Although the Ukrainian army, aided by Makhno in the south, fought an intermittent war with the Red Army from late 1919 to late 1920, by mid-1921 it had been defeated. In 1922 the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was admitted to the USSR as a “sovereign” state. The level of sovereignty was demonstrated in the 1930s when Stalin’s mass collectivisation policy led to the “Holodomor”, or “Hunger-Extermination”, of between three and seven million Ukrainian peasants, a policy now regarded as a genocide inflicted on Ukraine in order to crush the last vestiges of national independence. Following the Holodomor, many Ukrainian nationalist leaders were executed in the Great Terror of 1936-38.
Poland might have gone the same way, except that in Josef Pilsudski Polish nationalism had a leader as ruthless and determined as Lenin. Since 1895 Pilsudski had been leader of the Polish Socialist Party (PSP). The PSP did not shrink from using paramilitary forces to achieve its goal of national liberation. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Pilsudski took the Polish Legion to fight for Austria and Germany against Russia. In November 1918 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Polish forces and promptly declared an independent Poland. Although his government introduced progressive social reforms, it was primarily a nationalist coalition and it was as a nationalist force that it fought the Polish-Soviet War. After the fall of Ukraine to the Red Army, Pilsudski formed an alliance with Ukrainian nationalist leader Petliura. In May 1920 Polish-Ukrainian forces under Pilsudski’s command invaded Ukraine and took Kiev. The response inside Soviet Russia was immediate. Many non-political Russian patriots such as General Brusilov joined the Red Army in order to repel Catholic Poland from “Little Russia”, whose capital Kiev was regarded as the cradle of Russian civilisation.
It was the beginning of a new conservative movement labeled “National Bolshevism”, in which Russian patriots, after the undeniable and total defeat of the Whites, rallied behind Sovnarcom and the Red Army as the force most likely to re-establish Great Russia and its Empire. Its two most prominent figures were Brusilov and Nikolai Ustrialov, a Slavophile intellectual who had been a right-wing Kadet fighting for Kolchak before he sensed which way the wind was blowing and defected to the Bolsheviks. In 1920 he wrote, with some prescience, “The Bolsheviks, by the logic of events, will progress from Jacobinism to Napoleanism”.7
Ustrialov influenced other Slavophiles who saw beyond the surface rhetoric of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to its more enduring features–a professional army, a political police and a strong centralised state. Although Ustrialov himself never achieved the position he sought, his ideas took hold. After Lenin’s death Stalin’s conception of “Socialism in One Country”, with the inevitable national pride that accompanied it, reflected many of the themes of National Bolshevism and secured the support of Ustrialov’s illustrious followers Aleksei Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg.
The Red Army counter-attack ejected the Poles from Kiev and Ukraine, after which Lenin, against the views of both Trotsky and Stalin, ordered a swift advance on Warsaw. He dreamed of the Red Army implanting Soviet socialism in Poland and thereby establishing a bridgehead to Germany. Behind the Red Army stood a “Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee” headed by Head of the Cheka and native Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. This would be the core of a new Polish government, a Polish Sovnarcom, from which bourgeois nationalists and democratic socialists would be excluded.
But Dzerzhinsky never got the chance to line up his firing squads. Although the Red Army, under its brilliant young commander General Tukhachevsky, advanced quickly into Poland and reached the outskirts of Warsaw, it had over-extended its supply lines. More importantly there was no welcome for them from the Polish working class, who preferred Pilsudski’s socialist nationalism to a Soviet state imposed on them by the Red Army and the Cheka. In an unexpected reverse known to Poles as “the Miracle on the Vistula”, on 16th August, 1920 Pilsudski counter-attacked from the south and defeated the larger Red Army, forcing a rapid retreat.
The campaigns against Ukraine and Poland revived the sleeping virus of militaristic nationalism within Soviet Russia. It would gradually begin to define the entire system. From 1921 it was the Red Army, not ranks of factory workers, who led major ceremonial parades in Moscow and Petrograd, “thus signaling a certain heroic and moral hegemony of the armed forces over civilian society”.8 After Lenin’s death in January 1924, the trend to transform revolutionary leaders into revered nationalistic symbols took off in style with the 1924 May Day procession in Moscow. Rows of tanks and troops filed past Lenin’s recently constructed tomb, in which lay his embalmed corpse, whilst a squadron of airplanes flew overhead. In 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin would unambiguously call on Soviet citizens to fight a “Great Patriotic War”. The subsequent post-war expansion of Soviet power into Eastern Europe under the Warsaw Pact was a source of nationalistic pride to many Russians, especially the state elite, most of whom by the 1950s and 1960s could be described as National Bolsheviks.
With the close of the Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War Sovnarcom turned its attention to establishing Soviet Republics in the west (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania), in Transcaucasia (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) and in the eastern borderlands and Central Asia. The “Conference of the Peoples of the East”, held at Baku in Azerbaijan in September 1920, opened up a new phase of Bolshevik policy towards former colonial possessions. The Conference was called by the Comintern and was attended by 1,900 representatives of Communist and anti-colonial parties from Persia, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya, and a variety of central Asian regions. It was addressed by Zinoviev, Radek, Bela Kun and John Reed. The “Manifesto of the Peoples of the East” adopted at the conference was intended mainly for the ears of Indian and other independence movements struggling against Western imperialist powers. It had less application to the USSR’s own subject territories, as the fate of the independent Republic of Georgia testified.
The Democratic Republic of Georgia was created in May 1918 when Georgia availed itself of Sovnarcom’s right of national self-determination and declared independence. In national elections held in February 1919 the Georgian RSDLP (i.e. the Mensheviks) won 81% of the vote and proceeded to establish a democratic socialist republic. Georgia’s Menshevik government rejected the Bolshevik route to socialism. It held multi-party elections. It allowed a free press and independent trade unions. The Mensheviks implemented in Georgia the land policy they had not had the chance to apply in Russia due to their minority status within the Provisional Government before October 1917, and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly after it. The Georgian government broke up large estates and allowed Georgian peasants to buy up plots at generous prices. It also introduced the kind of progressive labour reforms that had gained Pilsudski the loyalty of Polish workers, and with the same result. In its brief life the Democratic Republic of Georgia secured the support of Georgian peasants and most of the working class of Tiflis.