The fall of Armenia left Georgia surrounded by the Reds. Of the three Caucasian nations, this was the most viable as an independent state. The Georgians had a clear sense of their own national history and culture, a large native intelligentsia, and in the Mensheviks a genuine national leadership. During its first six months of independence, from May to November 1918, Georgia had the protection of the Germans, and after that of the British. The Menshevik government, led by Noi Zhordaniia, modelled itself on the German Social Democrats, putting statesmanship before social revolution. This was a reverse of the Mensheviks’ dogma which had prevented them from taking power in 1917. But with 75 per cent of the vote in the elections to the National Assembly there was simply no other national party.
Land reform was the basis of their power. By breaking up the larger farms and estates, owned increasingly by Armenians, they won the support of the Georgian peasants, who were allowed to buy most of the land at democratic prices. The land reform consecrated the smallholding peasant as the embodiment of the Georgian nation. It forged a synthesis of national and class solidarity — the Georgian peasants and impoverished nobles against the Armenian bourgeoisie — which enabled the Menshevik government to enjoy two years of relative stability.
Only the ethnic minorities, the Ossetians and Abkhazians, with their demands for self-government, caused serious difficulties. Their high-handed treatment by the government in Tiflis, which was not immune to petty chauvinism, gave the Bolsheviks a real base of support. It was here, among the poor tribes of the northern Caucasus, that they built up their military organization for the subversion of independent Georgia. The Ossetian rebels were trained by the Bolsheviks in Vladikavkaz, just across the border in Russia, and sent across the mountains into Georgia. Within Georgia itself, the Bolsheviks had almost no support. The tiny Georgian police force had no difficulty in suppressing the Bolshevik leadership. In May 1920, when the Tiflis Bolsheviks tried to stage a coup to persuade the Eleventh Red Army (then in Baku) to launch an invasion, it was easily put down. Lenin ordered the Reds to pull back from Georgia: troops were needed on the Polish Front and, at least as Lenin later claimed, Georgia was not yet ripe for Sovietization. On 7 May, the Soviet Government signed a treaty with Georgia recognizing its independence and pledging not to interfere in its internal affairs.96
Here the Georgian Mensheviks made a fatal mistake. In a secret clause they agreed to legalize the Bolshevik Party in Georgia. Hundreds of activists were released from jail. No doubt the Mensheviks rationalized this as the price of guaranteeing Georgia’s independence. But, as their oldest foes, they should have known better than to trust the Bolsheviks. The Georgian Bolsheviks now became a fifth column of the Red Army based in Baku. Strikes and revolts against the government were planned from the Soviet Embassy in Tiflis with the aim of sparking an invasion. Lenin remained opposed to the military option, favouring a more gradual process of revolutionary subversion. Like Trotsky, he was concerned by the possible reaction of the British and the Germans, with whom the Bolsheviks were hoping to trade, not to mention the reaction of Turkey. The Western Socialist leaders had hailed Georgia as the only truly socialist country in the world. Karl Kautsky and Ramsay MacDonald had made a pilgrimage to Tiflis during 1920 and returned to Europe full of praise. There were also a practical problem. Kamenev, the head of the Red Army, warned that the troops of the Eleventh Red Army were too exhausted for a new offensive. But Ordzhonikidze was impatient for the ‘liberation’ of his native Georgia and, without Moscow’s knowledge, began to build up troops on the Armenian and Azerbaijani borders. Together with Kirov, the Soviet Ambassador in Tiflis, he pleaded with Lenin for immediate intervention. ‘One cannot hope for an internal explosion. Without our help Georgia cannot be Sovietized,’ the two men wrote on 2 January. Stalin supported them in another letter two days later. Lenin finally agreed. ‘Do not postpone,’ he wrote on Stalin’s letter.97
On 14 February 1921 the Politburo ordered the invasion to begin. Neither Kamenev nor Trotsky was informed. Against the 100,000 invaders Georgia’s tiny army, which had always been more of a symbol than a shield for the nation, stood no chance. It fought bravely for over a week before surrendering Tiflis on the 25th. Taking advantage of Georgia’s collapse, Turkey now invaded it from the south-west with the aim of capturing the port of Batum. This prevented the Menshevik leaders from making a last stand in their old rural stronghold of Guria, as they had intended. On 18 March they finally surrendered to the Reds and boarded an Italian ship bound for Europe. The rest of their organization went underground. It remained a dominant presence in the countryside, where it led the uprising that shook the Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1924.
Lenin was aware of the depth of the Mensheviks’ popularity in the countryside and was worried that the ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ displayed by some Bolsheviks during the invasion might turn Georgia into a bed of nails. On 2 March he had written to Ordzhonikidze urging him to pursue ‘a special policy of concessions with regard to the Georgian intelligentsia and small merchants’. This was the time when the NEP was introduced. Lenin saw its concessions to peasant agriculture, the free market and foreign trade as essential for the regime in Georgia. But he worried that the Bolsheviks in Ordzhonikidze’s Caucasian Bureau were dangerously caught in the old mentalities of War Communism and Russian centralism. The Caucasus, he explained in a letter to the local Bolsheviks on 14 April, was ‘even more peasant than Russia’ and this required ‘more softness, caution and conciliation’ in the transition to socialism than in the rest of Russia. Makharadze’s wing of the Georgian Party championed the cause of National Bolshevism and, thanks in part to them, some gains were made by the policy of korenizatsiia during the early 1920s. More Georgians entered Soviet office, many of them former Mensheviks. There was a boom of publications in the Georgian language, which began to replace Russian in the public sphere. All this showed that Georgia’s subjugation did not have to mean a cultural defeat. In the words of the Georgian poet, Leo Kiacheli, ‘the Georgian soul should rule in Georgia’.98
Yet there were still some Bolsheviks who were not even prepared to concede this. It was ironic that the foremost among these were two Georgians, Ordzhonikidze and Stalin, whose own Bolshevism had become mixed in a complex way with a sort of Great Russian chauvinism. The conflict rumbled on beneath the surface until 1922, when it suddenly erupted on to the Moscow scene. But that is the story of Lenin’s last struggle.