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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, I

The history of Communism as a practical movement begins with a single man: Vladimir Ilich Lenin. The Russian Marxist movement preceded Lenin by two decades, but it was Lenin who split off a militant faction from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and forged it into a potent weapon for totalitarian revolution. Totalitarian tendencies were veritably omnipresent in the entire Russian Marxist movement - in not only the Leninists, or "Bolsheviks," but also in his Menshevik opponents. As the 1903 party program of the R.S.D.L.P. - written by Plekhanov, a Menshevik who harshly criticized Lenin - explains, "As essential precondition for this social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the conquest by the proletariat of such political power as will enable it to quell all opposition by exploiters." But while the totalitarian impulse permeated the Russian Marxist movement, it was Lenin who gave this tendencies a rigorous theoretical foundation upon which he always acted with perfect consistency.

  Lenin's Theoretical Innovations

Lenin accepted most of Marx's thought without alteration. He prided himself upon his Marxist orthodoxy, attacking any new idea that struck him as heretical. But probably his greatest hatred was reserved for the so-called Revisionism of Bernstein and other avant-garde socialist intellectuals who admitted, among other things, that contrary to Marx the absolute living standard of workers had vastly improved under capitalism.

But for all of his rage against Revisionism, Lenin's theoretical innovations begin by accepting the Revisionist observation that the condition of the proletariat had improved. But while the Revisionists tended to see this as proof that Marx's economics was unsound, Lenin offered an alternative explanation: the workers whose living conditions had improved were being "bribed" by capitalists who made up their losses by further tightening their grip on the hapless native workers of Europe's colonies. As Franz Borkenau explains, Lenin argued that World War I was...

...an "imperialistic" war, which meant a war by which the bourgeoisie of the big powers aimed at securing monopolistic, colonial, and semi-colonial markets for their export trade and their capital export, and cheap raw materials... But this very imperialism, by providing colonial "extra-profits" for the bourgeoisie, put it in a position to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat; these strata, so bribed, naturally behave as "traitors." (World Communism)

Marx was not really mistaken, but simply underestimated the duplicity of the bourgeoisie. But Lenin went one step further, and argued that even if they were not being "bribed," workers by themselves would never initiate the socialist revolution. As Richard Pipes explains, "The longer he observed the behavior of workers in and out of Russia, the more compelling was the conclusion, entirely contrary to the fundamental premise of Marxism, that labor (the "proletariat") was not a revolutionary class at all: left to itself, it would rather settle for a larger share of the capitalists' profits than overthrow capitalism... In a seminal article published at the end of 1900, Lenin uttered the unthinkable: 'the labor movement, separated from Social-Democracy... inevitably turns bourgeois.'" (The Russian Revolution) As Lenin put it in his What is To Be Done?, "The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade union consciousness."

If the working class by itself develops mere "trade union consciousness," then how can mankind reach the final stop on the March of History - namely, Communism? Lenin's answer was that this could only be accomplished with the firm guidance of professional revolutionaries who would be a combination of sages and generals of the proletariat. As Paul Johnson explains:

[Lenin's] entire life was spent among the members of his own sub-class, the bourgeois intelligentsia, which he saw as a uniquely privileged priesthood, endowed with a special gnosis and chosen by History for a decisive role. Socialism, he wrote quoting Karl Kautsky, was the product of "profound scientific knowledge... The vehicle of [this] science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia: contemporary socialism was born in the heads of individual members of this class. (Modern Times)

But if the intellectuals guide the workers, who guides the intellectuals? That, Lenin answered, is to be done by a rigidly hierarchical, strictly disciplined Party - headed by himself. As Lenin continued to develop his tactical views, it became clear that not only would the party lead the proletariat to victory, but would also hold the reins of power for the proletariat after victory was achieved. Leon Trotsky, though initially a critic of Lenin, eventually became his enthusiastic supporter; he explained their doctrine thusly:

In the composition of [the proletariat] there enter various elements, heterogeneous moods, different levels of development. Yet the dictatorship pre-supposes unity of will, unity of direction, unity of action. By what other path can it be attained? The revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat presupposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of a party, with a clear program of action and a faultless internal discipline. (The Defense of Terrorism)

Lenin conspicuously failed to elaborate upon the great void in Marxist theory: to wit, precisely what would "socialism" be? Marx had repeatedly declared it "unscientific" to specify - a clever trick for uniting quarreling socialists, but hardly intellectually satisfying. Lenin scarcely advanced further than this when he seized power: "All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers... All that is required is that they should work equally, should regularly do their share of the work, and should receive equal pay. The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic." (State and Revolution) But Lenin combined simple-minded programs with a calculating cynicism. For whatever policies he might advocate, there was but one target in his sights, as he plainly states: "The point of the uprising is the seizure of power; afterwards we will see what we can do with it."

Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, II

  Planning for Leninism: Forging the Vanguard Party

Once Lenin figured out his organization strategy, he had to put it into practice. This he accomplished in a series of maneuvers within the R.S.D.L.P. At the 1903 party congress, Lenin lost a battle over the definition of party membership (Lenin's opponent, Martov, proposed a marginally less hierarchical party structure). But Lenin managed to turn this to his advantage: "But then a fortuitous incident altered the balance of forces. When the Bund and the Workers' Cause representatives withdrew from the congress because their parties were denied any independence within the structure of the R.S.D.L.P., Lenin's group found itself in the majority. From the resulting distribution of forces derive the names of the two rival factions in the R.S.D.L.P.: the Mensheviks, (i.e., members of the minority) and the Bolsheviks (i.e., members of the majority)." (Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements) This division gave Lenin's faction its name, and marked a widening division among the Russian Marxists between those who followed Lenin, and those who did not.

Lenin's next step was to split the party. In 1910, the central committee of the R.S.D.L.P. met in London; attempting to build bridges to fellow travelers, the London congress voted to offer three seats on the central committee to Lenin's hated enemies, the reformist "Liquidators" (as Lenin dubbed them). As Landauer explains:

Lenin's reaction to this effort at unity... was to split the organization and set up his faction as the party. He assembled a small conference of his followers at Prague in January, 1912. It was attended by only fourteen voting delegates, yet this conference proclaimed itself the supreme organ of the party and as such elected a new central committee of six members (including Lenin, Zinoviev, Orjonikidze), amended the party statutes, and passed a resolution expelling the Liquidators. Henceforth, the Bolsheviks no longer considered themselves a faction in the party; they had arrogated to themselves the dignity and the powers of the party. As it happened, events would legitimize their presumptions. (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

Lenin now had an iron grip on what Paul Johnson aptly calls "a small organization of intellectual and sub-intellectual desperadoes, which he could completely dominate." (Modern Times) In other times and places, control of such a band would hardly have sufficed for a small gangland rumble, but as fortune would have it, Lenin had hit upon the right formula for his peculiar historical moment.

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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, III

  The Russian Revolution: March, 1917

World War I broke out in 1914. Lenin spent the war years in exile, brooding over how carry out his slogan: "Turn the imperialistic war into civil war." His antipathy towards the rest of the European socialist movement turned into hatred when, contrary to their internationalist pledges, the socialists of almost every belligerent country loyally voted to support the war efforts of their respective nations. At the same time, this left disaffected anti-war wings of the European socialist parties who would become a fruitful pool of recruits for the Bolsheviks.

Lenin and most of his associates either lived in foreign exile in neutral countries, or languished in the Czar's Siberian prisons. Few of them were present to even participate in, let alone lead, the first Russian Revolution which occurred in March of 1917. The March revolution forced the Czar to abdicate, established freedom of the press, and granted a blanket amnesty to political prisoners in Siberia - including terrorists. A much freer Russia seemed to be on the horizon. But ironically, liberalization inadvertently summoned back to Russia a small army of Bolsheviks from the far corners of the planet, often (as in Lenin's case) with transportation paid by the German Kaiser:

After the Czar's abdication, power passed to a Provisional Government appointed by a temporary committee of the Duma, which proposed to share power to some extent with councils of workers and soldiers known as "soviets." Following a brief and chaotic period of fairly democratic procedures, a mixed body of socialist intellectuals known as the Ispolkom secured the right to "represent" the soviets. The democratic credentials of the soviets were highly imperfect to begin with: peasants - the overwhelming majority of the Russian population - had virtually no say, and soldiers were grossly over-represented. The Ispolkom's assumption of power turned this highly imperfect democracy into an intellectuals' oligarchy. As Pipes explains, the Ispolkom "was not representative of the workers and soldiers, for its members were not elected by the Soviet but, as in 1905, nominated by the socialist parties. Members of the Ispolkom represented not workers and soldiers but their respective party organizations, and could be replaced at any time by others of these parties." In short, "Rather than serving as the executive organ of the Soviet, therefore, the Ispolkom was a coordinating body of socialist parties, superimposed on the Soviet and speaking in its name." (The Russian Revolution)

In sum, the abdication of the Czar left power somewhere in the hands of the Provisional Government and the Ispolkom, but no one knew quite where. This confused structure not only left the new government vulnerable to manipulation by tiny minorities claiming to speak for millions of people who had never heard of them; it also invited strong-willed factions with guns to try their hand at a coup d'etat. To add to these problems, leadership fell into the hands of one Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist with the foresight and resolve of Hamlet.

But these structural problems would probably have not been terminal if Kerensky and the Provisional Government had the common sense to make a separate peace with the Germans. They did not. With bravado, they swore to fight on, earning the enmity of soldiers dying at the front, peasants forced to turn over their grain at below-market prices, and city dwellers wanting for food. Energy and hope which should have been spent laying the groundwork for prosperity and freedom was instead wasted upon continuing the hopeless struggle against the Kaiser. And while the Provisional Government focused on the foreign invader, the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership prepared to seize power by dominating the soviets, violent action, or both. As Lenin explained his position:

No support to the Provisional Government; exposure of the utter falsity of its promises... unmasking, instead of admitting, the illusion-breeding "demand" that this government, a government of capitalists, cease being imperialistic. (April Theses)

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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, IV

  The Russian Coup d'Etat: November, 1917

The indecisive Kerensky, already minister of war and navy, became Prime Minister soon after the first failed Leninist coup. His response to the putsch was, strangely, to alienate his military supporters (Pipes in particular argues forcefully that Kornilov and other military figures jailed by Kerensky were not in fact plotting against him) while thwarting any serious effort to neutralize the Bolsheviks. As Pipes notes, Kerensky "even deprived the Military Staff of the authority to arrest Bolsheviks and forbade it to confiscate weapons found in their possession. As the end of July, he looked the other way as the Bolsheviks held their Sixth Party Congress in Petrograd." Kerensky soon ordered the release of all but a few of the Bolsheviks from prison, including Trotsky, so that by October 10 (old calendar) "all but twenty-seven Bolsheviks were at liberty and preparing for the next coup."(The Russian Revolution) Largely under Trotsky's control due to Lenin's absence, the Bolsheviks intensified their manipulation of the soviets; upon winning control of the Moscow and Petrograd soviets, they set up their own national soviet organization, even though on the national level the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were still the dominant parties. The Bolsheviks cleverly split off a faction of the Social Revolutionaries, known henceforth as the "Left SRs," which enabled them to keep up the pretense of sharing power with other socialist parties.

The next step was for the Bolsheviks to convene a the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Just as Lenin split off his followers from the R.S.D.L.P. and declared his faction to be the "real" party, so too did Lenin now split off his followers in the soviets and declare them to be the "real" national council of soviets - even though the Mensheviks and SRs still had a large majority on the national level. After bargaining for a few concessions, the original Ispolkom legitimized the Second Congress by agreeing to participate. This was a fatal error, as Pipes observes:

Although aware of what the Bolsheviks had in mind, the Ispolkom gave them what they wanted: a hand-picked body, filled with their adherents and allies, which was certain to legitimize a Bolshevik power seizure. (The Russian Revolution)

Lenin now secretly returned to Petrograd, ensuring that his followers would exert their best efforts to seize power. The night before their hand-picked Second Congress was to meet, on October 24 (old calendar) Leninist cadres forcibly seized control of all the power centers in Petrograd: railroads, mail, phones, banks, bridges. Their early efforts to take the Winter Palace and arrest the Provisional Government were however thwarted by loyal troops. Lenin and Trotsky had planned to open the Second Congress only after the Winter Palace was under their control, but these difficulties put them in an awkward situation. Unfazed, Trotsky simply opened the Second Congress with the announcement that the Provisional Government had been dismissed. Lenin arrived at the Congress to proclaim the "worldwide socialist revolution." Suitably packed with loyal Bolsheviks, the Second Congress voted in a new 15-member Provisional Government or "Sovnarkom" composed exclusively of Bolsheviks, along with a new Iskolpom of 62 Bolsheviks and 29 Left SRs out of 101 members. The Winter Palace fell shortly thereafter, and part of the Provisional Government was arrested. In other urban centers, similar coups put Lenin's followers firmly in charge, bolstered by their Left SR allies, with a window dressing of other parties to keep up appearances.

Lenin and Trotsky now had the upper hand, but their triumph was incomplete. Their gerrymandered Provisional Government was supposed to reign only until new elections to the Constituent Assembly were held. Lenin's optimism led him to permit these national elections, which were relatively free and representative of the entire Russian population. While the Bolsheviks won in Petrograd and Moscow, and had particularly strong support from soldiers, the elections made it clear that at best the Bolsheviks had the support of only a minority of the population - even though they had been in charge of the central government for a month!

This was a crushing defeat for Lenin. But while only a quarter of the voters cast their votes for the Bolsheviks, Lenin's followers had the determination and discipline that their opponents lacked. The Leninists abruptly changed their position, declaring that the Constituent Assembly elections did not represent the will of the people. They banned the Kadets (which, like the Bolsheviks, had a relatively strong following in the urban centers), dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and pulled their standard trick: forming a packed parallel assembly and declaring it to the be "the" assembly. As Pipes explains, in early January...

[T]he Bolsheviks opened their counter-Assembly, labeled "Third Congress of Soviets." Here no one could obstruct them because they had reserved for themselves and the Left SRs 94 percent of the seats, more than three times what they were entitled to, judging by the results of the Constituent Assembly. The little left over their allocated to the opposition socialists - just enough to have a target for abuse and ridicule. The congress duly passed all the measures submitted to it by the government spokesmen, including the "Declaration of Rights." Russia became a "Federation of Soviet Republics," to be known as the "Russian Soviet Socialist Republic," which name she retained until 1924, when she was renamed "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." The congress acknowledged the Sovnarkom as the country's legitimate government, removing from its name the adjective "provisional." It also approved the principle of universal labor obligation.

As Orwell wrote in 1984, "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." The first Communist state had arrived.

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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, V

  The First Communist Dictatorship

Lenin had promised "Peace, Land, and Bread." After several false starts, the Bolsheviks successfully negotiated a separate peace with the Germans, the famous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Ratified in March, 1918, Lenin ceded the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the Ukraine to the Germans. This amounted to surrendering over 25% of Russia's population. This removed the external threat to the Bolshevik regime; and since Lenin anticipated revolution in Europe and in any case planned to break the treaty after consolidating his regime, there was much sense in his claim that "To obtain an armistice now means to conquer the whole world." Lenin's Left SR allies objected so violently to Brest-Litovsk that they left the coalition government; but by this point, they had outlived their usefulness anyway. At the Seventh Party Congress the Bolsheviks also changed their official name to the Russian Communist Party, and it was as "Communists" that the world would henceforth know them and their adherents around the world.

(During the negotiations, British, French, and American forces did occupy a few Russian ports, but it should be noted that to some extent the Allies were invited by the Bolsheviks in order to strengthen their bargaining position against the Germans. The Allies, blind to the long-term threat that Lenin posed, focused almost entirely on getting Lenin to get back into the war against the Germans. It was also quite easy for Lenin to deliver land to the peasants. They had been seizing and dividing up large estates for almost a year before Lenin legally recognized this accomplished fact. What the peasants did not realize was that just as Lenin planned to dispose of Brest-Litovsk at the first opportunity, so too did he plan to nationalize the peasants' land as soon as he could get away with it.

Lenin's last promise of bread was the hardest to deliver. The Provisional Government, barely more literate in economics than Lenin, had imposed a price ceiling on food, resulting, as any "bourgeois" economist could have told them, in severe shortages of food in the cities. Arguably this hurt the Provisional Government as much as its failure to sign a separate peace with the Germans; for the price ceiling angered both peasants, forced to sell their grain for a pittance, and workers, unable to obtain food at any price. Lenin merely intensified the brutality of enforcement of the price controls on food; rather than starve in the cities, large percentages of the urban population returned to their family farms in the country. (In the end, even this desperate move would not save many of them from starvation).

Draconian enforcement of price controls was merely one of a plethora of tasks entrusted to the backbone of Lenin's new regime: the secret police, or Cheka, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its nucleus was Trotsky's goon squad from the Petrograd Soviet, which almost immediately became an official organ of the government after the coup. Its rate of growth was fantastic: "The Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 250,000 full-time agents." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times) Its powers were vast: now only was the Cheka judge, jury, and executioner, but it acknowledged no law to guide its actions, only "the dictates of revolutionary conscience." Its methods were savage: summary shooting, concentration camps, and forced labor were its three basic weapons. And its potential victims, the "enemies of the people" it was instructed to hunt down, were countless. As the high-ranking Chekist Latsis explained:

The Extraordinary Commission is neither an investigating body nor a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home front of a civil war... We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.

Or as Zinoviev, another high-ranking Bolshevik put it, "We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated." As Paul Johnson observes, "There is no essential moral difference between class-warfare and race-warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the modern practice of genocide was born." (Modern Times)

The work of the Cheka, Russia soon learned, was never done. Censorship was quickly imposed, and it was up to the Cheka to confiscate the literature of dissident workers: "[O]n 17 November the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the regime..." (Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Workers were re-forming independent soviets; the Cheka broke them up. Independent newspapers criticized Lenin's government; the Cheka closed them down, until the Bolshevik-controlled Pravda and Izvestia had a monopoly on the supply of news. As Shapiro notes, "The refusal to come to terms with the socialists and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker or peasant, who opposed bolshevik rule." (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union)

The Cheka soon turned to "taking hostages"; i.e., arresting people who they guessed had anti-Bolshevik feelings, and shooting them if their demands were not met or their decrees disobeyed. For example, Lenin's government might decree that the peasants in a certain region must deliver food or timber to the government; if the government's demands were not met, they would shoot some hostages. Lenin himself gave the order to...

[D]esignate in every district (designate, do not seize) hostages, by name, from among kulaks, rich men, and exploiters, whom you are to charge with responsibility for collection and delivery to assigned stations or grain-collection points and for turning over to the authorities of all the surplus grain without exception.

The hostages are answerable with their lives for the accurate and prompt payment of the contribution. (quoted in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution

While initially the Cheka was mainly concerned with crushing direct political threats to the regime, it soon began a desperate attempt to impose Lenin's half-baked economic policies on the country. Price maxima were combined with unrestrained printing-press inflationary finance. Businesses and banks were chaotically nationalized. Decrees imposed the "universal labor obligation," which required anyone not currently employed to report to the government to receive their work assignment. And like the Russian governments before it, Lenin's imposed conscription to raise armies - a measure particularly resented by the peasants who thought that Lenin's regime had ended their wartime suffering.

Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, took Communist tyranny to new heights. But Stalin was not the corrupter of the noble work of a great lover of human freedom. Communism meant tyranny from its inception, and Lenin and Trotsky were the vanguard of that tyranny. Whenever moral scruples stayed the hand of his followers, Lenin urged them to cast "bourgeois morality" aside. As the great democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer concluded, "This totalitarian form of government took a long time to develop and Lenin did not live to see its completion, but he was its author." (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VI

·  The Russian Civil War and the Russo-Polish War

The Bolsheviks soon moved their capital from Petrograd to Moscow, surrounding themselves with bodyguards. They knew that their policies were sure to alienate much of the population. Those who hated Lenin's regime scanned the political landscape for a savior. But no savior was available, only several desperate and vaguely monarchist "White" armies. Once again, Lenin's disciplined vanguard party proved itself able to defeat its confused and divided opponents, in a sequence of bloody battles known as the Russian Civil War.

The first opponents of Lenin's regime to take up arms were the Cossacks in the south of Russia. While their will to fight the Bolsheviks was great, they had a fatal weakness, as Landauer explains: "Although the Cossacks were dangerous enemies because of their highly developed military qualities, in political matters their scope was utterly limited. They had no common goal except the defense of their property and they failed to understand that the success of this defense depended on the annihilation of the Soviet regime in all Russia, and not merely on local victories." (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements) A string of would-be supreme generals tried to bring the Cossacks and other anti- Bolshevik forces in southern Russia under a common banner. The first was General Michael Alexeyev, Kerensky's former chief of staff. Due to illness, Alexeyev was soon replaced by General Kornilov. Kornilov led the so-called White forces for a couple of months, but had the bad luck to die in battle. One General Anton Denikin assumed command of the Cossack forces, in an uneasy alliance with the pro-German General Krasnov.

The Denikin and Krasnov forces were no significant threat to Lenin's regime until the summer of 1918, when Trotsky provoked a bizarre international incident. A large army of Czech prisoners of war had been permitted by Kerensky's government to form units to fight the Central Powers. The plan was to transport the new Czech army by railroad across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, and then sail them to France. Although the Czech units were in fact friendly to the Bolshevik cause, Trotsky strangely decided to halt the rail progress of the Czech army and instead ordered the Czechs to "join the Red Army to be pressed into 'labor battalions' - that is, become part of the Bolshevik compulsory labor force. Those who disobeyed were to be confined to concentration camps." (Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution) The Czechs resisted with force, seizing much of the rail system and emboldening the scattered Russian anti-Communists. Amidst this disorder, the Bolsheviks former allies, the Left SRs failed at an attempt to seize power. Around this time token Allied forces arrived in the Arctic port cities of Murmansk and Archangel, while more substantial Japanese forces moved to occupy Russia's Pacific coast. (As mentioned earlier, Allied intervention has been seriously misrepresented in many accounts of the Russian Civil War.

Amidst this flurry, Trotsky forged the Red Army out of peasant conscripts, long-time Bolsheviks, and sympathetic ex-Czarist officers. With assistance from the Czechs, anti-Bolshevik forces captured Kazan and Samara (see map). A September, 1917 conference in Ufa tried to unify anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, but within two months one faction had arrested the other and control fell to one Admiral Kolchak. With this move the Kolchak forces alienated the Czechs and provoked anti-Bolshevik SRs to declare a two-front struggle against Reds and Whites alike. Meanwhile the Japanese threw their support to the Ataman Gregor Semenov, who operated a yet another anti-Bolshevik government around Vladivostok, while the Anarchist armies of Nestor Makhno fought Reds and Whites alike throughout the Ukraine.

Kolchak had a few early successes, capturing Perm in December of 1918, and advancing further to the Volga. But the Red Army's counter-attack re-took Perm by July of 1919. Meanwhile Denikin's forces in southern Russia won several major victories - by October they were 130 miles from Moscow. While Denikin advanced, anti-Bolshevik armies in the Baltic countries clashed with the Red Army. (Riga, the Latvian capital, fell to the Red Army in January, 1919, but with German assistance Latvians re-took Riga four months later). Baltic forces joined with Russian Whites under General Yudenich and marched to capture Petrograd. Trotsky's successful defense of Petrograd broke Yudenich's forces, leading the Baltic countries to sign a separate peace with the Bolsheviks in early 1920.

By now White forces everywhere were in retreat. Denikin's army was beaten back all of the way to the Crimea. Increasingly unpopular, Denikin resigned his command in favor of General Peter Wrangel. Kolchak's forces suffered severe defeats, and the Czech decision to evacuate (and hand Kolchak over to SRs for execution). The war seemed to be essentially at its conclusion. But the outbreak of war between Lenin's regime and the new nation of Poland gave the Whites one last hope.

Initially Polish successes were very impressive. Minsk and Kiev fell to Poland's armies. Misled by this turn of events, Wrangel's armies in the Crimea made a final offensive northwards. But the Red Army decisive beat back the Poles and drove into the heart of Poland. Now that their enemies had been beaten back, the Red Army began what Franz Borkenau called "the attempt to carry revolution into the West with Russian bayonets." As Borkenau elaborates:

Trotsky, in the gazette of his armoured train, wrote an article in which he claimed to see the Red Army, after defeating the Whites, conquer Europe and attack America. And Sinovjev, in number 1 of the Communist International, prophesied that within a year not only would all of Europe be a Soviet republic, but would already be forgetting that there had ever been a fight for it. (Franz Borkenau, World Communism)

One year later, the second meeting of the Comintern coincided with the Red Army's offensive into Poland. Zinoviev addressed the conference, and joked about his overly optimistic prediction:

"[P]erhaps we have been carried away; probably, in reality, it will need not one year but two or three years before all Europe is one Soviet republic. If you are so modest that one or two years' delay seems to you extraordinary bliss, we can only congratulate you for your moderation." (quoted in Franz Borkenau, World Communism)

Representatives of the Polish Communist Party, slightly more informed of real conditions in Poland, voiced the concern that the Polish proletariat was unlikely to take up arms to aid the Red Army's invasion. Trotsky too had doubts, but Lenin urged on the attack. Many attribute the failure of this invasion to the refusal of Joseph Stalin to cooperate with Tukachevsky. In any case, the Poles routed the Red Army in what has been often called "the Miracle of the Vistula." A Russo-Polish treaty soon followed, leaving the Red Army to mop up the remnants of their opponents. Baron Wrangel's forces were beaten back and evacuated from the Crimea.

Allied forces had long since abandoned their positions, but Japanese forces remained in along Russia's Pacific coast. In April, 1920 the Bolshevik Alexander Krasnoshchekov declared the establishment of an "independent" Far Eastern Republic based in Chita and claiming sovereignty over territory occupied by Japan. While Krasnoshchekov was plainly a Leninist puppet, he purported independence won the support of many wavering factions who might have resisted a frankly Communist regime. Japan withdrew from Vladivostok in late 1922; soon afterwards, the Red Army (not the army of the Far Eastern Republic) took Vladivostok. Four weeks later the Far Eastern Republic puppet voted to unite with the rest of Soviet Russia. As Landauer observes, "[T]he Bolsheviks knew only too well how valuable the relative freedom of Finland had been to Russian revolutionaries under the tsarist regime. Lenin and Trotsky were not willing to run the risk of letting opponents find a refuge in Eastern Siberia; hence that country was ruled by the same relentless methods which were used against all dissenters from communism in the rest of the Soviet Republic..." (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

As in most wars, the behavior and intentions of the various factions in the Russian Civil War ranged from bad to worse. The Whites have justly earned infamy for their anti-Jewish pogroms, mass executions of POWs, and innumerable other atrocities. But it should be pointed out that in most cases the Whites' brutality was rarely ordered from Denikin or Kolchak as official policy, but was instead largely the result of lower-level officers' initiatives. In contrast, the Communists' inhumanity was publicly ordered by the highest levels of Lenin's government. As Carl Landauer astutely points out:

Unlike their opponents, the Bolsheviks needed not only power to carry out the terror but also the arguments to defend it ideologically... One cannot imagine a White general writing an apology of terrorism in his spare time. Trotsky, in the midst of battles, wrote his booklet The Defence of Terrorism as a reply to Kautsky's attack upon Bolshevik methods. What would have been a waste of energy for one party was a necessity for the other...(European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

The war crimes of the Bolsheviks were numerous, and not nearly as well publicized as those of the Whites. Just as the Whites massacred large numbers of Jews, the Bolsheviks (apparently under Lenin's orders - see the documents in Richard Pipes The Unknown Lenin) were guilty of the mass extermination of the entire Don Cossack people - killing an estimated 700,000 out of around 1,000,000 of them. (This would prove to be only the first of several near-genocides of ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union). The Red Army showed especial brutality to surrendering Whites and civilians sympathetic to them. (Kolchak's armies and associated civilians suffered particularly awful treatment because the Allies made no effort to evacuate these refugees before departing, as they did with the Whites in the Crimea). In the train of the army followed the Cheka, eager to apply more systematic penalties for opposition to the Soviet state.

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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII

  "War Communism", the Red Terror, and Lenin's Famine

Almost immediately after they seized power, Lenin's Bolsheviks inaugurated an endless stream of economic decrees and policies. These proved to be disastrous, resulting in a horrific famine, depopulation of the cities, and an enormous decline in living standards. So unpopular were these policies that after they were finally altered in mid 1921, Lenin tried to re-write their history. It was at this point that the Bolsheviks economic policies from 1918-1921 were dubbed "War Communism," and declared to have been a temporary expedient forced upon Lenin's government by wartime conditions. In fact, so-called "War Communism" began before serious fighting erupted, and continued after the Whites had been decisively defeated. It was not a wartime expedient; it was the policy that Lenin wanted to pursue in war or peace. As Pipes explains, "War Communism as a whole was not a 'temporary measure' but an ambitious and as it turned out premature attempt to introduce full-blown communism." (The Russian Revolution) As noted earlier, Lenin's ideas on desirable economic policy were vague at best. So upon taking power, he looked around the world for inspiration; what caught his eye was the "War Socialism" of the German Kaiser. As Paul Johnson notes:

So one might say that the man who really inspired Soviet economic planning was Ludendorff. His "war socialism" certainly did not shrink from barbarism. It employed slave-labourers. In January 1918 Ludendorff broke a strike of 400,000 Berlin workers by drafting tens of thousands of them to the front in "labor battalions." Many of his methods were later to be revived and intensified by the Nazis. It would be difficult to think of a more evil model for a workers' state. Yet these were precisely the features of German "war socialism" Lenin most valued. (Modern Times)

The primary features of War Communism were:

• Uncontrolled inflationary printing press finance, ultimately leading to hyperinflation and nationwide reversion to barter
• Near universal nationalization of manufacturing; widespread nationalization of retailing
• Stringent price controls upon and forced requisitioning of agricultural products; state monopoly on grain purchases
• Forced labor for civilians as well as the military

The package fit together quite logically. The tax system had broken down, so the Bolsheviks just turned on the Czar's printing pressing to fund their activities. At the same time, the prices of most goods were fixed, so as the money supply increased without limit, the legal prices became less and less realistic. Rationing cards replaced rubles as the means of acquiring goods. But if money no longer bought goods, then what was the point of working? Hence, the imposition of compulsory labor.

The Bolsheviks' forced labor policies gave new life to the concept of irony. The men who had proclaimed themselves liberators of the workers and denounced the exploitation of labor suddenly discovered the joys of serfdom. Trotsky stood at the theoretical vanguard of the literal proponents of slavery: "It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nationwide economic plan." Initially the forced labor laws were applied to the (ex-)middle classes, but their application rapidly broadened to include not only workers and peasants but even minors. As Pipes explains:

By late 1918, it became common practice for the Bolshevik authorities to call up workers and specialists for state service exactly as they drafted recruits into the Red Army. The practice was for the government to announce that workers and technical specialists in a specified branch of the economy were "mobilized for military service" and subject to court- martial: those leaving jobs to which they had been assigned were treated as deserters... Efforts to organize industrial labor on the military model could not have worked well in view of the plethora of decrees on this subject, setting up ever new punishments for "labor deserters," ranging from publication of their names to confinement in concentration camps. (The Russian Revolution)

One would expect that the mere suggestion of compulsory labor, let alone its actual imposition, would have branded Lenin and Trotsky as demonic traitors to anyone who purported to care about the plight of workers. Ominously, it did not; Party intellectuals proclaimed the wonders of the new system. "Compulsory labour under capitalism, wrote Bukharin, was quite the reverse of compulsory labour under the dictatorship of the proletariat: the first was 'the enslavement of the working class,' the second the 'self- organization of the working class'." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times) At this point, the reluctance of Communists from Marx to Lenin to precisely explain their proposed policies takes on a new meaning. As the Russian emigre Ayn Rand put it: "Intellectuals? You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: they'll swallow anything." (Atlas Shrugged)

As the economy deteriorated, the Cheka waxed ever fatter. After an July 1918 revolt by SRs, the Cheka turned its guns on fellow socialists, executing 350 captured SR rebels. One month later, the SR Fanya Kaplan nearly succeeded in assassinating Lenin. Her noble effort unfortunately gave the Cheka the excuse to initiate the Red Terror, i.e., mass executions of people based not upon their actions but their class origins and beliefs. As Landauer explains, "The first conspicuous act of government-ordered reprisals on a large scale without regard for individual guilt came after the assassination of Michael Uritzky and the attempt on Lenin's life on August 30. These events were not in themselves apt to justify measures against the bourgeoisie, for the two assassins, Kenigiesser and Fania Kaplan, were both members of the Social Revolutionary party and therefore not "bourgeois." But the minds of the Soviet leaders were dominated by the theory that Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were tools of the "class enemy," and it appeared logical to the Bolsheviks to strike at the group which allegedly had inspired the assassination. Five hundred hostages were shot in reprisal in Petrograd alone by order of Zinoviev, the head of the local soviet. On September 5, the people's commissars officially legalized the red terror..." (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

From then on the Cheka's executions never ceased. The exact number murdered is usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the chaotic wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult. But execution was not the Cheka's only tool; it also pioneered the development of the modern slave labor (or "concentration") camp. Inmates were generally frankly treated as government-owned slaves, and used for the most demanding sorts of work - such as digging arctic canals - while receiving pitifully small rations. As Pipes explains, "Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to confinement in them were not only individuals but also 'categories of individuals' - that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration camps be erected for the 'bourgeoisie.' Living in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost." (The Russian Revolution) The number of people in these camps according to Pipes was about 50,000 prisoners in 1920 and 70,000 in 1923; many of these did not survive the inhuman conditions.

The mildest manifestation of the Red Terror was the official policy excluding "class enemies" entirely from the wartime rationing system; i.e., legally, it was often impossible for disfavored groups to even purchase food. As Landauer simply puts it: "As a consequence, the average "bourgeois" had only the choice between death and illegal activities." (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements) Bourgeoisie with valued technical training could usually get around these rules, but otherwise their plight - and the plight of their families - was bleak indeed, though naturally far better than the inmates of the slave labor camps.

But the greatest crime committed by Lenin's regime was the civil war the Soviet government waged against the peasantry, and the famine this war precipitated. The alliance of "the workers and peasants" was an ingenious slogan given the fact that almost everyone in Russia was a peasant. But it was a slogan that Lenin and his followers never had the slightest intention of following. They despised the peasants as ignorant "petty bourgeoisie" who stood in the way of collectivized agriculture. With one hand Lenin's regime legally recognized the peasants' land seizures, but with the other hand it demanded food at ever more unreasonable terms (in the end, unrestrained printing press finance plus price controls effectively required peasants to give their food away for free). "The law provided that all the grain that the producer had left over after satisfying his personal needs and providing for seed belonged to the state and had to be sold to its agencies at fixed prices." (Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution) The consequences were a perfect illustration of the principles of "bourgeois" economics: with ever stricter price controls, peasants opted not to sell their grain to the cities. This made life ever harder for urban workers, who fled back to the country in huge numbers - often city populations declined by over 50%. Rather than repeal its price controls, the Bolshevik regime scapegoated black marketeers and speculators, unleashing the Cheka upon them with orders to administer summary executions. This merely drove up black market prices.

So Lenin's government advanced to the next stage: sending the Cheka and the Red Army to seize grain directly from the peasant. This was ideologically justified by dubbing peasants who resisted grain as wealthy "kulaks," though rich and poor alike found themselves staring down the muzzles of the Cheka's guns. Once again, the resort to ever greater brutality did not bring the desired results. Minimal food was collected, and the peasants went into open revolt. Lenin, who in every other matter seemed to be the master of the temporary compromise, could not control his hatred of the resisting peasants. He ordered kulaks to be deprived of not only surplus grain, but even seed grain, while in his speeches he exhorted: "Merciless war against the kulaks! Death to them." Even as the Red Army battled Kolchak and Denikin, they waged a less visible civil war with the peasants. By most estimates several hundred thousand peasants were killed as a result of this so-called "Bread War" - as usual, the Red Army and the Cheka executed not only captured rebels, but often families, friends, or entire villages associated, however vaguely, with counter-revolution.

The peasants had numbers on their side, and many soldiers were reluctant to fight them, but the government's superior organization ultimately gave them victory over the peasants. But the victory was hollow, for after the fruit of their labor had been seized, farmers generally decided there was no point in growing a surplus. Moreover, since seed grain was often taken, many peasants were unable to grow surplus crops even if they wished. When the perverse incentives of price controls and expropriation were mixed with a drought, the result was one of the great disasters of the century: the Russian famine of 1921. Official Soviet reports admitted that fully 30 million Soviet citizens were in danger of death by starvation. The White forces shared little of the blame: as Pipes notes, the Civil War was essentially over by the beginning of 1920, but Lenin continued his harsh exploitation of the peasantry for yet another year. Moreover, the areas under White control had actually built up a food surplus. The horrific famine of 1921 was thus much less severe in 1920, because after the reconquest of the Ukraine and other White territories, the Reds shipped the Whites' grain captured grain north to Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities with less hunger but more political clout. Low estimates on the deaths from this famine are about 3 million; high estimates go up to 10 million - which would probably have been much higher if not for foreign relief efforts which Lenin had the good sense to permit. For perspective, the last severe famine in Russia hit in 1891-92, and cost about 400,000 lives.

Needless to say, Lenin had no plans to respect the freedom of religion. But until the famine, most of the persecution of religion appears to have been taken on local initiative. Most religious property was ordered expropriated, although in fact clergymen usually continued to occupy and use their church buildings. Parents lost the right to give their children religious education - although again, during the Civil War years, this does not seem to have been enforced. (Interestingly, while the state subsidies to the church greatly declined, the Orthodox Church under Lenin essentially remained a bureau of the state). Serious government persecution of the Orthodox Church began with the famine, which gave Lenin the chance to bring the Orthodox Church into line. He demanded that the Church hand over valuable relics to help famine victims (or so he said). The Church resisted, resulting in around 8000 executions of persons resisting the confiscation of relics. Similar but milder persecution began against Jews, Catholics, and to a lesser extent, Muslims. (These religions, however, had less to lose than the Orthodox Church, because they had no subsidies for the Bolsheviks to cut off).

Can Lenin and his associates be held morally culpable for the deaths of these millions of famine victims? If the famine were a natural catastrophe, this would be unreasonable. But the famine was largely man-made, the result of draconian price controls and requisitioning. Most of the evidence is that Lenin and his associates knew the probable results of their agricultural policies, but were willing to take the risk: according to Pipes, Lenin repeatedly said that he would sooner the whole nation die of hunger than allow free trade in grain. In short, Lenin and his comrades knew with substantial certainty that their policies would cause widespread death from starvation. Under any sensible definition of murder, this makes Lenin the murderer of millions.

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Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VIII

  Worldwide Communist Revolutions: Hungary, Germany, Mongolia...

Lenin was above all a master of the political bait-and-switch. "Peace, Land, and Bread" what he promised, but he only kept his promises when he found it convenient. The same would apply to his clever attack on "imperialism" and his proclamation of the "right of self-determination." These slogans won him temporary support when he needed it most; once total power was in his grip, no one would dare call accuse him of breaking his word. Thus in practice, "imperialism" meant non-Leninist imperialism and "self-determination" meant the right of all Soviet peoples to express their absolute agreement with Lenin in their native tongue.

While Lenin delivered brave speeches against imperialism, he was directing and encouraging Communist revolutions throughout Europe. All of these attempts to repeat Lenin's success story failed, but they reveal that the Bolsheviks' boasts of a Soviet Europe were not fantasy. It would take another world war before Communist imperialism would win major victories, but serious plans for worldwide revolution directed from Moscow were in existence by 1918.

The Communist revolution in Hungary had both the best chance for success and the closest direction from Moscow. The would-be dictator of the Hungarian Revolution was one Bela Kun, a POW released from the Czar's prison camp in Tomsk. Like many POWs in Russian camps, Kun was eager to hear the Bolsheviks' message and take it back to his homeland.

But few POWs had such an intimate relationship with the Bolshevik leadership. "Upon release from prison, he came to know Lenin in Petrograd. Lenin sent him in November 1918 to Budapest to found, with Soviet funds, the Hungarian Communist Party. Even though the Comintern was still in its formative stage, Bela Kun thus became one of its first agents." (Anthony Brown and Charles MacDonald, On a Field of Red) Kun was quickly arrested for fighting with the police, but when the socialists formed a new government, they released Kun and invited his Communist Party to merge with them. Negotiations "lasted only half an half, taking place in one of Budapest's chief prisons." (Franz Borkenau, World Communism) Kun and his socialist allies feigned intent to create a constitutional government, but almost immediately proclaimed a dictatorship of the proletariat with Kun as dictator on March 21, 1919. On the second day of the regime, the government decreed the nationalized almost all private property and announced that private commerce would be punished with the death penalty.

Kun thus tried to immediately implement a copy of War Communism; but he lacked Lenin's talent for writing bad checks to buy time. As Borkenau observes:

In Russia Kun had seen three things which were of primary importance for a Hungarian revolutionary: the agrarian revolution; Lenin's fierce fight against the "reformists"; and the peace negotiations with the Germans at Brest-Livotsk. From these three experiences Kun seems to have drawn the surprising principles that one must not give the land to the peasants; that one must make war at any price; and that, at the decisive moment, a revolutionary must form an alliance with the reformists. (World Communism)

While Kun terrorized Hungary, war threatened his new regime. Kun refused to compromise on the new Hungarian-Romanian border. The Romanians nearly captured Budapest, but were forced to retreat. Next the Czech army advanced upon Budapest; again, Kun's forces defeated them and took most of Slovakia. Kun next tried to spread the revolution to neighboring Austria. A Budapest lawyer, Ernst Bettelheim, had the approval and funding of the Comintern to set up an Austrian Communist Party. Bettelheim and his followers planned to seize control of the nerve centers of the government, while Kun sent the Red Hungarian army to the Austrian border (only two hours' march from Vienna), ready to invade to support their compatriots. The night before the planned rising, on June 14, 1919, however, the Austrian police arrested all of Austrian Communist leadership except for Bettelheim; a march of 4000 Communists to free them broke under police fire.

The Austrian revolution had been decapitated, so Kun returned his focus to his internal problems in Hungary. Like Lenin, Kun found that the peasants were unwilling give food to the cities for free. So Budapest was soon threatened with famine. The Hungarian equivalent of the Cheka tried using executions and hostages to squeeze food out of the peasants; this policy worked no better for Kun than it did for Lenin. Soon Kun faced revolts in both city and country. His Red Army was falling apart. A renewed offensive by the Romanians took Budapest, and in spite of Kun's pleas for aid, Lenin had no troops to spare. Kun did successfully negotiate safe passage for himself and most of his high command, but Communism would not return to Hungary until 1945.

Communist risings in Germany did not go nearly as far as Kun's in Hungary. But it is important to keep in mind that in chaotic post-war conditions, tiny and seemingly impotent movements like Lenin's on occasion won out. Communist revolutions easily crushed in their infancy could nevertheless spark reasonable fear in millions of people for decades to come. With the end of World War I, Communist-inspired power seizures were seen all over Germany. Most significant of these were the Spartacist Berlin rising, and the establishment of a Soviet republic in Bavaria.

The Spartacist rising was far less dependent upon Lenin's orders than the Bela Kun's takeover of Hungary. But the Bolsheviks were involved from the start. Lenin "dispatched a team of his most able revolutionaries to infiltrate Germany: Karl Radek, one of the most powerful men in the Comintern; Nikolai Bukharin, second-in-command of the Comintern; Christian Rakovsky, a Bulgarian who was a signatory at the founding of the Comintern; and a mysterious man called Ignatov, who probably was Alexander Shpigelglas, an official of the Cheka's Foreign Department who had a record of assassinations during the Terror.." (Anthony Brown and Charles MacDonald, On a Field of Red) Lenin's agents attended the first congress of the Communist Party of Germany, held in Berlin in December of 1918. There they urged the German far left to seize power from the moderate socialist Ebert government, explaining Lenin's view that a Communist Germany in close alliance with a Communist Russia would be invulnerable. But in Berlin, the Communists had independent leadership that the Russian guests had to win over or bypass: the long-time Marxist radicals Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was they who would actually lead the impending uprising.

Most historians have given Rosa Luxemburg inordinately favorable treatment, contrasting her love of democracy with Lenin's brutal dictatorship. Canonization is always easier for martyrs who die early in the crusade. But is Luxemburg's reputation deserved? Luxemburg attacked Lenin's authoritarianism in the early 1900's, but so did Trotsky - the future ideologist of the Red Terror. Moreover, when we look at Luxemburg's broader attack on Leninism, it becomes clear that her own dictatorial inclinations were quite pronounced. Luxemburg attacked Lenin for his deviations from orthodox Marxism on the questions of land and national self-determination. It was heresy to let the peasants keep private property in land, or to allow national minorities to secede. If Luxemburg was unwilling to make even these concessions, the blood required by her revolution could have made Lenin's pale in comparison.

In the realm of theory, then, Luxemberg frequently made Lenin seem a sober moderate. What about her practice? Most sources indicate that Luxemburg did not favor a Communist coup d'etat because she foresaw that it would fail. But once Liebknecht and her other compatriots seized the railroad stations, newspapers, and government buildings, Luxemburg took charge. Liebknecht announced that the current government of Germany had been dismissed and replaced by a provisional government composed of his Revolutionary Committee. But while Liebknecht issued these brave words, it was Luxemburg who jumped into the fray and began issuing concrete orders:

Rosa Luxemburg, she who had advised against revolution, was the only leader to act with vigor and enthusiasm. "Act!" she cried. "Disarm the counter-revolution, arm the masses, occupy all important positions. Act quickly! The revolution demands it!" (Anthony Brown and Charles MacDonald, On a Field of Red)

This "revolution" - in reality, a Lenin-style coup d'etat - petered out fairly quickly, although about 1200 people died during a week of street fighting. Luxemburg and Liebknecht went into hiding with a third comrade, Wilhelm Pieck. It was not long before the army tracked them down. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed shortly thereafter - and almost immediately became the beloved martyrs of the German Communists. But Wilhelm Pieck managed to elude escape - rising to world prominence in 1949 when he became dictator of East Germany. Yet ironically, the world remembers Luxemburg as a truly democratic socialist, rather than the godmother of one of the world's ugliest Communist despotisms.

A second Communist-inspired coup in Bavaria had far greater success. It began with the seizure of power by one Kurt Eisner. As usual, force was necessary: "a movement of war-tired and anti-Prussian peasant soldiers brought the local leader of the U.S.P., Kurt Eisner, into power" in November of 1918 (Franz Borkenau, World Communism). Elections held in January showed that Eisner's radical Independent had minimal popular support. Pressure was on Eisner to resign, and it appears that he would have were he not assassinated in late February. This soon brought the lunatic fringe into public view: the Independent poet Ernst Toller, who proclaimed a "dictatorship of love"; Gustav Landauer, an "anarchist" eager for a high political position in Soviet Munich; even a hastily-appointed foreign minister who declared war on the Papacy.

Toller, Landauer, and the others were not acting on orders from Moscow. The man with that distinction was one Eugene Toller, who received orders from the Comintern to seize power in Bavaria. Levine's Communists stayed aloof from Toller's antics until it appeared that troops loyal to the central government would put an end to Soviet Munich. Then Levine sent offers of help to Toller, condition upon obedience. Within three days of Toller's proclamation of a Soviet republic, Levine's Communists were firmly in power, started issuing frightening decrees, took hostages, and telegraphed Lenin: "We have the pleasure of informing you that the bogus Soviet Republic has collapsed and a real proletariat rule has been established in its place." But Levine's rule was only a little longer than Toller's. After a couple of weeks, loyalist troops were ready to take Munich back. Levine's military commander had 20 hostages shot, but this did not save his regime. On May 3, 1919, the Munich Soviet was crushed, and a month later, Levine was executed.

Loyalist troops created much sympathy for the Communists by killing about one thousand people upon taking Munich. Thus many came to remember Munich for its martyrs rather than for its experimentation with Leninist despotism.

Thus Leninist revolution failed in Hungary, Austria, and Germany. It also failed in parts of the former Russian Empire itself: in Finland and the Baltic countries, separatists defeated Communists and set up independent non-Communist governments. Communism seemed confined to a single country. But escaping world notice was the establishment of the world's second Communist dictatorship in the independent country of Mongolia.

Unlike the haphazard power seizures in Europe, the imposition of Soviet power upon Mongolia was carefully planned. First, a small number of Mongols were trained in Communist theory and practice in Moscow and Irkutsk. These Communist Mongols set up the First Congress of the Mongolian People's Party in Kyakhta, just north of the Mongolian border, and proclaimed a Provisional Revolution Government. Then the Mongolian Communists formed a minuscule Mongolian army. In March of 1921 this tiny force marched into Mongolia; following close behind was the Red Army, which guaranteed victory to what would have otherwise been the movement of a few hundred malcontents. The Red Army was now in Mongolia, and used standard techniques to seize total power under the guise of national self-determination. The Mongolian People's Republic would be the first Soviet satellite state. It would not be the last.