The assumption was that few troops would be needed because the Allies could rely on local anti-Bolshevik forces, but the Allies made no real effort to understand the disparate groups of ethnic nationalists, democrats, Romanov loyalists, proto-dictators and downright bandits with whom they were often reluctantly associated. In reality, the Allies’ Russian ‘partners’ were motivated by everything from loyalty to the late Tsar, to ethnic self-determination, or simple greed and lust for power – and often loathed each other even more than the Bolsheviks. Failure to understand the local politics Perhaps most importantly, the Allies failed to understand that the Russian people had largely already made their choice. However misguided hindsight may tell us it turned out to be, a sizeable proportion of those Russians who actually cared enough to be politically active wanted a Bolshevik government and had no interest in a government run by former Tsarist generals and functionaries, or one imposed by foreign powers. No domestic support The Allied people were sick of war, and in an era when democratic socialism was gaining traction across Europe, making war on communists to restore a Tsarist tyranny did not sit well. In Britain, opposition coalesced around a movement called the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign which, although it had little direct impact on government policy during the intervention, gained support afterwards. No consideration of consequences The legacy of suspicion and resentment of the west brought about by nearly three years of overt support for the White Russians lasted for decades after the last Allied soldier had left. Historians have argued that the nature of Soviet Russia made this inevitable, and this may well be the case – but the arrival of thousands of Allied soldiers apparently motivated by a desire to roll back the clock on the revolution surely cannot have helped. LISTEN: Lucy Ash tells the story of When Britain Invaded Russia in 1918 for BBC Radio 4 This article was first published in the March 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine and has since been updated
Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster
With the world’s attention fixed firmly on the invasion of Ukraine, Antony Beevor’s new history of Russia’s 1917 revolutions and subsequent civil war is especially timely. He explains to Rob Attar how the fall of the last tsar launched a chain of events leading to millions of deaths and one of history’s most brutal dictatorships
Revolution and civil war: in context The Russian Revolution was actually two revolutions. The first began when the last tsar, Nicholas II, was toppled in March 1917, brought down by a combination of food shortages, Russia’s disastrous performance in the First World War and his personal failings. With his fall, Russia seemed set for a democratic future but, until elections could be held, the country was ruled by a Provisional Government dominated by liberals from the tsarist-era Duma (parliament). The Provisional Government, its effectiveness hampered by a lack of legitimacy, faced a powerful rival in the shape of the socialist-led Petrograd Soviet that ruled the country’s then-capital city (now called St Petersburg). The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, sought to undermine the Provisional Government, which itself made a series of missteps – notably continued failures in the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Capitalising on these weaknesses, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Leon Trotsky launched a coup d’état, the so-called October Revolution, seizing power with relative ease. Consolidating that power proved far more difficult, as a combination of opponents – ranging from former tsarist generals to other leftwing political groups who distrusted the Bolsheviks – took up arms against them. The stage was set for a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and their “White” enemies that devastated the country and led to millions of deaths. Several international powers also contributed troops and supplies to the conflict, predominantly to the Bolsheviks’ opponents. In 1919, White armies led by Generals Kolchak and Denikin launched offensives that seemed set to destroy the fledgling communist regime, but the Red Army managed to repel them. Following those triumphs the Bolsheviks were eventually able to achieve ultimate victory, though fighting continued for many more months. Rob Attar: Most of your previous books have focused on the Second World War. What made you decide to head back 20 years earlier for this one? Antony Beevor: The most important thing for me was to understand the chain of disasters of the 20th century – the impacts of which actually are still with us today, as we see in Ukraine. Around 12 million people died in the Russian Civil War. This wanton destruction created a terrible fear among the middle classes, but also galvanised the left – the Bolsheviks and other communists – and marked the start of a vicious circle of rhetoric that developed, above all, in the 1930s. This is really what dominates the whole of the 20th century, yet I think that the Russian Civil War is not understood well enough. This book was always going to be a tremendous challenge, and was made possible almost entirely by the wonderful research done by my great Russian colleague, Lyuba Vinogradova, over the past five years. What new insights have emerged from the work that you and Lyuba have done over these past few years? What has stood out is the sheer horror of the civil war. There’s a savagery and a sadism that is very hard to comprehend; I’m still mulling it over and trying to understand it. It was not just the build-up of hatred over centuries but a vengeance that seemed to be required. It went beyond the killing; there was also the sheer, horrible inventiveness of the tortures inflicted on people. We need to look at the origins of the civil war: who started it, and was it avoidable? But one also needs to see the different patterns seen in the “Red Terror” [the campaign of political repression and violence carried out by the Bolsheviks] and the “White Terror” [the violence perpetrated by that side in the war] – and consider the question: why are civil wars so much crueller, so much more savage than state-on-state wars? How much was the Red Terror being centrally directed by the Bolsheviks, and to what extent did it emerge from the chaos of war? Well, a lot of it obviously did emerge from the chaos of war. Even the Cheka [Soviet secret police], under the command of Felix Dzerzhinsky, never really controlled many of its local agents who committed some of the worst atrocities. But also – as with, say, Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War – a smaller party trying to control areas where they’re in a tiny minority will often resort to terror, simply to make up for the lack of numbers. This was very much the case with Lenin, who was determined to crush opposition to the “Great Revolution” – actually a coup d’état. From Lenin’s point of view, therefore, the Red Terror was something that was essential right from the beginning. For a few months following the overthrow of the tsar in early 1917, Russia was ruled by a liberal Provisional Government, with the potential for democracy. Why was this so short-lived? There was a fundamental political problem. The Russian writer Alexander Herzen talked about the “pregnant widow” – the idea that when one regime has fallen, there’s a very dangerous interregnum before a new regime emerges. The Russian Provisional Government was in an impossible position. It was essentially liberal, but merged with socialists from the Petrograd Soviet in an attempt to hold together a country that was obviously split. The whole administration, both in the countryside and in the towns, had disappeared. Members of the police, the most hated of all of the tsarist institutions, had to flee for their lives. In the countryside, particularly, peasants and soldiers returning from the front would loot every alcohol store and every distillery they could find. They would then would start burning and smashing up the estates and the landowners’ manor houses. This was exactly what Lenin and the Bolsheviks needed. The upsurge of chaotic violence was actually bulldozing a way through for the Bolsheviks to seize power, because the liberals were incapable of doing anything about it. The levers of power were attached to no forces of power. All the government could do was to say: “Well, we can’t take any decisions until the new, democratic constituent assembly has come together.” There was frustration with the lack of decision-making – which, of course, increased the power of the Bolsheviks, simply because they were seen to be the only ones who were in a position to really force through change. Of course, nobody knew what those changes were going to be, because Lenin had kept his plans very quiet. Even then, Lenin was really the only one within the Bolshevik party who actually believed that a coup was possible. Even Trotsky was nervous. What Lenin perceived – and he was absolutely right – was that the success of a coup depends on the apathy of the majority, not on how many real supporters you have. Trotsky estimated that, within the huge garrison in and around Petrograd, there were probably only a couple of thousand who were active Bolshevik supporters, and about 140,000 who were uncertain. But those people weren’t prepared to do anything to save the Provisional Government – so, with a tiny minority, the Bolsheviks were able to seize power. On the podcast | Military historian Antony Beevor discusses his new book Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 Once the Bolsheviks had taken power in November 1917, how revolutionary was the government that they installed? Even many Bolsheviks were shocked by Lenin’s extremism. His new government abolished the police and the army, replacing them with Red Guards from the factories, and absolutely everything was nationalised. This course of action wasn’t apparent beforehand, and – not surprisingly – many of the civil servants didn’t want to work with the new government. That was when the paranoia started, and Lenin decided to bring in the Cheka. He even accused the bourgeoisie of somehow sabotaging food supplies. Actually, though, the bourgeoisie had virtually no control over food supplies at all. In fact, a lot of the food supply issues had been caused by problems with the railways and the lack of rolling stock. In the earlier part of the year, Russia had perfectly good food reserves, but many of those had been wrecked during that chaotic summer, when there was a lack of planting and other work undertaken on the farms. That marked the start of a downward cycle, and every measure that the Bolsheviks instituted to try to grab food from the peasants to give to the cities only made the situation worse. Was civil war inevitable after the Bolshevik revolution? Lenin actually wanted the civil war. He said: “Civil war is the sharpest form of the class struggle.” In his view, it was the only way for the Bolsheviks to take power. The other socialist parties – the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks – were horrified by his plans because they knew that after he had smashed the liberal and conservative parties, he would turn on them – and he certainly did. Lenin despised anybody who disagreed with him, even – especially – within his own party. The less-extreme members who warned against this complete seizure of power, this total dictatorship that Lenin was planning, were either more or less rejected from the party or kept in a kind of subservient position. The Bolsheviks didn’t have the support of the majority of people around the country at the time of the revolution. Didn’t that put them at a serious disadvantage once the civil war began? It put them at a serious disadvantage in certain areas, and there were uprisings against the communists immediately after the coup d’état of November 1917 [called the October Revolution, based on the use of the old Julian calendar in Russia]. However, what’s interesting is how few of the White officers in Petrograd, Moscow and many other places actually joined the revolt against the communists at that stage. I think they were all so dispirited and demoralised by everything that had happened that most of them had sunk into apathy. But yes, there were certain areas where there were very strong reactions against the Bolsheviks. And that early part of the civil war, in the winter of 1917–18, showed that the outcome largely depended on what happened in local areas. It was a geographically fragmented civil war that was taking place across the whole of the landmass. How important to the outcome of the war was the fragmentation and disunity of the Whites compared with the centralisation and unity of the Bolsheviks? This is absolutely central to an understanding of the war. When one talks of the Whites, one automatically thinks of the forces led by former generals and commanders from the tsarist army. But there were also Socialist Revolutionaries who were appalled by the dictatorship that had been created in Petrograd, and they made uneasy alliances with groups of White officers. There was always going to be tension right from the start, because most of these White officers were anti-Semitic – and there were many Jews in the Socialist Revolutionaries and other socialist parties. White officers also wanted to bring back the punishments used by the tsarist army, which meant that they would be allowed to punch soldiers in the face on a summary charge, whip them using rifle-cleaning rods, things like that. Of course, this created a terrible tension the whole time. These problems created by the Whites also applied to their relationships with possible allies such as the Finns, the Baltic States and the Poles later on. If those powers had combined, they could well have defeated the communists. Along the whole of that western frontier, from Finland all the way down through to Ukraine and the Donbas, they had a tremendous advantage, with trained troops that were extremely effective. However, the White generals were arrogant, basically telling the Finns, the Estonians and so on that they were still part of the Russian empire – insulting all of their nationalist aspirations. This was almost as unpopular as the Whites’ appalling social policies towards the peasants. The tsarists wanted to get all their land back from the peasants, which of course was going to create a tremendous hatred and fear; as a result, there was almost continual war. The Whites had no proper administration; all they were interested in was taking what they could from these local areas, including food – which in many cases they did not pay for. Many international powers lined up on the side of the White army. Why were they not able to affect the outcome of the conflict? Their commitment was unclear, and this was always the problem: they couldn’t make up their own minds. In the early part of 1919, US president Woodrow Wilson thought that some form of peace could be achieved in Russia, and suggested a conference to be held in the Princes’ Islands lying in the Sea of Marmara close to Constantinople [now Istanbul]. However, the Whites were so furious at the Reds and what had happened up till then – the murders of the aristocracy, the destruction and so on – that they refused to sit down with the Reds. And Lenin and the Bolsheviks – who at that stage thought that they were going to win the war – had no intention of taking part themselves. Earlier on, Russia’s First World War Allies agreed to provide a certain amount of help to the White cause in the form of weaponry. Now, you can provide weapons and you can provide supplies, but you’ve got to be able to get them to their destination – and, until the First World War came to an end in November 1918, the Allies didn’t have access through the Dardanelles and therefore couldn’t supply the Cossacks and Denikin’s White armies in the south of Russia. Some supplies were brought in through the far north – through Murmansk, where the British already had a base, and Archangel, with some marines who’d landed in 1918 to protect the supplies delivered there. Then, in the far east, the Japanese started to land huge numbers of troops. At one stage Japan had almost 70,000 troops in Siberia. The Americans also sent in the equivalent of a small division of troops as part of an expeditionary force. The British eventually landed only a couple of battalions – of the Middlesex Regiment and the Hampshire Regiment. But there were also Italians, there were Serbs, there were Greeks and then the French, who came into Odessa and into the Black Sea region. But this actually proved to be a disaster, because so many of their troops were politicised and were much more sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks than they were towards their own officers. How was the Red Army eventually able to triumph over their White opponents? The Reds had a huge advantage with internal lines. They were based in one of the most populous areas of central-western Russia, between the Volga and roughly the Polish frontier. They had some of the largest cities and many of the factories, particularly the arms factories. That matter of internal lines proved incredibly important, especially when it came to the crucial moments. There were times when the Bolsheviks themselves thought that they’d lost the civil war, and were almost preparing to abandon Moscow. In early 1919, for example, there was a sudden advance by the White General Kolchak’s troops all the way to the Volga. The trouble was that the great advance of General Denikin from the south did not coincide with that – and by the time Denikin’s march on Moscow started, Kolchak’s advance was in full retreat. Denikin’s advance initially went well, and there were moments when Trotsky and others in the Red camp really thought that they were facing defeat. But, because the Red Army no longer had to worry about Kolchak’s troops to the east, they were able to reinforce their troops facing Denikin. October 1919 saw a complete turnaround – the final turning point, if you like, in the war. Churchill [then British secretary of state for war] couldn’t believe what had happened. He was sending signals to General Holman, commander of the British military mission, saying: “I can’t believe this. The Reds were in full retreat, and now suddenly they seem to be beating the Whites on every front. What’s happened?” He’d failed to understand that it was purely because the Bolsheviks had reinforced that eastern front at a crucial moment, then – with the advantage of their internal lines – been able to bring troops back very rapidly to transform the whole situation. Some of the places that were fought over during the civil war have recently been battlegrounds in the current conflict in Ukraine. How far, if at all, did the Russian civil war prefigure the events of today? The Russian Civil War was really the moment when Ukraine started to develop a more modern nationalism. There was already a Ukrainian culture in the countryside, in its poetry and in a lot of its literature. But at this time they really did want to take Ukraine forward, to create a completely different state – and they’d been given the opportunity. This is what Putin has been raging about: it was Lenin who almost gave up Ukraine at that stage. The Bolsheviks thought that allowing a certain amount of autonomy or independence to these former nation states of the Russian empire would cause no problems, because the forthcoming world revolution would bring those states back under communist control – and that’s where they made their great mistake. Read more about the Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion Antony Beevor is a world renowned historian and author who has written numerous bestselling books, primarily on the Second World War. His latest book is Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917–1921 (Orion, May 2022)
Military historian Antony Beevor discusses his new book Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921
Bestselling military historian Antony Beevor discusses his new book Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921. In conversation with Rob Attar, he delves into the two revolutions that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and brought the Bolsheviks to power, and then examines the bloody civil war that ultimately consolidated communist control. Antony Beevor is the author of Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
After the end of communist rule in eastern Europe and the break-up of the Soviet Union, many observers suggested that revolutions never really achieve their objectives. But how do we judge the long-term outcome of such endeavours - and have any been truly successful? Six historians debate the legacies of major revolts and uprisings
Charles Townshend Revolution has meant many things – except perhaps its literal meaning: a full-circle return to a previous state. In the modern world it has meant change, usually dramatic and rapid, often accelerated by violence. It has been applied to sudden seizures of power, but also to vast processes such as industrialisation and technological development. (The United States even called its development of so-called ‘smart weapons’ the Revolution in Military Affairs.) Variations in meaning bear directly on the issue of success or failure. In ‘palace revolutions’ (sometimes mistakenly labelled coups d’état), in which one general might seize power from another, the issue has been resolved after a short military clash. But such revolutions cause little change, beyond that of the Swiss bank account into which the proceeds of political power are transferred. Revolutions that have attempted to transform whole societies – the great French, Russian and Chinese uprisings – have far-reaching, complex and maybe contradictory effects that work themselves out over very long periods of time. Because of this, success and failure can be hard to calibrate. Did the French Revolution fail? That’s certainly what Beethoven thought when he struck out the dedication of his Eroica symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte – but Bonaparte was a child of the revolution, and his dictatorship was a world away from the Bourbon monarchy. After the revolution, power derived from the nation, not God; democracy was built into it. Though many French people today see the revolution as a bloodstained disaster, they still hold to the ‘republican values’ it established. A century ago, the Irish revolution promised not just to free Ireland from British rule, but to remake it as a new Gaelic society. This carried a price: partition, confining independence to 26 out of 32 Irish counties. Yet its centrepiece, the revival of the language, was never achieved, even if it still complicates the politics of Northern Ireland. Failure is relative; revolutions may not fail entirely, but most end in disillusionment. Charles Townshend is professor emeritus of international history at Keele University, and author of The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence (Allen Lane, 2013) Evan Mawdsley The Russian Revolution might seem to be a classic case of failure. The autocracy of Emperor Nicholas II was overthrown in February 1917, only to be replaced by Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in October 1917 and by Stalin’s even worse rule of terror in the 1920s and 1930s. The events and outcome were caricatured in George Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm, which ends with the revolutionary pigs turning into humans, and the restoration of ‘Manor Farm’ – the old order. In truth, things were more complicated than that precis suggests. Revolutions can fail or succeed in different ways. The earlier revolution of 1905 failed because the Tsar made concessions to the liberals, and because the forces of order remained intact. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 failed within eight months because the centrist (Duma) politicians who overthrew the Tsar did not satisfy popular economic demands, especially land reform, and did not bring an end to an unpopular war. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 surely did not fail, at least politically, in the sense that the radical group that brought it about remained in power until 1991. The Bolsheviks (later Communists) avoided failure, in the short term at least, by addressing the issues of land hunger and war-weariness. At the same time, they ruthlessly dealt with the forces of counter-revolution and disorder in the subsequent civil war. Revolutions sometimes fail because they are attacked by counter-revolutionaries from beyond national borders. Revolutionary ‘Soviet’ Russia benefited from the impact of the First World War and its aftermath, which made effective foreign intervention impractical. Having said that, Lenin’s revolution was a failure, at least in its own ‘internationalist’ terms, because it could not immediately trigger similar uprisings in other countries (although it did do so in the late 1940s). Whether the October Revolution failed in an Animal Farm sense – by merely replacing the old ruling class with another oppressive and corrupt one – is more open to dispute. The Communists did not create a truly egalitarian polity, but they did bring about remarkable upward social mobility and mass education. The fact that this was implemented alongside Stalin’s cruel repression does not necessarily make it less revolutionary. Evan Mawdsley was professor of international history at the University of Glasgow. His books include World War II: A New History (CUP, 2009) Marisa Linton History is littered with instances of revolts that never became revolutions. Most uprisings of the oppressed are ruthlessly crushed by the ruling group. So what does it take for a revolt to become a revolution – if we define ‘revolution’ as a political regime change accompanied by social transformation that empowers the poor? If the ruling group remains united, decisive and, above all, retains control of the army, then internal revolt is unlikely to succeed, at least without foreign intervention. The French Revolution of 1789 shows what can happen when the state fails on a catastrophic scale. Financial crisis and the collapse of the old regime paved the way for the most shattering revolution the world had yet seen. It became, for many observers, the archetypal revolution. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote Wordsworth. Liberty and equality became the watchwords, along with ‘fraternity’ – love of one’s fellow man. So how did this idealism collapse within four years into war, civil war and terror? This scenario was not inevitable, though made more likely by the reluctance of the king to co-operate with the new regime. His attempt to flee France, along with the revolutionaries’ reckless decision to export the revolution abroad in a foreign war, fatally undermined the constitutional monarchy, leading to renewed revolution – and the terror that made a mockery of the revolutionaries’ humanitarian aims. Revolutions are overwhelming experiences for the people who live through them, including their leaders. By 1795, many of the leaders in France were either dead, in exile or exhausted – cynical and disillusioned with idealism. As one leader wrote: “We have lived six centuries in six years”. Revolutions are, by their nature, politically destabilising. When the revolutionaries chose war, they risked the revolution coming under the control of the army’s leaders. Ultimately, the revolution was destroyed by an opportunistic and unscrupulous general who seized his chance to become a military dictator. Many more people would die in Napoleon’s wars than died under the revolutionary terror. Marisa Linton is associate professor in history at Kingston University, and author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) Michael A McDonnell The American Revolution is often rightly seen as an example of a ‘successful’ revolution. A colonial resistance movement against imperial taxes snowballed into a successful war for independence that resulted in the creation of a union of states, in the federal constitution – and in the founding of a nation. But we need to think carefully about how we define ‘success’, and from whose perspective we do so. Few patriots who protested against the Stamp Act in 1765 envisioned independence. Most were proud Britons at the time. And the myriad forces that led to that break also drove many to stay loyal to the British empire. Few remember the revolution as a civil war, but fighting among colonists across the new states was endemic, and some 70,000 colonists and enslaved people fled during the conflict. African-Americans and Native Americans would also contest the success of the revolution. Many enslaved Americans already embraced patriot rhetoric that stressed liberty over tyranny, but were deeply disappointed that the revolutionary settlement did not include wholesale abolition, despite the fact that many enslaved people fought for their masters against the British during the war. Thousands of others instead fought for and tried to escape to British lines where at least some found freedom in far-flung places including Australia. Native Americans fought for their own independence against founding fathers who coveted their land and waged a war of conquest in the west. It was only the constitution of 1789 that gave the newly united states sufficient force to overcome the still powerful native nations on their borders. Finally, even many patriots were disappointed with the outcome. Radicals who embraced abolition, a broader suffrage and more representative assemblies were often defeated by conservative forces in the individual states when new governments were formed. And though the federal constitution is often seen as a revolution in politics and political thinking, its creators deliberately set out to curb the more democratic tendencies of the state governments in the name of stability. Americans still wrestle with the revolution’s ambiguous legacy: the vagaries of the electoral college, state versus federal rights, and the inequalities perpetuated by the creation of a nation rhetorically dedicated to freedom, but built by enslaved African-American labourers on Native American lands. Michael A McDonnell is associate professor in history at the University of Sydney Robert Bickers The 1911 revolution in China began with a farce and ended in tragedy. Launched when a cigarette-smoking bomb-maker blew himself and his comrades to smithereens, it finished when the first man democratically elected to be prime minister was assassinated by the president’s secret service at a railway station in Shanghai. The bombing unleashed the fury of 20 years of ethno-nationalist propaganda that saw thousands slaughtered in pogroms, as the uprising advanced across the sprawling Qing empire ruled by the Manchu dynasty. As chaos spread, a great fear grew that foreign powers – which, barely 11 years earlier, had sent troops into northern China to suppress the anti-colonial Boxer uprising (1899–1901)– would seize the moment to carve up the country. Like so many other revolutions, this one ended in uneasy compromise. The Manchu rulers abdicated and a new strongman, Yuan Shikai – once head of an important Qing army – became president of a new republic. China was saved from extinction, and the republic incorporated all of the lands ruled by the Manchus (except Tibet and Mongolia, which broke free). The former emperor was even allowed to keep the ‘Forbidden City’, his palace at the heart of the capital. But Yuan Shikai was no republican. Between December 1912 and January 1913, millions of voters selected an electoral college that chose a new national assembly – the first and only time that mainland China has held anything approaching a free, democratic election. The revolutionaries won the vote, but in March 1913 their prime minister designate was assassinated. The murder sparked a ‘Second Revolution’, pitching the nationalist revolutionaries against Yuan Shikai. They were defeated, the revolution failed, and 40 years of political disintegration and vicious strife followed. The preservation of China’s territorial integrity triumphed over the aspirations of its people. But the incomplete revolution prompted a far darker turn. It seemed to many that it was China’s culture itself – not Yuan, nor foreign influences – that obstructed all hope of progress. To remove that obstruction, the revolutions that unfolded during the years in which Mao Zedong controlled the country aimed to destroy every last vestige of the old order. Decades of agony would ensue. Robert Bickers is professor of history at the University of Bristol, and author of Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (Allen Lane, 2017) Charles Forsdick Although the Haitian Revolution has been described as the “only successful slave revolt in history”, it is equally associated with the inevitability of revolutionary failure. Western media often perpetuate an account of Haitian history that implies a teleology of decline. An extreme version of this was evoked following the January 2010 earthquake, which the US fundamentalist preacher Pat Robertson blamed on a “pact with the devil” (an allusion to the August 1791 vodou ceremony seen as the trigger for the revolution). According to such a narrative, the revolution represents a tipping point in the passage from colonial abundance to postcolonial impoverishment. Such an account downplays the extent to which – by most criteria – the Haitian Revolution was, in fact, a major success. The wealth of the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ depended on a brutal system of plantation slavery that denied the freedom and humanity of the enslaved. The revolution represented an extension of the French revolutionary spirit of 1789 but was, more importantly, the culmination of resistance evident throughout Atlantic slavery. Under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a revolt of the enslaved turned into a disciplined revolutionary movement that defeated French, British and Spanish forces, delivering universal emancipation from slavery (decades before French abolition in 1848) and liberation from colonial France. In the revolution itself were, nevertheless, seeds of the failures that followed in its wake. Central to these were decisions regarding the systems required to replace plantation slavery. Afro-Trinidadian historian CLR James saw Louverture’s tragic flaw as his inability to communicate this to the people. Independence was followed by civil war associated with government based on skin tone, by diplomatic ostracisation as world powers sought to quarantine the impact of Haiti’s revolution, by the crippling debt imposed by France in return for recognition of independence in 1825. Despite attempts to ‘silence’ its importance, the impact of the revolution is, nevertheless, evident in abolitionism, anti-slavery revolts and other political radicalism throughout the 19th century. The limitations of the Haitian Revolution are primarily associated with its failure to defend the gains achieved. It has, though, continued to shape and inspire political movements today, suggesting that, far from having failed, the Haitian Revolution remains still unfinished. Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, and co-author of Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto, 2017) This article was first published in issue 6 of BBC World Histories magazine