Lenin, Gorbachev and the Disintegration of Empires : Nationalities: Why did Lenin, who came to power calling for liberation, instead hold on to as much of the czarist empire as he could?

Governments in Central and Eastern Europe crumbled without warning. Crowds streamed into the streets and public squares. Democracy and self-determination were in the air. Iron rulers stepped down and, denuded of their robes of office, were seen to be no more than frightened old men.

The Russian empire was disintegrating. Ancient lands and peoples--Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Finns--moved to assert self-rule. Against all odds, these events unfolded at a time when Russia had a new leader who was at least open to the possibility of granting such claims.

The year was 1918; the new leader was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin.

Americans at the time wondered what to make of Lenin, just as Americans now wonder what to make of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Was he sincere when he professed liberal principles? Did he really intend to allow the nationalities hitherto ruled by Russia to secede from the empire and to rule themselves?

What made it especially difficult to answer such questions, even after events unfolded, was that like Gorbachev, Lenin ruled in precarious circumstances. His options were limited. When he reached decisions or took action, it was not always clear whether he was doing what he chose to do or what he felt forced to do.

In November, 1917, Lenin seized control of the government in Petrograd, Russia’s capital; a mere six weeks later he established his secret police, the Cheka. On March 8, 1918, Lenin told the 7th Congress of his Bolshevik Party that “Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureaucracy, no standing army, no police . . . .” But feeling his regime threatened, Lenin created a police state: By mid-1921 his Cheka numbered 250,000 in the Russian heartland of the empire alone, a force almost 20 times larger than the Czar’s secret political police force. Was such a force intended to be a merely temporary measure? If so, Lenin miscalculated, for its establishment, when joined to the implementation of Lenin’s “centralist” theory (that the state must be dominated by a single party, obviously his own) turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian police state. Was this Lenin’s intention? Or was it instead the result of his profound failure to understand that power corrupts?

He may not have been thinking about the power of his government at the time; he may have been thinking instead about its vulnerability. When Lenin seized Petrograd in November, 1917, he won possession of an island surrounded by an ocean of enemies. He had always said that the various nationalities ruled by the czar should be free to secede. He said it still. He may even have believed what he said. But he was in no position to carry the policy into effect.

The German general staff, which for years had provided him and the Bolsheviks with financial support, believed him--and the Germans were no bunch of wide-eyed innocents. Years before, they had learned to accept the truth of what one of Lenin’s oldest colleagues in the revolutionary underground had told them: that Russian Communists “could only achieve their aim by the total destruction of Czarism and the division of Russia into smaller states . . . . The interests of the German government were therefore identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries, who were already at work.”

The Germans may well have been correct in believing that Lenin himself, in normal circumstances, would have been prepared to let the Finns, the Poles and the others go their own way. But he could hardly do so at a time when these breakaway places were staging areas for the czarist (“White”) armies preparing to march on Petrograd to crush the Bolsheviks and undo the revolution. The armies winning independence for Finland, for example, were commanded by a czarist officer who proposed a White crusade against Bolshevik Russia; Lenin’s Reds could not wage the civil war against him as a White without, as Russians, fighting Finns. Nor could Lenin’s forces avoid fighting the Poles, whose independence they in fact had recognized; for Poland invaded the Ukraine.

In the end, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland won independence from European Russia. Lenin did not live long enough afterward to show what his policy in practice would have been with respect to the continuing independence of these nations. It is at least suggestive of things to come, however, that Lenin’s colleagues would not follow him on the national independence issue even while he was alive. The head of the Cheka was a Pole who did not desire independence even for Poland; he believed in Russian hegemony, as did the commissar for nationalities, Josef Stalin, a Georgian who did not desire independence for Georgia.

If Lenin’s policy on independence movements in the former czarist empire in Europe was complicated, his approach to such movements in Asian areas of the czar’s former empire was even more so. These were not politically cohesive areas; they were mosaics of sects, clans, tribes and peoples. The basic political fact was that they were unable to get on with one another. Disorder and communal strife flourished--as did political intrigues conducted by enemies of the Bolshevik regime.

South of the heights of the Caucasus mountain range, and west of the Caspian Sea, lay the territories ruled by the czars in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Armenians and the Georgians were Christians who had historically welcomed the Russians as protectors against Muslim neighbors.

In 1918 Georgia was controlled by Mensheviks, loyal to the socialist government of Russia that the Bolsheviks had overthrown. Though pushed into proclaiming national independence, the Mensheviks aimed to remain part of Russia and to overthrow (and replace) Lenin’s Bolshevik regime as Russia’s government. Naturally this brought them into collision with the Leninists; so that what looked to the world like Russia crushing the independence of Georgia was really the Bolsheviks crushing their Menshevik opponents in lands that both sides regarded as properly part of Russia.

The martyred Armenians, whose ancient homeland had been partitioned between Russia and Turkey long before, had experienced Russian protection and now hoped instead to obtain protection from the World War I Allies and the United States. Since these were enemies of Bolshevik Russia, the Soviets had at least an excuse--perhaps even a reason--for bringing Armenian independence to an end. They did, in collaboration with nationalist Turkey, once again splitting Armenia between them.

To the east, the Russian section of Azerbaijan (the rest of which belonged to Iran--or Persia, as it was called then) and, still further east, the vast steppe-lands of Russia’s section of Turkestan (the rest of which was occupied by China) were mainly Turkic-speaking, Moslem lands whose peoples feuded with non-Muslims and (in Turkestan) with Russian settlers. Lenin is said to have remarked that these peoples of colonialist Asia were not ready for self-government and would have to be governed by Europeans. If left alone by Russia, Azerbaijan and Turkestan could certainly have been viewed as power vacuums, easily used (as indeed they were, from 1918 onward) by Moscow’s enemies as bases from which to attack the Bolshevik regime. Lenin’s army and secret police were sent to bring them back under Russian control and succeeded in doing so by 1922.

So Lenin, who had come to power calling for liberation, instead held on to as much of the czarist empire as he could and made it even more a police state than it had been under the czar. Perhaps he had never meant to liberate anyone; he would certainly not have been the first politician to go back on his promises once in power. But it is possible to conceive of him as having been sincere, and as having been driven to betray his pledges by the necessities (as he saw them) of his country’s security.

Those necessities look different today: to Lenin it looked as though they pushed him toward totalitarianism, while to Gorbachev it looks as though they are pushing him away from it. But what Lenin believed or what Gorbachev believes a political society ought to be is probably less important than what Lenin perceived he had to do, and what Gorbachev perceives he has to do, in order to survive.

Lenin did what he thought he had to do--and in the long run failed. Gorbachev is obviously one who believes that nothing succeeds like success, so he is unlikely to choose the Leninist path if he can avoid it. It may be symptomatic that one of the new breed of Russian politicians of the Gorbachev age, Gavriil Popov, when asked recently whether Lenin’s embalmed body should be removed from Red Square, replied: “No, I think we should keep it there for our children’s sake, as a reminder of what they should not do.”