Among the peoples living to the south and southeast of European Russia, many of whom had been joined to the Russian Empire as late as the nineteenth century, numerous independence movements arose and independent states were proclaimed. The new states included the Crimean Tartar republic, the Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the Bashkir, Kirghiz, and Kokand republics, the emirates of Bokhara and Khiva, and others. Time and again local interests clashed and bitter local civil wars developed. In certain instances foreign powers, such as Turkey, Germany, and Great Britain, played important roles. The Men-shevik government of Georgia distinguished itself by the relative stability and effectiveness of its rale. But - without going into complicated and varied detail - whether new authorities received much or little popular support, they succumbed eventually to Soviet strength allied with local Communists. The fall of the independent Georgian government in 1921 marked essentially the end of the process, although native partisans in Central Asia, the "Basmachi," were not finally suppressed until 1926.
Reasons for the Red Victory
Few observers believed that the Bolsheviks would survive the ordeal of Civil War, national independence movements, war against Poland, and Allied intervention. Lenin himself, apparently, had serious doubts on that score. The first years of the Soviet regime have justly become a legendary Communist epic, its lustre undimmed even by the titanic events of the Second World War. Yet, a closer look puts the picture into a better focus and helps to explain the Bolshevik victory without recourse to magic in
Marxism or superhuman qualities of Red fighters. To begin with, Allied intervention - the emphatic Soviet view to the contrary notwithstanding - represented anything but a determined and co-ordinated effort to strangle the new Communist regime. Kennan, Ullman, and other scholars have shown how much misunderstanding and confusion went into the Allied policies toward Russia, which never amounted to more than a half-hearted support of White movements. Allied soldiers and sailors, it might be added, saw even less reason for intervening than did their commanders. The French navy mutinied in the Black Sea, while the efficiency of American units was impaired by unrest as well as by a fervent desire to return home. The Labor party in Great Britain and various groups elsewhere exercised what pressure they could against intervention. Ill-conceived and poorly executed, the Allied intervention produced in the end little or no result. The Poles, by contrast, knew what they wanted and obtained it by means of a successful war. Their goals, however, did not include the destruction of the Soviet regime in Russian territory proper. National independence movements also had aims limited to their localities, and were, besides, usually quite weak. The Soviet government could, therefore, defeat many of them one by one and at the time of its own choosing, repudiating its earlier promises when convenient, as in the cases of Ukraine and the Trans-caucasian republics.
The White movement did pose a deadly threat to the Reds. Ultimately there could be no compromise between the two sides. The White armies were many, contained an extremely high proportion of officers, and often fought bravely. The Reds, however, had advantages that in the end proved decisive. The Soviet government controlled the heart of Russia, including both Moscow and Petrograd, most of its population, much of its industry, and the great bulk of military supplies intended for the First World War. The White armies constantly found themselves outnumbered and, in spite of Allied help, more poorly equipped. Also, the Red Army enjoyed the inner lines of communication, while its opponents had to shift around on the periphery. Still more important, the Reds possessed a strict unity of command, whereas the Whites fought, in fact, separate and unco-ordinated wars. Politics, as well as geography, contributed to the White disunity. Anti-Bolshevism represented the only generally accepted tenet in the camp, which encompassed everyone from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Few positive programs were proposed or developed. The Whites' inability to come to terms with non-Russian nationalities constituted a particular political weakness. White generals thought naturally in terms of "Russia one and indivisible" and reacted against separatism; or at least, they felt it quite improper to decide on their own such fundamental questions as those of national independence and boundaries. Thus Denikin antagonized the Ukrainians by his measures to suppress the Ukrainian
language and schools, and Iudenich weakened his base in Estonia because he would not promise the Estonians independence.
In the last analysis, the attitude of the population probably determined the outcome of the Civil War in Russia. Whereas the upper and middle classes favored the Whites, and the workers, with some notable exceptions, backed the Reds, the peasants, that is, the great majority of the people, assumed a much more cautious and aloof attitude. Many of them came to hate both sides, for White rule, as well as Red rule, often brought mobilization, requisitions, and terror - as cruel as, if less systematic than, that of the Cheka. In many areas anarchic peasant bands attacked both combatants. Indeed, this so called green resistance proved to be in scope, casualties, and, alas, cruelty quite comparable to the more prominent struggle between the Whites and the Reds, although it was by its very nature local rather than national. Still, on the whole, the peasants apparently preferred the Reds to the Whites. After all, they had obtained the gentry land following the October Revolution, while the Whites were associated in their minds - not entirely unjustly - with some kind of restoration of the old order, a possibility that evoked hatred and fear in the Russian village. Mutatis mutandis, one is reminded of the later circumstances of the Communist victory in the civil war in China.
The R.S.F.S.R. and the U.S.S.R.
The first Soviet constitution was adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets and promulgated on July 10, 1918. It created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or the R.S.F.S.R. Local Soviets elected delegates to a provincial congress of Soviets, and provincial congresses in turn elected the membership of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The latter elected the Executive Committee, which acted in the intervals between congressional sessions, and the Council of People's Commissars. Elections were open rather than secret, and they were organized on a class basis, with the industrial workers especially heavily represented. By contrast, the "non-toiling classes" received no vote. In effect, the Communist party, particularly its Central Committee and Political Bureau headed by Lenin, from the beginning dominated the government apparatus and ruled the country. Besides, the same leading Communists occupied the top positions in both party and government, with Lenin at the head of both. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came into being as a federation of Russia, Ukraine, White Russia, and Transcaucasia. Later in the '20's three Central Asiatic republics received "Union Republic" status. Compared to the empire of the Romanovs, the new state had lost Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Polish territories, all of which had become independent, and had lost western Ukraine and