Bolshevik nationality policy also contributed to their success. Whereas most (especially patriotic Whites) sought to re-establish the empire, the Bolsheviks recognized the volatility of the nationality question and promised national self-determination—albeit, with the proviso that self-determination be subordinate to the interests of the proletariat. Despite the activities of the Commissariat of Nationalities (led by Stalin), the Bolsheviks actually could only abide and applaud the breakup of the empire. By mid-1918 independent states had arisen in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Finland, and Belorussia; a powerful pan-Islamic movement was sweeping through the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. However much Lenin wished to reconquer the lost territories, this consummate
The Bolshevik cause also benefited from the fractious disunity of their adversaries. They were indeed a motley group—radical socialists, anarchist peasants, moderate Kadets and Octobrists, and of course arch-conservative officers from the gentry. Ultimately the main adversary was the White officer corps, which tended to replicate the politics—and mistakes—of 1917. Thus they plainly despised moderate socialists, even in the cause against Bolsheviks. Moreover, White generals such as Kolchak, Iudenich, and Wrangel were miserable administrators and even worse politicians. That was particularly evident in the nationality question: though fighting amidst non-Russian peoples on the periphery, the Whites loudly proclaimed their goal of resurrecting ‘Great Russia’, with all the minority territories. Such nationalistic views, while typical of the officer corps (and indeed the centre and moderate parties in the Dumas and Provisional Government), were naturally opprobrious to aspiring national groups like the Cossacks.
Intervention by the allies, however much they might have loathed Bolshevism, had little military effect. It could hardly be otherwise: a momentous revolution in the vast Russian spaces could not be channelled, let alone halted or reversed, by the tiny tactical forces of the allied powers. Exhausted by four years of total war, fearful of domestic unrest, the allies provided some men and equipment, but lacked the clear purpose and persistence necessary to stay the course. Nor did they even share common goals. Under Winston Churchill’s leadership, Britain supplied the most money and equipment; its primary aim was to contain German power (and avert a German-Russian alliance) and to prevent Russian advances in Asia and the Near East. For its part, Japan landed troops for the simple purpose of acquiring territory in the eastern maritime provinces. Wilson dispatched American soldiers but eagerly seized on Soviet peace feelers, first at an abortive conference in Prinkipo in late 1918, later in a mission by William Bullitt and the writer Lincoln Steffens to Moscow in early 1919. In the end the allies, having denied unconditional support to the Whites, gradually withdrew from the conflict, having done little more than to reify the myth of hostile ‘imperialist aggression’ against the young socialist state.
War Communism
The civil war left a deep imprint on Bolshevik political culture. War made the Red Army the largest, most important institution in the new state: it absorbed vast resources and, to ensure political reliability, deliberately conscripted the most ‘class-conscious’ elements of the working class and party. As a result, the army not only represented a military force but also provided the formative experience for the first generation of Bolsheviks. Not surprisingly, Soviet Russia developed as a military-administrative state, the military idiom and norm permeating government, economy, and society. Civil war reinforced the ideology of class conflict that informed Bolshevik policy, not just propaganda, during these early years.
Of course, the party still embraced a broad spectrum of opinion and interests. Its radical, impatient wing demanded that socialism be constructed immediately, in a militant fashion. At the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 1918), ‘left-wing communists’ also hoped to ride the wave of history and export the revolution beyond Soviet borders. L. Kritsman, in an influential tract written during the civil war, codified the notion of militant and heroic communist state-building and adumbrated a coherent policy agenda of ‘War Communism’—proletarian and collectivist. Lewis Siegelbaum has demonstrated that this famous term has been used without analytical precision, and that a heady mixture of realism and utopian ideology actually shaped Bolshevik policy from mid-1918 to early 1921.
