I'm also glad to see this back! The new plan sounds good to me, and I'm excited for some bigger divergences.
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Good thing you will continue it
I understand your reluctance.
It will be really interesting to see the situation from different perspectves ^^
Thank you, guys!
Good to see y'all back here too. Don't expect an update this week though, the next at the earliest! - 2
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Book Two, Chapter Two
Chapter Two: Group of Democratic Centralism - the Decists - the Ultra Left
The 8th Party Congress. The formation of the Decists.
The Group of Democratic Centralists, Decimists, or the Group of 15, derogatorily labeled by Trotskij during their first clash as "ultra-left", was a factional group, first emerging during the early rule of Lenin - more accurate during the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. Composed of Bolshevik intellectuals, they opposed what they saw as excessive centralism of the Party, at the detriment of local soviets, local party initiative, and suffocating top-down control of the industry, and local administration alike.
In effect they saw the government of Lenin and Trotskij as moving toward a Dictatorship of the Party, degrading the democratic aspect of democratic centralism - instead, they advocated once more emphasis on the democratic aspect of the aforementioned intra-party leadership, in conjunction with restoring the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The zenith of their power came around during the 9th Congress, however, their proposal to increase soviet autonomy was quickly defeated, and during the infamous 10th Congress, with the Party fracturing into many opposing factions, the iron fist of Lenin clenched and banned factions within the Communist Party.
Still, the determined members did not give in, gaining increased traction with Stalin's consolidating power and protesting against the gradual abolition of intra-party democracy. Burying their hatchet (albeit, temporarily), the Decists in 1923 joined forces with Trotskij's Left Opposition. Continuing to undermine Stalin's authority, the Decimists soon followed their uneasy coalition to form an even broader one, Smirnov and Sapronov formed the Group of 15 and joined the United Opposition with Trotskij, Kamenev, and Zinovjev. With the expulsion of Trotskij, and his exile, their days seemed to be doomed. However, despite the machination of Stalin, several Decists still remained in the Party (albeit, they were barred from any key functions).
In prison and in exile, the Group of 15 and Decimists continued to work against Stalin, along with the Left Opposition. However, it was not a unified group, but more of a marriage of convenience. Their distrust was mutual, Trotskij and his Left Opposition were distrusted for their part in consolidating power away from the proletariat and toward the Party, meanwhile, Trotskij and his supporters disagreed with the notion that under Stalin, the Soviet Union had become a state capitalist society. While allied with the Left Opposition, they were not Trotskyists per se, indeed Trotskij only saw the Decists as a working partner, and the Decists saw themself as separate from the Trotskyists. Trotskij's biographer sums it up: n their enmity towards the bureaucracy they had been far less inhibited than the Trotskyists. More or less openly, they had renounced all allegiance to the existing state and party. They proclaimed that the revolution and Bolshevism were dead and that the working class had to begin again from the beginning ... to free itself from exploitation by the new 'state capitalism'. In 1928, Smirnov described the communist party under Iosif Stalin as a 'stinking corpse', and claimed that the destruction of inner-party democracy in 1923 had been "a mere prologue to the development of a peasant-kulak democracy." Tellingly, in prison when Smirnov was informed of a rumor that Trotskij has given up and kowtowed to Stalin, a fellow prisoner said he merely remarked "Trotskij has capitulated. That is all to the good. This semi-Menshevik will now, at last, cease to hamper the authentic revolutionary movement by his presence."
Smirnov and Sapronov - the Ultra Leftists.
Vladimir Smirnov - not to be confused with Ivan Smirnov.
With a criminally short summary of the Decists, who were Sapronov, and Smirnov? Who were the leaders of this, according to Trotskij, ultra-left movement?
First, we will be introduced to Vladimir Smirnov, who by his name and as an ally of the Left Opposition, is often conflated with the renowned Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov. In fact, that they would both be loyal supporters of Trotskij, could not be further from the truth. Vladimir was a persistent critic of party leaders, Lenin, Trotskij, and Stalin alike - and envisioned a doctrinal pure and militant line.
Born to a middle-class family in 1887, he would be drawn into politics during the 1905 Revolution, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907 - thus making him an Old Bolshevik, itself a dangerous and dubious honor after the assassination of Kirov. Here he soon became friends with Bukharin and Osinsky, forming an intellectual trio, that would be reunited during the Russian Revolution.
Despite being part of the government, with a bright future, Smirnov not only joined Bukharin and his Left Communist faction, opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and supporting a revolutionary war, he outright turned down his ministerial positions and instead joined a formal opposition - where he would remain for the remainder of his life. Smirnov argued attempts to turn pre-industrialized Russia into a socialist state, warning it was "a side turning off the main highway of European socialism" and was "foredoomed to failure" - foreshadowing the later conflict between Trotskij on one hand, and Stalin and Bukharin on the other.
Marking one of his earlier clashes with the policies of Trotskij, Smirnov became a leader of the Military Opposition, being against the reintroduction of Tsarist Officers, instead advocating for Political Commissars; "The role of the political commissars is limited to the functions of supervision... Now that we have the political commissars with sufficient combat experience and able not to intervene when not needed, we must give them broader rights, a larger part in the direction of the armies."
Smirnov, the Military Opposition, and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries advocated for a politicization of the Red Army, totally opposed by Trotskij, but in the end, they won out. Stalin would later use the Commissars to further consolidate his power and lash against perceived, and real enemies alike within the Red Army - well after the expulsion of Trotskij.
As mentioned, in 1920, Smirnov, Osinsky, and Sapronovformed the 'Decists', a left-wing opposition group that opposed the managerial system in the industry, and advocated more democracy within the communist party. Smirnov signed The Declaration of 46 in 1923 and acted as one of the main speakers for the opposition at the party conference in January 1924. In 1926, he and Sapronov formed the "Group of 15", which joined the United Opposition headed by Trotskij, Zinovjev, and Kamenev.
During the 15th Congress, Smirnov was expelled from the party, but he was saved from arrest by the intervention of the Congress and would continue his opposition underground. But this was not to last for long, with the NKVD breathing down his neck, eager to root out any and all resistance, and was arrested in March of 1935 after the assassination of Kirov...
Timofej Sapronov.
Just like Smirnov, Timofej Sapronov (also transliterated as Timofei Sapronov) was born in 1887. However, he would instead join the Russian Social Democratic Party (bolshevik) in 1912. Being active in the Moscow Soviet, he too became a close affiliate of the, then, left communist Bukharin. After liberating Kharkov from Anton Denikin, Sapronov would become the chairman of the liberated province's Revolutionary Committee and Executive Committee. Working closely with other left communists from Moscow, he formed the inner-party faction that this chapter is dedicated to; the Decists. In 1919 he presented the case that 'the party should not impose its will on the soviets’, only to be resoundingly defeated by Vladimir Lenin himself. Despite this, Sapronov would continue to have a career within the Party and State, and would not outright leave government positions.
The Democratic Centralists continued to campaign against the bureaucratic methods of the party throughout the early twenties as part of the so-called 1923 opposition. Despite this Sapronov remained a leading party figure and chairman of the Public Works Committee, a member of the Central Executive Committee, and was a pall-bearer at Lenin's funeral. He, along with Osinsky, Smirnov, and Drobnis, signed The Declaration of 46 and later adhered to the Left Opposition, albeit as a separate grouping considered ultra-left within it. Sapronov helped lay the groundwork for the United Opposition of the Trotskyist and Zinovite factions in 1926, but he and the former Democratic Centralists remained ultra-left, declaring in the statement of the Group of 15 that the Soviet Union was "no longer a workers' state" and that capitalism "had been restored". According to Lev Trotskij, they ‘denied the necessity for the defense of the Soviet Union'.
The 15th Party Congress, narrowly failing to expel Sapronov in 1925, at the very least managed to strip him of any meaningful positions within the Soviet hierarchy, making him an outsider of the nomenklatura. Being de-facto exiled to Crimea in a lesser function, he would remain there, until, like so many others, 1935 in the wake of the convenient assassination of Kirov.
The 8th Party Congress. The formation of the Decists.
The Group of Democratic Centralists, Decimists, or the Group of 15, derogatorily labeled by Trotskij during their first clash as "ultra-left", was a factional group, first emerging during the early rule of Lenin - more accurate during the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. Composed of Bolshevik intellectuals, they opposed what they saw as excessive centralism of the Party, at the detriment of local soviets, local party initiative, and suffocating top-down control of the industry, and local administration alike.
In effect they saw the government of Lenin and Trotskij as moving toward a Dictatorship of the Party, degrading the democratic aspect of democratic centralism - instead, they advocated once more emphasis on the democratic aspect of the aforementioned intra-party leadership, in conjunction with restoring the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The zenith of their power came around during the 9th Congress, however, their proposal to increase soviet autonomy was quickly defeated, and during the infamous 10th Congress, with the Party fracturing into many opposing factions, the iron fist of Lenin clenched and banned factions within the Communist Party.
Still, the determined members did not give in, gaining increased traction with Stalin's consolidating power and protesting against the gradual abolition of intra-party democracy. Burying their hatchet (albeit, temporarily), the Decists in 1923 joined forces with Trotskij's Left Opposition. Continuing to undermine Stalin's authority, the Decimists soon followed their uneasy coalition to form an even broader one, Smirnov and Sapronov formed the Group of 15 and joined the United Opposition with Trotskij, Kamenev, and Zinovjev. With the expulsion of Trotskij, and his exile, their days seemed to be doomed. However, despite the machination of Stalin, several Decists still remained in the Party (albeit, they were barred from any key functions).
In prison and in exile, the Group of 15 and Decimists continued to work against Stalin, along with the Left Opposition. However, it was not a unified group, but more of a marriage of convenience. Their distrust was mutual, Trotskij and his Left Opposition were distrusted for their part in consolidating power away from the proletariat and toward the Party, meanwhile, Trotskij and his supporters disagreed with the notion that under Stalin, the Soviet Union had become a state capitalist society. While allied with the Left Opposition, they were not Trotskyists per se, indeed Trotskij only saw the Decists as a working partner, and the Decists saw themself as separate from the Trotskyists. Trotskij's biographer sums it up: n their enmity towards the bureaucracy they had been far less inhibited than the Trotskyists. More or less openly, they had renounced all allegiance to the existing state and party. They proclaimed that the revolution and Bolshevism were dead and that the working class had to begin again from the beginning ... to free itself from exploitation by the new 'state capitalism'. In 1928, Smirnov described the communist party under Iosif Stalin as a 'stinking corpse', and claimed that the destruction of inner-party democracy in 1923 had been "a mere prologue to the development of a peasant-kulak democracy." Tellingly, in prison when Smirnov was informed of a rumor that Trotskij has given up and kowtowed to Stalin, a fellow prisoner said he merely remarked "Trotskij has capitulated. That is all to the good. This semi-Menshevik will now, at last, cease to hamper the authentic revolutionary movement by his presence."
Smirnov and Sapronov - the Ultra Leftists.
Vladimir Smirnov - not to be confused with Ivan Smirnov.
With a criminally short summary of the Decists, who were Sapronov, and Smirnov? Who were the leaders of this, according to Trotskij, ultra-left movement?
First, we will be introduced to Vladimir Smirnov, who by his name and as an ally of the Left Opposition, is often conflated with the renowned Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov. In fact, that they would both be loyal supporters of Trotskij, could not be further from the truth. Vladimir was a persistent critic of party leaders, Lenin, Trotskij, and Stalin alike - and envisioned a doctrinal pure and militant line.
Born to a middle-class family in 1887, he would be drawn into politics during the 1905 Revolution, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907 - thus making him an Old Bolshevik, itself a dangerous and dubious honor after the assassination of Kirov. Here he soon became friends with Bukharin and Osinsky, forming an intellectual trio, that would be reunited during the Russian Revolution.
Despite being part of the government, with a bright future, Smirnov not only joined Bukharin and his Left Communist faction, opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and supporting a revolutionary war, he outright turned down his ministerial positions and instead joined a formal opposition - where he would remain for the remainder of his life. Smirnov argued attempts to turn pre-industrialized Russia into a socialist state, warning it was "a side turning off the main highway of European socialism" and was "foredoomed to failure" - foreshadowing the later conflict between Trotskij on one hand, and Stalin and Bukharin on the other.
Marking one of his earlier clashes with the policies of Trotskij, Smirnov became a leader of the Military Opposition, being against the reintroduction of Tsarist Officers, instead advocating for Political Commissars; "The role of the political commissars is limited to the functions of supervision... Now that we have the political commissars with sufficient combat experience and able not to intervene when not needed, we must give them broader rights, a larger part in the direction of the armies."
Smirnov, the Military Opposition, and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries advocated for a politicization of the Red Army, totally opposed by Trotskij, but in the end, they won out. Stalin would later use the Commissars to further consolidate his power and lash against perceived, and real enemies alike within the Red Army - well after the expulsion of Trotskij.
As mentioned, in 1920, Smirnov, Osinsky, and Sapronovformed the 'Decists', a left-wing opposition group that opposed the managerial system in the industry, and advocated more democracy within the communist party. Smirnov signed The Declaration of 46 in 1923 and acted as one of the main speakers for the opposition at the party conference in January 1924. In 1926, he and Sapronov formed the "Group of 15", which joined the United Opposition headed by Trotskij, Zinovjev, and Kamenev.
During the 15th Congress, Smirnov was expelled from the party, but he was saved from arrest by the intervention of the Congress and would continue his opposition underground. But this was not to last for long, with the NKVD breathing down his neck, eager to root out any and all resistance, and was arrested in March of 1935 after the assassination of Kirov...
Timofej Sapronov.
Just like Smirnov, Timofej Sapronov (also transliterated as Timofei Sapronov) was born in 1887. However, he would instead join the Russian Social Democratic Party (bolshevik) in 1912. Being active in the Moscow Soviet, he too became a close affiliate of the, then, left communist Bukharin. After liberating Kharkov from Anton Denikin, Sapronov would become the chairman of the liberated province's Revolutionary Committee and Executive Committee. Working closely with other left communists from Moscow, he formed the inner-party faction that this chapter is dedicated to; the Decists. In 1919 he presented the case that 'the party should not impose its will on the soviets’, only to be resoundingly defeated by Vladimir Lenin himself. Despite this, Sapronov would continue to have a career within the Party and State, and would not outright leave government positions.
The Democratic Centralists continued to campaign against the bureaucratic methods of the party throughout the early twenties as part of the so-called 1923 opposition. Despite this Sapronov remained a leading party figure and chairman of the Public Works Committee, a member of the Central Executive Committee, and was a pall-bearer at Lenin's funeral. He, along with Osinsky, Smirnov, and Drobnis, signed The Declaration of 46 and later adhered to the Left Opposition, albeit as a separate grouping considered ultra-left within it. Sapronov helped lay the groundwork for the United Opposition of the Trotskyist and Zinovite factions in 1926, but he and the former Democratic Centralists remained ultra-left, declaring in the statement of the Group of 15 that the Soviet Union was "no longer a workers' state" and that capitalism "had been restored". According to Lev Trotskij, they ‘denied the necessity for the defense of the Soviet Union'.
The 15th Party Congress, narrowly failing to expel Sapronov in 1925, at the very least managed to strip him of any meaningful positions within the Soviet hierarchy, making him an outsider of the nomenklatura. Being de-facto exiled to Crimea in a lesser function, he would remain there, until, like so many others, 1935 in the wake of the convenient assassination of Kirov.
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A shortish chapter up.
There will be several chapters in Book Two detailing the inner factions and workings of the USSR.
Confused with democratic centralism, the Declaration of 46, the various Congresses, and so on? Do not fret, it is on purpose made vague at this stage. It will all be explained in greater detail once they are relevant.
The point of this chapter is both to give a short introduction in the format of the other factions, an overview of where it stands, and the leading figures of the faction. In addition, it is to show that indeed, purges and bans on factions existed before Stalin. And that Trotskij and his coalition of oppositional, might not be as homogenous as you might believe. Even if they manage to challenge Stalin, or even depose him, the Trotskyist movement is quite diverse, and conflict may erupt at any moment, before, during, or after their uprising against Stalin.
Also, the preceding chapter is very likely to get some edits. If that happens, I will make a separate post notifying you of it, and telling you what those edits are.
And the formatting bugged out on me, the bold texts at the end are something I am trying to remove. It is not supposed to be bolded.
There will be several chapters in Book Two detailing the inner factions and workings of the USSR.
Confused with democratic centralism, the Declaration of 46, the various Congresses, and so on? Do not fret, it is on purpose made vague at this stage. It will all be explained in greater detail once they are relevant.
The point of this chapter is both to give a short introduction in the format of the other factions, an overview of where it stands, and the leading figures of the faction. In addition, it is to show that indeed, purges and bans on factions existed before Stalin. And that Trotskij and his coalition of oppositional, might not be as homogenous as you might believe. Even if they manage to challenge Stalin, or even depose him, the Trotskyist movement is quite diverse, and conflict may erupt at any moment, before, during, or after their uprising against Stalin.
Also, the preceding chapter is very likely to get some edits. If that happens, I will make a separate post notifying you of it, and telling you what those edits are.
And the formatting bugged out on me, the bold texts at the end are something I am trying to remove. It is not supposed to be bolded.
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Very interesting to read about another part of Stalin's opposition. I have mixed feelings about them though. More democracy in the Soviet Union seems like a good thing, but they're also fervent revolutionaries who liked commissars, so maybe their commitment to democracy would only last until they took power?
Maybe this is the wrong conclusion, but they seem to me like the idealistic, passionate revolutionaries that helped carry the Bolsheviks to victory and were soon enough disposed of as their purity and convictions got in the way of building a real government.
Maybe this is the wrong conclusion, but they seem to me like the idealistic, passionate revolutionaries that helped carry the Bolsheviks to victory and were soon enough disposed of as their purity and convictions got in the way of building a real government.
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More democracy would certainly be nice, but remember, what the Soviets consider a democracy is pretty different from what we consider a democracy. In effect, liberal democracy is seen as a bourgeois dictatorship. And remember, after the October Revolution, the Russian Constituent Assembly that was democratically elected, the Bolsheviks and their allies lost. Democracy here is more about Democratic Centralism, and perhaps the role of the Soviets. More on that in later chapters.
And yes, it looks to be a theme that some are democratic etc until they come to power. It is easy to be idealistic in opposition, something else when in position. Trotskij for example was quite harsh in putting down the Kronstadt Rebellion among other things and limiting the powers of trade unions and soviets once they were in power. We will delve into it more in-depth in later chapters, however, it is important to have this in the back of your head.
Will Trotskij and other exiled revolutionaries move toward a genuine more democratic and/or decentralized system, or are they saying it only when they are in opposition, perhaps they will change their mind (or rather find out they can't implement their reforms) if they come to power. Or perhaps even more cynical, perhaps they are only giving an appearance of being more democratic in order to gain a new powerbase? We will see.
I will aim to get the next chapter up tomorrow, if not, it will not come out this week as I will not be at home from Thursday-Sunday.
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Bloodsoaked Birth of the Soviet Union
The Bloodsoaked Birth of the Soviet Union
The Russian Civil War claimed 12 million lives during its span from 1917-1921 - some four million lives per year - making this one of the greatest catastrophes during the 20th Century.
Now Soviets are again massacring each other, in the steppes of Russia, the fields of Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the metropolises. Can we draw parallels?
Let us retrace, and go back to the spring of 1917. Think if, for whatever reason, Lenin had been brought to death on his way home to Petrograd from Zürich. Then those antagonistic to his coup plans, within and outside of the Bolshevik Party, would likely have prevailed. Politicians like Nikolaj Bukharin, Grigorij Zinovjev, and even Lev Trotskij - all doubted if the Bolsheviks could muster enough strength to defeat Aleksandr Kerenskij and his Provisional Government.
The ripples can be enormous here: Russia could be set on a constitutional course, dodged the horror regime of the thirties under Stalin, and the Russian and Soviet civil wars alike.
Yet, still, the Russian Civil War happened, with the following Red Terror, along with the Great Purges. Why did the Whites lose? Why are civil wars often to a greater degree more.. uncivil and horrible than "normal" wars? Where do this massive sadism and systemic violence come from?
Which side was the worst during the Russian Civil War?
To make an attempt to summarize; More than often represented the White side the most debased types of the human species. When it comes to ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks were invincible.
Today, the author is weighted down by these questions, from the previous civil war - and todays. For both sides, White as Red, it was not only a matter of taking out your enemy. The enemy had to be humiliated, frightened - murdered in the most bestial of fashions.
In Spain, 15 years later, it was more of the same, despite the war currently "only" claiming some hundreds of thousand casualties.
The 20th Century has thus far been only a string of catastrophes. Now it is repeating itself in the former Russian Empire.
12.000.000 casualties were claimed by the war that started in late autumn and lasted until 1921. The casualty figures alone elevate the civil war to one of the main axes of the 20th Century's history.
The Civil War ushered a spiral of violence, that resonates well into our day and age. The war created particular shockwaves in Europe's middle classes: The violence can shed a light on the bitterness and intransigence during the Post-Great War age.
Between the lines, we can read that this desperation contributed to throwing the German borgeoisie into the arms of Hitler - as a last bulwark against the leftish revolutionary fear.
The Massive Dynamic of Violence
The more obvious the enemy no longer represents a threat, the worse the terror and violence will become. Violence is driven forward by a dynmic of its own.
The Cheka, the precursor to the NKVD, instituted systemic and total contempt for human worth. Were you a "counter-revolutionary", or under Stalin an "enemy of the people", all restraints were brushed away from the Red Guards.
The common element that binds Leninism/Stalinism with Nazism and Fascism, is this systematic destruction of conditions for an autonomous civil society, and thus - democracy. This is the core of the totalitarian dictatorship.
Feliks Dzerzinskijs - Iron Felix.
Feliks Dzerzinskij's secret police, the VChK, the Cheka, was established in the late autumn of 1917 when the resistance to the extremism of Lenin and Trotskij caught on.
This fanatic of Polish nobility often lacked supervision over his local enforcers. These local Red Guards, which soon swelled to tens of thousands, were not rarely the driving force behind the worst excesses of the violence.
Just as often the explanation of the violence is in numerical inferiority. When a minority wishes to subjugate a greater area, excessive violence will often become compensation for territorial control.
Lenin was crystal clear in this tactic. Terror was the most acute form of class struggle. Violence should frighten, and initiate subservience - to a much greater degree than what a number of soldiers could do.
Lenin in his personal office, Moscow 1927.
Political Vacuum
So why did neither Prime-Minister Kerenskij, the leader of the Provisional Government after the Tsar's fall in March 1917, nor the White Generals crush the numerical inferior Bolsheviks? Lenin's party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), only got a fourth of the votes during the Constitutional Assembly of November 1917.
The explanation can be found in the political vacuum that emerged in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 when Tsar Nikolaj fell.
Such pockets of power can also be used to explain the death of the Weimar Republic in 1930 and 1933. The power that crumbled, invited those who wanted to crush democracy. Lenin in 1917, Mussolini in 1922, Franz von Papen, and Hitler in 1932/33.
After the abdication of the Tsar, the disintegration process followed on this road: The government of the Tsardom was widely hated and soon crumbled. Especially in the rural countryside police, legal powers, and civil servants feared for their lives and fled. Returned soldiers, often totally demoralized and shell shocked, raided all alcohol vendors, and were mortal in their intoxication. Looting become the new normal.
It is worth noting, that the Tsarist Army would not raise one rifle to the defense of the monarchy. So despised was the regime of Nikolaj Romanov.
This was caused first and foremost by a lack of legitimacy (and total lack of popular support), and then in a good second place action and decisional paralysis. Kerenskij waited, in vain, for a new and restructured governmental basis the Constitutional Assembly would give him.
The assembly was meant to meet in January 1918, but the delegates were chased back home by the bayonets of the Red Guards. Then Lenin's contempt for democracy was clear to all.
Precisely this normalization and stabilization of Russian politics was what Lenin feared the most. Therefore he ignited willpower in the Bolshevik Party to seize power through a coup and destroy any constitutional reform.
In short: Without Lenin, there would have been no revolution that paved the road for Stalin and his terror regime.
In the end, almost none wanted to defend Kerenskij. This marginal transitional figure of history escaped through a backdoor in the Winter Palace and fled to Paris in a car from the American Embassy.
In the Summer of 1917, Kerenskij could have easily eliminated Lenin. The Bolshevik leader got Stalin to shave his iconic beard and fled to exile in Finland.
A White propaganda poster. Lenin in red robes, with, from left to right, Uritskij; Sverdlov; Zinovjev; Trotskij; Kamenev; Radek, sacrificing Russia to a statue of Marx.
However, these slogans hid Lenin's pure cynicism. He aimed to nationalize the soil, not give it to the farmers. When the peasants understood this, he had to establish the Cheka to cow them. And his slogan "All Power to the Soviets", was simply a spin of words. The Soviets was never meant to be decentralized popular advisory and self-governance organs. Only ruthless claws from the party top down to control the masses.
The only promise Lenin held, was the promise of peace.
It was Marx's only adversary Mikhail Bakhunin that saw this Bolshevik abuse of power 50 years earlier: "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself".
The World Revolution
Lenin understood something his more dogmatic comrades did not, the future of the revolution was in pulling Russia out of the trenches, where soldiers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, dragged their lives in incomprehensible humiliation and debasement. Russia lost 1.3 million soldiers during the Great War. By the end of 1917 four million Russians were in German and Austrian captivity.
Here we must remember that Lenin's thinking was always preoccupied with world revolution. Without a revolution in Western Europe, then his own Russia was doomed to failure.
This might shed a light on his bold politics: No sacrifice was big enough, as long as it could salvage his revolution. Here Lenin was both an ideologue, and a pragmatic. Therefore he accepted the humiliating Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
Iosif Stalin, on the other hand, saw a European revolution, and especially a German one, with suspicion - if not outright horror. In his view, a world revolution would demote the Soviets Union to secondary power, and in turn, threaten his own position. Thus he leaked that the German communists, with Radek and Zinovjev, planned an uprising in 1923.
The Whites' Fatal Mistake
The greatest lapse of judgment is found among the counter-revolutionaries.
The Whites lost the war, primarily by the Tsarist Generals' total absence of understanding of the suffering of the Russian masses and their mass poverty. And their own insistence to continue the war.
Now, it is very important to remember that the Whites consisted of a fragile coalition. They had a significant contribution Social Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks (who despite their name, were the majority of the RSDLP).
Lenin on the other hand, despised those who disagreed with him, especially within his own party! Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries were natural allies to the Bolsheviks. But many instead switched to an unstable alliance with the Whites as they feared the totalitarian tendencies and the dictatorship.
In short order, Lenin nationalized everything, from land to big industries, replaced police and judicial powers with Red Guards, and hunted down any "bourgeois" element, very broadly defined. The Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks understood early on that after the elimination of the conservatives and liberals, the Bolsheviks would come for them.
Endless Brutality
The individuals play a major role. The White Generals' blindness was highlighted the most with the reintroduction of the Tsar's Army methods of punishment: Being slapped in the face, and public whipping.
Nothing was more hated than these methods, and when they were reintroduced in the White Army, desertion increased significantly. It was for all practical purposes impossible to continue the war, with an extension of the Russian Civil War. The peasant soldier would simply return home, to get peace, bread, and land, rather than fight for a rotten regime, let it be the Tsar or reactionary generals.
In addition, they made it clear to Finnish and Baltic soldiers, that their homes and lands were still considered part of Russia. That unity in struggle, which could be formed with an open attitude toward national self-detirmination, could have become a decisive factor against the Bolsheviks. Instead, the dreams of empire prevailed.
And even if the Whites had better military leadership, in the beginning, the generals had such a limited appeal to the masses, because they could never fathom their complete disdain for the old regime - and the longing for peace.
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A new type of post, consider it a bonus because there was no chapter last week. It is not to be treated as an "official" chapter. Instead, see it as a supplement. The tone and perspective are different from the chapters that actually deal with the story, consider it a contemporary opinion article in a liberal democratic newspaper. Making it a (biased) counterweight, especially as the narration will become increasingly unreliable as the "Books" progress. It gives another perspective on chapters we have already covered, but some themes and events are also noted here that will become very important later on.
Let me know if you would like further supplemental essays in the future, or if it is just a distraction. The next "real" chapter should come tomorrow, detailing one of the oppositional groups. This time, to Lenin, however, and not Stalin directly.
The Russian Civil War claimed 12 million lives during its span from 1917-1921 - some four million lives per year - making this one of the greatest catastrophes during the 20th Century.
Now Soviets are again massacring each other, in the steppes of Russia, the fields of Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the metropolises. Can we draw parallels?
Let us retrace, and go back to the spring of 1917. Think if, for whatever reason, Lenin had been brought to death on his way home to Petrograd from Zürich. Then those antagonistic to his coup plans, within and outside of the Bolshevik Party, would likely have prevailed. Politicians like Nikolaj Bukharin, Grigorij Zinovjev, and even Lev Trotskij - all doubted if the Bolsheviks could muster enough strength to defeat Aleksandr Kerenskij and his Provisional Government.
The ripples can be enormous here: Russia could be set on a constitutional course, dodged the horror regime of the thirties under Stalin, and the Russian and Soviet civil wars alike.
Yet, still, the Russian Civil War happened, with the following Red Terror, along with the Great Purges. Why did the Whites lose? Why are civil wars often to a greater degree more.. uncivil and horrible than "normal" wars? Where do this massive sadism and systemic violence come from?
Which side was the worst during the Russian Civil War?
To make an attempt to summarize; More than often represented the White side the most debased types of the human species. When it comes to ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks were invincible.
Today, the author is weighted down by these questions, from the previous civil war - and todays. For both sides, White as Red, it was not only a matter of taking out your enemy. The enemy had to be humiliated, frightened - murdered in the most bestial of fashions.
In Spain, 15 years later, it was more of the same, despite the war currently "only" claiming some hundreds of thousand casualties.
The 20th Century has thus far been only a string of catastrophes. Now it is repeating itself in the former Russian Empire.
12.000.000 casualties were claimed by the war that started in late autumn and lasted until 1921. The casualty figures alone elevate the civil war to one of the main axes of the 20th Century's history.
The Civil War ushered a spiral of violence, that resonates well into our day and age. The war created particular shockwaves in Europe's middle classes: The violence can shed a light on the bitterness and intransigence during the Post-Great War age.
Between the lines, we can read that this desperation contributed to throwing the German borgeoisie into the arms of Hitler - as a last bulwark against the leftish revolutionary fear.
The Massive Dynamic of Violence
The more obvious the enemy no longer represents a threat, the worse the terror and violence will become. Violence is driven forward by a dynmic of its own.
The Cheka, the precursor to the NKVD, instituted systemic and total contempt for human worth. Were you a "counter-revolutionary", or under Stalin an "enemy of the people", all restraints were brushed away from the Red Guards.
The common element that binds Leninism/Stalinism with Nazism and Fascism, is this systematic destruction of conditions for an autonomous civil society, and thus - democracy. This is the core of the totalitarian dictatorship.
Feliks Dzerzinskijs - Iron Felix.
Terror - a product of numerical inferiority
An important perspective to have is in the question of why and how the terror accelerated so violently - it more or less grew organic out of the chaos of the Civil War. The deeds of violence must be understood as politics with different means, first and foremost an extension of a lack of control.Feliks Dzerzinskij's secret police, the VChK, the Cheka, was established in the late autumn of 1917 when the resistance to the extremism of Lenin and Trotskij caught on.
This fanatic of Polish nobility often lacked supervision over his local enforcers. These local Red Guards, which soon swelled to tens of thousands, were not rarely the driving force behind the worst excesses of the violence.
Just as often the explanation of the violence is in numerical inferiority. When a minority wishes to subjugate a greater area, excessive violence will often become compensation for territorial control.
Lenin was crystal clear in this tactic. Terror was the most acute form of class struggle. Violence should frighten, and initiate subservience - to a much greater degree than what a number of soldiers could do.
Lenin in his personal office, Moscow 1927.
Political Vacuum
So why did neither Prime-Minister Kerenskij, the leader of the Provisional Government after the Tsar's fall in March 1917, nor the White Generals crush the numerical inferior Bolsheviks? Lenin's party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), only got a fourth of the votes during the Constitutional Assembly of November 1917.
The explanation can be found in the political vacuum that emerged in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 when Tsar Nikolaj fell.
Such pockets of power can also be used to explain the death of the Weimar Republic in 1930 and 1933. The power that crumbled, invited those who wanted to crush democracy. Lenin in 1917, Mussolini in 1922, Franz von Papen, and Hitler in 1932/33.
After the abdication of the Tsar, the disintegration process followed on this road: The government of the Tsardom was widely hated and soon crumbled. Especially in the rural countryside police, legal powers, and civil servants feared for their lives and fled. Returned soldiers, often totally demoralized and shell shocked, raided all alcohol vendors, and were mortal in their intoxication. Looting become the new normal.
It is worth noting, that the Tsarist Army would not raise one rifle to the defense of the monarchy. So despised was the regime of Nikolaj Romanov.
Kerenskij lacked legitimacy
This general crumbling of society was the one shot the Bolsheviks waited for. Kerenskij's moderate government could not do anything to stop the coup.This was caused first and foremost by a lack of legitimacy (and total lack of popular support), and then in a good second place action and decisional paralysis. Kerenskij waited, in vain, for a new and restructured governmental basis the Constitutional Assembly would give him.
The assembly was meant to meet in January 1918, but the delegates were chased back home by the bayonets of the Red Guards. Then Lenin's contempt for democracy was clear to all.
Precisely this normalization and stabilization of Russian politics was what Lenin feared the most. Therefore he ignited willpower in the Bolshevik Party to seize power through a coup and destroy any constitutional reform.
In short: Without Lenin, there would have been no revolution that paved the road for Stalin and his terror regime.
In the end, almost none wanted to defend Kerenskij. This marginal transitional figure of history escaped through a backdoor in the Winter Palace and fled to Paris in a car from the American Embassy.
In the Summer of 1917, Kerenskij could have easily eliminated Lenin. The Bolshevik leader got Stalin to shave his iconic beard and fled to exile in Finland.
Lenin's borderless cynicism
Lenin's message was peace, land, and bread. Lenin wanted peace so much that he agreed to the humiliating peace with Germany in Brest-Litovsk, March 1918 - to the protestations from Trotskij, Bukharin, and the Left Communists. There he yielded territories that encompassed most of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Caucasus, and the Baltics. It was a Diktat that was considerably harsher than what the Germans were confronted with in Versailles half a year later.
A White propaganda poster. Lenin in red robes, with, from left to right, Uritskij; Sverdlov; Zinovjev; Trotskij; Kamenev; Radek, sacrificing Russia to a statue of Marx.
However, these slogans hid Lenin's pure cynicism. He aimed to nationalize the soil, not give it to the farmers. When the peasants understood this, he had to establish the Cheka to cow them. And his slogan "All Power to the Soviets", was simply a spin of words. The Soviets was never meant to be decentralized popular advisory and self-governance organs. Only ruthless claws from the party top down to control the masses.
The only promise Lenin held, was the promise of peace.
It was Marx's only adversary Mikhail Bakhunin that saw this Bolshevik abuse of power 50 years earlier: "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself".
The World Revolution
Lenin understood something his more dogmatic comrades did not, the future of the revolution was in pulling Russia out of the trenches, where soldiers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, dragged their lives in incomprehensible humiliation and debasement. Russia lost 1.3 million soldiers during the Great War. By the end of 1917 four million Russians were in German and Austrian captivity.
Here we must remember that Lenin's thinking was always preoccupied with world revolution. Without a revolution in Western Europe, then his own Russia was doomed to failure.
This might shed a light on his bold politics: No sacrifice was big enough, as long as it could salvage his revolution. Here Lenin was both an ideologue, and a pragmatic. Therefore he accepted the humiliating Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
Iosif Stalin, on the other hand, saw a European revolution, and especially a German one, with suspicion - if not outright horror. In his view, a world revolution would demote the Soviets Union to secondary power, and in turn, threaten his own position. Thus he leaked that the German communists, with Radek and Zinovjev, planned an uprising in 1923.
The Whites' Fatal Mistake
The greatest lapse of judgment is found among the counter-revolutionaries.
The Whites lost the war, primarily by the Tsarist Generals' total absence of understanding of the suffering of the Russian masses and their mass poverty. And their own insistence to continue the war.
Now, it is very important to remember that the Whites consisted of a fragile coalition. They had a significant contribution Social Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks (who despite their name, were the majority of the RSDLP).
Lenin on the other hand, despised those who disagreed with him, especially within his own party! Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries were natural allies to the Bolsheviks. But many instead switched to an unstable alliance with the Whites as they feared the totalitarian tendencies and the dictatorship.
In short order, Lenin nationalized everything, from land to big industries, replaced police and judicial powers with Red Guards, and hunted down any "bourgeois" element, very broadly defined. The Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks understood early on that after the elimination of the conservatives and liberals, the Bolsheviks would come for them.
Endless Brutality
The individuals play a major role. The White Generals' blindness was highlighted the most with the reintroduction of the Tsar's Army methods of punishment: Being slapped in the face, and public whipping.
Nothing was more hated than these methods, and when they were reintroduced in the White Army, desertion increased significantly. It was for all practical purposes impossible to continue the war, with an extension of the Russian Civil War. The peasant soldier would simply return home, to get peace, bread, and land, rather than fight for a rotten regime, let it be the Tsar or reactionary generals.
In addition, they made it clear to Finnish and Baltic soldiers, that their homes and lands were still considered part of Russia. That unity in struggle, which could be formed with an open attitude toward national self-detirmination, could have become a decisive factor against the Bolsheviks. Instead, the dreams of empire prevailed.
And even if the Whites had better military leadership, in the beginning, the generals had such a limited appeal to the masses, because they could never fathom their complete disdain for the old regime - and the longing for peace.
-----------
A new type of post, consider it a bonus because there was no chapter last week. It is not to be treated as an "official" chapter. Instead, see it as a supplement. The tone and perspective are different from the chapters that actually deal with the story, consider it a contemporary opinion article in a liberal democratic newspaper. Making it a (biased) counterweight, especially as the narration will become increasingly unreliable as the "Books" progress. It gives another perspective on chapters we have already covered, but some themes and events are also noted here that will become very important later on.
Let me know if you would like further supplemental essays in the future, or if it is just a distraction. The next "real" chapter should come tomorrow, detailing one of the oppositional groups. This time, to Lenin, however, and not Stalin directly.
- 1
I'm all for supplemental material and really enjoyed this one. As you said its giving a different perspective.
Book Two, Chapter Three
Chapter Three: Workers' Truth
Founded in 1921, in the wake of Lenin's suppression of Proletkult, this faction was one of the many Left Communist factions that would challenge Soviet rule. However, unlike the more prominent examples, it was in opposition to Lenin. Although not associated with Trotskij, they shared some ideals of the early position of Trotskij but took a step further. Where Trotskij led a faction within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Workers' Truth instead sought to create a new worker's party in opposition to the CPSU. The Worker's Truth, along with the Decists, and Worker's Opposition, would lead to Lenin's infamous ban on party factions - a tool used by Stalin to accumulate personal power.
The Workers' Truth considered that the Soviet economy had been transformed into a form of capitalism, with the technical managers and organizers as a new ruling class, together with the private entrepreneurs that emerged with the New Economic Policy (NEP), the CPSU has become the representative of that ruling class, and no longer of the proletariat. Thus, the Workers' Truth, although continuing to act within the Communist Party, defended the need to create a new workers' party. In short, they warned against the danger of the new bureaucratic class becoming a new ruling class in a capitalist state. The Workers' Truth received publicity in the Berlin-based Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, and they also distributed a manifesto at the 12th Bolshevik Congress and were active in the industrial unrest which swept Moscow and Petrograd in July and August 1923.
Their activists were mostly students from institutions to form the intellectuality of the new regime. In addition, they argued for compliance of existing labor laws within the Union; administrative reform; freedom of expression and association; cooperation with capitalist countries like the USA and Germany; severing ties with France (who they considered reactionary); supporting national and bourgeoise revolutions in China, Egypt, India - against colonialism. As ever with left-wing opposition groups, they squabbled with each other. Instead of uniting forces (something other opposition groups would later amend), the Workers' Truth criticized the Mensheviks for being reactionary, the Social Revolutionaries for having lost their popular base, the Workers' Opposition for "objective reactionism" for wanting to implement War Communism, meanwhile the Workers Group considered the Workers' Truth wanting to preserve capitalism under the NEP, and instead fight for better labor laws and abandoned their revolutionary cause.
Nevertheless, the group was not to last.
The "scissors crisis" - basically the prices of industrial and agricultural goods widened.
With the declining health of Lenin, and massive strikes in the wake of an economic crisis - that critics blamed on the NEP and reversion to capitalism - the hammer fell down on the faction in September 1923.
Fearing that dissident communist groups like Workers' Truth or the Workers' Group could capitalize on the labor unrest to gain support among the working class, the Communist Party leadership decided to take action against them. On 8 September 1923, the Soviet secret police arrested several people accused of having links with Workers' Truth, such as Fanya Shutskever, Pauline Lass-Kozlova, Efim Shul'man, Vladimir Khaikevich, and also the philosopher and "old Bolshevik" Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov denied any organizational involvement with them, although they had claimed that they were inspired by his views, and demanded a face-to-face meeting with Iron Felix (head of the Cheka), with whom he spoke twice before being released on 13 October.
Aleksandr Bogdanov during his arrest.
Bogdanov was an interesting figure in and of himself. He was a co-founder of the Bolshevik faction when they split from the Mensheviks. There he was the second most influential figure within the Bolshevik faction and was Lenin's main rival, history usually rhymes, and Bogdanov led several left-wing factions within the Bolshevik faction that challenged Lenin and demanded they cease all cooperation within the State Duma. During and after the Revolution he would continue to support the Bolsheviks, albeit having left the party. He founded the magazine Proletkult, and argued to foment a "pure proletarian culture" and for the "complete destruction of old bourgeois culture". Proletkult would later influence the Workers' Truth, and in turn, the Soviets saw Bogdanov as the ideologue in this opposition group. One of his main thesis was that a revolution against capitalism would lead to a technocratic society He would die in 1928 - not in arrest, however. He managed to persuade the head of the Cheka to release him. Instead, he would die from a blood transfusion gone wrong. He believed experiments with blood transfusions would lead to eternal life, he even claimed to stop balding, and improve his eyesight, among other things. This search for the fountain of youth ended when he got a transfusion of blood tainted with malaria and tuberculosis. His theories, as a non-Leninist communist revolutionary would continue to influence underground left-wing dissidents in opposition to the Bolshevik autocracy.
In December 1923, Fanya Samoilova Shutskever, Efim Rafailovich Shul'man, Vladimir Markovich Khaikevich, Yakov Grigorevich Budnitsky, Pauline Ivanovna Lass-Kozlova, Oleg Petrovich Vikman-Beleev, and Nellie Georgievna Krym were identified as the leaders of Workers' Truth and expelled from the CPSU.
With the arrests of September 1923, the Workers' Truth was effectively dissolved. Albeit not as violent as Trotskij's quelling of the Kronstadt Rebellion, this was yet another crushing of a left-wing opposition group to the Party and the Nomenklatura. Precedence was set - one that Iosif Stalin would follow. The followers of the Workers' Truth would disperse and would either give up their work, go underground, or be absorbed, as dubious bedfellows, in later opposition groups such as Trotskij's Left Opposition.
----------------
There, is a short chapter on one of the many dissident groups. The Workers' Truth is disbanded, but as we can see there is factionalism within the USSR, also before Stalin. Lenin, Trotskij, and Stalin alike weren't shy to purge and arrest dissidents - meaning, purging and the likes are not something unique to Stalin. They are disbanded and lost their influence. But perhaps their ideas live on?
A bigger chapter is in the works, namely on the Workers Opposition (one of the big factions that will be important, the two detailed thus far are minor ones) along with Democratic Centralism and the Ban of Factions in the Soviet Union. I'll try to get it out tomorrow, if not it will come out next week.
Founded in 1921, in the wake of Lenin's suppression of Proletkult, this faction was one of the many Left Communist factions that would challenge Soviet rule. However, unlike the more prominent examples, it was in opposition to Lenin. Although not associated with Trotskij, they shared some ideals of the early position of Trotskij but took a step further. Where Trotskij led a faction within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Workers' Truth instead sought to create a new worker's party in opposition to the CPSU. The Worker's Truth, along with the Decists, and Worker's Opposition, would lead to Lenin's infamous ban on party factions - a tool used by Stalin to accumulate personal power.
The Workers' Truth considered that the Soviet economy had been transformed into a form of capitalism, with the technical managers and organizers as a new ruling class, together with the private entrepreneurs that emerged with the New Economic Policy (NEP), the CPSU has become the representative of that ruling class, and no longer of the proletariat. Thus, the Workers' Truth, although continuing to act within the Communist Party, defended the need to create a new workers' party. In short, they warned against the danger of the new bureaucratic class becoming a new ruling class in a capitalist state. The Workers' Truth received publicity in the Berlin-based Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, and they also distributed a manifesto at the 12th Bolshevik Congress and were active in the industrial unrest which swept Moscow and Petrograd in July and August 1923.
Their activists were mostly students from institutions to form the intellectuality of the new regime. In addition, they argued for compliance of existing labor laws within the Union; administrative reform; freedom of expression and association; cooperation with capitalist countries like the USA and Germany; severing ties with France (who they considered reactionary); supporting national and bourgeoise revolutions in China, Egypt, India - against colonialism. As ever with left-wing opposition groups, they squabbled with each other. Instead of uniting forces (something other opposition groups would later amend), the Workers' Truth criticized the Mensheviks for being reactionary, the Social Revolutionaries for having lost their popular base, the Workers' Opposition for "objective reactionism" for wanting to implement War Communism, meanwhile the Workers Group considered the Workers' Truth wanting to preserve capitalism under the NEP, and instead fight for better labor laws and abandoned their revolutionary cause.
Nevertheless, the group was not to last.
The "scissors crisis" - basically the prices of industrial and agricultural goods widened.
With the declining health of Lenin, and massive strikes in the wake of an economic crisis - that critics blamed on the NEP and reversion to capitalism - the hammer fell down on the faction in September 1923.
Fearing that dissident communist groups like Workers' Truth or the Workers' Group could capitalize on the labor unrest to gain support among the working class, the Communist Party leadership decided to take action against them. On 8 September 1923, the Soviet secret police arrested several people accused of having links with Workers' Truth, such as Fanya Shutskever, Pauline Lass-Kozlova, Efim Shul'man, Vladimir Khaikevich, and also the philosopher and "old Bolshevik" Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov denied any organizational involvement with them, although they had claimed that they were inspired by his views, and demanded a face-to-face meeting with Iron Felix (head of the Cheka), with whom he spoke twice before being released on 13 October.
Aleksandr Bogdanov during his arrest.
Bogdanov was an interesting figure in and of himself. He was a co-founder of the Bolshevik faction when they split from the Mensheviks. There he was the second most influential figure within the Bolshevik faction and was Lenin's main rival, history usually rhymes, and Bogdanov led several left-wing factions within the Bolshevik faction that challenged Lenin and demanded they cease all cooperation within the State Duma. During and after the Revolution he would continue to support the Bolsheviks, albeit having left the party. He founded the magazine Proletkult, and argued to foment a "pure proletarian culture" and for the "complete destruction of old bourgeois culture". Proletkult would later influence the Workers' Truth, and in turn, the Soviets saw Bogdanov as the ideologue in this opposition group. One of his main thesis was that a revolution against capitalism would lead to a technocratic society He would die in 1928 - not in arrest, however. He managed to persuade the head of the Cheka to release him. Instead, he would die from a blood transfusion gone wrong. He believed experiments with blood transfusions would lead to eternal life, he even claimed to stop balding, and improve his eyesight, among other things. This search for the fountain of youth ended when he got a transfusion of blood tainted with malaria and tuberculosis. His theories, as a non-Leninist communist revolutionary would continue to influence underground left-wing dissidents in opposition to the Bolshevik autocracy.
In December 1923, Fanya Samoilova Shutskever, Efim Rafailovich Shul'man, Vladimir Markovich Khaikevich, Yakov Grigorevich Budnitsky, Pauline Ivanovna Lass-Kozlova, Oleg Petrovich Vikman-Beleev, and Nellie Georgievna Krym were identified as the leaders of Workers' Truth and expelled from the CPSU.
With the arrests of September 1923, the Workers' Truth was effectively dissolved. Albeit not as violent as Trotskij's quelling of the Kronstadt Rebellion, this was yet another crushing of a left-wing opposition group to the Party and the Nomenklatura. Precedence was set - one that Iosif Stalin would follow. The followers of the Workers' Truth would disperse and would either give up their work, go underground, or be absorbed, as dubious bedfellows, in later opposition groups such as Trotskij's Left Opposition.
----------------
There, is a short chapter on one of the many dissident groups. The Workers' Truth is disbanded, but as we can see there is factionalism within the USSR, also before Stalin. Lenin, Trotskij, and Stalin alike weren't shy to purge and arrest dissidents - meaning, purging and the likes are not something unique to Stalin. They are disbanded and lost their influence. But perhaps their ideas live on?
A bigger chapter is in the works, namely on the Workers Opposition (one of the big factions that will be important, the two detailed thus far are minor ones) along with Democratic Centralism and the Ban of Factions in the Soviet Union. I'll try to get it out tomorrow, if not it will come out next week.
- 2
Book Two, Chapter Four
Chapter 4: Workers' Opposition - Trade Union Debate
Tracing its roots back to 1917 when Aleksandr Shliapnikov proposed expanding the Council of People's Commissars (ministries, the government) by including representatives of all Soviet parties, and not the Bolsheviks alone. Formally created in September of 1920, the Workers’ Opposition formed a faction within the All-Russian Communist Party to try to halt the perceived drift towards bureaucratism in both Soviet institutions and the party itself and to promote a councilist control of the economy. Along with the Democratic Centralists, the Workers’ Opposition represented the most serious threat to party unity since the October Revolution and was indicative of considerable working-class disenchantment with the party leadership and its policies. The leading figures in the Workers’ Opposition were Aleksandr Shliapnikov, chair of the central committee of the Metalworkers’ Union, and Aleksandra Kollontai, the most prominent Bolshevik feminist.
The group began to develop in 1919, resisting the domination of central party organs over local party units and trade unions. The group also resisted the party’s minimization of the role of workers in controlling industrial enterprises, the increasing use of so-called bourgeois specialists in the industry, and the party’s efforts to replace group control of enterprises with one-man management. First emerging as an oppositional group in the peripheries of Tula and Novosilsky, it soon consolidated power in Moscow with the support of several Old Bolsheviks. Here Shliapnikov proposed a simple, and codified, separation of powers in the Soviet government. The Party would be the political leader of the state and construct and lead the revolutionary struggle. The Soviets would be the basis of all political power, meanwhile, the trade unions were the only nation to organize and direct the national economy. The Workers' Opposition (in this chapter, simply called the Opposition for simplicity's sake) soon became a strong force in the peripheries of the Union, attracting grassroot support, with over half of the membership in Tula defecting to the opposition. The Workers' Truth tried to gain the large working class and revolutionary following of the Opposition - but would never come to their heights. Perhaps reflected by the latter's following among the industrial working class along with Old Bolsheviks, and the former's following mostly among newly educated party intellectuals.
Sergej Medvedev, along with Shliapknikov, the leader of the Opposition.
Anyway. The Central Committee soon saw the Opposition as a major threat to their rule; the Leadership viewed them as a Syndicalist threat, stripping the Party of its leading role in the economy. Bukharin sharply criticized Shlyapnikov’s ideas, accusing him of “syndicalism, guild narrowness, distrust of the Soviets and the party.” In response to such accusations, Lozovsky, who attended the meetings, noted that syndicalists denied the state itself, and Shlyapnikov had a different point of view: the opposition leader did not deny the state and did not encroach on state property; he talked only about the responsibility of trade unions for the economy and the main role of unions in Soviet industry.
Come to the 9th Party Congress, the Opposition saw a major surge in popularity, with a discussion regarding the upper and lower classes of the party membership, and the periphery against the central government. Jurij Lutovinov formulated the oppositional program, in his speech he “fervently insisted on the immediate implementation of the broadest possible labor democracy, on the complete abolition of appointment, and on the strictest cleansing of the party.” The Bolshevik Party tried to repress the new Opposition, even creating a special control committee, however, they failed to do so. And the Opposition gained a large number of followers, with support speeches in the regions and the central areas of the Soviet Union alike.
Jurij Lutovinov
The Trade Union Debate.
The Workers’ Opposition became embroiled in the trade union controversy that broke out in preparation for the party’s Tenth Congress. Most fully articulated by Kollontai, it advocated a congress of producers be elected by the trade unions, unions should not be subordinate to the state, but instead responsible for the management of industry and control over the entire economy. Condemning the increasing reliance on “bourgeois specialists,” Kollontai wrote that “only workers can generate … new methods of organizing labor as well as running industry.” As for the party, the Workers’ Opposition called for the expulsion of all non-proletarian elements and for future eligibility for membership to be contingent on the performance of manual labor for “a certain period of time.” The Opposition gained substantial rank-and-file support among the party membership, no major leader would join their cause.
Aleksej Kiselyov, Chair of the Miner's Union.
According to Aleksej Kiselyov, serious disagreements with the party leadership among the trade union leaders emerged at the beginning of 1920: he saw them as the main reason for the transition to a policy of militarization of labor. At that time, the majority of trade unions believed that the prospect of the end of active hostilities required, if not a change in policy guidelines, then at least a shift in emphasis in the organization of labor - a transition to economic incentives. In particular, they advocated the improvement of the food situation of the proletariat and the development of "amateur activity" of workers within the framework of trade union organizations. Moreover, the party leadership proceeded from the assumption that in the prevailing conditions at the time of the end of the long war, reliance on conventional methods of industrial management would not be able to prevent the final collapse of the Soviet economy: they believed that emergency measures, including military ones, were necessary.
The various ideas soon merged into the following groupings: The Lenin-Zinovjev bloc (Platform of the 10), Trotskij, the Group of 10, the Opposition, the Decists (see Chapter 2). In short Lenin, with the support of Bukharin and trade unionist Tomsky, wanted trade unions to withdraw from the economy and instead organize the labor force, Trotskij planned to transform trade unions into state organs. With different maneuvering, it was soon only the Platform of the 10 and Trotskij's position that became viable. Trotskij, however, lost to Lenin, and the whole Trade Union debate was a major blowback to his prestige.
At the Tenth Congress, the Workers’ Opposition’s position on trade unions received only 18 of over 400 votes cast by delegates. The party apparatus’ manipulation of delegate selection at the provincial level undoubtedly contributed to the Opposition’s poor showing. Weary of the divisions within the party ranks, Lenin pushed through resolutions on “party unity” and against “the anarcho-syndicalist deviation” that effectively banned the Workers’ Opposition and other party factions. A purge of the leadership of the Metalworkers’ Union followed soon thereafter. Complaints against the party’s repression of dissent within its ranks such as a “Declaration of the Twenty-Two” addressed to the Comintern and an appeal of the “Workers’ Truth” group continued into 1922. Ironically, Trotskij was to lodge similar complaints, but only after these groups that he had opposed ceased to exist.
Aleksandra Kollontai, a prominent spokesperson for the Opposition.
Its members, nevertheless, continued to agitate, complaining particularly about the lack of democracy within the party, the central leadership’s lack of respect for the workers and local autonomy, and the manner in which the party leaders were endeavoring to break up the opposition by transferring its adherents to remote regions. Although being censured, and restrained by the Party, the Opposition continued to speak out against the Central Party, and their members were not expelled. They engaged in sharp polemics against the NEP, attracting the attention and approval of Trotksij and Radek. While in exile, Trotskij, and his Left Opposition, made several inroads to the Opposition, and soon the Workers' Opposition would ally with Trotskij's Left Opposition. Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and the other leaders would sign the Letter of the 22. Trotskij, allegedly, moved more toward the German council communism that the Workers' Opposition associated itself with, and in turn inspired by the likes of Rosa Luxembourg. The Workers' Opposition had thus, by the 30s, been integrated into the Left Opposition - but remained nevertheless a distinct faction within the larger opposition.
Both prior to, and within the Left Opposition, the Workers' Opposition advocated the role of unionized workers in directing the economy at a time when Soviet government organs were running industry by diktat and trying to exclude trade unions from a participatory role. Specifically, the Workers' Opposition demanded that unionized workers (blue and white collar) should elect representatives to a vertical hierarchy of councils that would oversee the economy. At all levels, elected leaders would be responsible to those who had elected them and could be removed from below. The Workers' Opposition demanded that Russian Communist Party secretaries at all levels cease petty interference in the operations of trade unions and that trade union should be reinforced with staff and supplies to allow them to carry out their work effectively. Leaders of the Workers' Opposition were not opposed to the employment of "bourgeois specialists" in the economy but did oppose giving such individuals strong administrative powers, unchecked from below. The "Workers' Opposition" based their ideas on the experience of the first months of Soviet power - a short period when the organization of production was really carried out on the basis of the self-government of the proletarians
Aleksandr Shliapnikov.
Born in 1898 to an Old Believer family Shliapknikov was from an early age faced with political and religious repression. Already at the age of 13, he started as an industrial worker, and the following year he was first introduced to Marxist literature. In 1900 he moved to St. Petersburg, but because he was involved in industrial strikes and unrest, and by the age of 15 he was blacklisted from industrial work, not only in St. Petersburg but also in his home district and the regions. Radicalized further the young Shliapknikov distributed illegal underground literature and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).
Now he joined the Bolshevik faction within the RSDLP. He continued to work as a factory worker in Murom even as he deepened his involvement in political activism, and in 1904 he was arrested for distribution of illegal literature. Shliapnikov managed to convince the prosecutor that he had been entrapped by police provocateurs, and thus won his freedom, but also attracted the attention of the local Black Hundreds, who brutally assaulted him on his way home. Undeterred, Shliapnikov continued his revolutionary activities, and during the 1905 revolution, he led an armed demonstration of workers in Murom, helping to take the local police chief hostage and force the police to retreat, resulting in another arrest. Even after being freed by the general amnesty issued in October, his continued militancy and intransigence saw him jailed for a third time, in a prison stint that would last until January 1907. Almost immediately after his release, Shliapnikov was drafted into the army, and after refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Tsar, the police once again arrested him. Freed on bail, he vanished into the underground, finding work in the Electrical Station of 1886 in St. Petersburg, where he met fellow metalworker Sergej Medvedev (a future leader and comrade of the Opposition), establishing what would become a decades-long friendship. Later in 1907, the now 22-year-old Shliapnikov became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP(b), and due to his growing prominence, at the end of 1907, his friends advised him to emigrate from Russia. Entrusted with letters for Lenin, he left Russia in January 1908, and after arriving in Switzerland, where he briefly met with Lenin, continued onwards to Paris, and within two months Shliapnikov found work in an automobile factory.
In France, he soon became a prominent emigre figure for the Russians, but he also participated in French Unionism, getting a seat in the SFIO, establishing contacts with labor unions across Europe, and becoming romantically involved with Kollontai - the later Spokesperson of the Opposition.
Shliapnikov eagerly returned to Russia in October 1916. To help him rebuild the Russian Bureau, he recruited Vyacheslav Molotov and Petr Zalutskii, and as such, they were the senior Bolsheviks in Petrograd during the February Revolution in 1917. Under Shliapnikov, the Russian Bureau took a stance of opposition towards the provisional government and called for the Petrograd Soviet to form a revolutionary government. The arrival of more prominent Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin from Siberian exile brought on a struggle over leadership and the correct stance towards the war. The "moderates" under Kamenev successfully outmaneuvered the Russian Bureau, seizing control of the party newspaper Pravda, and refusing to publish Lenin's "Letters from Afar" urging opposition to the provisional government. On March 15, Kamenev published an editorial supporting the war effort, and by March 18 had persuaded the Petersburg committee to provide "conditional support" to the provisional government.
The arrival of Vladimir Lenin in Petrograd during April seriously challenged the dominant "moderate" line and brought about a shift in the party's positions, but Shliapnikov, hospitalized for weeks due to an automobile accident, did not play a major role in this affair. Instead, Shliapnikov and Konstantin Eremeev played a leading role in organizing a "Workers' Guard" among radical workers in the Vyborg district of Petrograd, and in August 1917, Shliapnikov joined the newly formed general staff of the Red Guard. On May 7, Shliapnikov was elected to the central board of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union alongside the unaligned socialist Aleksei Gastev and the Menshevik I.G. Volkov, and once he recovered from his automobile accident, he chaired the first Central Committee of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union on May 27. By June 11, the Union had established a system of supporting unemployed workers, set up the journal "Metallist", and begun to mediate conflicts between workers and industrialists. Over the next month, delegates from across Russia formed the first All-Russian Metalworkers' Union, and Shliapnikov found himself elected to its central committee alongside three other Bolsheviks, Volkov and three other Mensheviks, and Gastev. Due to Gastev's support, he was elected as chairman of the Central Committee during its first meeting on June 29. He led negotiations for a wage agreement between Petrograd metalworkers and factory owners in 1917.
Shliapnikov (left) with Krasin.
Following the October Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power, Shliapnikov was appointed Commissar of Labor. Shliapnikov supported a coalition government composed of left socialist parties and signed Zinoviev's and Kamenev's statements supporting a socialist coalition government, but unlike other "moderates" refused to resign from his post. The coalition agreement reached with the Left-SRs mollified most of the "moderate" Bolsheviks. In contrast to his "moderate" position in regard to coalitions with other socialist parties, Shliapnikov held a decisively "radical" stance towards the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik CC assigned him to take control of Bolshevik preparations for the Constituent Assembly, countering Zinoviev's and Kamenev's efforts to install a "moderate" provisional bureau that would support their stances, and Shliapnikov wholeheartedly supported the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly over the course of January 18 and 19. During the Civil War, Shliapnikov began to criticize the increasing tendency of the Russian Communist Party and Soviet government to rely on authoritarian measures to enforce policies toward industry and industrial workers. To Shliapnikov, the denial of workers' right to participate in economic decision-making was a step away from the goals of the 1917 revolution.
Shliapnikov became the leader of the Opposition movement inside the CPSU. AKollontai was a mentor and advocate of the group, which was composed of leaders of trade unions and industry who were all former industrial workers, usually metalworkers. In 1921, following the government repression of the Opposition, Shliapnikov was forced out of his elected post as chairman of the Metalworkers' Union.
In 1922, Shliapnikov and some other trade-unionists from within and outside the Workers' Opposition, supported by Alexandra Kollontai, presented an appeal, called the Letter of the Twenty Two, requesting that the Comintern help heal a "rift" within the Russian Communist Party between Party leaders and workers. Party leaders and Party-controlled media condemned the appeal. Two of the signatories of the appeal were expelled from the Party, but Shliapnikov, Kollontai, and Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion.
Shliapnikov turned to writing his memoirs and held jobs in metals import and economic planning institutions. The Party Central Control Commission investigated him and Medvedev in 1926 and in 1930 for alleged factionalism in connection with the formation of oppositionist groups among workers in Baku and Omsk. In 1932, the Party Politburo ordered Shliapnikov to publish a public confession of "political errors" in writing his memoirs of the revolution, under pain of being purged from the party. Shliapnikov refused, and after a large solidarity demonstration, was reinstated into the party. Severely undermining Stalin's authority.
However, Stalin would never forget Shliapknikov personally undermining his leadership, and leading a factional group. In 1935 following the assassination of Kirov, the NKVD made a swift operation and arrested Shliapnikov for political crimes. Despite being personally interrogated by Kaganovich, Shliapnikov did not make any testimonies implicating others or made any confessions.
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Here is the Worker's Opposition and their leader. They are (for the moment at the very least) part of the Left Opposition. They are to the Left of Trotskij, and it remains to be seen if they will manage to take Trotskij further to the left, or if they will be marginalized by him. Their group also hangs in the balance as their leader is imprisoned. It should also be noted that the other leader of the Opposition: Medvedev is in prison. Kollontai is abroad, still a member of the party. Kiselyov is a People's Commissar in Russia. Lutovinov committed suicide shortly after the repression of the Opposition, being disillusioned with the NEP and the increasing power of the party and state apparatus.
The next chapter will be on perhaps the greatest oppositional faction: The Right Opposition and the Bukharinists. They are not only a rival to Stalin, but also to Trotskij.
Tracing its roots back to 1917 when Aleksandr Shliapnikov proposed expanding the Council of People's Commissars (ministries, the government) by including representatives of all Soviet parties, and not the Bolsheviks alone. Formally created in September of 1920, the Workers’ Opposition formed a faction within the All-Russian Communist Party to try to halt the perceived drift towards bureaucratism in both Soviet institutions and the party itself and to promote a councilist control of the economy. Along with the Democratic Centralists, the Workers’ Opposition represented the most serious threat to party unity since the October Revolution and was indicative of considerable working-class disenchantment with the party leadership and its policies. The leading figures in the Workers’ Opposition were Aleksandr Shliapnikov, chair of the central committee of the Metalworkers’ Union, and Aleksandra Kollontai, the most prominent Bolshevik feminist.
The group began to develop in 1919, resisting the domination of central party organs over local party units and trade unions. The group also resisted the party’s minimization of the role of workers in controlling industrial enterprises, the increasing use of so-called bourgeois specialists in the industry, and the party’s efforts to replace group control of enterprises with one-man management. First emerging as an oppositional group in the peripheries of Tula and Novosilsky, it soon consolidated power in Moscow with the support of several Old Bolsheviks. Here Shliapnikov proposed a simple, and codified, separation of powers in the Soviet government. The Party would be the political leader of the state and construct and lead the revolutionary struggle. The Soviets would be the basis of all political power, meanwhile, the trade unions were the only nation to organize and direct the national economy. The Workers' Opposition (in this chapter, simply called the Opposition for simplicity's sake) soon became a strong force in the peripheries of the Union, attracting grassroot support, with over half of the membership in Tula defecting to the opposition. The Workers' Truth tried to gain the large working class and revolutionary following of the Opposition - but would never come to their heights. Perhaps reflected by the latter's following among the industrial working class along with Old Bolsheviks, and the former's following mostly among newly educated party intellectuals.
Sergej Medvedev, along with Shliapknikov, the leader of the Opposition.
Anyway. The Central Committee soon saw the Opposition as a major threat to their rule; the Leadership viewed them as a Syndicalist threat, stripping the Party of its leading role in the economy. Bukharin sharply criticized Shlyapnikov’s ideas, accusing him of “syndicalism, guild narrowness, distrust of the Soviets and the party.” In response to such accusations, Lozovsky, who attended the meetings, noted that syndicalists denied the state itself, and Shlyapnikov had a different point of view: the opposition leader did not deny the state and did not encroach on state property; he talked only about the responsibility of trade unions for the economy and the main role of unions in Soviet industry.
Come to the 9th Party Congress, the Opposition saw a major surge in popularity, with a discussion regarding the upper and lower classes of the party membership, and the periphery against the central government. Jurij Lutovinov formulated the oppositional program, in his speech he “fervently insisted on the immediate implementation of the broadest possible labor democracy, on the complete abolition of appointment, and on the strictest cleansing of the party.” The Bolshevik Party tried to repress the new Opposition, even creating a special control committee, however, they failed to do so. And the Opposition gained a large number of followers, with support speeches in the regions and the central areas of the Soviet Union alike.
Jurij Lutovinov
The Trade Union Debate.
The Workers’ Opposition became embroiled in the trade union controversy that broke out in preparation for the party’s Tenth Congress. Most fully articulated by Kollontai, it advocated a congress of producers be elected by the trade unions, unions should not be subordinate to the state, but instead responsible for the management of industry and control over the entire economy. Condemning the increasing reliance on “bourgeois specialists,” Kollontai wrote that “only workers can generate … new methods of organizing labor as well as running industry.” As for the party, the Workers’ Opposition called for the expulsion of all non-proletarian elements and for future eligibility for membership to be contingent on the performance of manual labor for “a certain period of time.” The Opposition gained substantial rank-and-file support among the party membership, no major leader would join their cause.
Aleksej Kiselyov, Chair of the Miner's Union.
According to Aleksej Kiselyov, serious disagreements with the party leadership among the trade union leaders emerged at the beginning of 1920: he saw them as the main reason for the transition to a policy of militarization of labor. At that time, the majority of trade unions believed that the prospect of the end of active hostilities required, if not a change in policy guidelines, then at least a shift in emphasis in the organization of labor - a transition to economic incentives. In particular, they advocated the improvement of the food situation of the proletariat and the development of "amateur activity" of workers within the framework of trade union organizations. Moreover, the party leadership proceeded from the assumption that in the prevailing conditions at the time of the end of the long war, reliance on conventional methods of industrial management would not be able to prevent the final collapse of the Soviet economy: they believed that emergency measures, including military ones, were necessary.
The various ideas soon merged into the following groupings: The Lenin-Zinovjev bloc (Platform of the 10), Trotskij, the Group of 10, the Opposition, the Decists (see Chapter 2). In short Lenin, with the support of Bukharin and trade unionist Tomsky, wanted trade unions to withdraw from the economy and instead organize the labor force, Trotskij planned to transform trade unions into state organs. With different maneuvering, it was soon only the Platform of the 10 and Trotskij's position that became viable. Trotskij, however, lost to Lenin, and the whole Trade Union debate was a major blowback to his prestige.
At the Tenth Congress, the Workers’ Opposition’s position on trade unions received only 18 of over 400 votes cast by delegates. The party apparatus’ manipulation of delegate selection at the provincial level undoubtedly contributed to the Opposition’s poor showing. Weary of the divisions within the party ranks, Lenin pushed through resolutions on “party unity” and against “the anarcho-syndicalist deviation” that effectively banned the Workers’ Opposition and other party factions. A purge of the leadership of the Metalworkers’ Union followed soon thereafter. Complaints against the party’s repression of dissent within its ranks such as a “Declaration of the Twenty-Two” addressed to the Comintern and an appeal of the “Workers’ Truth” group continued into 1922. Ironically, Trotskij was to lodge similar complaints, but only after these groups that he had opposed ceased to exist.
Aleksandra Kollontai, a prominent spokesperson for the Opposition.
Its members, nevertheless, continued to agitate, complaining particularly about the lack of democracy within the party, the central leadership’s lack of respect for the workers and local autonomy, and the manner in which the party leaders were endeavoring to break up the opposition by transferring its adherents to remote regions. Although being censured, and restrained by the Party, the Opposition continued to speak out against the Central Party, and their members were not expelled. They engaged in sharp polemics against the NEP, attracting the attention and approval of Trotksij and Radek. While in exile, Trotskij, and his Left Opposition, made several inroads to the Opposition, and soon the Workers' Opposition would ally with Trotskij's Left Opposition. Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and the other leaders would sign the Letter of the 22. Trotskij, allegedly, moved more toward the German council communism that the Workers' Opposition associated itself with, and in turn inspired by the likes of Rosa Luxembourg. The Workers' Opposition had thus, by the 30s, been integrated into the Left Opposition - but remained nevertheless a distinct faction within the larger opposition.
Both prior to, and within the Left Opposition, the Workers' Opposition advocated the role of unionized workers in directing the economy at a time when Soviet government organs were running industry by diktat and trying to exclude trade unions from a participatory role. Specifically, the Workers' Opposition demanded that unionized workers (blue and white collar) should elect representatives to a vertical hierarchy of councils that would oversee the economy. At all levels, elected leaders would be responsible to those who had elected them and could be removed from below. The Workers' Opposition demanded that Russian Communist Party secretaries at all levels cease petty interference in the operations of trade unions and that trade union should be reinforced with staff and supplies to allow them to carry out their work effectively. Leaders of the Workers' Opposition were not opposed to the employment of "bourgeois specialists" in the economy but did oppose giving such individuals strong administrative powers, unchecked from below. The "Workers' Opposition" based their ideas on the experience of the first months of Soviet power - a short period when the organization of production was really carried out on the basis of the self-government of the proletarians
Aleksandr Shliapnikov.
Born in 1898 to an Old Believer family Shliapknikov was from an early age faced with political and religious repression. Already at the age of 13, he started as an industrial worker, and the following year he was first introduced to Marxist literature. In 1900 he moved to St. Petersburg, but because he was involved in industrial strikes and unrest, and by the age of 15 he was blacklisted from industrial work, not only in St. Petersburg but also in his home district and the regions. Radicalized further the young Shliapknikov distributed illegal underground literature and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).
Now he joined the Bolshevik faction within the RSDLP. He continued to work as a factory worker in Murom even as he deepened his involvement in political activism, and in 1904 he was arrested for distribution of illegal literature. Shliapnikov managed to convince the prosecutor that he had been entrapped by police provocateurs, and thus won his freedom, but also attracted the attention of the local Black Hundreds, who brutally assaulted him on his way home. Undeterred, Shliapnikov continued his revolutionary activities, and during the 1905 revolution, he led an armed demonstration of workers in Murom, helping to take the local police chief hostage and force the police to retreat, resulting in another arrest. Even after being freed by the general amnesty issued in October, his continued militancy and intransigence saw him jailed for a third time, in a prison stint that would last until January 1907. Almost immediately after his release, Shliapnikov was drafted into the army, and after refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Tsar, the police once again arrested him. Freed on bail, he vanished into the underground, finding work in the Electrical Station of 1886 in St. Petersburg, where he met fellow metalworker Sergej Medvedev (a future leader and comrade of the Opposition), establishing what would become a decades-long friendship. Later in 1907, the now 22-year-old Shliapnikov became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP(b), and due to his growing prominence, at the end of 1907, his friends advised him to emigrate from Russia. Entrusted with letters for Lenin, he left Russia in January 1908, and after arriving in Switzerland, where he briefly met with Lenin, continued onwards to Paris, and within two months Shliapnikov found work in an automobile factory.
In France, he soon became a prominent emigre figure for the Russians, but he also participated in French Unionism, getting a seat in the SFIO, establishing contacts with labor unions across Europe, and becoming romantically involved with Kollontai - the later Spokesperson of the Opposition.
Shliapnikov eagerly returned to Russia in October 1916. To help him rebuild the Russian Bureau, he recruited Vyacheslav Molotov and Petr Zalutskii, and as such, they were the senior Bolsheviks in Petrograd during the February Revolution in 1917. Under Shliapnikov, the Russian Bureau took a stance of opposition towards the provisional government and called for the Petrograd Soviet to form a revolutionary government. The arrival of more prominent Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin from Siberian exile brought on a struggle over leadership and the correct stance towards the war. The "moderates" under Kamenev successfully outmaneuvered the Russian Bureau, seizing control of the party newspaper Pravda, and refusing to publish Lenin's "Letters from Afar" urging opposition to the provisional government. On March 15, Kamenev published an editorial supporting the war effort, and by March 18 had persuaded the Petersburg committee to provide "conditional support" to the provisional government.
The arrival of Vladimir Lenin in Petrograd during April seriously challenged the dominant "moderate" line and brought about a shift in the party's positions, but Shliapnikov, hospitalized for weeks due to an automobile accident, did not play a major role in this affair. Instead, Shliapnikov and Konstantin Eremeev played a leading role in organizing a "Workers' Guard" among radical workers in the Vyborg district of Petrograd, and in August 1917, Shliapnikov joined the newly formed general staff of the Red Guard. On May 7, Shliapnikov was elected to the central board of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union alongside the unaligned socialist Aleksei Gastev and the Menshevik I.G. Volkov, and once he recovered from his automobile accident, he chaired the first Central Committee of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union on May 27. By June 11, the Union had established a system of supporting unemployed workers, set up the journal "Metallist", and begun to mediate conflicts between workers and industrialists. Over the next month, delegates from across Russia formed the first All-Russian Metalworkers' Union, and Shliapnikov found himself elected to its central committee alongside three other Bolsheviks, Volkov and three other Mensheviks, and Gastev. Due to Gastev's support, he was elected as chairman of the Central Committee during its first meeting on June 29. He led negotiations for a wage agreement between Petrograd metalworkers and factory owners in 1917.
Shliapnikov (left) with Krasin.
Following the October Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power, Shliapnikov was appointed Commissar of Labor. Shliapnikov supported a coalition government composed of left socialist parties and signed Zinoviev's and Kamenev's statements supporting a socialist coalition government, but unlike other "moderates" refused to resign from his post. The coalition agreement reached with the Left-SRs mollified most of the "moderate" Bolsheviks. In contrast to his "moderate" position in regard to coalitions with other socialist parties, Shliapnikov held a decisively "radical" stance towards the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik CC assigned him to take control of Bolshevik preparations for the Constituent Assembly, countering Zinoviev's and Kamenev's efforts to install a "moderate" provisional bureau that would support their stances, and Shliapnikov wholeheartedly supported the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly over the course of January 18 and 19. During the Civil War, Shliapnikov began to criticize the increasing tendency of the Russian Communist Party and Soviet government to rely on authoritarian measures to enforce policies toward industry and industrial workers. To Shliapnikov, the denial of workers' right to participate in economic decision-making was a step away from the goals of the 1917 revolution.
Shliapnikov became the leader of the Opposition movement inside the CPSU. AKollontai was a mentor and advocate of the group, which was composed of leaders of trade unions and industry who were all former industrial workers, usually metalworkers. In 1921, following the government repression of the Opposition, Shliapnikov was forced out of his elected post as chairman of the Metalworkers' Union.
In 1922, Shliapnikov and some other trade-unionists from within and outside the Workers' Opposition, supported by Alexandra Kollontai, presented an appeal, called the Letter of the Twenty Two, requesting that the Comintern help heal a "rift" within the Russian Communist Party between Party leaders and workers. Party leaders and Party-controlled media condemned the appeal. Two of the signatories of the appeal were expelled from the Party, but Shliapnikov, Kollontai, and Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion.
Shliapnikov turned to writing his memoirs and held jobs in metals import and economic planning institutions. The Party Central Control Commission investigated him and Medvedev in 1926 and in 1930 for alleged factionalism in connection with the formation of oppositionist groups among workers in Baku and Omsk. In 1932, the Party Politburo ordered Shliapnikov to publish a public confession of "political errors" in writing his memoirs of the revolution, under pain of being purged from the party. Shliapnikov refused, and after a large solidarity demonstration, was reinstated into the party. Severely undermining Stalin's authority.
However, Stalin would never forget Shliapknikov personally undermining his leadership, and leading a factional group. In 1935 following the assassination of Kirov, the NKVD made a swift operation and arrested Shliapnikov for political crimes. Despite being personally interrogated by Kaganovich, Shliapnikov did not make any testimonies implicating others or made any confessions.
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Here is the Worker's Opposition and their leader. They are (for the moment at the very least) part of the Left Opposition. They are to the Left of Trotskij, and it remains to be seen if they will manage to take Trotskij further to the left, or if they will be marginalized by him. Their group also hangs in the balance as their leader is imprisoned. It should also be noted that the other leader of the Opposition: Medvedev is in prison. Kollontai is abroad, still a member of the party. Kiselyov is a People's Commissar in Russia. Lutovinov committed suicide shortly after the repression of the Opposition, being disillusioned with the NEP and the increasing power of the party and state apparatus.
The next chapter will be on perhaps the greatest oppositional faction: The Right Opposition and the Bukharinists. They are not only a rival to Stalin, but also to Trotskij.
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Book Two, Chapter 5
The Right Opposition - the Bukharinists
A young Bukharin provided the ideological foundation of the Right Opposition and Stalin alike.
We have already glossed over the Right Opposition (now called the "Right") and their role in both supporting Stalin, and later on, opposing him.
In the wake of Lenin's death three main tendencies emerged, the Left (Trotskij), the Center (Stalin), and the Right - the latter led by Bukharin and Aleksej Rykov. The Center relied upon the state, party, and their bureaucracies, and, as we know, tended to shift alliances whenever it suited them. The Center initially supported what would become the Right, but turned them away once an opportunity arose - all the while maintaining some theoretical framework established by Bukharin. The Right was closely associated with the NEP, the Kulaks, and NEPmen. The Right asserted that the NEP would be a slow process to attain socialism, and not revert to capitalism as their critics maintained.
Trotskij was deeply opposed to the Right, perhaps even more so than the Center. How deeply opposed? Trotskij considered the Right to be a greater threat than Stalin. There were a few reasons for this. One was the Right Opposition's economic policy of favoring market mechanisms and a limited open market in the country. The Left Opposition believed this would empower small capitalists and give them political leverage that they could use to eventually subvert and destroy the Soviet system. Beyond economics, there were some strong ideological/theoretical reasons Trotskij had to bitterly oppose the Right. Most people are aware of the doctrine of Socialism in One Country and attribute it to Stalin. In fact, it was formulated by Bukharin, albeit at the behest of Stalin, in stark contrast to the World Revolution and Trotskij's Permanent Revolution alike.
Propaganda poster of Stalin, the self-attributed servant of Lenin, building Socialism in One Country.
Hey hey. In short Socialism in One Country seeing the failed revolutions in the wake of the Russian Civil and the Great War in Europe, believed they could not wait for the world revolution, and had to instead build socialism in Russia. Even here, however, Stalin and Bukharin started to diverge on exactly what Socialism in One Country was. Bukharin's position was that "Socialist Construction" was possible, what he called 'building Socialism', but not actually achieving it. This was Stalin's initial position on what the Doctrine of Socialism in One Country was. After Stalin crushed the Right Opposition and collectivization was complete, Stalin declared, counter to Bukharin's conception, that Socialism had actually been achieved. Strengthening his own position as the Vozdh and the Father of Nations. Bukharin's position was that Socialism could be "built", the process of creating socialism could begin in one country, but couldn't actually be achieved without World Revolution.
To recap a former chapter, after the Center turned on Zinovjev and Kamenev, they allied with Bukharin and the Right in 1924. Together they created leadership and promptly expelled Trotskij from the Communist Party and demoted Kamenev, Zinovjev (who had since established Trotskij's positions in the economic and industrial sphere) in December 1927. However, once Trotsky was out of the way and the Left Opposition had been illegalized, Stalin soon became alarmed at the danger posed to the Soviet state by the rising power of the Kulaks and NEPmen, who had become emboldened by the Left Opposition's illegalization. Or perhaps even more cynical, he became alarmed by the rising influence of Bukharin and other men than himself, wanting to concentrate power in his own hands. Stalin then turned on his Right Opposition allies. Bukharin and the Right Opposition were, in their turn, sidelined and removed from important positions within the Communist Party and the Soviet government from 1928-1930, with Stalin abandoning the NEP and beginning the first Five-year plan and collectivization. Underlying the opportunism of Stalin, once the Right and Left were out of the way, adopted the Left's position of collectivization and rapid industrialization.
International Communist Opposition
Sidelined and isolated within the USSR the Right turned outward, instead seeking to establish an opposition within the Comintern. At first, this was expressed through the International Communist Opposition (ICO), however, they did not make the extra step of creating an International of their own, instead, the ICO viewed itself as a faction within the Comintern. Naturally, they were soon sidelined, or even purged. The only notable formation was the BOC in Spain, which was larger than the official Communist Party of Spain. The BOC would merge with the Trotskyists, forming POUM. More on them in a later chapter. The ICO would disintegrate in 1933, instead paving the way for the International Revolutionary Marxist Center, more on them later as well.
Bukharin was isolated from his allies abroad, and, in the face of increasing Stalinist repression, was unable to mount a sustained struggle against Stalin. Unlike Trotskij, who built an anti-Stalinist movement, Bukharin and his allies capitulated to Stalin and admitted their "ideological errors".
Nikolaj Bukharin
Bukharin, once the golden boy of Lenin.
Hello World. Born in 1888 in Moscow, Bukharin joined the Bolshevik faction in 1906, following the Revolution of 1905 and his participation in student activities of said revolution. He quickly rose through the ranks, founding the Komsomol, and became a member of the Moscow leadership of the party at the age of 20. He would soon be arrested by the secret police and was exiled to Arkhangelsk. From there he escaped to Germany, and it was here he would make acquittance with Lenin. He and Lenin would often argue, as Bukharin was close to the far left and anti-statist currents of Europe. Nevertheless, he became an influential Bolshevik theorist, and worked closely with Lenin early on, with Lenin borrowing freely from his books for his own works. At the behest of Lenin, Bukharin also helped Stalin write articles. While in New York City, Bukharin edited the newspaper Novy Mir with Trotksij and Kollontai. When Trotskij arrived for his exile in New York, Bukharin was the first to greet him, and Trotksij's wife later recalled "with a bear hug and immediately began to tell them about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once" dragging the tired Trotskys across town "to admire his great discovery".
Delegates to second Congress of the Comintern.
With the February Revolution, Bukharin returned to Moscow and was soon elected to the Moscow Regional Bureau, which is the left-wing faction of the Moscow Communist Party. From here his career would continue to rise, and he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Allotugh no one dominated the party and soviets as much as Trotskij did in Petrograd, Bukharin emerged as the most prominent leader in Moscow. After the October Revolution, he would edit the Pravda.
Bukharin believed passionately in the promise of world revolution. In the Russian turmoil near the end of the Great War, he demanded a continuance of the war, fully expecting to incite all the foreign proletarian classes to arms. Even as he was uncompromising toward Russia's enemies, he also rejected any fraternization with the capitalist powers allied to Russia: he reportedly wept when he learned of official negotiations for assistance. Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In this wartime power struggle, Lenin's arrest had been seriously discussed by them and Left Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918. Bukharin revealed this in a Pravda article in 1924 and stated that it had been "a period when the party stood a hair from a split, and the whole country a hair from ruin."
Nikolaj Bukharin with the "Communist Bible"1923.
Nevertheless, he continued his responsibilities in the Party after the signing of the treaty. In March 1919, he became a member of the Comintern's executive committee. During the Russian Civil War, he published several theoretical economic works, including the popular primer The ABC of Communism in 1919, and the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921). Becoming one of the most influential theorists in the Communist Party.
By 1921, he changed his position and took a sharp right turn, accepting Lenin's emphasis on the survival and strengthening of the Soviet state as the bastion of the future world revolution. He became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy (NEP), to which he was to tie his political fortunes. Considered by the left communists as a retreat from socialist policies, the NEP reintroduced money and allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state retained control of heavy industry.
After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo. In the subsequent power struggle, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as a centrist of the Party and supported the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks, and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism (in Marxist theory, the period of transition to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that socialist gains could be consolidated in a single country, without that country relying on simultaneous successful revolutions across the world. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism.
Bukharin during a congress.
In the 1926-1928 period Bukharin enjoyed the zenith of his power as he allied himself with Stalin. Alas, he flew too close to the sun, and with the grain shortage of 1928 and the concentration of power within the Right ranks, Stalin reversed his economic positions, and Stalin who had achieved unchecked power with the help of Bukharin outmaneuvered the Right, and their members in the Comintern, Unions, and in Moscow was replaced by men loyal to Stalin. The Right had lost its power base.
Out of power and isolated Bukharin attempted to forge an alliance with the Left against "Genghis Khan", as Bukharin coined Stalin. More on this in a later chapter. However, by 1936, Bukharin was largely isolated. The ICO crumbled, and Bukharin soon begged for forgiveness from Stalin. In 1936 he was rehabilitated and worked on the new Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Bukharin intended to guarantee democratization and even a two-party system. Bukharin and several Right members were expelled from high positions, but they remained a valuable cog in the Soviet administration and bureaucracy, with Bukharin lending a vital theoretical framework. It remains to be seen if Bukharin and the Right really capitulated to Stalin and his line, or if they were insincere.
Aleksej Rykov.
Hei. Born in 1881, Saratov, Rykov joined the RSDLP in 1898, sided with the Bolsheviks during the split, and then Lenin during his rivalry with Bogdanov. Interrupting his exile in London and Paris, he self-exiled himself to Siberia to continue his revolutionary activities there. This was only bolstered by the Revolution of 1917, which became a member of both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, along with the Central Committee.
After the revolution, Rykov was appointed the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. On 29 October 1917 (Old Style), immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the executive committee of the national railroad labor union threatened a national strike unless the Bolsheviks shared power with other socialist parties and dropped Lenin and Trotskij from the government. Zinovjev, Kamenev, and their allies in the Bolshevik Central Committee argued that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to start negotiations since a railroad strike would cripple their government's ability to fight the forces that were still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government. Although Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov briefly had the support of a Central Committee majority and negotiations were started, a quick collapse of the anti-Bolshevik forces outside Petrograd allowed Lenin and Trotsky to convince the Central Committee to abandon the negotiating process. In response Rykov, Zinovjev, Kamenev, Vladimir Milyutin, and Victor Nogin resigned from the Central Committee and from the government on 17 November 1917.
Stalin, Rykov, Lenin, Zinovjev.
Once the Bolsheviks emerged victorious in the civil war, Rykov resigned his Supreme Council of National Economy post on 28 May 1921. On 26 May 1921, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense of the Russian SFSR under Lenin. With Lenin increasingly sidelined by ill health, Rykov became his deputy at the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) on 29 December. Rykov joined the ruling Politburo. A government reorganization in the wake of the formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922 resulted in Rykov's appointment as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Council of National Economy and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars on 6 July 1923.
After Lenin's death on 21 January, 1924 Rykov gave up his position as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Council of National Economy and became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR ("Prime Minister" of USSR) and, simultaneously, of the Sovnarkom of Russia (Prime Minister of Russia)
Along with Bukharin and Tomsky, Rykov led the moderate wing of the Communist Party in the 1920s, promoting NEP policies. The moderates supported the Troika against the Left. After Kamenev voiced opposition to Stalin at the 14th Party Congress in December 1925, he lost his position as Chairman of the Soviet Council of Labor and Defense—which he had assumed from Lenin following Lenin's death—and was replaced by Rykov on 19 January 1926.
Despite officially being the Premier of the USSR from 1924-1930, Stalin used his position and crushing of the opposition to take away power from the legitimate government structures, and instead merge them with the position of the General Secretary or subordinate them to the CPSU. Rykov watched power slip away from his fingers, slow to react so as not to anger the ire of Stalin. With the defeat of the United Opposition, Stalin and his radical policies came into conflict with the moderates led by Rykov. Subsequently, Rykov was stripped of his positions, first as premier of the RSFSR and then as premier of the USSR. The final nail came to his coffin (for the moment, not literal) when he was removed from his last ministerial position, and then from the Politburo. He, however, managed to get a new position as People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs, he retained his position as a member of the Central Committee.
Grigory Sokolnikov
Born in 1888 in Romny, he moved to Moscow as a teenager and soon became friends with his peer aged Bukharin, joined the Bolsheviks in 1905, and following the theme of Bolshevik revolutionaries, was arrested, only to escape Paris. In France, he obtained his doctorate in economics and was a conciliator who wanted to prevent an outright split with the Mensheviks. Come the Revolution of 1917, he was part of the sealed train taking Lenin and other revolutionaries back home to Russia.
Back in Petrograd he became a member of the forerunner to the Politburo and supported Lenin's call for a coup against the Provisional Government. Together with Stalin, he controlled Bolshevik newspapers as Lenin went into hiding. Supporting Lenin's line for peace, he was part of the peace delegation in Brest-Litovsk. Although he saw it as a delaying tactic before the Red Army could be created, and carry out a revolutionary war. Despite trying to get Zinovjev to sign the treaty, it ultimately fell to Sokolnikov, who he protested as he signed, claiming this would not be the end of German expansionism. Allegedly this ruined the day for Austrian and German diplomats.
When he returned to a war-torn Russia, now embroiled in Civil War, he was tasked with supervising the nationalization of the banks and the creation of a central bank system. Despite being an editor of Pravda, he instead spent the Civil War as a Commissar on the frontline, fighting from the Urals to the steppes of south Russia and the Don. Here he fought on the front against the Don Cossacks and Denikin. He would also order mass shootings during his time as a commissar. Against the protests of Stalin he was appointed Army Commander, and later the Turkestan Front. Here he quelled the Basmachi Rebellion but also introduced land reform, and free trade, reverting land seized by Russian settlers back to the Kyrgyz and reviving the cotton industry.
In 1922 he was made the People's Commissar of Finance and was responsible for introducing a new and stable currency, along with relaxing state monopoly and the introduction of the NEP. He was one of the most insistent proponents of the NEP, earning him many foes within the left of the party.
On 5 September 1925, Sokolnikov signed the unpublished 'Platform of the Four', a joint protest by Zinovjev, Kamenev, and Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya against Stalin's leadership. His decision seems to have been more personal than political because politically he was on the right of the party. He appears to have been motivated by mistrust of Stalin, and friendship with Kamenev. Even while publicly aligned with the opposition, he continued to argue that agricultural output had to be increased before the industry could be expanded and that consumer goods should be imported to give the peasants an incentive to take their produce to market. He was also openly dismissive of the figures produced by Gosplan, believing that 'state capitalism' properly managed would be more efficient than a centrally planned economy.
In October 1926, the six principal leaders of the opposition, including Sokolnikov, signed a promise to follow the party line in the future. He kept to this line, losing his position within the Politburo and maintaining it in the Central Committee. In the same month, he was removed from the post of People's Commissar for finance, and appointed Deputy Chairman of Gosplan, despite his well-known skepticism about the value of central planning. In the spring of 1926, he was sent on a trade mission to the US, which was aborted when he was denied a visa.
In March 1928, when the Central Committee discussed the food crisis - to which Stalin reacted later in the year by sending shock troops into the villages to collect grain by force - Sokolnikov made a speech in which, while admitting that he had been wrong in the past, he stuck to his earlier beliefs by arguing that the way to get peasants to sell their products was to raise the price of grain. However, after the introduction of the First five-year plan, he defended the principle that it was possible and necessary for the state to intervene and plan economic output. He wrote:
"The history of recent decades shows that even in countries where the principle of private property dominates, unlimited competition of private enterprises is steadily receding before the advance of gigantic financial and industrial corporations which...actually plan production and marketing within the limits of certain branches, often carrying their operations across national frontiers...A policy of non-interference by the state in such conditions would mean paralysis of state power."
In July 1928, Sokolnikov and Bukharin were returning to the Kremlin from a Central Committee plenum when they encountered Kamenev, and Bukharin talked indiscreetly about the gathering opposition to Stalin within the Politburo. In February 1929, Sokolnikov was formally rebuked by the Politburo for being present during this conversation, after a transcript had been published abroad. He was removed from his post in Gosplan. From 1929 to 1932, Sokolnikov was the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom, where the newly elected Labour government had extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR. Speaking very little English, he had limited contacts with leading British politicians.
In 1932, Sokolnikov was recalled to Moscow (and replaced by Ivan Maisky, who spoke fluent English) and appointed Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
Mikhail Tomskij
Hei. Born in 1880 to Russian parents, he moved at an early age to Estonia. Here he took part in the 1905 Revolution and helped form unions. This caused his arrest, and he as many others before and after, was deported to Siberia. There he escaped to St. Petersburg and became President of the Union of Engravers and Chromolithographers, only to be arrested once more, exiled to France, and returned once more to Russia in 1909, and surprisingly, was once more arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor. Come 1917, he would not escape but instead be freed by the Provisional Government, and was once more on the move and participated in the October Revolution in Moscow.
In 1918 he attended the Fourth All Russian Conference of Trade Unions (12–17 March), where he moved a resolution concerning the Relations between the Trade Unions and the Commissariat for Labour which stated that the October Revolution had changed "the meaning and character of state organs and significance of proletarian organs as well". It was elaborated that previously the old ministry of Labour had acted as arbitrator between Labour and Capital, whereas the new Commissariat was the champion of the economic policy of the working class.
From here he was elected first to the Central Committee, then the Orgburo, and finally to the Politburo in April 1922. There he quickly became an ally of Bukharin and Rykov and joined the moderate wing of the CPSU.
In 1928 Stalin (as we know) moved against his former allies, defeating Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky at the April 1929 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee and forcing Tomsky to resign from his position as leader of the trade union movement in May 1929. Tomskij was put in charge of the Soviet chemical industry, a position which he occupied until 1930. He was not re-elected to the Politburo after the 16th Communist Party Congress in July 1930 but remained a full member of the Central Committee, which he still held in 1936.
First of May Celebration with Tomskij, Stalin, Kalinin.
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Short overview of the Right Opposition, and introduction to their principal and key members. There are some blank spaces that will be filled later on in the next chapter, namely the United Opposition, between Trotskij, Zinovjev, and Kamenev. I'll be gone during the next week and the week after, so don't expect an update any time soon. I will try to get it up this week, but can't promise anything.
A young Bukharin provided the ideological foundation of the Right Opposition and Stalin alike.
We have already glossed over the Right Opposition (now called the "Right") and their role in both supporting Stalin, and later on, opposing him.
In the wake of Lenin's death three main tendencies emerged, the Left (Trotskij), the Center (Stalin), and the Right - the latter led by Bukharin and Aleksej Rykov. The Center relied upon the state, party, and their bureaucracies, and, as we know, tended to shift alliances whenever it suited them. The Center initially supported what would become the Right, but turned them away once an opportunity arose - all the while maintaining some theoretical framework established by Bukharin. The Right was closely associated with the NEP, the Kulaks, and NEPmen. The Right asserted that the NEP would be a slow process to attain socialism, and not revert to capitalism as their critics maintained.
Trotskij was deeply opposed to the Right, perhaps even more so than the Center. How deeply opposed? Trotskij considered the Right to be a greater threat than Stalin. There were a few reasons for this. One was the Right Opposition's economic policy of favoring market mechanisms and a limited open market in the country. The Left Opposition believed this would empower small capitalists and give them political leverage that they could use to eventually subvert and destroy the Soviet system. Beyond economics, there were some strong ideological/theoretical reasons Trotskij had to bitterly oppose the Right. Most people are aware of the doctrine of Socialism in One Country and attribute it to Stalin. In fact, it was formulated by Bukharin, albeit at the behest of Stalin, in stark contrast to the World Revolution and Trotskij's Permanent Revolution alike.
Propaganda poster of Stalin, the self-attributed servant of Lenin, building Socialism in One Country.
Hey hey. In short Socialism in One Country seeing the failed revolutions in the wake of the Russian Civil and the Great War in Europe, believed they could not wait for the world revolution, and had to instead build socialism in Russia. Even here, however, Stalin and Bukharin started to diverge on exactly what Socialism in One Country was. Bukharin's position was that "Socialist Construction" was possible, what he called 'building Socialism', but not actually achieving it. This was Stalin's initial position on what the Doctrine of Socialism in One Country was. After Stalin crushed the Right Opposition and collectivization was complete, Stalin declared, counter to Bukharin's conception, that Socialism had actually been achieved. Strengthening his own position as the Vozdh and the Father of Nations. Bukharin's position was that Socialism could be "built", the process of creating socialism could begin in one country, but couldn't actually be achieved without World Revolution.
To recap a former chapter, after the Center turned on Zinovjev and Kamenev, they allied with Bukharin and the Right in 1924. Together they created leadership and promptly expelled Trotskij from the Communist Party and demoted Kamenev, Zinovjev (who had since established Trotskij's positions in the economic and industrial sphere) in December 1927. However, once Trotsky was out of the way and the Left Opposition had been illegalized, Stalin soon became alarmed at the danger posed to the Soviet state by the rising power of the Kulaks and NEPmen, who had become emboldened by the Left Opposition's illegalization. Or perhaps even more cynical, he became alarmed by the rising influence of Bukharin and other men than himself, wanting to concentrate power in his own hands. Stalin then turned on his Right Opposition allies. Bukharin and the Right Opposition were, in their turn, sidelined and removed from important positions within the Communist Party and the Soviet government from 1928-1930, with Stalin abandoning the NEP and beginning the first Five-year plan and collectivization. Underlying the opportunism of Stalin, once the Right and Left were out of the way, adopted the Left's position of collectivization and rapid industrialization.
International Communist Opposition
Sidelined and isolated within the USSR the Right turned outward, instead seeking to establish an opposition within the Comintern. At first, this was expressed through the International Communist Opposition (ICO), however, they did not make the extra step of creating an International of their own, instead, the ICO viewed itself as a faction within the Comintern. Naturally, they were soon sidelined, or even purged. The only notable formation was the BOC in Spain, which was larger than the official Communist Party of Spain. The BOC would merge with the Trotskyists, forming POUM. More on them in a later chapter. The ICO would disintegrate in 1933, instead paving the way for the International Revolutionary Marxist Center, more on them later as well.
Bukharin was isolated from his allies abroad, and, in the face of increasing Stalinist repression, was unable to mount a sustained struggle against Stalin. Unlike Trotskij, who built an anti-Stalinist movement, Bukharin and his allies capitulated to Stalin and admitted their "ideological errors".
Nikolaj Bukharin
Bukharin, once the golden boy of Lenin.
Hello World. Born in 1888 in Moscow, Bukharin joined the Bolshevik faction in 1906, following the Revolution of 1905 and his participation in student activities of said revolution. He quickly rose through the ranks, founding the Komsomol, and became a member of the Moscow leadership of the party at the age of 20. He would soon be arrested by the secret police and was exiled to Arkhangelsk. From there he escaped to Germany, and it was here he would make acquittance with Lenin. He and Lenin would often argue, as Bukharin was close to the far left and anti-statist currents of Europe. Nevertheless, he became an influential Bolshevik theorist, and worked closely with Lenin early on, with Lenin borrowing freely from his books for his own works. At the behest of Lenin, Bukharin also helped Stalin write articles. While in New York City, Bukharin edited the newspaper Novy Mir with Trotksij and Kollontai. When Trotskij arrived for his exile in New York, Bukharin was the first to greet him, and Trotksij's wife later recalled "with a bear hug and immediately began to tell them about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once" dragging the tired Trotskys across town "to admire his great discovery".
Delegates to second Congress of the Comintern.
With the February Revolution, Bukharin returned to Moscow and was soon elected to the Moscow Regional Bureau, which is the left-wing faction of the Moscow Communist Party. From here his career would continue to rise, and he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Allotugh no one dominated the party and soviets as much as Trotskij did in Petrograd, Bukharin emerged as the most prominent leader in Moscow. After the October Revolution, he would edit the Pravda.
Bukharin believed passionately in the promise of world revolution. In the Russian turmoil near the end of the Great War, he demanded a continuance of the war, fully expecting to incite all the foreign proletarian classes to arms. Even as he was uncompromising toward Russia's enemies, he also rejected any fraternization with the capitalist powers allied to Russia: he reportedly wept when he learned of official negotiations for assistance. Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In this wartime power struggle, Lenin's arrest had been seriously discussed by them and Left Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918. Bukharin revealed this in a Pravda article in 1924 and stated that it had been "a period when the party stood a hair from a split, and the whole country a hair from ruin."
Nikolaj Bukharin with the "Communist Bible"1923.
Nevertheless, he continued his responsibilities in the Party after the signing of the treaty. In March 1919, he became a member of the Comintern's executive committee. During the Russian Civil War, he published several theoretical economic works, including the popular primer The ABC of Communism in 1919, and the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921). Becoming one of the most influential theorists in the Communist Party.
By 1921, he changed his position and took a sharp right turn, accepting Lenin's emphasis on the survival and strengthening of the Soviet state as the bastion of the future world revolution. He became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy (NEP), to which he was to tie his political fortunes. Considered by the left communists as a retreat from socialist policies, the NEP reintroduced money and allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state retained control of heavy industry.
After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo. In the subsequent power struggle, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as a centrist of the Party and supported the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks, and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism (in Marxist theory, the period of transition to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that socialist gains could be consolidated in a single country, without that country relying on simultaneous successful revolutions across the world. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism.
Bukharin during a congress.
In the 1926-1928 period Bukharin enjoyed the zenith of his power as he allied himself with Stalin. Alas, he flew too close to the sun, and with the grain shortage of 1928 and the concentration of power within the Right ranks, Stalin reversed his economic positions, and Stalin who had achieved unchecked power with the help of Bukharin outmaneuvered the Right, and their members in the Comintern, Unions, and in Moscow was replaced by men loyal to Stalin. The Right had lost its power base.
Out of power and isolated Bukharin attempted to forge an alliance with the Left against "Genghis Khan", as Bukharin coined Stalin. More on this in a later chapter. However, by 1936, Bukharin was largely isolated. The ICO crumbled, and Bukharin soon begged for forgiveness from Stalin. In 1936 he was rehabilitated and worked on the new Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Bukharin intended to guarantee democratization and even a two-party system. Bukharin and several Right members were expelled from high positions, but they remained a valuable cog in the Soviet administration and bureaucracy, with Bukharin lending a vital theoretical framework. It remains to be seen if Bukharin and the Right really capitulated to Stalin and his line, or if they were insincere.
Aleksej Rykov.
Hei. Born in 1881, Saratov, Rykov joined the RSDLP in 1898, sided with the Bolsheviks during the split, and then Lenin during his rivalry with Bogdanov. Interrupting his exile in London and Paris, he self-exiled himself to Siberia to continue his revolutionary activities there. This was only bolstered by the Revolution of 1917, which became a member of both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, along with the Central Committee.
After the revolution, Rykov was appointed the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. On 29 October 1917 (Old Style), immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the executive committee of the national railroad labor union threatened a national strike unless the Bolsheviks shared power with other socialist parties and dropped Lenin and Trotskij from the government. Zinovjev, Kamenev, and their allies in the Bolshevik Central Committee argued that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to start negotiations since a railroad strike would cripple their government's ability to fight the forces that were still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government. Although Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov briefly had the support of a Central Committee majority and negotiations were started, a quick collapse of the anti-Bolshevik forces outside Petrograd allowed Lenin and Trotsky to convince the Central Committee to abandon the negotiating process. In response Rykov, Zinovjev, Kamenev, Vladimir Milyutin, and Victor Nogin resigned from the Central Committee and from the government on 17 November 1917.
Stalin, Rykov, Lenin, Zinovjev.
Once the Bolsheviks emerged victorious in the civil war, Rykov resigned his Supreme Council of National Economy post on 28 May 1921. On 26 May 1921, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense of the Russian SFSR under Lenin. With Lenin increasingly sidelined by ill health, Rykov became his deputy at the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) on 29 December. Rykov joined the ruling Politburo. A government reorganization in the wake of the formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922 resulted in Rykov's appointment as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Council of National Economy and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars on 6 July 1923.
After Lenin's death on 21 January, 1924 Rykov gave up his position as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Council of National Economy and became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR ("Prime Minister" of USSR) and, simultaneously, of the Sovnarkom of Russia (Prime Minister of Russia)
Along with Bukharin and Tomsky, Rykov led the moderate wing of the Communist Party in the 1920s, promoting NEP policies. The moderates supported the Troika against the Left. After Kamenev voiced opposition to Stalin at the 14th Party Congress in December 1925, he lost his position as Chairman of the Soviet Council of Labor and Defense—which he had assumed from Lenin following Lenin's death—and was replaced by Rykov on 19 January 1926.
Despite officially being the Premier of the USSR from 1924-1930, Stalin used his position and crushing of the opposition to take away power from the legitimate government structures, and instead merge them with the position of the General Secretary or subordinate them to the CPSU. Rykov watched power slip away from his fingers, slow to react so as not to anger the ire of Stalin. With the defeat of the United Opposition, Stalin and his radical policies came into conflict with the moderates led by Rykov. Subsequently, Rykov was stripped of his positions, first as premier of the RSFSR and then as premier of the USSR. The final nail came to his coffin (for the moment, not literal) when he was removed from his last ministerial position, and then from the Politburo. He, however, managed to get a new position as People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs, he retained his position as a member of the Central Committee.
Grigory Sokolnikov
Born in 1888 in Romny, he moved to Moscow as a teenager and soon became friends with his peer aged Bukharin, joined the Bolsheviks in 1905, and following the theme of Bolshevik revolutionaries, was arrested, only to escape Paris. In France, he obtained his doctorate in economics and was a conciliator who wanted to prevent an outright split with the Mensheviks. Come the Revolution of 1917, he was part of the sealed train taking Lenin and other revolutionaries back home to Russia.
Back in Petrograd he became a member of the forerunner to the Politburo and supported Lenin's call for a coup against the Provisional Government. Together with Stalin, he controlled Bolshevik newspapers as Lenin went into hiding. Supporting Lenin's line for peace, he was part of the peace delegation in Brest-Litovsk. Although he saw it as a delaying tactic before the Red Army could be created, and carry out a revolutionary war. Despite trying to get Zinovjev to sign the treaty, it ultimately fell to Sokolnikov, who he protested as he signed, claiming this would not be the end of German expansionism. Allegedly this ruined the day for Austrian and German diplomats.
When he returned to a war-torn Russia, now embroiled in Civil War, he was tasked with supervising the nationalization of the banks and the creation of a central bank system. Despite being an editor of Pravda, he instead spent the Civil War as a Commissar on the frontline, fighting from the Urals to the steppes of south Russia and the Don. Here he fought on the front against the Don Cossacks and Denikin. He would also order mass shootings during his time as a commissar. Against the protests of Stalin he was appointed Army Commander, and later the Turkestan Front. Here he quelled the Basmachi Rebellion but also introduced land reform, and free trade, reverting land seized by Russian settlers back to the Kyrgyz and reviving the cotton industry.
In 1922 he was made the People's Commissar of Finance and was responsible for introducing a new and stable currency, along with relaxing state monopoly and the introduction of the NEP. He was one of the most insistent proponents of the NEP, earning him many foes within the left of the party.
On 5 September 1925, Sokolnikov signed the unpublished 'Platform of the Four', a joint protest by Zinovjev, Kamenev, and Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya against Stalin's leadership. His decision seems to have been more personal than political because politically he was on the right of the party. He appears to have been motivated by mistrust of Stalin, and friendship with Kamenev. Even while publicly aligned with the opposition, he continued to argue that agricultural output had to be increased before the industry could be expanded and that consumer goods should be imported to give the peasants an incentive to take their produce to market. He was also openly dismissive of the figures produced by Gosplan, believing that 'state capitalism' properly managed would be more efficient than a centrally planned economy.
In October 1926, the six principal leaders of the opposition, including Sokolnikov, signed a promise to follow the party line in the future. He kept to this line, losing his position within the Politburo and maintaining it in the Central Committee. In the same month, he was removed from the post of People's Commissar for finance, and appointed Deputy Chairman of Gosplan, despite his well-known skepticism about the value of central planning. In the spring of 1926, he was sent on a trade mission to the US, which was aborted when he was denied a visa.
In March 1928, when the Central Committee discussed the food crisis - to which Stalin reacted later in the year by sending shock troops into the villages to collect grain by force - Sokolnikov made a speech in which, while admitting that he had been wrong in the past, he stuck to his earlier beliefs by arguing that the way to get peasants to sell their products was to raise the price of grain. However, after the introduction of the First five-year plan, he defended the principle that it was possible and necessary for the state to intervene and plan economic output. He wrote:
"The history of recent decades shows that even in countries where the principle of private property dominates, unlimited competition of private enterprises is steadily receding before the advance of gigantic financial and industrial corporations which...actually plan production and marketing within the limits of certain branches, often carrying their operations across national frontiers...A policy of non-interference by the state in such conditions would mean paralysis of state power."
In July 1928, Sokolnikov and Bukharin were returning to the Kremlin from a Central Committee plenum when they encountered Kamenev, and Bukharin talked indiscreetly about the gathering opposition to Stalin within the Politburo. In February 1929, Sokolnikov was formally rebuked by the Politburo for being present during this conversation, after a transcript had been published abroad. He was removed from his post in Gosplan. From 1929 to 1932, Sokolnikov was the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom, where the newly elected Labour government had extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR. Speaking very little English, he had limited contacts with leading British politicians.
In 1932, Sokolnikov was recalled to Moscow (and replaced by Ivan Maisky, who spoke fluent English) and appointed Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
Mikhail Tomskij
Hei. Born in 1880 to Russian parents, he moved at an early age to Estonia. Here he took part in the 1905 Revolution and helped form unions. This caused his arrest, and he as many others before and after, was deported to Siberia. There he escaped to St. Petersburg and became President of the Union of Engravers and Chromolithographers, only to be arrested once more, exiled to France, and returned once more to Russia in 1909, and surprisingly, was once more arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor. Come 1917, he would not escape but instead be freed by the Provisional Government, and was once more on the move and participated in the October Revolution in Moscow.
In 1918 he attended the Fourth All Russian Conference of Trade Unions (12–17 March), where he moved a resolution concerning the Relations between the Trade Unions and the Commissariat for Labour which stated that the October Revolution had changed "the meaning and character of state organs and significance of proletarian organs as well". It was elaborated that previously the old ministry of Labour had acted as arbitrator between Labour and Capital, whereas the new Commissariat was the champion of the economic policy of the working class.
From here he was elected first to the Central Committee, then the Orgburo, and finally to the Politburo in April 1922. There he quickly became an ally of Bukharin and Rykov and joined the moderate wing of the CPSU.
In 1928 Stalin (as we know) moved against his former allies, defeating Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky at the April 1929 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee and forcing Tomsky to resign from his position as leader of the trade union movement in May 1929. Tomskij was put in charge of the Soviet chemical industry, a position which he occupied until 1930. He was not re-elected to the Politburo after the 16th Communist Party Congress in July 1930 but remained a full member of the Central Committee, which he still held in 1936.
First of May Celebration with Tomskij, Stalin, Kalinin.
------------------------
Short overview of the Right Opposition, and introduction to their principal and key members. There are some blank spaces that will be filled later on in the next chapter, namely the United Opposition, between Trotskij, Zinovjev, and Kamenev. I'll be gone during the next week and the week after, so don't expect an update any time soon. I will try to get it up this week, but can't promise anything.
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Really nice to read about Right Opposition quaaidemocrats in USSR, but when will we get some chapters about Europe?
Glad you liked it! What do you mean quasidemocrats? We all know that the glorious USSR is the truest form of democracy! In more serious tones, I suppose all of the factions in the USSR consider themself democrats, but again, democracy here is within the party (and even then, unless sweeping reforms are made it can hardly be called a democracy), what's more important is really the view on economics. In hindsight, we know that the planned economy (that Trotskij supported, not only Stalin) really didn't work out well, the same with collectivization. If Bukharin and the Right come to power or have a strong enough base to influence Trotskij or whoever will be at the helm, I think the Soviet economy would be better off. And especially the peasantry (and people in general) who suffered immensely under the collectivization. I won't go too much into detail on how they suffered, forum rules, but I think you know what I speak of. Bukharin and the likes could mean a more humane form of socialism, but again, he at the heart wants a world revolution, just not as immediate as Trotskij.
Anyway, if you are interested in Europe, I can alternate between the chapters of book two and book three. That is, book two detail the internal situation of the USSR and leading up to Trotskij's attempt of a power grab, while book three is more like book one, detailing the rest of Europe/the world in the interwar years.
If so I will try to make a chapter on a European country tomorrow or by Friday. Saturday I will be gone for a week with the job. I can try to make the next chapter on the USSR the next weekend. After that, I'll be on vacation in Spain for around a week. If you're interested, I can alternate with the chapters.
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I think it's an interesting idea, so I would like it very much, but it's your AAR, so do however you want it
Book Three, Preface
Book Three: "Post-War Era"
Preface.
The Great War had not merely changed the European map and unleashed revolutions that crushed three empires. It ushered far-reaching effects, direct and indirect, in nearly every area and facet. Many politicians, diplomats, and others attempted to turn back the development, to return to a sense of "normalcy", in the world that existed prior to 1914, but it proved to be impossible. The shock had been so profound, violent, overwhelming, and long-lasting that consequently the old world was broken down, so radically that none could really restore it. Neither its societal norms, ideas, nor moral norms.
It was not, however, that the war had created something new and something sinful. The seeds of war had been laid down in times of peace - but the catastrophe proved to be the catalyst for the development of a totally new tempo, razed down much of the old, torn down inhibitions and factors that worked as a break, prevailed over slow-paced developments, unleashed forces that laid latent. Millions of soldiers under the constant pressure of their constant inherent danger to their lives through four years reconsidered their values. They up-valued the goods of the now, at the expense of the uncertain future, like the frontline life had meant an enormous simplification and primitivization, and there were others than just the frontline soldier that had learned the vigilance and brutality under the jungle law that reign supreme during times of war. Not only many old illusion, prejudices, and values, but also many hard-won rights and norms for human life and coexistence was busted. The measure of values got a new scale, it was as if everything was moving, slipping away as if it no longer had any solid foundation, - it could be the monetary system and the sexual morale, spheres of politics and art, indeed it even concerned the laws of science that Albert Einstein made relative.
Civilians celebrating the end of the Great War. The soldiers who returned were more often than not, bitter, angry, resentful, apathetic, and shell-shocked.
The fundamental uncertainty that marked the age, was especially relevant on the economical front. Here the war had brutally stricken down a complex, flexible, harmonic system, with strict rules and hard values. The Demands of War had blown it all up. It could only be financed through inflation, through a printing of money that only hollowed out the value of the currency. The destruction and depletion the war caused, affected the monetary systems, and manifested itself in the chaotic exchange rates, in the feverish curves of the price indexes. Neither here was it possible to return to "normal." Not only had the cost and destruction been so enormous that entire countries and social classes were left in ruin; but under and after the war a new economic system grew, with new avenues for both production and trade. Europe had for four years lived above its ability, consumed its reserves, and reduced its production of all goods and products other than war essential ones. Consequently, this continent that had dominated for centuries, had to view its position vis-à-vis the overseas power as diminished.
Europe was not even close to its former position as the workshop of the world. The overseas country had not merely replaced the aborted stream of European industrial goods, with its own production, but had increasingly started to export their own goods to the old world, which was exchanged in the form of debt, which made the USA the dominating economical powerhouse. An enormous war debt weighed down many states, this was only compounded by the lack of real capital to compensate for the debt; these states had financed barrage fire and trenches. In Europe, the old system was beaten, broken, and imploded. New states emerged in former economical zones, and these states were often nationalist in both their economical and political policies behind the newly erected 11 000 tariff walls.
Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the 20th Century. In 1905 he penned the theory of relativity, but it was not well known until after the Great War, leading to his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921
The trail of desolation and poverty followed a political radicalization of the masses. The masses got a stronger position along with an increased self-consciousness. A modern, industrialized great war demanded a million armies and a huge armaments industry - mobilization of all resources. No regime could thus be relevant without the backing of the rural- and industrial masses. They made the armies count millions whose morale and will to fight determined the outcome of the war. They manned the munitions factories, they produced coal, oil, grain, and goods just as essential for final victory as divisions and their arms. Never before had governments been so reliant on the support of the masses, and never before had the masses had such a feeling of power. Where the strain on the old state apparatus was felt the most, where defeat came on top of the war's many other miseries, where there was particular tension between the proletariat, and an old autocratic, and sometimes incapable rule, ended in revolution, in Russia, in Germany, in Austria-Hungary, and in Turkey. But also in other countries, where civil society had been stronger, more in with the times, and adaptable, there was a major shift of the political gravity to the left.
In many places, the labor movement now took the place the liberal parties traditionally held on the left flank, and the exchange between conservative and progressive governments government gave rise to a three-pointed duel, where the labor movement in many instances became the strongest or second strongest political force. The post-war years brought thus not only revolutionary socialist regimes but also - for the first time in Europe - parliamentary labor party governments; Branting's in Sweden in 1920; MacDonald's in Great Britain; and Stauning's in Denmark in 1924. The years following the war also meant the breakthrough for the eight-hour work day, which the labor movement had demanded for decades. In many countries that evaded the revolutionary redistribution of land, it was conducted wide-reaching reforms, with the partition of old estates. Women, who in great numbers had to step into the work sector in place of the mobilized men, got their lot in life largely improved. Whole in 1914 there were only four countries that introduced the right to vote for women - New Zealand, Norway, Finland, and Australia - by the end of the 1920s there were only a few states left in the West without female suffrage: France, Switzerland, Italy, and some other countries with strong Catholic traditions. Another important facet was the great growth in state power; the need to concentrate all national forces behind the war effort, the major changes in production, the trade war, the period of high prices, the need, and so on, called most nations to strong, sometimes almost dictatorial, state intervention in the economic and social sector. With the regulation of production and profits, rationing, license systems, and other measures. And while most of it was dissolved with the end of the war, no country came even close to the market-liberal system that was so prelevant pre-war.
Roaring Twenties, not everything was doom and gloom post-Great War.
Preface.
The Great War had not merely changed the European map and unleashed revolutions that crushed three empires. It ushered far-reaching effects, direct and indirect, in nearly every area and facet. Many politicians, diplomats, and others attempted to turn back the development, to return to a sense of "normalcy", in the world that existed prior to 1914, but it proved to be impossible. The shock had been so profound, violent, overwhelming, and long-lasting that consequently the old world was broken down, so radically that none could really restore it. Neither its societal norms, ideas, nor moral norms.
It was not, however, that the war had created something new and something sinful. The seeds of war had been laid down in times of peace - but the catastrophe proved to be the catalyst for the development of a totally new tempo, razed down much of the old, torn down inhibitions and factors that worked as a break, prevailed over slow-paced developments, unleashed forces that laid latent. Millions of soldiers under the constant pressure of their constant inherent danger to their lives through four years reconsidered their values. They up-valued the goods of the now, at the expense of the uncertain future, like the frontline life had meant an enormous simplification and primitivization, and there were others than just the frontline soldier that had learned the vigilance and brutality under the jungle law that reign supreme during times of war. Not only many old illusion, prejudices, and values, but also many hard-won rights and norms for human life and coexistence was busted. The measure of values got a new scale, it was as if everything was moving, slipping away as if it no longer had any solid foundation, - it could be the monetary system and the sexual morale, spheres of politics and art, indeed it even concerned the laws of science that Albert Einstein made relative.
Civilians celebrating the end of the Great War. The soldiers who returned were more often than not, bitter, angry, resentful, apathetic, and shell-shocked.
The fundamental uncertainty that marked the age, was especially relevant on the economical front. Here the war had brutally stricken down a complex, flexible, harmonic system, with strict rules and hard values. The Demands of War had blown it all up. It could only be financed through inflation, through a printing of money that only hollowed out the value of the currency. The destruction and depletion the war caused, affected the monetary systems, and manifested itself in the chaotic exchange rates, in the feverish curves of the price indexes. Neither here was it possible to return to "normal." Not only had the cost and destruction been so enormous that entire countries and social classes were left in ruin; but under and after the war a new economic system grew, with new avenues for both production and trade. Europe had for four years lived above its ability, consumed its reserves, and reduced its production of all goods and products other than war essential ones. Consequently, this continent that had dominated for centuries, had to view its position vis-à-vis the overseas power as diminished.
Europe was not even close to its former position as the workshop of the world. The overseas country had not merely replaced the aborted stream of European industrial goods, with its own production, but had increasingly started to export their own goods to the old world, which was exchanged in the form of debt, which made the USA the dominating economical powerhouse. An enormous war debt weighed down many states, this was only compounded by the lack of real capital to compensate for the debt; these states had financed barrage fire and trenches. In Europe, the old system was beaten, broken, and imploded. New states emerged in former economical zones, and these states were often nationalist in both their economical and political policies behind the newly erected 11 000 tariff walls.
Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the 20th Century. In 1905 he penned the theory of relativity, but it was not well known until after the Great War, leading to his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921
The trail of desolation and poverty followed a political radicalization of the masses. The masses got a stronger position along with an increased self-consciousness. A modern, industrialized great war demanded a million armies and a huge armaments industry - mobilization of all resources. No regime could thus be relevant without the backing of the rural- and industrial masses. They made the armies count millions whose morale and will to fight determined the outcome of the war. They manned the munitions factories, they produced coal, oil, grain, and goods just as essential for final victory as divisions and their arms. Never before had governments been so reliant on the support of the masses, and never before had the masses had such a feeling of power. Where the strain on the old state apparatus was felt the most, where defeat came on top of the war's many other miseries, where there was particular tension between the proletariat, and an old autocratic, and sometimes incapable rule, ended in revolution, in Russia, in Germany, in Austria-Hungary, and in Turkey. But also in other countries, where civil society had been stronger, more in with the times, and adaptable, there was a major shift of the political gravity to the left.
In many places, the labor movement now took the place the liberal parties traditionally held on the left flank, and the exchange between conservative and progressive governments government gave rise to a three-pointed duel, where the labor movement in many instances became the strongest or second strongest political force. The post-war years brought thus not only revolutionary socialist regimes but also - for the first time in Europe - parliamentary labor party governments; Branting's in Sweden in 1920; MacDonald's in Great Britain; and Stauning's in Denmark in 1924. The years following the war also meant the breakthrough for the eight-hour work day, which the labor movement had demanded for decades. In many countries that evaded the revolutionary redistribution of land, it was conducted wide-reaching reforms, with the partition of old estates. Women, who in great numbers had to step into the work sector in place of the mobilized men, got their lot in life largely improved. Whole in 1914 there were only four countries that introduced the right to vote for women - New Zealand, Norway, Finland, and Australia - by the end of the 1920s there were only a few states left in the West without female suffrage: France, Switzerland, Italy, and some other countries with strong Catholic traditions. Another important facet was the great growth in state power; the need to concentrate all national forces behind the war effort, the major changes in production, the trade war, the period of high prices, the need, and so on, called most nations to strong, sometimes almost dictatorial, state intervention in the economic and social sector. With the regulation of production and profits, rationing, license systems, and other measures. And while most of it was dissolved with the end of the war, no country came even close to the market-liberal system that was so prelevant pre-war.
Roaring Twenties, not everything was doom and gloom post-Great War.
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Cool, thanksI think it's an interesting idea, so I would like it very much, but it's your AAR, so do however you want it
Small introduction up, it became quite pessimistic, either way, I work on a chapter of the Weimar Republic and aim to get it up tomorrow.- 1
Book Three, Chapter One
Book Three: Chapter One
The November Revolution
Austria-Hungary has just put out peace feelers, they intend to federalize their ancien regime. They were out of time, the Slavs demanded full independence, and the state soon collapsed. In face of an Italian offensive, the soldiers refused to fight for Vienna, they wanted to return home, to salvage their lives, to be part of building their new national states upon the ruins of the double monarchy.
The first contingent of American soldiers arrived in Europe in June, 1917. Pictured an American machine gun position on the western front.
On to Germany. The Bulgarian collapse had already created a crisis in the German High Command. They realized their entire armed forces risked collapse, they demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities. Ludendorff counted on a relatively mild treatment from President Wilson, and believed Germany still possessed some strength in negotiations, the western front had still not been broken through, and the Allied troops was likewise war-weary. However, he was aware that the old Imperial government was not the right to turn toward Wilson, the man who fought to safeguard democracy and had thundered in his speeches against the German Kaisertum and Prussian militarism. Above anything else, the democratization of Germany was in order, a "Revolution von oben", to create a government based upon the majority of the Reichstag, of liberal, radical, and socialist parties. From a totally panicked pressure from the General Staff and military elite, a new government was formed under the liberal Prince Maxmillian, Margrave of Baden, and the night between the 3rd and 4th of October the first German note was passed on to Wilson via Switzerland. For a whole month, note exchanges followed that gave the Germans unpleasant surprises. Ludendorff had expected negotiations between equal peers and counted on - after gaining a certain breathing space - to continue the fight if the conditions became too severe. He was not prepared at all that Germany should make any major concessions after an armistice. Wilson on the other hand made demands that would make it completely impossible for the Germans to resume hostilities, and for each moment the President's demands became clearer: Germany had to face a complete systemic change. The Kaiser had to step back.
German soldier, western front.
For Kaiser Wilhelm II. himself, and for his closest surroundings, this was an unheard demand, and in mid-October Ludendorff, all of sudden gave a much more confident outlook on the military situation than just a few weeks prior; Germany could not accept just any condition, in a few weeks winter would set in... If this was an expression of the General's nervous mood swings between optimism and pessimism, or if it was really just an attempt to escape any responsibility of capitulation he knows started to recognize the contours of, can always be discussed, but in reality, the decision was already made; none could halt the development that had begun. Not only did the German allies fall away, one by one, but not only did the Allies push relentlessly from one position to the other on the western front, now an avalanche had begun amongst the German populace. They had, despite everything, to the very end believed in the endsieg, after all the military victories the past four years, fed with propaganda and censure that held the real position hidden, even if hunger and longing had been a reality for an extended period of time, and even if it was unrest among the working class. Now people were suddenly confronted with grim reality, with the looming defeat, with the looming collapse. Years of discontent and doubt became relevant, war exhaustion became intolerable, the mood in the wider circles could be characterized by the social-democrat Phillip Scheidemann's words "rather an end with dismay, than dismay without an end", and the revolution that was instigated "von oben", could no longer be controlled.
German sailors mutiny and take control of the Kiel port.
27th of October, at the same time as the capitulation of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and after the resignation of Ludendorff, the German government declared itself willing to accept Wilson's demands. Rightly so they did not mention the Emperor, who still clamored to his power, but the demand that the Kaiser had to abdicate had now become a general demand among the population, not only because they were under the impression that his person was an obstruction to a fair peace, but because it from below had been created a real revolutionary situation, a desire to cleanse the old system that led the nation into catastrophe. The spark was first lit in the Navy. Where the war exhaustion was especially prevelant, among the nervously exhausted sailors in the mortal submarine arm, and among sailors in the Hochseeflotte, that year in and year out had been confined in their ports, where discontent could spread like wildfire. Now in the twelfth hour, the Navy's high command decided as a last desperate gesture to, an offensive in the English Channel, with their aim to engage the Grand Fleet itself in a major battle that might support the Army in their struggle, and certainly would create a heroic legend, with the Imperial Fleet that would go down with their flag to the top. Alas, it was too late. Ship after ship mutinied; the sailors refused to set sail, the stokers refused to fire the boilers, and the officers had nothing other to do than ignore the operation. In reality, the German Revolution had just begun, and the sparks from Kiel soon spread to North and Western Germany, meanwhile, an uprising happened in Bavaria. Wilhelm II., who was in his headquarters in Spa, understood nothing of this, and refused to pull away; he was especially bitter over the faithless Navy, the Navy he had done so much for...
Barricades manned during the November Revolution.
Finally, in late evening on the 8th of November, the military leaders realized the Kaiser had to go. He still maintained he would not abdicate as King of Prussia. But even before the Kaiser could decide, the Republic was proclaimed in Berlin, where the situation during the morning of the 9th was especially tense; in the capital, the working class masses were on the move, and it was not merely a liberal-democratic republic or social-democracy that was talked about. The communist ideas had taken root among many after the Russian Revolution one year prior, not least among the soldiers in the east. The issue was no longer if the monarchy could be salvaged, but if it was possible to maintain control over the development so the Soviet system would not be victorious. Everywhere workers' and soldiers' councils emerged after the Russian template, and the Social Democratic leader Fritz Ebert, told Prince Max, that if the Kaiser did not abdicate, social revolution would be inevitable, and "I hate it as the sin!" When his party comrade Phillip Scheidemann, proclaimed the Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag, Ebert was furious, but Scheidemann turned down his protests and his demand that the form of governance in the future be decided by a newly elected national assembly. Now, was a matter of time for quick action to snatch victory from the communists. They, however, made the fatal mistake of entering into a coalition government with the USDP.
Scheidemann proclaiming the Republic.
Night to the 10th of November the Kaiser went into exile to the Netherlands, where he lived an unremarkable life, other than wood chopping, until his death in 1941. On the 7th of November the German negotiators traveled to Foch's headquarters in the Compiègne forest, where the Marshal had his railway carriage. There they got the conditions of the armistice. It was harsh conditions; in reality, it meant Germany capitulated and could not resume hostilities. The Germans attempted to amend the conditions, but to little to no avail. Five o'clock in the morning, on the 11th of November they signed under protest, and at eleven o'clock the same noon the guns fell silent.
The greatest of wars had ended. It had cost 10 million lives, 20 million wounded, 7 million of them invalids. Empires had collapsed, and entire societal systems laid in ruins. The World War had turned the world to something else.
The Weimar-Republic
Coat of Arms of the Weimar Republic.
When Imperial Germany broke down in November of 1918, the social democrats (SDP) took leadership. They had for decades represented the strongest oppositional factor to the Empire that was forged by Bismarck through Iron and Blood. But now, as they suddenly were in power, they had neither the strength nor the daring to pursue the change of power they for decades had advocated. On the left-wing of the labor movement, among the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USDP) and first and foremost in the so-called Spartacus League - that later formed the core of the communist party - there were forces that wanted to see the revolution all the way through, transform it into a social revolution, like the Russian Revolution, and build a new society on the basis of the council and the Soviet system. Everywhere workers'- and soldiers' councils (Räte in German) after the Russian template sprung up, and for a time it looked like the Social Revolution had a greater chance of succeeding in the highly industrial Germany, than in Russia with their large peasant class.
Rosa Luxemburg speaking to the masses. With Karl Liebknecht they formed the extreme left of the Weimar Republic. They published the oppositional magazine "Die rote Fahne". After the uprising, they were executed in the streets of Berlin.
SPD, however, retreated from the complete restructuring of society. They were not - neither in nature nor in schooling - true revolutionaries. This was because they were at the helm, with all the responsibilities of governance, their hands were full, and they had to keep the great machinery going from day to day, hinder that it would descend into chaos: there was no time for experiments. In response, the USDP left the government, greatly weakening the SDP government. Now they could not risk any further and stronger quakes in society that led to the downfall of the Kaiserreich, the defeat, and the famine. Therefore Fritz Eberts cabinet stepped away from their position of socializing the industry, along with the redistribution of the great Junker estates in the east. Ebert furthermore recognized that the Army was the only power factor that could maintain law and order, and avert a communist coup attempt. He immediately ushered into close cooperation with the General Staff. In January of 1919, the Spartacists and Marxists of Germany led a General Strike in Berlin that in turn led to an armed struggle. They attempted to take the power from the moderate SPD government, but it was in vain, the government cracked down on the Spartacist Uprising and dispersed the masses. The leaders of the Spartacists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested and liquidated by police forces. Also, in other places, like the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic (April-May of 1919), and the Ruhr and Westphalian Soviet Republics (January of 1919), the communist uprisings, and attempts at social revolution were brutally suppressed. If anything, during the turmoil of winter and spring of 1919 it became clear for all to see that the development of a German Soviet Republic was halted. The workers' councils' power base was steadily diminished, with the regular government increasing their own, and the outcome of the general elections to the Constitutional Assembly on 19th of January 1919, showed that there was a majority for a bourgeoise democratic republic. It was also confirmed when the new constitution was ratified - in Goethe's Weimar, not the Prussian Berlin. The constitution was a democratic template, that on paper secured freedom and civil rights, and secured parliamentary rule; it became much more difficult to carry out these principles in practice.
Phillip Scheidemann (left) and Fritz Ebert, the two leading social democrats during the first phase of the German Republic. Ebert became Chancellor when the German Empire imploded on the 9th of November 1918, Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic the same day. Afterward, Ebert became the first President of the Weimar Republic, and Scheidemann took over the position as head of government. That Ebert, who had been a saddle maker, became head of state, was a profound shock to many Kaiser loyal conservatives.
The so-called Weimar Republic, with the socialist Ebert as the first President, and his fellow party comrade, Phillip Scheidemann in the position of the first Reich Chancellor, was shaken by its serious crisis in May of 1919 when it was confronted with the choice of it should accept the Versaille-peace. Scheidemann resigned in protest, and in conservative, nationalist, and military circles the bitterness and resentment were strong. Any way around, or without it did not exist; the treaty was signed. The main responsibility was laid on the social democrats, and this was exploited by conservative and reactionary circles. Just after the breakdown of society in November, these forces had been on the defensive. Indeed they had almost ceased to exist in political life. Now they were once more on the offensive. They blamed the Marxist-, liberal- and labor movements for the military defeat, but also attacked them because they had kneeled to the inevitable and accepted the Versailles treaty. Later one of the greatest contentious questions in German politics became the "fulfillment politics": Should Germany loyally strive to fulfill the treaty, or instead sabotage it in desperate defiance to the victors?
Captain Hermann Ehrhardt (to the left), the leader of the so-called Marine Brigade, a freikorps that gave military support to the reactionary politician Wolfgang Kapp
An intermezzo in March of 1920 was characteristic of the situation. A group of officers and reactionary politicians attempted a putsch in Berlin, with the help of the freikorps', irregular forces, filled with adventurers, disillusioned veterans, and Landsknecht types, that under chaotic conditions held guard to the eastern border, and partly operated in the Baltic states. "Marinebrigade Ehrhardt" occupied government buildings and other strategic key positions in the capital, a new Reich Chancellor was proclaimed, a reactionary civil servant and politician from East Prussia, Wolfgang Kapp. The Reichswehr, unlike the earlier uprising in 1919, refused to fight their brothers in arms in the naval brigade, and President Ebert with the government had to flee to Dresden. The Kapp Putsch, however, only became a short interlude; the coup makers were confused and indecisive, and the whole foundation of their coup was pulled away from under their feet when the trade unions ordered a general strike, that literally paralyzed any activity, the most effective demonstration of the power of the labor unions anyone had ever seen. The whole revolt whimpered away after a few days. Still, the first ordinary election under the Weimar Republic in June of 1920 showed that the voters had largely moved toward the right, and while the threat to the democratic republic had at first come from the communist front, the following years showed that it was first and foremost the right-wing extremists that became a threat to the democratic republic.
Soldiers from the "Marinebrigade Ehrhardt" occupying Potsdamer Bahnhof in Berlin during the attempted coup. Following the failure of the coup, Wolfgang Kapp fled to Sweden.
The conditions in the country remained very difficult, both because of the war's direct after effects, and because of the issues, the war reparations to the allies caused problems. April 1921 the war reparations sum was decided. The demands caused an uproar and bitterness grew in Germany, and from the extreme reactionary wing they did not merely raise critics toward the governmental parties and politicians of the social democratic and center parties, also the weapon of terror was utilized. It was the age of the Feme murders. Secret nationalist societies were formed, and reinstated to methods of punishment dating back to the late middle ages, the so-called "Femgerichte", Feme-courts, exercised a swift and summarily vigilante justice. Several well-known politicians, among others Mathias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau, were assassinated by modern Feme-murderers, who believed the victims had betrayed their fatherland and intended to "rid first of the republicans, then the republic". Meanwhile, the government fought a tough struggle with the Victors of the Great War to get the reparations reduced, at least the rates postponed, but no to no avail. In January of 1923 - when the Germans were behind on their payments - French and Belgian troops moved into the Ruhr valley and occupied it, to then exert extra pressure on the German debtor. The occupation caused great resentment in Germany; the population of the Ruhr answered with passive resistance, and cessation of work in the factories France secured as "productive deposit". It also came to violent clashes with the occupation and German resistance movements - more on this later.
Children playing with the abundance of the Paper Mark. As the flow of the currency continued, many made a business model change to Pfenning coins, that at least had some - and rapidly rising - metal value. The paper bills they paid for the coins, soon got a strongly reduced value, so one could earn good money on the trade even if one paid over the exchange rate for the coin.
However, the Occupation of the Ruhr had primary effects on the German currency system, with inflation that later ran out to a monetary madness. The foundation of this development was actually laid already during the war when the German government financed their war effort largely by printing new currency; the bill mass increased from 6 billion Papiermarks (now called Mark) in 1914 to 33 billion in 1918. In the post-war years, it only continued, because the state could no longer meet their expenses through taxes alone; the reparations payments also constantly pressured the Mark rate. At the onset of the Occupation of the Ruhr, the Dollar-Mark exchange rate was one to 10 000. Less than six weeks later one dollar was worth 20 000 Marks, and three weeks later 50 000. The occupation of Germany's industrial heartland, along with the financing of the passive resistance broke the back of the already exhausted German economy, and come summer of 1923 Dollar to Mark rose to a baffling 100 000 Marks, but it continued to 1 000 000, then 10 000 000 - and come autumn 160 000 000! By that time 39 paper factories and 1783 printing presses were used to print the paper marks. And not for long did a mere stamp or a matchbox cost billions of Marks. When people got their salary, they raced to exchange them for hard goods, which rose in price from day to day, sometimes even by the hour. In the end the witch dance of the inflation so wild that one Dollar rose on the Berlin-bourse 613 000 each second. In Mid-November 1923 the government halted this lunacy, stabilized the Dollar rate at 4.2 billion Marks - in other words, a rate that was exactly one billion times the old parity - and introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, that was set to a rate of a billion to the old Mark.
Irregulars of the Volksmarinedivision taking up a position in Berlin.
It was really a delayed war reparation that was paid in this manner, primarily by savings from the average German. Before the war the saving banks had a deposit of around 20 billion Goldmarks (currency of the German Empire); after the stabilization in 1923, this amount was more than halved. This destitution was primarily felt by the lower-middle class. Having gained inroads to the trade unions and passive resistance in the Ruhr area, along with old communist strongholds in Bavaria and Saxony, the KPD sought to exploit the state crisis and instability of the Weimar Republic to incite a communist revolution in Germany, and then usher into a new wave of revolutions in Europe, and then the long coveted World Revolution. Among its main instigators were Radek and Zinovjev from abroad, Trotskij soon lent his support to the uprising, in direct confrontation with Stalin who distanced himself from it. Separatists in the Rhineland and Palaptatine declared Soviet Republics, meanwhile uprisings in Berlin, Saxony, Bavaria, and Thuringia were brutally suppressed. Stretched thin, the Reichswehr struggled to take down the new Soviet Republics in the Rhineland and Palaptatine, and in another round of humiliation was forced to watch France invade the west bank and restore order. However, it was not only on the extreme left the idealistic democracy faced issues; a fanatic named Adolf Hitler now began his meteoric rise. On November 8th, 1923, in the ongoing Red Autumn, taking advantage of the instability of the Weimar Republic and fearing another Bavarian Soviet Republic, he made a failed and almost operetta-like attempt on a coup attempt in München. Here he would gain his most loyal followers. More on this in a later debacle. When the revolutionary attempts and the gun smoke settled, the first years after the monetary reform saw some kind of stabilization and normalization, both in the economical and political life in Germany, as in Europe overall. In France, where it looked like their currency would follow the same trajectory as the Mark, they realized the curve was set too high, and the English, that had initially opposed the invasion of the Ruhr (naturally, until the Soviet republics in the Rhineland), and the harsh French creditor policy at all, emerged as a mediator. They also succeeded in engaging the Americans, that had withdrawn from the reparations committee, striving toward a more rational solution, under the leadership of the banker Charles G. Dawes a new plan was proposed. The "Dawes Plan" represented a temporary solution, it did not stipulate a final amount for the reparations, but it maintained that Germany until 1928-1929 should pay a yearly sum, rising from 1 to 2.5 billion Goldmark. A condition was that the payments would not imperil the stabilized Rentenmark. The creditors took collateral in German real-values, among other things railways and tariff income, and the Reichsbank was put under foreign supervision. As a sort of startup capital, Germany would borrow 800 million Goldmark in foreign currency, to stabilize the new Mark.
The foreign ministers Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, during the latter half of the 1920s, introduced a Franco-German rapprochement.
The next five years ushered into a brighter age. Economically Germany was back at its feet, not least because of major foreign - primarily American - loans to the state, the municipalities, and industry. In effect, the reparations quotas could be paid without much difficulty, and a period of lowered political tension set in. In France and Germany alike politicians willing to cooperate entered office, represented in the first line of duty by the many yeared French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and the German Foreign-Minister Gustav Stresemann. They attempted to milden the Franco-German oppositional relation, which was the mother of all European tension. They succeeded to achieve some results. The most important was the Locarno Treaties, which came into existence during October-December of 1925: With the Rhineland-Pact Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy guaranteed the Franco-Belgium borders; disputes between on the one side Germany, and on the other France and Belgium, should submit to arbitration, Rhineland would continue to be demilitarized (with a cessation of the financing of the resistance groups, with members of the self-proclaimed Soviet Republics being interned in France and Belgium), Rhineland and Ruhr would no longer be occupied, and if Germany, France, or Belgium were the victim of an unprovoked attack Britain and Italy would come to their aid. The other side of the Locarno Treaties, the so-called East Pact, among other things detailed agreements of arbitration in disputes between Germany on the one side, and Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other, and if the latter two states were threatened or attacked, France would give them military support - the British on the other hand withheld any guarantee for the eastern borders.
From one of the meetings during the Locarno Conference in October-December 1925. In the middle of the table in the background you can sight Foreign Minister Briand, and sitting on the same table to the far left is the British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain. In front of the standing group on the left of the picture, you can spot Benito Mussolini and the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann.
The British promise to support France-Belgium in case of another German assault and the circumstance that Germany voluntarily obliged itself to let Rhineland become vacant of troops, contributed to giving France some of the security she sought and led to the country no longer seeing it as necessary to uphold the legal rights of the Versailles Treaty, in 1930 the occupation of the Rhineland was abandoned five years before the time the treaty stipulated. This happened in conjunction with a new revision of the Dawes Plan, which was relieved by the Young Plan, also named after a mediating American banker, Owen D. Young. A definitive amount was now stipulated. The plan represented a better deal than the old for Germany: a final amount was fixated. Germany was in a period of 57 years supposed to pay 116 billion Goldmark. Germany again regained sovereignty over its finances, and it had yearly payments that were lower than under the Dawes Plan. With the basis of the conditions that were under the positive conjunctures until 1929, the plan looked reasonable, however the price fall during the economical world crisis that now came into effect, made the burdens much greater than first calculated, and under the economical chaos the crisis created, the whole ordeal ended with a reparation demand of 3 billion Marks, that was never paid.
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Here's the Weimar Chapter. Tell me if you are interested in Hitler's rise or if it is already too well known (this will be later on anyways). Some minor divergences, tell me if you can spot them, or ask me what they are. As I have said, I will be gone now for the next week, hopefully, the next chapter will be out next weekend. Then we return to Soviet politics.
The November Revolution
Austria-Hungary has just put out peace feelers, they intend to federalize their ancien regime. They were out of time, the Slavs demanded full independence, and the state soon collapsed. In face of an Italian offensive, the soldiers refused to fight for Vienna, they wanted to return home, to salvage their lives, to be part of building their new national states upon the ruins of the double monarchy.
The first contingent of American soldiers arrived in Europe in June, 1917. Pictured an American machine gun position on the western front.
On to Germany. The Bulgarian collapse had already created a crisis in the German High Command. They realized their entire armed forces risked collapse, they demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities. Ludendorff counted on a relatively mild treatment from President Wilson, and believed Germany still possessed some strength in negotiations, the western front had still not been broken through, and the Allied troops was likewise war-weary. However, he was aware that the old Imperial government was not the right to turn toward Wilson, the man who fought to safeguard democracy and had thundered in his speeches against the German Kaisertum and Prussian militarism. Above anything else, the democratization of Germany was in order, a "Revolution von oben", to create a government based upon the majority of the Reichstag, of liberal, radical, and socialist parties. From a totally panicked pressure from the General Staff and military elite, a new government was formed under the liberal Prince Maxmillian, Margrave of Baden, and the night between the 3rd and 4th of October the first German note was passed on to Wilson via Switzerland. For a whole month, note exchanges followed that gave the Germans unpleasant surprises. Ludendorff had expected negotiations between equal peers and counted on - after gaining a certain breathing space - to continue the fight if the conditions became too severe. He was not prepared at all that Germany should make any major concessions after an armistice. Wilson on the other hand made demands that would make it completely impossible for the Germans to resume hostilities, and for each moment the President's demands became clearer: Germany had to face a complete systemic change. The Kaiser had to step back.
German soldier, western front.
For Kaiser Wilhelm II. himself, and for his closest surroundings, this was an unheard demand, and in mid-October Ludendorff, all of sudden gave a much more confident outlook on the military situation than just a few weeks prior; Germany could not accept just any condition, in a few weeks winter would set in... If this was an expression of the General's nervous mood swings between optimism and pessimism, or if it was really just an attempt to escape any responsibility of capitulation he knows started to recognize the contours of, can always be discussed, but in reality, the decision was already made; none could halt the development that had begun. Not only did the German allies fall away, one by one, but not only did the Allies push relentlessly from one position to the other on the western front, now an avalanche had begun amongst the German populace. They had, despite everything, to the very end believed in the endsieg, after all the military victories the past four years, fed with propaganda and censure that held the real position hidden, even if hunger and longing had been a reality for an extended period of time, and even if it was unrest among the working class. Now people were suddenly confronted with grim reality, with the looming defeat, with the looming collapse. Years of discontent and doubt became relevant, war exhaustion became intolerable, the mood in the wider circles could be characterized by the social-democrat Phillip Scheidemann's words "rather an end with dismay, than dismay without an end", and the revolution that was instigated "von oben", could no longer be controlled.
German sailors mutiny and take control of the Kiel port.
27th of October, at the same time as the capitulation of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and after the resignation of Ludendorff, the German government declared itself willing to accept Wilson's demands. Rightly so they did not mention the Emperor, who still clamored to his power, but the demand that the Kaiser had to abdicate had now become a general demand among the population, not only because they were under the impression that his person was an obstruction to a fair peace, but because it from below had been created a real revolutionary situation, a desire to cleanse the old system that led the nation into catastrophe. The spark was first lit in the Navy. Where the war exhaustion was especially prevelant, among the nervously exhausted sailors in the mortal submarine arm, and among sailors in the Hochseeflotte, that year in and year out had been confined in their ports, where discontent could spread like wildfire. Now in the twelfth hour, the Navy's high command decided as a last desperate gesture to, an offensive in the English Channel, with their aim to engage the Grand Fleet itself in a major battle that might support the Army in their struggle, and certainly would create a heroic legend, with the Imperial Fleet that would go down with their flag to the top. Alas, it was too late. Ship after ship mutinied; the sailors refused to set sail, the stokers refused to fire the boilers, and the officers had nothing other to do than ignore the operation. In reality, the German Revolution had just begun, and the sparks from Kiel soon spread to North and Western Germany, meanwhile, an uprising happened in Bavaria. Wilhelm II., who was in his headquarters in Spa, understood nothing of this, and refused to pull away; he was especially bitter over the faithless Navy, the Navy he had done so much for...
Barricades manned during the November Revolution.
Finally, in late evening on the 8th of November, the military leaders realized the Kaiser had to go. He still maintained he would not abdicate as King of Prussia. But even before the Kaiser could decide, the Republic was proclaimed in Berlin, where the situation during the morning of the 9th was especially tense; in the capital, the working class masses were on the move, and it was not merely a liberal-democratic republic or social-democracy that was talked about. The communist ideas had taken root among many after the Russian Revolution one year prior, not least among the soldiers in the east. The issue was no longer if the monarchy could be salvaged, but if it was possible to maintain control over the development so the Soviet system would not be victorious. Everywhere workers' and soldiers' councils emerged after the Russian template, and the Social Democratic leader Fritz Ebert, told Prince Max, that if the Kaiser did not abdicate, social revolution would be inevitable, and "I hate it as the sin!" When his party comrade Phillip Scheidemann, proclaimed the Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag, Ebert was furious, but Scheidemann turned down his protests and his demand that the form of governance in the future be decided by a newly elected national assembly. Now, was a matter of time for quick action to snatch victory from the communists. They, however, made the fatal mistake of entering into a coalition government with the USDP.
Scheidemann proclaiming the Republic.
Night to the 10th of November the Kaiser went into exile to the Netherlands, where he lived an unremarkable life, other than wood chopping, until his death in 1941. On the 7th of November the German negotiators traveled to Foch's headquarters in the Compiègne forest, where the Marshal had his railway carriage. There they got the conditions of the armistice. It was harsh conditions; in reality, it meant Germany capitulated and could not resume hostilities. The Germans attempted to amend the conditions, but to little to no avail. Five o'clock in the morning, on the 11th of November they signed under protest, and at eleven o'clock the same noon the guns fell silent.
The greatest of wars had ended. It had cost 10 million lives, 20 million wounded, 7 million of them invalids. Empires had collapsed, and entire societal systems laid in ruins. The World War had turned the world to something else.
The Weimar-Republic
Coat of Arms of the Weimar Republic.
When Imperial Germany broke down in November of 1918, the social democrats (SDP) took leadership. They had for decades represented the strongest oppositional factor to the Empire that was forged by Bismarck through Iron and Blood. But now, as they suddenly were in power, they had neither the strength nor the daring to pursue the change of power they for decades had advocated. On the left-wing of the labor movement, among the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USDP) and first and foremost in the so-called Spartacus League - that later formed the core of the communist party - there were forces that wanted to see the revolution all the way through, transform it into a social revolution, like the Russian Revolution, and build a new society on the basis of the council and the Soviet system. Everywhere workers'- and soldiers' councils (Räte in German) after the Russian template sprung up, and for a time it looked like the Social Revolution had a greater chance of succeeding in the highly industrial Germany, than in Russia with their large peasant class.
Rosa Luxemburg speaking to the masses. With Karl Liebknecht they formed the extreme left of the Weimar Republic. They published the oppositional magazine "Die rote Fahne". After the uprising, they were executed in the streets of Berlin.
SPD, however, retreated from the complete restructuring of society. They were not - neither in nature nor in schooling - true revolutionaries. This was because they were at the helm, with all the responsibilities of governance, their hands were full, and they had to keep the great machinery going from day to day, hinder that it would descend into chaos: there was no time for experiments. In response, the USDP left the government, greatly weakening the SDP government. Now they could not risk any further and stronger quakes in society that led to the downfall of the Kaiserreich, the defeat, and the famine. Therefore Fritz Eberts cabinet stepped away from their position of socializing the industry, along with the redistribution of the great Junker estates in the east. Ebert furthermore recognized that the Army was the only power factor that could maintain law and order, and avert a communist coup attempt. He immediately ushered into close cooperation with the General Staff. In January of 1919, the Spartacists and Marxists of Germany led a General Strike in Berlin that in turn led to an armed struggle. They attempted to take the power from the moderate SPD government, but it was in vain, the government cracked down on the Spartacist Uprising and dispersed the masses. The leaders of the Spartacists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested and liquidated by police forces. Also, in other places, like the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic (April-May of 1919), and the Ruhr and Westphalian Soviet Republics (January of 1919), the communist uprisings, and attempts at social revolution were brutally suppressed. If anything, during the turmoil of winter and spring of 1919 it became clear for all to see that the development of a German Soviet Republic was halted. The workers' councils' power base was steadily diminished, with the regular government increasing their own, and the outcome of the general elections to the Constitutional Assembly on 19th of January 1919, showed that there was a majority for a bourgeoise democratic republic. It was also confirmed when the new constitution was ratified - in Goethe's Weimar, not the Prussian Berlin. The constitution was a democratic template, that on paper secured freedom and civil rights, and secured parliamentary rule; it became much more difficult to carry out these principles in practice.
Phillip Scheidemann (left) and Fritz Ebert, the two leading social democrats during the first phase of the German Republic. Ebert became Chancellor when the German Empire imploded on the 9th of November 1918, Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic the same day. Afterward, Ebert became the first President of the Weimar Republic, and Scheidemann took over the position as head of government. That Ebert, who had been a saddle maker, became head of state, was a profound shock to many Kaiser loyal conservatives.
The so-called Weimar Republic, with the socialist Ebert as the first President, and his fellow party comrade, Phillip Scheidemann in the position of the first Reich Chancellor, was shaken by its serious crisis in May of 1919 when it was confronted with the choice of it should accept the Versaille-peace. Scheidemann resigned in protest, and in conservative, nationalist, and military circles the bitterness and resentment were strong. Any way around, or without it did not exist; the treaty was signed. The main responsibility was laid on the social democrats, and this was exploited by conservative and reactionary circles. Just after the breakdown of society in November, these forces had been on the defensive. Indeed they had almost ceased to exist in political life. Now they were once more on the offensive. They blamed the Marxist-, liberal- and labor movements for the military defeat, but also attacked them because they had kneeled to the inevitable and accepted the Versailles treaty. Later one of the greatest contentious questions in German politics became the "fulfillment politics": Should Germany loyally strive to fulfill the treaty, or instead sabotage it in desperate defiance to the victors?
Captain Hermann Ehrhardt (to the left), the leader of the so-called Marine Brigade, a freikorps that gave military support to the reactionary politician Wolfgang Kapp
An intermezzo in March of 1920 was characteristic of the situation. A group of officers and reactionary politicians attempted a putsch in Berlin, with the help of the freikorps', irregular forces, filled with adventurers, disillusioned veterans, and Landsknecht types, that under chaotic conditions held guard to the eastern border, and partly operated in the Baltic states. "Marinebrigade Ehrhardt" occupied government buildings and other strategic key positions in the capital, a new Reich Chancellor was proclaimed, a reactionary civil servant and politician from East Prussia, Wolfgang Kapp. The Reichswehr, unlike the earlier uprising in 1919, refused to fight their brothers in arms in the naval brigade, and President Ebert with the government had to flee to Dresden. The Kapp Putsch, however, only became a short interlude; the coup makers were confused and indecisive, and the whole foundation of their coup was pulled away from under their feet when the trade unions ordered a general strike, that literally paralyzed any activity, the most effective demonstration of the power of the labor unions anyone had ever seen. The whole revolt whimpered away after a few days. Still, the first ordinary election under the Weimar Republic in June of 1920 showed that the voters had largely moved toward the right, and while the threat to the democratic republic had at first come from the communist front, the following years showed that it was first and foremost the right-wing extremists that became a threat to the democratic republic.
Soldiers from the "Marinebrigade Ehrhardt" occupying Potsdamer Bahnhof in Berlin during the attempted coup. Following the failure of the coup, Wolfgang Kapp fled to Sweden.
The conditions in the country remained very difficult, both because of the war's direct after effects, and because of the issues, the war reparations to the allies caused problems. April 1921 the war reparations sum was decided. The demands caused an uproar and bitterness grew in Germany, and from the extreme reactionary wing they did not merely raise critics toward the governmental parties and politicians of the social democratic and center parties, also the weapon of terror was utilized. It was the age of the Feme murders. Secret nationalist societies were formed, and reinstated to methods of punishment dating back to the late middle ages, the so-called "Femgerichte", Feme-courts, exercised a swift and summarily vigilante justice. Several well-known politicians, among others Mathias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau, were assassinated by modern Feme-murderers, who believed the victims had betrayed their fatherland and intended to "rid first of the republicans, then the republic". Meanwhile, the government fought a tough struggle with the Victors of the Great War to get the reparations reduced, at least the rates postponed, but no to no avail. In January of 1923 - when the Germans were behind on their payments - French and Belgian troops moved into the Ruhr valley and occupied it, to then exert extra pressure on the German debtor. The occupation caused great resentment in Germany; the population of the Ruhr answered with passive resistance, and cessation of work in the factories France secured as "productive deposit". It also came to violent clashes with the occupation and German resistance movements - more on this later.
Children playing with the abundance of the Paper Mark. As the flow of the currency continued, many made a business model change to Pfenning coins, that at least had some - and rapidly rising - metal value. The paper bills they paid for the coins, soon got a strongly reduced value, so one could earn good money on the trade even if one paid over the exchange rate for the coin.
However, the Occupation of the Ruhr had primary effects on the German currency system, with inflation that later ran out to a monetary madness. The foundation of this development was actually laid already during the war when the German government financed their war effort largely by printing new currency; the bill mass increased from 6 billion Papiermarks (now called Mark) in 1914 to 33 billion in 1918. In the post-war years, it only continued, because the state could no longer meet their expenses through taxes alone; the reparations payments also constantly pressured the Mark rate. At the onset of the Occupation of the Ruhr, the Dollar-Mark exchange rate was one to 10 000. Less than six weeks later one dollar was worth 20 000 Marks, and three weeks later 50 000. The occupation of Germany's industrial heartland, along with the financing of the passive resistance broke the back of the already exhausted German economy, and come summer of 1923 Dollar to Mark rose to a baffling 100 000 Marks, but it continued to 1 000 000, then 10 000 000 - and come autumn 160 000 000! By that time 39 paper factories and 1783 printing presses were used to print the paper marks. And not for long did a mere stamp or a matchbox cost billions of Marks. When people got their salary, they raced to exchange them for hard goods, which rose in price from day to day, sometimes even by the hour. In the end the witch dance of the inflation so wild that one Dollar rose on the Berlin-bourse 613 000 each second. In Mid-November 1923 the government halted this lunacy, stabilized the Dollar rate at 4.2 billion Marks - in other words, a rate that was exactly one billion times the old parity - and introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, that was set to a rate of a billion to the old Mark.
Irregulars of the Volksmarinedivision taking up a position in Berlin.
It was really a delayed war reparation that was paid in this manner, primarily by savings from the average German. Before the war the saving banks had a deposit of around 20 billion Goldmarks (currency of the German Empire); after the stabilization in 1923, this amount was more than halved. This destitution was primarily felt by the lower-middle class. Having gained inroads to the trade unions and passive resistance in the Ruhr area, along with old communist strongholds in Bavaria and Saxony, the KPD sought to exploit the state crisis and instability of the Weimar Republic to incite a communist revolution in Germany, and then usher into a new wave of revolutions in Europe, and then the long coveted World Revolution. Among its main instigators were Radek and Zinovjev from abroad, Trotskij soon lent his support to the uprising, in direct confrontation with Stalin who distanced himself from it. Separatists in the Rhineland and Palaptatine declared Soviet Republics, meanwhile uprisings in Berlin, Saxony, Bavaria, and Thuringia were brutally suppressed. Stretched thin, the Reichswehr struggled to take down the new Soviet Republics in the Rhineland and Palaptatine, and in another round of humiliation was forced to watch France invade the west bank and restore order. However, it was not only on the extreme left the idealistic democracy faced issues; a fanatic named Adolf Hitler now began his meteoric rise. On November 8th, 1923, in the ongoing Red Autumn, taking advantage of the instability of the Weimar Republic and fearing another Bavarian Soviet Republic, he made a failed and almost operetta-like attempt on a coup attempt in München. Here he would gain his most loyal followers. More on this in a later debacle. When the revolutionary attempts and the gun smoke settled, the first years after the monetary reform saw some kind of stabilization and normalization, both in the economical and political life in Germany, as in Europe overall. In France, where it looked like their currency would follow the same trajectory as the Mark, they realized the curve was set too high, and the English, that had initially opposed the invasion of the Ruhr (naturally, until the Soviet republics in the Rhineland), and the harsh French creditor policy at all, emerged as a mediator. They also succeeded in engaging the Americans, that had withdrawn from the reparations committee, striving toward a more rational solution, under the leadership of the banker Charles G. Dawes a new plan was proposed. The "Dawes Plan" represented a temporary solution, it did not stipulate a final amount for the reparations, but it maintained that Germany until 1928-1929 should pay a yearly sum, rising from 1 to 2.5 billion Goldmark. A condition was that the payments would not imperil the stabilized Rentenmark. The creditors took collateral in German real-values, among other things railways and tariff income, and the Reichsbank was put under foreign supervision. As a sort of startup capital, Germany would borrow 800 million Goldmark in foreign currency, to stabilize the new Mark.
The foreign ministers Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, during the latter half of the 1920s, introduced a Franco-German rapprochement.
The next five years ushered into a brighter age. Economically Germany was back at its feet, not least because of major foreign - primarily American - loans to the state, the municipalities, and industry. In effect, the reparations quotas could be paid without much difficulty, and a period of lowered political tension set in. In France and Germany alike politicians willing to cooperate entered office, represented in the first line of duty by the many yeared French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and the German Foreign-Minister Gustav Stresemann. They attempted to milden the Franco-German oppositional relation, which was the mother of all European tension. They succeeded to achieve some results. The most important was the Locarno Treaties, which came into existence during October-December of 1925: With the Rhineland-Pact Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy guaranteed the Franco-Belgium borders; disputes between on the one side Germany, and on the other France and Belgium, should submit to arbitration, Rhineland would continue to be demilitarized (with a cessation of the financing of the resistance groups, with members of the self-proclaimed Soviet Republics being interned in France and Belgium), Rhineland and Ruhr would no longer be occupied, and if Germany, France, or Belgium were the victim of an unprovoked attack Britain and Italy would come to their aid. The other side of the Locarno Treaties, the so-called East Pact, among other things detailed agreements of arbitration in disputes between Germany on the one side, and Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other, and if the latter two states were threatened or attacked, France would give them military support - the British on the other hand withheld any guarantee for the eastern borders.
From one of the meetings during the Locarno Conference in October-December 1925. In the middle of the table in the background you can sight Foreign Minister Briand, and sitting on the same table to the far left is the British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain. In front of the standing group on the left of the picture, you can spot Benito Mussolini and the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann.
The British promise to support France-Belgium in case of another German assault and the circumstance that Germany voluntarily obliged itself to let Rhineland become vacant of troops, contributed to giving France some of the security she sought and led to the country no longer seeing it as necessary to uphold the legal rights of the Versailles Treaty, in 1930 the occupation of the Rhineland was abandoned five years before the time the treaty stipulated. This happened in conjunction with a new revision of the Dawes Plan, which was relieved by the Young Plan, also named after a mediating American banker, Owen D. Young. A definitive amount was now stipulated. The plan represented a better deal than the old for Germany: a final amount was fixated. Germany was in a period of 57 years supposed to pay 116 billion Goldmark. Germany again regained sovereignty over its finances, and it had yearly payments that were lower than under the Dawes Plan. With the basis of the conditions that were under the positive conjunctures until 1929, the plan looked reasonable, however the price fall during the economical world crisis that now came into effect, made the burdens much greater than first calculated, and under the economical chaos the crisis created, the whole ordeal ended with a reparation demand of 3 billion Marks, that was never paid.
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Here's the Weimar Chapter. Tell me if you are interested in Hitler's rise or if it is already too well known (this will be later on anyways). Some minor divergences, tell me if you can spot them, or ask me what they are. As I have said, I will be gone now for the next week, hopefully, the next chapter will be out next weekend. Then we return to Soviet politics.
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This is probably the closest the stab in the back myth comes to being correct. The german miltiary absolutely could blame Austria for not only starting the war in the first place but then being so rubbish at it that they lost to Italians, having first been bailed out of being defeated by Russia.
Good chapter. Gets the chaos of the reich in the twenties very well. The rise of Hitler is relatively well know I think, but not what occurred between 1929 and 1933, that is, the years immediately before the nazis suddenly got into power.
Book Three, Chapter Two
Book Three: Chapter Two
The Aster Revolution led to the short-lived Hungarian Republic.
The Successor States
The Double Monarchy, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, crumbled in November of 1918 under the sheer weight of defeat and the many years of strain from the war, just like Wilhelmian Germany. But in addition to the political shake-ups in the double monarchy, came along national uprisings that blew the ancien regime of the Habsburgs to smithereens. In Bohemia and Moravia a new Czechoslovak state was organized, to resurgent Poland went millions of citizens and vast swathes of land in the northeast, in the south substantial to the new Greater Serbian state Yugoslavia, and the old master countries, Austria and Hungary, became two independent, comparatively small states. The double monarchy had been a great power with 52 million inhabitants; the new Austria had a mere 6 million; the new Hungary had 8 million. Of Austria's 6 million, one quarter called Vienna home.
Engelbert Dolfuss, Austrian Chancellor from 19312-1934. Dolfuss represented the most reactionary wing of the Christian-Social Party, and by extent, Austro-Fascism, established an authoritarian, clerical regime, and repressed the social democrats during an open civil war in 1934. He also, with the support of Mussolini, resisted attempts at Nazification coming from Germany. Towering 152 cm he was called "Millimeternich", this also contributed to making him popular in his "David vs. the German Goliath struggle". 25th of July 1934 he was assassinated by the nazis.
Not just the stress of war, but also the bust of the old major economical entity that was the double monarchy, ushered into a violent and tumultuous crisis and a long-lasting state of emergency in Austria. When the Empire broke down, the Social Democrats took the lead, here as in Germany, and many expected the radical wing would pursue the Social Revolution and establish a Soviet Regime by Russian pattern. In many ways, the conditions were ripe for such a development in the beaten, suffering country, where the ancien regime had so helplessly broken apart. When Bolshevism did not prevail, it was due partly to the peasanty, in contrast to the industrial workers - and unlike the Russian peasants - was not revolutionary, but quite to the contrary staunch anti-communist. Also in part owing to the fact that Austria was at this time totally dependent on Allied supplies of foodstuffs, fuel, and raw materials, and they had to take into account that a communist revolution would not merely lead to an embargo by the victorious Entente, but likely also armed intervention. Leaders of the Labor Movement withheld the revolutionary forces from a coup that could very well lead to a bloody adventure. Instead, they aimed to secure the working man's interest best through practical reforms, within the frames of a liberal, democratic, and bourgeois republic.
Austrian soldier inspecting a café in Vienna after hard fighting against the Republikanischer Schutszbund.
Moreover, the first post-war election in February 1919 proved there was no socialist majority among the populace. Austrian politics in the '20s was some sort of trench warfare between the Conservative, Clerical Christian-Social Party, which drew its strength from the rural population, and the Social-Democrats with their stronghold in "Red Vienna". Social-Democrats and many conservatives alike meant that following the war, the new rump Austria with her oversized capital had no economical existential foundation, and subsequently sought union with Germany; but the Entente, primarily France and Italy, was firmly against any form of "Anschluss" from the perspective of realpolitik; Austria consequently had more or less permanent economical difficulties. This in turn contributed to sharpening the political antagonism; come March 1933 and the Christian-Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss found a clerical, proto-fascist dictatorship. In February of 1934 the Social Democrats, isolated and desperate, had their moderate wing subsumed by the radicals, and working with the Communist Party, led an uprising. Taking power in the capital, and some other industrial cities, they had high hopes for a social revolution. Instead, the security forces of the Austrian state were violently put down after four days of urban combat.
Hungarian communists dashing down the streets of Budapest during the proclamation of Soviet Hungary.
In Hungary - prior to the war a semi-feudal country with large estates and a dominant nobility - the Republic was proclaimed a few days after the armistice of 1918, but here it was a Count that took charge, the liberal and idealistic Mihály Károly, that showed his sincerity in regards to his reform policies by distributing his own estates to the peasants. Hungary was, however, in such a dire situation the well-meaning, but ultimately weak and somewhat removed man could not dominate. The neighboring states - Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania - sent in troops to grab as much land as possible from the dying corpse that was Hungary, meanwhile revolution brewed, was under the leadership of Béla Kun formed a Communist Party. Károly could not accept the allied territorial demands and be deeply disappointed in his trust in Wilsonian idealism. He ceded power to the Social Democrats, who in turn formed a government with the communists. Together this government - which was increasingly dominated by the communists - proclaimed the Soviet Republic of Hungary 21st of March 1919; its strongman was Béla Kun. A few chaotic months followed; in the south Romanians and Hungarians clashed, and in the north fueled by both revanchism and internationalism Soviet Hungary occupied and declared Soviet Slovakia, engaging in open combat with the Czechs. Meanwhile, the Budapest-based government tried to form the dictatorship of the proletariat and - partly with terroristic activities - attempted to achieve the Social Revolution by looking to the Russian experience. Meanwhile, they were under constant pressure from the western powers, that feared the communist revolution would spread to Austria and Germany. Béla Kun was significantly strengthened when he did as Lenin, did and let the peasants share the lands, instead of nationalizing the estates. In 1919 when Romanian troops threatened Budapest, the Hungarians rose up in a people's war and resisted the invaders. First by conventional means, and later by partisan warfare. Nevertheless, the Romanians occupied Budapest, and while they fought a protracted war in the countryside, Béla Kun fled to Moscow. Budapest was pillaged, and the reactionary forces that now came to power had a white terror of their own to revenge the red terror. The western powers attempted in November of 1919 to make the Romanian troops withdraw from Hungary, but no to avail. The partisan war continued. Not until the following year, with increased strain on their forces, immense pressure from their allies, and the public at home turning, did the Romanians withdraw. The old Hungarian upper class, represented among others by Admiral Miklós Horthy could consolidate their position; the country continued to be a monarchy, and Horthy, that assumed the functions of the Head of State, got the title of Regent. The last Emperor Charles made two indecisive attempts to return as King of Hungary, to the Crown of St. Stephen, but had to abandon his adventure due to strong resistance among the Magyars, and more importantly because the successor states - Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia - would have none of a Habsburg restoration. Just as decisively they resisted the coming years any revision to the peace treaty, which made Hungary lose 2/3 of its country and around 60 percent of her population; between 2 and 3 million Magyars were now under foreign rule.
The three leaders of Hungary in the wake of the revolutions: Károlyi, Kun, and Horthy.
The third of the Central Powers, Bulgaria, was an owner of self-owning farmers, and it was they who took the helm of the nation under their leader Alexander Stambuliskij, a wroth and ruthless politician, that one-sided advocated the interests of the farmers, at the expense of the urban population. His party, the Agrarian Union, was nicknamed "the Green Socialists", and Stambuliskij toyed with the idea of a "Green International" of radical peasant movements. Nevertheless, he was overthrown and assassinated during a coup d'etat in June of 1923, carried out by the urban bourgeois, officers, and Macedonian nationalists (IMRO). A subsequent communist rebellion was repressed, and a more or less authoritarian regime through the '20s laid the foundations for the dictatorship established by the Zveno Coup in 1934 and presided over by Boris III. in the '30s.
Leaders of the Bulgarian Coup.
Among the successor states, Czechoslovakia was the direct result of the fall of the double monarchy - naturally also a result of many years of struggle to assert the national cultural values in Johan Huss' and Comenius' land - and also Romania and Yugoslavia had grown considerably by annexing former Austro-Hungarian territories. Romania's territory and the population had doubled - they had also annexed Dobruja from Bulgaria and the former Russian Bessarabia - and Yugoslavia sported a census thrice that of old Serbia. Common for the three states was that they got substantial national minorities within their borders, minorities that amounted to 25-30 percent of their total population. Such a group was the "Sudeten Germans" in Czechoslovakia, 3 million German-speaking minorities in the borderlands, that were incorporated in the new state both because Bohemia had been a de-jure kingdom, and more importantly an economical entity of its, and because the "Bohemian Bastion" would be impossible to defend without the mountain ranges along the border. Romania primarily got a Magyar minority in Transylvania, the old Siebenbürgen. In Yugoslavia, the German and Hungarian minorities represented comparatively lesser issues than the national confrontation between the Slavic groups: Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Bulgarians; especially problematic was the tension between the Croatians and the dominating Serbians, among other things over differences in their cultural traditions.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the "father" of the Czechoslovak nation, was one of the inter-war years most noble statesmen. He was born in 1850 and grew up in great poverty, but thanks to his good abilities, and untameable energy he got an academic education and was at the age of 32 years a professor in philosophy. However, he primarily made a name for himself as the leader of the oppressed Czech and Slovak peoples. During the Great War, he fled abroad and worked for the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state. It was made a reality in 1918, and Masaryk was the natural first President; he was reelected every time until he resigned in 1935 at the age of 85.
The three states embarked upon three divergent paths in their domestic politics. In the most industrialized and cultivated country of the countries, Czechoslovakia, there was always a democratic form of rule, and the country's first President Tomáš G. Masaryk, a noble, humane, highly cultivated representative for the democratic idealism, had his everlasting impression on the country who was "father" to; he had also been the leader and champion of the national self-assertion struggle among the people had fought for decades under the Habsburg regime; his pupil and successor, as President, Eduard Beneš, carried the torch onward to the next decade. In Romania, the conditions were more variegated, with conflict - not always in impeccable democratic tradition - between the Liberal, yet conservative, Party and an agrarian party, in addition, there were dynastic entanglements. In Yugoslavia, hostilities between the different Slavic ethnicities had a dominating role, and it was not least this conflict that laid the foundation of the "Royal Dictatorship" Alexander, King Peter's son, created in 1929. He represented the "Greater Serbian" politic, and resisted any and all demands, among others from the Croats, to federate the nation.
Map of Poland and the Baltics in 1920, still undefined borders and ripe for conflict.
The resurrection of Poland was also a result of the war, made possible that all the three great powers that had partitioned the country for over a century had suffered humiliating defeats. The demand for an independent Poland had been of Wilson's 14 Points, but it became a significant conflict regarding her borders, against Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union alike. The Poles attempted, mostly with French support, to expand their territories as much as possible, and they came to war with the Soviet Union during the Spring of 1920. The British were opposed to the ambitious plans, and the British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon proposed a ceasefire on the foundation of a demarcation line, that went north-south over Brest-Litovsk, and west of Lwow and the Carpathians. The "Curzon-Line" reflected the ethnic composition fairly well between Poles on one side and Byelorussians and Ukrainians on the other side, however, it ended with the borders being drawn much further to the east; also Poland got substantial ethnic minorities within their borders, all in all, ca. 30%. The new Poland's leading personality was Józef Pilsudski. He had been both a socialist and national freedom fighter in the Russian part of the country, had spent many years in Siberia, and led during the Great War the Polish Free-Corps, which cooperated with Austro-Hungarian Army. He was both a dreamer and a real politician, revolutionary and authoritarian, but, he was primarily a nationalist. He was for a time President of the Polish Republic but was disappointed the new constitution did not grant the President as much power as he liked, and therefore retired from politics in 1923. Three years later, in May of 1926, he made a comeback and launched a putsch, and ruled Poland until his death in 1935, with dictatorial powers even though he was formally Minister of War.
Józef Pilsudski, was Poland's strong man and dictatorial leader from 1926 until his death in 1935.
In the old Russian Baltic provinces three new national states emerged, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the conditions during the Russian Revolution and during the Russian Civil War were chaotic, to say the least, with Balts, Germans, Red and White Russians alike fighting for control of power and territory. Between Poland and Lithuania, there was also conflict around the Vilnius area, which the Poles occupied and kept; in return, the Lithuanians grabbed Memel through a coup, where it was supposed to be, just like in Vilnius, a plebiscite. The eastern borders for the Baltic - along with the other eastern European states - were not decided in the peace conferences in Paris, because the entire area was in chaos during this time. But by blood alone, and many years of armed struggle and coups were regulated by treaties with the Soviet Union at the beginning of the '20s.
Hyökkäys by Eetu Isto, 1905, was a symbol of Russification, with the Maiden of Finland defending the law against the Russian eagle.
Finland was also among the countries that regained their freedom in the wake of the Great War and Russian Revolution. When the Tsar was overthrown, the Finnish Parliament convened. It was elected in 1916 and had a slim socialist majority - 103 of 200 representatives - but it had never been summoned. The new Russian government initiated a more liberal policy over the Finns, but when they elected to transfer the Tsar's powers to the parliament, it was dissolved by Kerenskij; the labor movement answered by pulling their representatives out of the government, which had 6 social democratic and 6 bourgeoises. The new parliamentary election was called in October of 1917 and gave a bourgeois majority with 108 representatives, meanwhile, a situation had developed that brought the country to the edge of civil war. The radical wing of the labor movement was bitter that the bourgeois forces had gained parliamentary power, an economical crisis created much need in many homes, the Bolshevik coup d'etat in November emboldened the revolutionary spirit, and both camps armed and prepared for a possible clash by organizing "red" and "white" guards.
White machine gun teams.
On the 6th of December, the parliament issued a declaration of independence, and on New Year's Eve, the Soviet government affirmed independent Finland. The tension between Finns, however, only grew; the "Reds" cooperated in several places with revolutionary soldiers and sailors in the Russian garrisons scattering the country, and both during a general strike in November and later assassinations and other acts of violence ensued, that spurred great resentment on the bourgeoise side. The government, under the leadership of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, organized volunteer shooting clubs in Österbotten under the leadership of Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, a general that during the Tsarist period had made his career in the Russian Army. Night to the 28th of January the socialists seized power by a coup in Helsinki and created a Council of People's Commissars under the helm of the party's leader Kullervo Manner. The Reds soon got power in the southern part of the country, where they were militarily strong, but Mannerheim's White that now advanced from Österbotte, steadily grew, and they had more competent leadership. A significant number of former Tsarist officers reported for duty in the White Guards, Sweden there was also an influx of a not insignificant number of officers From Germany Finnish jägers returned home, students and farmhands who after the declaration of war went to Germany to gain military education and sought to liberate Finland from Russia, they had also participated on the eastern front. They now joined forces with Mannerheim. From Germany, also came major supplies of weapons and ammunition, while the Reds got their weapons and munitions from Russian depots.
Tampere in the wake of the battle.
It developed into a bloody and gruesome civil war, hate and bitterness were ripe on both sides. When March turned to April in 1918 Mannerheim's forces won decisively during the Battle of Tampere, and around the same time, a German division made landfall in Hangö. It occupied Helsinki on the 13th of April. During April and May, the last remaining Red forces were defeated. Svinhufvud became Regent, and a German Prince, Fredrik Karl of Hessen, was in October elected King. Nevertheless, he would never ascend to the throne, because soon thereafter Germany broke apart, and Mannerheim, who had always opposed close cooperation with the Germans, relieved Svinhufvud as regent. In July a new Finnish constitution was proclaimed, which made the country a republic, and later that month the liberal politician professor Kaarlo Ståhlberg was elected President. With the peace of Dorpat, in October 1920 Finland reclaimed their historical borders to Russia, except Petsamo in the north, leading to Finland gaining an ice port. The question of the Åland Islands was first determined in the League of Nations in 1921; by a plebiscite, the country almost unanimously voted for union with Sweden, but the islands remained part of Finland, at the same time it was decided they would remain a demilitarized zone.
Portrait of General, friherre Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, by Ero Järnefelt. Mannerheim made a brilliant career in the Russian army and had on several occasions distinguished himself during the Great War. After the revolutions of 1917, he turned home to Finland, where he became commander in chief of the White forces during the civil war. He was regent from 1918-1919, men were defeated by Kaarlo Ståhlberg during the Presidential election, and withdrew to privacy.
The Aster Revolution led to the short-lived Hungarian Republic.
The Successor States
The Double Monarchy, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, crumbled in November of 1918 under the sheer weight of defeat and the many years of strain from the war, just like Wilhelmian Germany. But in addition to the political shake-ups in the double monarchy, came along national uprisings that blew the ancien regime of the Habsburgs to smithereens. In Bohemia and Moravia a new Czechoslovak state was organized, to resurgent Poland went millions of citizens and vast swathes of land in the northeast, in the south substantial to the new Greater Serbian state Yugoslavia, and the old master countries, Austria and Hungary, became two independent, comparatively small states. The double monarchy had been a great power with 52 million inhabitants; the new Austria had a mere 6 million; the new Hungary had 8 million. Of Austria's 6 million, one quarter called Vienna home.
Engelbert Dolfuss, Austrian Chancellor from 19312-1934. Dolfuss represented the most reactionary wing of the Christian-Social Party, and by extent, Austro-Fascism, established an authoritarian, clerical regime, and repressed the social democrats during an open civil war in 1934. He also, with the support of Mussolini, resisted attempts at Nazification coming from Germany. Towering 152 cm he was called "Millimeternich", this also contributed to making him popular in his "David vs. the German Goliath struggle". 25th of July 1934 he was assassinated by the nazis.
Not just the stress of war, but also the bust of the old major economical entity that was the double monarchy, ushered into a violent and tumultuous crisis and a long-lasting state of emergency in Austria. When the Empire broke down, the Social Democrats took the lead, here as in Germany, and many expected the radical wing would pursue the Social Revolution and establish a Soviet Regime by Russian pattern. In many ways, the conditions were ripe for such a development in the beaten, suffering country, where the ancien regime had so helplessly broken apart. When Bolshevism did not prevail, it was due partly to the peasanty, in contrast to the industrial workers - and unlike the Russian peasants - was not revolutionary, but quite to the contrary staunch anti-communist. Also in part owing to the fact that Austria was at this time totally dependent on Allied supplies of foodstuffs, fuel, and raw materials, and they had to take into account that a communist revolution would not merely lead to an embargo by the victorious Entente, but likely also armed intervention. Leaders of the Labor Movement withheld the revolutionary forces from a coup that could very well lead to a bloody adventure. Instead, they aimed to secure the working man's interest best through practical reforms, within the frames of a liberal, democratic, and bourgeois republic.
Austrian soldier inspecting a café in Vienna after hard fighting against the Republikanischer Schutszbund.
Moreover, the first post-war election in February 1919 proved there was no socialist majority among the populace. Austrian politics in the '20s was some sort of trench warfare between the Conservative, Clerical Christian-Social Party, which drew its strength from the rural population, and the Social-Democrats with their stronghold in "Red Vienna". Social-Democrats and many conservatives alike meant that following the war, the new rump Austria with her oversized capital had no economical existential foundation, and subsequently sought union with Germany; but the Entente, primarily France and Italy, was firmly against any form of "Anschluss" from the perspective of realpolitik; Austria consequently had more or less permanent economical difficulties. This in turn contributed to sharpening the political antagonism; come March 1933 and the Christian-Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss found a clerical, proto-fascist dictatorship. In February of 1934 the Social Democrats, isolated and desperate, had their moderate wing subsumed by the radicals, and working with the Communist Party, led an uprising. Taking power in the capital, and some other industrial cities, they had high hopes for a social revolution. Instead, the security forces of the Austrian state were violently put down after four days of urban combat.
Hungarian communists dashing down the streets of Budapest during the proclamation of Soviet Hungary.
In Hungary - prior to the war a semi-feudal country with large estates and a dominant nobility - the Republic was proclaimed a few days after the armistice of 1918, but here it was a Count that took charge, the liberal and idealistic Mihály Károly, that showed his sincerity in regards to his reform policies by distributing his own estates to the peasants. Hungary was, however, in such a dire situation the well-meaning, but ultimately weak and somewhat removed man could not dominate. The neighboring states - Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania - sent in troops to grab as much land as possible from the dying corpse that was Hungary, meanwhile revolution brewed, was under the leadership of Béla Kun formed a Communist Party. Károly could not accept the allied territorial demands and be deeply disappointed in his trust in Wilsonian idealism. He ceded power to the Social Democrats, who in turn formed a government with the communists. Together this government - which was increasingly dominated by the communists - proclaimed the Soviet Republic of Hungary 21st of March 1919; its strongman was Béla Kun. A few chaotic months followed; in the south Romanians and Hungarians clashed, and in the north fueled by both revanchism and internationalism Soviet Hungary occupied and declared Soviet Slovakia, engaging in open combat with the Czechs. Meanwhile, the Budapest-based government tried to form the dictatorship of the proletariat and - partly with terroristic activities - attempted to achieve the Social Revolution by looking to the Russian experience. Meanwhile, they were under constant pressure from the western powers, that feared the communist revolution would spread to Austria and Germany. Béla Kun was significantly strengthened when he did as Lenin, did and let the peasants share the lands, instead of nationalizing the estates. In 1919 when Romanian troops threatened Budapest, the Hungarians rose up in a people's war and resisted the invaders. First by conventional means, and later by partisan warfare. Nevertheless, the Romanians occupied Budapest, and while they fought a protracted war in the countryside, Béla Kun fled to Moscow. Budapest was pillaged, and the reactionary forces that now came to power had a white terror of their own to revenge the red terror. The western powers attempted in November of 1919 to make the Romanian troops withdraw from Hungary, but no to avail. The partisan war continued. Not until the following year, with increased strain on their forces, immense pressure from their allies, and the public at home turning, did the Romanians withdraw. The old Hungarian upper class, represented among others by Admiral Miklós Horthy could consolidate their position; the country continued to be a monarchy, and Horthy, that assumed the functions of the Head of State, got the title of Regent. The last Emperor Charles made two indecisive attempts to return as King of Hungary, to the Crown of St. Stephen, but had to abandon his adventure due to strong resistance among the Magyars, and more importantly because the successor states - Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia - would have none of a Habsburg restoration. Just as decisively they resisted the coming years any revision to the peace treaty, which made Hungary lose 2/3 of its country and around 60 percent of her population; between 2 and 3 million Magyars were now under foreign rule.
The three leaders of Hungary in the wake of the revolutions: Károlyi, Kun, and Horthy.
The third of the Central Powers, Bulgaria, was an owner of self-owning farmers, and it was they who took the helm of the nation under their leader Alexander Stambuliskij, a wroth and ruthless politician, that one-sided advocated the interests of the farmers, at the expense of the urban population. His party, the Agrarian Union, was nicknamed "the Green Socialists", and Stambuliskij toyed with the idea of a "Green International" of radical peasant movements. Nevertheless, he was overthrown and assassinated during a coup d'etat in June of 1923, carried out by the urban bourgeois, officers, and Macedonian nationalists (IMRO). A subsequent communist rebellion was repressed, and a more or less authoritarian regime through the '20s laid the foundations for the dictatorship established by the Zveno Coup in 1934 and presided over by Boris III. in the '30s.
Leaders of the Bulgarian Coup.
Among the successor states, Czechoslovakia was the direct result of the fall of the double monarchy - naturally also a result of many years of struggle to assert the national cultural values in Johan Huss' and Comenius' land - and also Romania and Yugoslavia had grown considerably by annexing former Austro-Hungarian territories. Romania's territory and the population had doubled - they had also annexed Dobruja from Bulgaria and the former Russian Bessarabia - and Yugoslavia sported a census thrice that of old Serbia. Common for the three states was that they got substantial national minorities within their borders, minorities that amounted to 25-30 percent of their total population. Such a group was the "Sudeten Germans" in Czechoslovakia, 3 million German-speaking minorities in the borderlands, that were incorporated in the new state both because Bohemia had been a de-jure kingdom, and more importantly an economical entity of its, and because the "Bohemian Bastion" would be impossible to defend without the mountain ranges along the border. Romania primarily got a Magyar minority in Transylvania, the old Siebenbürgen. In Yugoslavia, the German and Hungarian minorities represented comparatively lesser issues than the national confrontation between the Slavic groups: Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Bulgarians; especially problematic was the tension between the Croatians and the dominating Serbians, among other things over differences in their cultural traditions.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the "father" of the Czechoslovak nation, was one of the inter-war years most noble statesmen. He was born in 1850 and grew up in great poverty, but thanks to his good abilities, and untameable energy he got an academic education and was at the age of 32 years a professor in philosophy. However, he primarily made a name for himself as the leader of the oppressed Czech and Slovak peoples. During the Great War, he fled abroad and worked for the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state. It was made a reality in 1918, and Masaryk was the natural first President; he was reelected every time until he resigned in 1935 at the age of 85.
The three states embarked upon three divergent paths in their domestic politics. In the most industrialized and cultivated country of the countries, Czechoslovakia, there was always a democratic form of rule, and the country's first President Tomáš G. Masaryk, a noble, humane, highly cultivated representative for the democratic idealism, had his everlasting impression on the country who was "father" to; he had also been the leader and champion of the national self-assertion struggle among the people had fought for decades under the Habsburg regime; his pupil and successor, as President, Eduard Beneš, carried the torch onward to the next decade. In Romania, the conditions were more variegated, with conflict - not always in impeccable democratic tradition - between the Liberal, yet conservative, Party and an agrarian party, in addition, there were dynastic entanglements. In Yugoslavia, hostilities between the different Slavic ethnicities had a dominating role, and it was not least this conflict that laid the foundation of the "Royal Dictatorship" Alexander, King Peter's son, created in 1929. He represented the "Greater Serbian" politic, and resisted any and all demands, among others from the Croats, to federate the nation.
Map of Poland and the Baltics in 1920, still undefined borders and ripe for conflict.
The resurrection of Poland was also a result of the war, made possible that all the three great powers that had partitioned the country for over a century had suffered humiliating defeats. The demand for an independent Poland had been of Wilson's 14 Points, but it became a significant conflict regarding her borders, against Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union alike. The Poles attempted, mostly with French support, to expand their territories as much as possible, and they came to war with the Soviet Union during the Spring of 1920. The British were opposed to the ambitious plans, and the British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon proposed a ceasefire on the foundation of a demarcation line, that went north-south over Brest-Litovsk, and west of Lwow and the Carpathians. The "Curzon-Line" reflected the ethnic composition fairly well between Poles on one side and Byelorussians and Ukrainians on the other side, however, it ended with the borders being drawn much further to the east; also Poland got substantial ethnic minorities within their borders, all in all, ca. 30%. The new Poland's leading personality was Józef Pilsudski. He had been both a socialist and national freedom fighter in the Russian part of the country, had spent many years in Siberia, and led during the Great War the Polish Free-Corps, which cooperated with Austro-Hungarian Army. He was both a dreamer and a real politician, revolutionary and authoritarian, but, he was primarily a nationalist. He was for a time President of the Polish Republic but was disappointed the new constitution did not grant the President as much power as he liked, and therefore retired from politics in 1923. Three years later, in May of 1926, he made a comeback and launched a putsch, and ruled Poland until his death in 1935, with dictatorial powers even though he was formally Minister of War.
Józef Pilsudski, was Poland's strong man and dictatorial leader from 1926 until his death in 1935.
In the old Russian Baltic provinces three new national states emerged, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the conditions during the Russian Revolution and during the Russian Civil War were chaotic, to say the least, with Balts, Germans, Red and White Russians alike fighting for control of power and territory. Between Poland and Lithuania, there was also conflict around the Vilnius area, which the Poles occupied and kept; in return, the Lithuanians grabbed Memel through a coup, where it was supposed to be, just like in Vilnius, a plebiscite. The eastern borders for the Baltic - along with the other eastern European states - were not decided in the peace conferences in Paris, because the entire area was in chaos during this time. But by blood alone, and many years of armed struggle and coups were regulated by treaties with the Soviet Union at the beginning of the '20s.
Hyökkäys by Eetu Isto, 1905, was a symbol of Russification, with the Maiden of Finland defending the law against the Russian eagle.
Finland was also among the countries that regained their freedom in the wake of the Great War and Russian Revolution. When the Tsar was overthrown, the Finnish Parliament convened. It was elected in 1916 and had a slim socialist majority - 103 of 200 representatives - but it had never been summoned. The new Russian government initiated a more liberal policy over the Finns, but when they elected to transfer the Tsar's powers to the parliament, it was dissolved by Kerenskij; the labor movement answered by pulling their representatives out of the government, which had 6 social democratic and 6 bourgeoises. The new parliamentary election was called in October of 1917 and gave a bourgeois majority with 108 representatives, meanwhile, a situation had developed that brought the country to the edge of civil war. The radical wing of the labor movement was bitter that the bourgeois forces had gained parliamentary power, an economical crisis created much need in many homes, the Bolshevik coup d'etat in November emboldened the revolutionary spirit, and both camps armed and prepared for a possible clash by organizing "red" and "white" guards.
White machine gun teams.
On the 6th of December, the parliament issued a declaration of independence, and on New Year's Eve, the Soviet government affirmed independent Finland. The tension between Finns, however, only grew; the "Reds" cooperated in several places with revolutionary soldiers and sailors in the Russian garrisons scattering the country, and both during a general strike in November and later assassinations and other acts of violence ensued, that spurred great resentment on the bourgeoise side. The government, under the leadership of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, organized volunteer shooting clubs in Österbotten under the leadership of Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, a general that during the Tsarist period had made his career in the Russian Army. Night to the 28th of January the socialists seized power by a coup in Helsinki and created a Council of People's Commissars under the helm of the party's leader Kullervo Manner. The Reds soon got power in the southern part of the country, where they were militarily strong, but Mannerheim's White that now advanced from Österbotte, steadily grew, and they had more competent leadership. A significant number of former Tsarist officers reported for duty in the White Guards, Sweden there was also an influx of a not insignificant number of officers From Germany Finnish jägers returned home, students and farmhands who after the declaration of war went to Germany to gain military education and sought to liberate Finland from Russia, they had also participated on the eastern front. They now joined forces with Mannerheim. From Germany, also came major supplies of weapons and ammunition, while the Reds got their weapons and munitions from Russian depots.
Tampere in the wake of the battle.
It developed into a bloody and gruesome civil war, hate and bitterness were ripe on both sides. When March turned to April in 1918 Mannerheim's forces won decisively during the Battle of Tampere, and around the same time, a German division made landfall in Hangö. It occupied Helsinki on the 13th of April. During April and May, the last remaining Red forces were defeated. Svinhufvud became Regent, and a German Prince, Fredrik Karl of Hessen, was in October elected King. Nevertheless, he would never ascend to the throne, because soon thereafter Germany broke apart, and Mannerheim, who had always opposed close cooperation with the Germans, relieved Svinhufvud as regent. In July a new Finnish constitution was proclaimed, which made the country a republic, and later that month the liberal politician professor Kaarlo Ståhlberg was elected President. With the peace of Dorpat, in October 1920 Finland reclaimed their historical borders to Russia, except Petsamo in the north, leading to Finland gaining an ice port. The question of the Åland Islands was first determined in the League of Nations in 1921; by a plebiscite, the country almost unanimously voted for union with Sweden, but the islands remained part of Finland, at the same time it was decided they would remain a demilitarized zone.
Portrait of General, friherre Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, by Ero Järnefelt. Mannerheim made a brilliant career in the Russian army and had on several occasions distinguished himself during the Great War. After the revolutions of 1917, he turned home to Finland, where he became commander in chief of the White forces during the civil war. He was regent from 1918-1919, men were defeated by Kaarlo Ståhlberg during the Presidential election, and withdrew to privacy.
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