There was no clean dividing line between war and peace. Hostilities between the new Russia and Germany, Austria and Turkey were formally ended in December 1917 by the armistice of Brest-Litovsk and that of Erzincan, but German forces stayed on to occupy Ukraine. Then, when Germany and its allies themselves capitulated late in 1918, Allied troops occupied Murmansk in the far north, and set up camps in southern Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East, where a large Japanese force operated until 1922. A bitter, chaotic civil war between Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and anti-Bolshevik ‘Whites’ had been waged since 1918 and was to continue into 1920, while, in a desperate attempt to link up with Marxist insurgents in Germany, the new regime also fought a losing war with the reconstituted state of Poland. Russia was engaged in total war for six years, not three, and when hostilities eventually petered out the country was bankrupt and ravaged, its people exhausted. No other power in modern times except, perhaps, for Germany in 1945 has presented so many scenes of desolation.
When Lenin and his supporters replaced the Provisional Government in the old imperial capital and occupied governmental posts, they found them to be only the shell of an imperial system in an advanced state of decomposition. These circumstances, as well as his innate distrust - a characteristic of conspirators - persuaded the new leader to use his small but disciplined Bolshevik Party to monitor government agencies at every level and to undertake executive tasks. The Party also enforced his ideas of the politically correct, for Lenin set the highest value on ideology. Lenin had never imagined that his Bolsheviks could survive in power except as part of an international Marxist revolution, or at least without a revolution in Germany which would then come to his aid. Events were eventually to show that even this hope was futile. Not until December 1924 was the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ to be proclaimed and the Empire reconstituted in the guise of a free association of socialist states, though by then Lenin was dead.
Hard experience and practical necessity slowly eroded parts of the theoretical Marxist model with which the Bolsheviks had set out. Indeed, in some respects the new regime came to bear a startling resemblance to its tsarist predecessor. As the American correspondent of the
The process had begun with the need for the new regime to secure itself against its competitors, as any regime must do. Recognizing this, Lenin created a new security agency to guard the Revolution, appointing a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinskii, to run it. Known as the Cheka, this was the forerunner of the KGB. It maintained a surveillance system which kept every foreigner and suspected ‘class enemy’ in its sights and set up detention camps, interrogation centres and all the other apparatus needed by an efficient secret police service. Given the war conditions that prevailed when it was established and the regime’s vulnerability in its early years, the Cheka’s zeal and cruelties were hardly surprising, but the characteristics became ingrained.
In March 1921 a serious armed rising was mounted by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, who were more radical even than the Bolsheviks. As under the old regime, there were recurring peasant disturbances, in particular a huge one in the province of Tambov, a regular scene of large-scale rural protests in tsarist times. It was in suppressing these efficiently that a former lieutenant in the imperial army, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, commended himself to the new regime. A massive emigration of the old elite was still in progress; most of the officer corps gravitated to the anti-Bolshevik Whites, but a surprising number of them stayed on to serve the Reds. In fact the new Red Army employed no fewer than 75,000 former tsarist officers, including 800 of general rank.
Inertia was the principal reason. Many opted to keep their jobs rather than concern themselves too much with the regime. Others felt that any firm government, even a Bolshevik one, was preferable to anarchy; and straightforward patriotism was a factor too. As the celebrated General Brusilov, hero of the successful offensive against Austria-Hungary in 1916, confessed:
