When Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin tried to moderate the powers of the secret police Lenin overruled them. As late as 1921 he was still expanding the Cheka's powers of summary execution.
Even after the Khrushchev revelations of 1956, when Soviet historiography began to heap blame on Stalin for the murderous excesses of the century, it continued to exculpate Lenin as if his reputation were inviolable. But it was unequivocally Lenin who initiated and inculcated the reign of terror. It was he who ordered the repressions, the executions and the concentration camps. And he ordered them after he was shot by Fanny Kaplan.
The shooting in August 1918 had a dramatic impact on Lenin. If the Kaplan assassination attempt had never taken place, the intensity of the Red Terror would surely have been less; fewer people would have lost their liberty and their lives.
But if Kaplan hadn't been half blind, if her aim had been less uncertain, if Lenin had died that day in August, the impact on history could have been cataclysmic. Chaos theory's 'butterfly effect' - time's amplification of initially minor perturbations, a butterfly flapping or not flapping its wing, into the immense force of hurricanes - could have changed everything. The Bolshevik regime, already assailed by powerful enemies, could easily have foundered. And even if it had survived the loss of its inspirational leader, its subsequent development would have been dramatically different.
It is likely that Leon Trotsky, the cruel, mercurial minister of war, would have become leader in Lenin's place. His hatred of Stalin would almost certainly have precluded the Georgian monster's rise to ultimate power. But it is equally probable that Trotsky's insistence on exporting communism to the rest of the globe - he was the unbending proponent of world revolution - would have done for the USSR well before then. Whatever Stalin's other failings, it was his pragmatic abandonment of the pipe dream of world revolution in favour of retrenchment - 'socialism in one country' - that saved the USSR from almost certain annihilation in the crisis years of the 1920s.
As it turned out, the events of 1918 - the escalation of civil war, the ferocity of Bolshevism's opponents, the spiralling feuds within the ranks of the revolution and, not least, Fanny Kaplan's attempted assassination of its leader - hardened the Bolsheviks into a party of autocratic power, uninterested in debate or divergent opinions. Henceforth they would consider themselves a paramilitary fraternity surrounded by an untrustworthy population that must be re-educated to understand the new reality. To achieve their ends, the party's leaders would steel themselves to be austere, disciplined zealots, untroubled by human emotions. It was the end of all hopes for democracy in Russia; the beginning of seventy years of unbending communist autocracy.
wo events in mid November 1918, separated by only a
SEA CHANGE IN THE CIVIL WAR
November 1918 evan mawd sley
week, transformed the course of the Civil War in Russia. The first was the armistice between Germany and the Allies, signed in a railway carriage at Compiegne in France on Monday, 11 November. The second took place 2,900 miles away, at Omsk in central Siberia on the following Sunday night, 17 November. The Provisional All-Russian Government (PA-RG), a body claiming to be the legitimate government of Russia and led by a 'Directory' of five men, was overthrown in a coup d'etat. The following morning a military dictator, Vice Admiral Alexander Kolchak, took the post of 'supreme ruler' (verkhovnyi pravi- tel) of Russia.
THE ARMISTICE AND RUSSIA
The terms of the Compiegne armistice included the withdrawal of German troops to within their own borders. While such forces in the west would move within fifteen days (Clause II), and most of those in the east should also do so 'immediately' (Clause XII), Russia was for the Allies something of a special case. Clause XII of the Armistice stipulated that while German troops 'in territories which before the war formed part of Russia' should also return home, this was to occur only'as soon as the Allies shall think the moment suitable, having regard to the internal situation of these territories'. Also important was Clause XXV which required the Germans to give Allied ships free access to the Baltic.1
The German military presence on Russian territory had developed over four years. Military defeats suffered under the Imperial Government and the 1917 'revolutionary' Provisional Government led to enemy occupation of Poland as well as parts of Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia. In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power, with the promise ofbringing an end to the war. But negotiations, followed by an armistice and then renewed fighting, ended with the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk on 3 March 1918. Under this treaty the new Soviet government lost control of large swathes of territory in the west and south, notably in the Baltic and Ukraine, which were occupied by German (and Aus- tro-Hungarian) troops.
The November 1918 armistice undid all this. The troops of the Central Powers in the Russian 'borderlands' were now concerned mainly with effecting their own rapid withdrawal. A temporary power vacuum was created, which could be filled by different forces. Nationalists among the ethnic minorities of the borderlands hoped to achieve genuine statehood. Ethnic Russians, opposed to both the Bolsheviks and the minority nationalists, wanted to regain control of these territories and use them as a base to strike against the Soviet zone. The Bolshevik central government prepared to reassert control over the borderlands by using its growing Red Army. At a grander level, the Bolsheviks hoped the borderlands would provide a bridge to central Europe, enabling them to extend socialism to Germany and the lands of Austria-Hungary. From the west the British and French wished to contain this expansion of Russian/Soviet power, by supporting anti- Soviet governments - minority nationalist or Russian anti-Bolshevik. The French, in particular, were eager to establish a cordon sanitaire around Bolshevik Russia. The Allies, like the Leninists, had a maximum programme: by isolating the Soviet zone and supporting local forces they would bring about the total destruction of Bolshevism.
On 23 October, two weeks before the Armistice and based on the already rapidly changing military situation, Premier Georges Clem- enceau had signed a directive launching an active struggle against Soviet Russia. He made much of the danger of growing Bolshevik strength and put forward a policy of economic blockade. Troops would be landed in south Russia to cut the Soviet regime off from the grain and mineral resources of Ukraine and the Don region, and a military nucleus would be created, around which an ti-Soviet forces could rally. Three days after the Armistice, on 14 November, the British War Cabinet met to approve the outlines of a post-war Russia policy. These included provision of military supplies to the anti-Bolshevik General Denikin in south Russia and to the governments of the Baltic States, 'if, and when, they have Governments ready to receive and utilise such material'. The small number of British troops already in north Russia and Siberia would remain there. In Siberia diplomatic support - de facto recognition - was to be offered to the local anti-Bolshevik government.2
In the weeks that immediately followed the 11 November armistice Allied fleets passed into the Baltic and Black seas. After the Mudros armistice with Turkey (signed on 30 October) British and French warships were finally able to enter the Dardanelles. On the morning of 13 November a large force anchored off Constantinople. Passing out of the Bosphorus and steaming north across the Black Sea, the main fleet arrived at Sevastopol on 25 November. Individual ships reached Novo- rossiisk in the north Caucasus on the 22nd and Odessa on the 27th. In the Baltic Sea, Allied naval vessels reached Libava (Liepaja) in Latvia on 9 December, and Revel (Tallinn) in Estonia on the 12th.