World Revolution? 1918-1924

The Russian Revolution1815-1924

Session VIIIThe World Revolution?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

• Introduction: Internationalism during the War, 1918

• Germany & Hungary: The First Failures

• The Comintern

• Poland: Revolution by War

• The Colonial World: A Different Approach

• America: It Didn’t Happen Here

• Failure of the Comintern & the Death of Lenin


Introduction:Internationalism

during theWar


Introduction:Internationalism

during theWar

Comrade LeninCLEANSESthe land ofuncleanness



Adolf Abramovich Ioffe(1883-1927)

Trotsky’s “right-hand-man”

first at Brest-Litovsk;then April-6November 1918as the Bolshevik ambassador

in Berlin


Germany--Marx’s site of the World Revolution

• 23 March 1918--the initial success of Ludendorff ’s western offensives led Lenin to draw closer to his “odd bedfellow”

• April--Adolf Ioffe took over the old Imperial Embassy in Berlin, “no ordinary embassy, but rather a revolutionary outpost deep in enemy territory”

• it had three principal missions, all of which it successfully carried out:

• to neutralize the German generals who wanted the Bolshevik government liquidated. This Ioffe accomplished by holding out before the German business community dazzling prospects of profits in Soviet Russia

• to encourage and assist revolutionary forces in Germany and neighboring countries

• to gather political and economic intelligence

• he was able to pursue these objectives with remarkable brazenness because he enjoyed the protection of the German Foreign Ministry, which thought it worth almost any price to keep the Bolsheviks afloat


Ioffe’s “Red” German Sailors Revolt

• anti-war speeches in the Reichstag, the January, 1918 munition strike, the 8 August “Black Day of the German Army; none of these began the German Revolution

• 28 October 1918--the German High Seas Fleet mutinied in three separate ports

• this set off a wave of shore based Red soldiers’ uprisings, all the work of Ioffe’s agents and funds

• the German communists were the left wing of the SPD, the USPD (Independent Socialdemocratic Party, Germany)

• the most radical of these took the name Spartacists, after the leader of the gladiators’ revolt in 73-71 BC

Matrose (sailor),Volksmarine Divisoin


Demonstration march of armed sailors onthe Unter den Linden, Berlin,

9 November 1918Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Germany & Hungary:The First Failures


Germany & Hungary:The First Failures

What doesSpartakus

want?


Proclamation of the Republic before the Reichstag building by the Socialist Philipp Scheidemann


Scenes from the Christmas Fighting


Fateful Bargain

SPD leader, acting chancellor, Ebert --“I hate the Social Revolution like

sin.” Army Chief Groener --“The army will support the government against the Reds.”

Kriegsminister Noske -- “Of course. Someone must become the bloodhound. I won’t shirk the responsibility.”


Karl Liebknecht(1871-1919)

son of SPD co-founder, Wilhelm Liebknecht,

anti-war SPD wing, 1916 founds Spartakusbund,1918,

proclaims “free socialist republic” 2 hours after

Scheidemann


Rosa Luxemburg(1870-1919)

Russian Poland, philosophy major, Zurich; married

German, 1898; imprisoned for political activities, left wing of

SPD,founded “Die Rote Fahne,” (The Red Banner)

pamphlets signed Spartakus,


Lenin’s Replacement for Ioffe• born Karol Sobelsohn to a Jewish family in Lviv,

Austria-Hungary

• 1904-joined the Polish Social Democratic Party and participated in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw

• 1907-to Germany, joined the SPD

• 1914-17-moved to Switzerland, became part of Lenin’s circle, accompanied him on the “sealed train”

• 1918-20-in Germany as Lenin’s agent, radicalizes the Spartakus, which becomes the KPD

• January, 1919-pushes the uprising, goes underground

• 1920-escapes to Russia, a Comintern functionary until the Stalin purges, sentenced to hard labor in the Trial of the Seventeen, killed by an NKVD agent in the gulag

Karl Radek1885-1939


Berlin Streetfighting

Spartacistsmarching towards

the [newspaper] Vorwärts


Spartakus Week5-12 January


Soldiers! Workers! Citizens!

The “Forwards”is retaken!

Join with all who support democracy and socialism, against those who favor

dictatorship and bloodsoaked preaching!

The situation improves hour to hourso that we dare hope the incredible disgrace of

this brothers war to see made an end to

The rejoicing for our side is exceedingly great.300 Spartacists we have taken prisoner, and

Büxenstein is again free.


A Bloody End

•Freikorps forces re-take the streets and 1,000, mostly Reds, die

•Liebknecht and Luxembourg hide in the working class district of Weding

•betrayed, they are arrested, beaten, and shot

•Luxemburg’s body is found four months later in the Landwehr Canal


Hungary and Bela KunMarch-August, 1919


Hungary and Bela KunMarch-August, 1919

How’s your Magyar?Wednesday, October 21, 2009

"Everywhere counter-revolutionaries run about and swagger; beat them down! Beat their heads where you find them! If counter-revolutionaries were to gain the upper hand for even a single hour, there will be no mercy for any proletarian. Before they stifle the revolution, suffocate them in their own blood!"

Tibor Szamuely


Szamuely speaking on Red Square. Behind him is Vladimir Ilyich


Szamuely LandlerKun


Founder of the Hungarian Communist Party• born Kohn to a lapsed Jewish notary and a

lapsed Protestant mother

• still, educated at a famous Reformed schule

• before the war a muck-raking journalist

• 1916-drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, becomes a Russian POW

• 1918-co-founds, with fellow ex-POWs, the HCP, joins the Red Army, fights in the Civil War

• November, 1918-with several hundred other Hungarian communists and a lot of soviet money, returns to Hungary

• 1938-dies in the Stalin purges Bela Kun1886-1938


Hungarian Soviet Republic• 31 October 1918-the Hungarian National Council overthrows the defeated Austro-

Hungarian Empire and establishes the Hungarian Democratic Republic

• in the chaos which followed defeat, occupation and partition this regime fails to gain popular support

• 21 March 1919-after rioting and arrests, a coalition of communists and social democrats take power and proclaim the Hungarian Soviet Republic

• a Red Guard and an even less disciplined group called Lenin’s Boys begin the terror

• Bela Kun, Commissar of Foreign Affairs and Tibor Szamuely, War Commissar, attempt to regain Hungary’s imperial borders; declare a Slovak Soviet Republic and invade Transylvania which the Paris Peace conference had given to Romania

• these unsuccessful foreign adventures, coupled with unpopular nationalizations of industry, land confiscations and assaults on religious observances erode popular support

• 6 August 1919-Romanian forces enter Budapest, the communists flee and a conservative regime under Admiral Miklos Horthy replaces them


Münchner RäterepublikMunich Soviet Republic

November, 1918-April, 1919


Münchner RäterepublikMunich Soviet Republic

November, 1918-April, 1919

Toller’s six day regime of anarchists and communists


The Bavarian Republic• 7 November 1918-on the first anniversary of the

October Revolution, Kurt Eisner proclaimed Bavaria a Free State

• thus ended the 700 year old Wittelsbach monarchy

• he became the premier of a Socialist Republic

• 21 February 1919-he was assassinated by Anton Graf (Count) von Arco-Valley

• 21 March-the Hungarian Soviet Republic encouraged radicals in Bavaria

• 6 April-the Bavarian Soviet Republic of Ernst Toller

• 12 April-its incompetence led to its replacement by the regime of Eugen Levine KURT EISNER, Bayerischer Ministerpräsident


To the Bavarian Working Class!

•Bavaria is a Soviet Republic!

•What’s the difference between the Soviet and the Landtag (the previous parliament)?

•Prov. revolutionary central [committee] signed Ernst Toller


Eugen Levine--”the Bavarian Lenin”•1883-born, Skt-Peterburg

• 1905-fought in the Revolution

•associate and agent of V.I. Lenin, member, KPD (Communist Party, Germany)

• raised the 20,000 man Red Army of the unemployed

•took eight aristocratic hostages who were murdered in the May fighting

•5 July, 1919-executed in Stadelheim Prison


Freikorps von Epp

Red Army

Krupp-DaimlerPlattformwagen


The Saviors of Munich

Idealized ActualWednesday, October 21, 2009

The Munich victory raised the Freikorps to a zenith of prestige....From an army that had seemed to be on the point of evaporation after the Armistice, an effective military force had been created. However, that effort to rebuild the army would be checked by the Treaty of Versailles.

Carlos Caballero Jurado, The German Freikorps, 1918-1923. p.15


The Ruhr Uprising1920


The Ruhr Uprising1920

The Red Armyon the Ruhr &

Rhine

Against theKapp Putsch

1920


For the first time in western European history the state’s professional armies were in confrontation with a properly organized revolutionary army. Within five days [3/15-20/1920], the Ruhr workers had managed to organize their own force of fifty thousand armed and determined men....This scratch force had succeeded in defeating Government militias, police, FKs, and the regular Reichswehr and were in possession of Germany’s main industrial region.

Nigel Jones, The Birth of the Nazis;How the Freikorps blazed a Trail for Hitler. p. 194


Things were so bad that even the “useless generation,” those too young for the war, were called upon. Most were eager to follow their elders.


Chronology

•15-20 March 1920-Reds seize control as a response to the earlier unsuccessful Kapp Putsch in Berlin

•24 March-truce

•3 April-broken

•8 April-FKs finish “restoring order”


ConclusionsThus the [four] efforts to promote revolutionary upheavals in central Europe at a time when conditions for it were uniquely propitious went down in defeat. Although Moscow, hailing each as the beginning of a world conflagration, had stinted on neither money nor personnel, it had gained nothing. European workers and peasants turned out to be made of very different stuff from their Russian counterparts. Indeed, such initiatives produced the very opposite result from that intended: they discredited communism and played into the hands of nationalist extremists. “The main results of that mistaken policy,” writes Neil McInnes, “were to terrify the Western ruling classes and many of the middle classes with the specter of revolution, and at the same time provide them with a convenient model, in Bolshevism, for a counterrevolutionary force, which was fascism.”

Pipes, p.289


Comintern


Comintern


During the five years when Lenin was in charge, the foreign policy of Soviet Russia was an adjunct of the policies of the Russian Communist Party. As such, it was intended to serve, first and foremost, the interests of the global revolution. It cannot be stressed strongly enough or often enough that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia not to change Russia but to use her as a springboard to change the world. “We assert,” Lenin said in May, 1918,”that the interests of socialism, the interests of world revolution, are superior to national interests, to the interests of the state.” The founders of the communist regime felt that their revolution could not survive for long unless it promptly spread abroad.

Pipes, p.286


A Two-tiered Foreign Policy

• the Commissariat of Foreign Policy, acting in the name of the state, maintained formally correct relations with those foreign powers that were prepared to have dealings with it

• March, 1919-the task of promoting world revolution devolved on a new body, the Third or Communist International (Comintern)

• formally, the Comintern was independent of both the Soviet government and the Russian Communist Party

• in reality, it was a department of the latter’s Central Committee

• the separation of the two entities enabled Moscow to conduct a policy of concurrent “peaceful coexistence” and subversion


The Comintern’s Two Tasks

• one offensive: to promote revolution abroad

• one defensive: to neutralize the efforts of “capitalist” countries to launch a crusade against Soviet Russia

• it had much more success with its defensive than its offensive mission

• its agents appealed to socialists and liberals with slogans such as “hands off Russia”

• its agents appealed to capitalists with the offer of lucrative business deals

• by the early 1920s, virtually all European countries had established diplomatic and commercial relations with a government they had initially treated as an outlaw


A Paper Existence

March, 1919-the founding congress consisted of 35 delegates. Only five

came from abroad and only one carried a mandate. Still, Zinoviev, Lenin’s appointed chairman was

ecstatic!

Trotsky’s German publication,1919


“The movement advances with such dizzying speed that one can confidently say; in a year we shall already have forgotten that Europe had to fight for Communism, because a year hence al l Europe shal l be Communist. And the struggle for Communism will shift to America, and perhaps also to Asia and other parts of the world.”

Grigori Zinovievsummer, 1919


A Well-financed Operational OrganizationSecond Congress, Summer, 1920

• foreign communists and sympathizers were far better represented

• 217 delegates from thirty-six countries

• Russia had one third of the delegates

• next largest delegations were from Germany, Italy, and France

• the mood was euphoric because during its sessions the Red Army approached Warsaw in a campaign that Communists saw as the opening stage of the conquest of Europe

• Lenin had three objectives for the congress:

1.create in every country a communist party “subject to iron military discipline”

2.the Comintern was to be centralized “A single Communist party with sections in every country”

3.foreign Communist parties were required to infiltrate and seize control of parliaments and trade unions with the ultimate goal of “armed insurrection” against all existing governments


Results of Lenin’s Program

• Goal 1: Communist parties were indeed established abroad. It was not difficult to split off the left wings of existing socialist parties. But the ensuing conflicts weakened the political left and made the rise of right wing groups easier, most notably in Italy (1922) Austria (1932) and Germany (1933)

• Goal 2:Foreign Communist parties proved remarkably docile and submissive to Moscow’s control. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

• Goal 3: Here the challenge was much greater. Workers found communism less attractive than did intellectuals! (Pipes) Lenin fumed at the lack of success here.”During the next fifteen years [1920-1935],” writes Franz Borkenau, “the communists in the West were unable to conquer a single union.”


COMMUNISTINTERNATIONAL

-------------EXECUTIVECOMMITTEE

Comrade Kilbom’s ID Carddated 14 July 1921


Poland: Revolution by War


Poland: Revolution by War

A map of thenew states with borders yet tobe established

1920


"The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies began."

Winston Churchill


Overview (February, 1919-March, 1921)

• the Polish-Soviet War was a conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and The Ukrainian Peoples Republic. It overlapped the Civil War.

• the frontiers between Poland and the Soviet states had not been defined in the Paris Peace Settlement

• as the Central Powers withdrew from the Brest-Litovsk cession, both Ukraine and Belarus(White Russia) sought to establish their independence and claim historic territories

• Josef Pilsudski sought to create a Polish-led buffer federation(Miedzymorze, Between the Seas, i.e. Baltic and Black) between German and Russian imperialism

• Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army must cross to carry the Revolution to the West


Pilsudski’s Grandiose Scheme

Invited to join were the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia


The Polish-Ukrainian War (November, 1918-July, 1919)

• the origins of the conflict lay in the mixed ethnicity, Polish and Ukrainian, of Galicia, until 1918, part of Austria-Hungary

• 1 November 1918-- the West Ukrainian National Republic was proclaimed with Lviv (Polish, Lvov, German, Lemberg) as its capital

• the rural areas were indeed majority Ukrainian, but Lviv and other cities were majority Polish speakers (Jews and Catholics)

• 1919-fighting began to expel Ukrainian forces. Polish troops had French military advisors and equipment. About 10,000Poles and 15,000 Ukrainians were KIA

• summer,1919-the Ukrainian Hetman Petlura was attacked by the Reds in Eastern Ukraine


“The Young Eagles”(1927) youthful defenders of Lvov, 1918in the Polish Army Museum


Blue-gray=West Ukrainian Republicyellow=relief of the siege of Lwow

March, 1919


Symon Petliura1879-1926

Hetman of the Ukraine, 1919-1920;directed the affairs of the

Ukrainian government-in-exile,assassinated in exile in Paris for

his alleged responsibility for pogroms in the war years


Lenin’s Ambitions Grow

• the first step was to recover the borderlands ceded in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

• In early 1919, they also set up a Lithuanian-Belorussian Republic (Litbel). This government was very unpopular due to terror and the collection of food and goods for the army.

• By the end of summer 1919 the Soviets managed to take over most of Ukraine, driving the Ukrainian Directorate from Kiev.

• late 1919-as Lenin saw the tide turning in the Civil War, he began to hope for further military successes

• Poland was the “bridge” for carrying the revolution to Germany and Western Europe


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian-Belorussian_Republic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian-Belorussian_Republic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Ukraine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Ukraine

The Bolsheviks propaganda, aimed at the international scene, would deny any visions of conquest:

“But our enemies and yours deceive you when they say that the Russian Soviet Government wishes to plant communism in Polish soil with the bayonets of Russian Red Army men. A communist order is possible only where the vast majority of the working people are penetrated with the idea of creating it by their own strength. Only then can it be solid; for only then can communist policy strike deep roots in a country. The communists of Russia are at present striving only to defend their own soil, their own constructive work; they are not striving, and cannot strive, to plant communism by force in other countries.”

EH Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, volume 3, p.165


Pilsudski & Petliura Take the Offensive

• early 1920-Petliura and some forces fled from the Ukraine to Poland after being defeated by the Reds. He controlled only a sliver of territory along the Polish border

• 21 April-the Warsaw Treaty between Petliura representing the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Poland

• Petliura accepted the loss of Western Ukraine to Poland

• he was promised Polish military assistance for winning an independent Ukraine

• 15,000 initial Ukrainian troops expanded to 35,000 as the campaign began with initial success against the Red Army Polish General Antoni Listowski

& Symon Petliura


Pilsudski and Petliura in Kiev

The Polish 3rd Army easily won border clashes with the Red Army in Ukraine but the Reds withdrew with minimal losses. The combined Polish-Ukrainian forces entered an abandoned Kiev on May 7, encountering only token resistance.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev

CORRUPT PETLYURA HAS SOLD UK-RAINE TO THE POLISH PANS

THE PANS HAVE BURNED AND PLUNDERED UKRAINEDEATH TO THEM AND THE PETLYURISTS


A RED PRESENT

FOR THEWHITEPAN

LET’S CHUCK THIS LITTLE

PACKAGE HIS WAY


Beatthe Bolshevik


The Polish-Ukrainian Offensive at its height; June, 1920Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Latvian-Lithuanian-

Polish-SovietWar;

January, 1919-May, 1920


Polish-Soviet-

LithuanianWar;

May-Aug, 1920


The Soviet offensive at its height; August, 1920Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Mikhail Nicholaevich Tukhachevsky

• tsarist lieutenant, member of the minor nobility

• 1918-commanded 1st Red Army against KOMUCH

• spring, 1919-commanded the 8th Army against the Don Cossacks, rising to lead the Caucasus Army Group in early 1920

• May, 1920-commands the Western Army Group in the counterattack against Poland

• 1935-made Marshall of the Soviet Union

• 12 June 1937-in a secret trial, along with eight other high ranking generals, tried, convicted, and immediately executed in the “Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization”

1893-1937Wednesday, October 21, 2009

To Arms!

Save the fatherlandconsider well our

future fate


Polish Thermopylae: Russian cavalry are stopped at the Battle of Zadwórze. (Painting by Stanisław Kaczor-Batowski, 1929. Polish Army Museum, Warsaw.)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Zadw%C3%B3rze

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Zadw%C3%B3rze

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stanislaw_Kaczor-Batowski&action=edit

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stanislaw_Kaczor-Batowski&action=edit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Army_Museum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Army_Museum

Battle of Zadwórze (sometimes referred to as the "Polish Thermopylae") was a battle of the Polish-Bolshevik War. It was fought on August 17, 1920 near the train station of Zadwórze, a small village located 33 kilometres from the city centre of Lwów (now Lviv). The battle, lasting roughly 24 hours, resulted in the complete destruction of the Polish forces but at the same time halted the Soviet advance, preventing the forces of Siemion Budionnyi from seizing Lwów and so contributing to the successful defence of Warsaw.

The final engagements, Polish Salamis (?), were called the Miracle of the Vistula which led to Russian withdrawal and acceptance of boundaries 150 miles east of what the Paris peacemakers had proposed for Poland.

The sad part of this military triumph was that Poland had an implacable enemy to its east. Stalin would take his revenge in 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Katyn Forest massacres.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Bolshevik_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Bolshevik_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_17


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lw%C3%B3w

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lw%C3%B3w

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemion_Budionnyi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemion_Budionnyi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Warsaw_%281920%29




Miracle at the Vistula, oil on canvas, 1930. Painting by Jerzy Kossak




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Kossak

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Kossak

The Battle of Warsaw (sometimes referred to as the Miracle at the Vistula, Polish: Cud nad Wisłą) was the decisive battle of the Polish-Soviet War, which began soon after the end of World War I in 1918 and lasting until the Treaty of Riga (1921).The Battle of Warsaw was fought from 13 to 25 August 1920 as Red Army forces commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevski approached the Polish capital of Warsaw and nearby Modlin Fortress. On August 16, Polish forces commanded by Józef Piłsudski counter-attacked from the south, forcing the Russian forces into a disorganised withdrawal eastward and behind the Niemen River. Estimated Bolshevik losses were 10,000 killed, 500 missing, 10,000 wounded and 66,000 taken prisoner, compared with Polish losses of some 4,500 killed, 10,000 missing and 22,000 wounded


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Soviet_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Soviet_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Riga

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Riga





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tukhachevski




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modlin_Fortress

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modlin_Fortress





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Pi%C5%82sudski

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Pi%C5%82sudski

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_%28military%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_%28military%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niemen_River

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niemen_River

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war

WARSAW

Initial Soviet Advance prior to the Battle, 12 Aug 1920


WARSAW

Polish Counterattack, 14 Aug 1920


Outcomes of the Battle

• Polish intelligence had broken the Soviet codes and continued to profit from this advantage

• three of the four Soviet armies had all but disintegrated along with the bulk of their cavalry corps, including Budyonny’s famous 1st Cavalry Army

• those retreating into German East Prussia were disarmed and briefly interned

• 15-25 September 1920-Tukashevski’s attempt to hold the line of the Nieman River resulted in another defeat, the second greatest battle of the war

• Lenin resolved never to send the Red Army outside Soviet borders again in pursuit of the World Revolution


Polish-Soviet Border under the Riga Treaty, 18 March 1921Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Caricature for Riga Peace 1921. Shows a Pole in old-style officer's uniform and sword-belt, and an ammunition-bandoliered and skull-faced Red Army soldier, together tearing White Russia or Belarus into two, while stomping on Ukraine.

DOWN WITH THE RIGA TREATY OUTRAGE!


Seeds for a bitter future harvest






Seeds for a bitter future harvestOur army is an armythat liberates workers

J. Stalin


The Colonial World:A Different Approach


The Colonial World:A Different Approach

PROLETARIANSOF EVERY LAND

UNITE


Although it concentrated on the industrial countries, the Comintern didn’t ignore the colonies. Lenin had become persuaded long before the Revolution by J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) that advanced capitalism managed to survive only thanks to the raw materials, labor, and markets provided by the colonies. Depriving it of these profits would, in his judgement, deliver capitalism the coup de grâce.

Pipes, p. 298


How to incite class war without a proletariat?

• it was necessary to find a surrogate for class war if the developing countries were to join the fight against capitalist imperialism

• this was nationalism: reactionary in capitalist countries, it was “progressive” in their colonial dependencies

• Lenin urged wars of “national liberation” in the colonies:

• the “masses” would join hands with the “bourgeoisie” to expel colonial masters

• the native communists would promote and lead this struggle

• once victorious, they would turn the “masses” against their erstwhile “bourgeois” allies

• the handful of Communists from the colonial areas attending the Second Congress objected to no avail. Lenin’s will prevailed and a resolution passed “actively to support liberation movements”


Turkey--Case Study #1

• 16 March 1921-the Treaty of Moscow bound the two “pariah nations” of Turkey and Russia in a pact of mutual friendship

• both considered the West, especially Britain, to be their enemies

• but accepting Soviet help did not mean that the Turkish strongman, Mustapha Kemal, Atatürk, would accept Communism

• "Communism is a social issue. Social conditions, religion, and national traditions of our country confirm the opinion that Russian Communism is not applicable in Turkey."

• Atatürk proceeded to make modern secular Turkey into a one-party state

• “Richard Loewenthal has called him the first nationalist dictator to embrace the Communist political model without embracing Communist ideology”--Pipes, p.299


China--Case Study #2

• 1923-Lenin’s agent, Mikhail Borodin, advised and supplied arms to China’s strongman, Dr. Sun Yat Sen

• following Borodin’s suggestion, Communists were allowed to join the Kuo Min Tang party and attend Whampoa Military Academy

• 1925-1927-after Sun Yat Sen’s death Borodin continued as an advisor and arms dealer until Chiang Kai-Shek began his purge of Communists which began the Chinese Civil War

• Borodin escaped to the USSR where he edited the English language Moscow News until it was his turn to go to the Gulag and die there

• 1949-finally, Mao, Chou and the rest of the CCP would bring the victory that the Comintern had long sought


Vietnam--Case Study #3• born to a family of Confucian scholars and teachers, he was

educated in a Vietnamese French Lycee in Hue

• 1911-1919-travelled to France, worked at menial kitchen jobs there & in Boston! tried in vain to speak at the Paris Peace Conference for Vietnamese independence

• Citing the language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Qu!c petitioned U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for help to remove the French from Vietnam and replace it with a new, nationalist government. His request was ignored.

• 1921-became a founding member of the Parti Communiste Français and spent much of his time in Moscow afterwards, becoming the Comintern’s Asia hand and principal theorist on colonial wars of national liberation

• 1923-1927-after the Fifth Comintern Congress he went to China and British Hong Kong and worked with Mikhail Borodin until Chiang Kai-Shek’s anti-Communist coup

• 1927-1941-more wanderings in Russia, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia until his rendezvous with destiny

Nguyen Sinh Cung, akaNguyen Ai Quoc, aka

Ho Chi Minh1890-1969


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Declaration_of_Independence




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam

America; It Didn’t Happen Here


America; It Didn’t Happen Here

CURSES! IT WON’TEXPLODE IN AMERICA

source: Literary Digest, 10/18/1919


The 1919 Red Scare• labor tension was high even before the war

• 1916-”Hyphenated Americans (who) have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out “ -Wilson

• 2 June 1919-bombs were detonated in several American cities. One in Washington, D.C. at the home of Atty Gen’l, A. Mitchell Palmer almost killed FDR and Eleanor, walking across the street

• the bombers were anarchists, not “Bolsheviks”

• 1919-1921-this led to a series of crack-downs on radicals of all types known as the Palmer Raids

• also fueling the Red Scare were a series of strikes led by such home-grown radicals as the I.W.W., the “Wobblies,” president, “Big Bill” Haywood

THE RED: “LET’S GO TOTHE BOTTOM FIRST

source: Literary Digest, 11/15/1919


Reds, Blacks, Who Cares! Get Rid of ‘em!

• 1919-the news of the Russian Civil War and America’s intervention merged in the public mind with domestic radical unrest

• 9 September 1919-the Boston police strike, the first of its kind, electrified national opinion

• when Governor Calvin Coolidge intervened, he won the second spot on Harding’s ticket

• sentiment grew for deporting the radicals to Russia, a “Christmas present” for Lenin




John Reed & Louise Bryant

• wealthy Harvard student, attended meetings of the Socialist Club, Walter Lippmann, president

• as a journalist, Reed first covered the Mexican Revolution, then the European war

• 1917-he and long-time lover Bryant arrived in Petrograd just in time for the Ten Days that Shook the World (his title for his book describing the October Revolution)

• both championed the Red government, he as a member of the Comintern

• 1920-while serving in war-torn Russia, Reed contracted typhus and died

• he, along with “Big Bill” Haywood, is buried in the Kremlin wall, behind Lenin’s tomb


Fellow Travelers and “Useful Idiots”

• perhaps the most useful allies of Soviet Russia were the capitalists who were depicted in their cartoons with big bellies and opera hats

• there was a positive scramble to invest in and sell to the Reds

• writers and journalists like Reed found that they were given royal treatment, as long as they adhered to “the Party line”

• Pipes characterizes the “naive” category as follows:

• they desperately wished for a world free of war and want

• capitalism disgusted them because of the poverty it tolerated in the midst of affluence and because of its inner contradictions that they believed made for war

• they believed that man and society could be perfected

• they readily accepted Communist ideals for Communist reality


Failure of the Comintern &the Death of Lenin


Failure of the Comintern &the Death of Lenin

“Man at the Crossroads” mural by Diego Riviera,originally intended for Rockefeller Center, 1933


In the final reckoning, the conventional efforts of Soviet diplomatic and economic agencies succeeded far better than the Comintern’s efforts at subversion. The record of the Comintern, from it’s foundation in 1919 until its dissolution in 1943, is one of unrelieved failures. Probably the main cause was the Bolsheviks’ ignorance of Europe….

And they refused to be taught. “Is there nothing more to learn from the struggles, movements, and revolutions of other countries?” an exasperated British Comintern delegate asked Zinoviev. “Have the Russians come here not to learn, but only to teach?”...

To these causes of the Comintern’s failure may be added a third, one imponderable by its very nature. This had to do with the “Russianness” of Bolshevism...a uniquely Russian phenomenon, with deep roots in the Russian soul.

Pipes, pp. 310-11


Lenin at Gorky, 1923

• physical strain from leading a revolution, running a government, and fighting a civil war combined with the trauma of his wounds

• 24 April 1922-a German surgeon removed Kaplan’s bullet from his neck. It had been there since August, 1918

• May, 1922-the first of three strokes. Partly paralyzed on his right side, his role in government diminshed

• December, 1922-the second stroke led him to withdraw from politics

• March, 1923-the third stroke left him dumb and bed-ridden until he died, 21 January 1924



Stalin viewing Lenin’s body


“Iron Felix”, head of the Cheka, pall bearerat Lenin’s funeral


Lenin’s Mausoleum


Lenin’s Mausoleum


Lenin’s Mausoleum


Thus the Bolsheviks, who five years earlier in a noisy campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own. Unlike the church’s saints, whose remains were revealed to be nothing but rags and bones, their god, as befitted the age of science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.

Pipes, p. 381


Against the threat of war, Soviet Russia needed the traditional tools of war, a strong, well-armed home base and the industrial society to support it. This, in 1924, was still a distant goal. At the time of Lenin’s death, Soviet Russia had not much advanced, in terms of military and industrial power, beyond the point where tsarist Russia had ignominiously left off. But the day of the decisive attack on the trammels of weakness was rapidly approaching.

von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, p. 201


World Revolution? 1918-1924

Education

german revolution

german army

germany hungary

german communists

german generals

world revolution

russian revolution

ioes red german sailors