A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Communism is completely unintelligible to the millions of barely literate peasants and it is doubtful that they will fight for it. If Christianity failed to unify the people in two thousand years, how can Communism hope to do so when most of the people had not even heard of it three years ago? Only the idea of Russia can do that.⁷⁵

Trotsky at once saw the propaganda victory to be won by getting Brusilov to join the Reds. The next day he announced the general's appointment as the Chairman of a Special Conference in command of the Western Front.* Printed in Pravda on 7 May, the announcement was typical of the increasingly xenophobic tone of the Bolsheviks' rhetoric. It called on all patriots to join the army and 'defend the Fatherland' from the 'Polish invaders', who were 'trying to tear from us lands that have always belonged to the Russians'. Trotsky claimed that the Poles were driven by 'hatred of Russia and the Russians'. The Red Army journal, Voennoe delo, published a xenophobic article (for which it was later suspended) contrasting the 'innate Jesuitry of the Polacks' with the 'honourable and open spirit of the Great Russian race'. Radek characterized the whole of the civil war as a 'national struggle of liberation against foreign invasion'. The Reds, he said, were 'defending Mother Russia' against the efforts of the Whites and the Allies to 'make it a colony' of the West. 'Soviet Russia', he concluded on a note of warning to the newly independent states, aimed to 'reunite all the Russian lands and defend Russia from colonial exploitation.'⁷⁶ It was back to the old imperialism.

The Bolsheviks were stunned by the success of their own patriotic propaganda. It brought home to them the huge potential of Russian nationalism as a means of popular mobilization. It was a potential Stalin later realized. Within a few weeks of Brusilov's appointment, 14,000 officers had joined the Red Army to fight the Poles, thousands of civilians had volunteered for war-work, and well over 100,000 deserters had returned to the Red Army on the Western Front. There were mass patriotic demonstrations with huge effigies of Pilsudski and Curzon which the protesters proceeded to burn. 'We never thought', Zinoviev confessed, 'that Russia had so many patriots.'⁷⁷

But in fact the patriotic motives that had driven Brusilov to join the Reds were shared by many people from the Old Russia. National Bolshevism, as their creed was later called, urged the patriotic intelligentsia to rally behind the Soviet state, now that it had won the civil war, for the resurrection of a Great Russia. It was an echo of the call by Vekhi to give up opposition to the

* Apart from Brusilov the conference included his two closest friends from the tsarist army, Generals Klembovsky and Zaionchkovsky, as well as his old ally Polivanov, the former Minister of War.