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

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.