It is true, as Pipes and Davies have both argued, that the Bolsheviks viewed the invasion of Poland as a likely catalyst to the revolution not just in Poland but throughout Europe. Following the Red Army to Warsaw was a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee led by Dzerzhinsky, which would hand over power to the Communists once it arrived in the Polish capital. This was the height of the Bolsheviks’ optimism in the exportability of Communism. Their expectations had been raised by the Spartacist Revolt in Berlin and the short-lived Soviet Republics in Hungary and Bavaria during 1919. In that spring, when the Comintern was formed, Zinoviev had predicted that ‘in a year the whole of Europe will be Communist’. There was a time, he later admitted, when ‘we had thought that only a few days or even hours remained before the inevitable revolutionary uprising’. By the summer of 1920 the Comintern had spread its influence throughout the capitals of Europe. Hardly a month went by without some delegation of Western socialists arriving in Russia to inspect and report back on the Great Experiment. Moscow was turned into one vast Potemkin village, with happy groups of workers and lavish banquets laid on for these naive foreign dignitaries, so that they went home full of praise. The Second Congress of the Comintern, which met in Moscow at the height of the advance towards Warsaw, aimed to create a single European Communist Party under Moscow’s guidance. The mood of the Congress was expectant. Every day the delegates followed the movement of the Red Army on a great map which was hung on the wall of the Congress hall. Lenin, who had insisted on the invasion of Poland against the advice of both Trotsky and Stalin, was convinced that the European revolution was just around the corner. It was inevitable, in his dogmatic Marxist view, that every other country should reach its October. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 was a ‘German Kornilov affair’; Estonia was ‘passing through its Kerensky period’; while Britain, with its Councils of Action, was in ‘its period of Dual Power’.80
There is no doubt that Lenin’s insistence that every other country should follow Russia’s road was symptomatic of a general Bolshevik imperiousness. It was that mixture of Russian nationalism and Communist internationalism which later came to characterize the whole dogmatic tone of Soviet foreign policy. The Bolsheviks boasted that Russia led the world when it came to making revolutions and assumed that all foreign Communists should be made to toe the Moscow line. That was certainly the essence of the Comintern Congress and its ‘21 Conditions’ for admission to the new International. The Comintern was a Bolshevik Empire.
