Apart from their military encounters with the Whites, the Bolsheviks also had to contend with a front behind their own lines because of the appeal of rival socialist parties and because Bolshevik economic policies alienated much of the working class and drove the peasantry to rise up against the requisitioning of grain and related measures. Viewing October 1917 as a stage in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Menshevik Party refused to take part in an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks, but found their neutrality difficult to sustain when the White threat intensified. The party's political and ideological concessions to the Bolsheviks, however, damaged its identity, even its ideals, thus jeopardising its support among workers. Adopting hardline policies towards Right Menshevik critics opposed to accommodating the Bolsheviks, the Menshevik Central Committee disbanded certain local party organisations, and expelled members from others.[150] True, some Right SRs experienced a short-lived period of co-operation with the Bolsheviks during the White offensive of 1919, but for the most part they threatened the Soviet government with the possibility of forming a third front comprising all other socialist groups. Given the far-reaching opposition to Bolshevik rule by 1920, Mensheviks and SRs believed the Leninists would be forced to co-opt the Menshevik/SR programme or face defeat. This encouraged them, as well as anarchist groups, to step up their agitation against the Bolsheviks at the end of the year.
The activities of the rival socialist parties provided the frame for popular revolt. Recent studies underscore the vast scale of the crisis of early 1921, documenting workers' strikes and armed peasant rebellions in many locales.[151]Peasant discontent, which the Communists called the Green movement, and mass worker unrest convinced the party to replace its unpopular economic policies known, in retrospect, as War Communism - characterised by economic centralisation, nationalisation of industry and land and compulsory requisitioning of grain - with the New Economic Policy (NEP), which swapped the hated grain requisitioning with a tax in kind and restored some legal private economic activity. The necessity of this shift in policy was made clear when, in early March 1921, sailors of the Kronstadt naval fortress rose up against the Bolsheviks whom they had helped bring to power. Demanding the restoration of Soviet democracy without Communists, the sailors met with brutal repression. Although most historians view the Kronstadt uprising, worker disturbances, the Green movement and the introduction of the NEP as the last acts of the civil war, after which the party mopped up remaining pockets of opposition in the borderlands, the famine of 1921 marks the real conclusion to the conflict, for it helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power by robbing the population of initiative. Holding broad swaths of the country tightly in its grip until late 1923, the famine and related epidemic diseases took an estimated 5 million lives; countless more would have perished had it not been for foreign relief.
Moreover, the Bolshevik Party took advantage of mass starvation to end its stalemate with the Orthodox Church. Turning many believers against the new order, the Bolsheviks had forced through a separation of Church and state in 1917 and removed schools from Church supervision. Once famine hit hard, the party leadership promoted the cause of Orthodox clergy loyal to Soviet power, so-called red priests, or renovationists. They supported the party's determination to use Church valuables to finance famine relief, hoping thereby to strengthen their own position. Popular opposition to what soon amounted to a government confiscation of Church valuables, however, triggered violent confrontations. Viewing these as evidence of a growing conspiracy, party leaders allied with the renovationists. But this move was one of expedience, for 'the Politburo planned to discard them in the final stage of destroying the church'.17
The defeat of the Whites, the end of the war with Poland and famine made it possible for the Lenin government to focus on regaining breakaway territories in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Siberia and elsewhere, where issues of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, foreign intervention and differing levels of economic development and ways of life complicated local civil wars. Russians had comprised approximately 50 per cent of the tsarist empire's multinational population. At times tolerant, but increasingly contradictory and even repressive, tsarist nationality policies had given rise to numerous grievances among
17 Edward E. Roslof, RedPriests:Renovationism,Russian Orthodoxy, andRevolution, 1905-1946 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 39-73, quote on p. 72.
the non-Russian population. Yet only a minority of intellectuals in the outlying areas before 1914 championed the emergence of independent states. The situation in Poland and perhaps Finland was the exception to this generalisation. The Revolution of 1917, however, gave impetus to national movements in Ukraine and elsewhere.
As Marxists engaged in an international struggle on behalf of the interests of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks backed self-determination of nations. This policy contributed to the destabilisation of the Provisional Government, and also created problems for the Bolsheviks once they took power. In January 1918 Sovnarkom's Commissariat ofNationalities (Narkomnats) headed by Stalin confirmed the Soviet government's support for self-determination of the country's minorities, characterising the new state as a federation of Soviet republics. The first Soviet constitution of July 1918 reiterated these claims, without specifying the nature of federalism. The cost of survival, however, made it necessary to be pragmatic and flexible: Lenin made clear already in early 1918 that the interests of socialism were more important than the right of self-determination. The sober reality of ruling, disappointment over the failure of world revolution, fear of hostile border states that could serve as bases for new intervention and the Soviet state's inability to prevent the emergence of an independent Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, shaped emerging Soviet nationality politics.
Fostered by intellectuals and politicians, local nationalisms tended to develop into political movements with popular support in territories most affected by industrial development, whereas national consciousness arose more slowly where local nationalities had little presence in towns. Often, however, class and ethnic conflicts became entangled as these territories turned into major battlefields of the civil war and arenas of foreign intervention. The situation in regard to Ukraine illustrates these points. The Ukrainian authorities had demanded autonomy from the Provisional Government, and the Bolsheviks recognised Ukraine's independence at the end of 1917. But Ukraine's support of General Kaledin and the consequences of the short-lived Brest- Litovsk Peace with Germany dramatised the dangers of an unfriendly border state. Soon the activities of peasant rebel Nestor Makhno obscured the intertwining hostilities among Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, Germans and Poles, as Ukraine changed hands frequently. Under the black flag of anarchism, Makhno first formed a loose alliance with the Communists, but then battled against Red and White alike until Red forces crushed his army in 1920. With its rich farmland, developed industry and complex ethnic and social situation that included a sizeable Russian population in the cities, Ukraine was too important to the emerging Soviet state to be allowed to go its separate way. In Belorus- sia, nationalists had declared their independence under German protection in 1918, but this effort at statehood failed with Germany's withdrawal from the war. Nevertheless, the signing of the Treaty of Riga forced the Bolsheviks to give up parts of both Western Ukraine and Belorussia.
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Raleigh,