In April 1920 Georgian Bolsheviks, following tactics successful in Armenia and Azerbaijan, attempted a coup in Tiflis that was intended to act as the pretext for the Red Army to invade Georgia to liberate its workers. But the coup had virtually no internal support and was easily defeated. Ronald G. Suny’s examination of the Georgian Menshevik government concludes that the reason the Mensheviks secured the loyalty of a majority of the population was because they adopted an approach entirely different from that of the Bolsheviks in Russia, which was “to mediate rather than intensify social conflicts, to keep as open as possible a political forum, both in the press and in elected institutions, and to use force minimally”.9
The independent Republic of Georgia had wide support on the international left. This was one reason why Sovnarcom signed the Treaty of Moscow in May 1920 with the Georgian government, guaranteeing its independence. Despite this, senior officials of Stalin’s Nationalities Commissariat in the Caucasus, including his friend and sidekick Sergei Ordzhonikidze, continued to plan a coup in Georgia. Although Trotsky was strongly opposed to this, he was in a minority of one on the Politburo. The majority feeling was that the existence of a viable, popular democratic socialist government led by the Menshevik Party on Russia’s doorstep was intolerable.
Stalin and Ordzhonikidze continued to work covertly with Georgian Bolsheviks to stage a series of “uprisings” in outlying Georgian towns in early 1921, and give Moscow a pretext to intervene. On 14th February the Central Committee met and approved an invasion, with only Karl Radek dissenting. Trotsky, away at the time, was not informed of the meeting by the Secretariat. With the excuse that it was coming to the aid of Georgian workers, the Red Army invaded on 16th February. Trotsky was not even told the operation was about to commence. The small Georgian army, with the support of most of the Georgian working class, resisted the invading force for a fortnight, but it stood no chance against the much bigger Red Army.
The social and political system subsequently imposed upon Georgia was so severe that on 7th August, 1921 an appeal was issued signed by 3,449 Georgian workers, titled “The Appeal of the Tiflis Workers to All the Workers of Western Europe”. It read:
From the very first days Georgia was conquered, we were placed in the position of and treated as slaves. We were deprived of freedom of speech, assembly and the right of free association. A regime of military labour service has been imposed upon all the workers of Georgia, irrespective of their occupation. Everywhere Extraordinary Committees (Chekas) have been set up and summary arrests of workers for innocuous remarks have been taking place.
After cataloging the oppression being visited upon Georgian workers, the Appeal finished by proclaiming:
Human life has become of no value. Innocent people are shot, even those who never mixed into politics, who never took part in any political struggle. People were shot because they served the democratic government and the state, because in open war they defended their native country from the invasion of foreign troops.10
The Western powers who intervened in Soviet Russia to assist the Whites greeted the suppression of a democratic socialist republic in Georgia with indifference. Karl Kautsky, who visited Georgia in late 1920 for three months, spoke for the democratic left with his book Georgia: A Social-Democratic Peasant Republic: Impressions and Observations (1921). Despite the immense difficulties under which it laboured–Georgia was at roughly the same level of social and economic development as Russia in 1917–Kautsky was impressed with the efforts of the Georgian Mensheviks to effect a social revolution: “It was left for the revolution to take the land from the feudal nobles, to provide the poor peasant with land, and to change the leaseholder into a freeholder. This was no socialistic but a middle-class revolution, but the conditions rendered it necessary, and it took place”. In Kautsky’s view, the course of the Georgian Revolution confirmed that the entire political and economic programme of the Bolsheviks was premature and excessive and could not be imposed except by state coercion.
By contrast the Georgian Revolution, which did not shrink from expropriating all large landowners’ estates, proceeded to create a mixed economy of peasant small holdings with state-owned enterprises, overseen by the state and local municipalities. The main strategic industries were nationalised with about a third of the economy left in private hands. A new economy of consumers’ and workers’ cooperatives was introduced to provide the space for different forms of ownership and economic management. Suggesting a slower but more practical route to socialism, not unlike that of Venezuela’s Solidaristic Economy, Kautsky suggested, “In those spheres where the monopolistic character of capital has scarcely made itself felt, the production carried on by organisations of consumers can create socialistic conditions of production, if these consumers’ organisations are dominated by the socialist outlook”.
Kautsky ended by considering what the invasion meant for future socialist progress. He drew a parallel between the corruption of the Russian Revolution by the Bolsheviks and the degradation of the French Revolution by Napoleon:
The close parallel which exists between the course which the Russian Revolution has hitherto followed and that of the great French Revolution must not blind us to the differences between the two events […] Although French Bonapartism constituted a strong reaction from the Republic, its policy of expansion brought many improvements to the rest of Europe. The present Moscow Bonapartism is not only reactionary in relation to the proletarian revolution of Russia, out of which it arose, but even more so in comparison with the proletarian movements of the rest of Europe, which it seeks to fetter.11
Within a few years Trotsky would advance the concept that in the 1920s Soviet Russia had undergone a form of “Thermidor” (the period of the French Revolution in which the conservative Thermidorians ousted Robespierre and the Jacobins, presaging the emergence of Bonapartism) as an explanation of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was therefore no small irony that Trotsky was given the task of responding to Kautsky. The resulting work, Between Red and White: Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention (1922), was not his finest. Most of Red and White avoids the question of the nature and policies of the Menshevik regime and the extent of its support by the Georgian working class. It concentrates instead on the wider canvass of foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War and the hypocrisy of social democrats like Henderson or Vandevelde to criticise the Soviet Union and the Third International. It was a dazzling display of intellectual pyrotechnics, but in a bad cause, and Trotsky knew it.
The attempted military expansion of the Revolution, whether in the form of the march on Warsaw, the revolutionary proclamations made at Baku, or the invasion of Georgia, was partly to offset its complete collapse at home. Many working-class activists were now bitter and disenchanted. As soon as she arrived in Petrograd in early 1920, Emma Goldman escaped her official Soviet minders and went in search of the real Russian working class. Taken at night to a secret meeting of Petrograd’s few surviving anarchists, she heard “a recital of the betrayal of the revolution by the Bolsheviki”. She reported that:
Workers from the Baltic factories spoke of their enslavement, Kronstadt sailors voiced their bitterness and indignation against the people they had helped to power and who had become their masters. One of the speakers had been condemned to death by the Bolsheviki for his anarchist ideas, but had escaped and was now living illegally. He related how the sailors had been robbed of the freedom of their Soviets, how every breath of life was being censored.12