Posted on 12/01/2012 6:35:01 PM PST by neverdem
Robert Service chronicles the Wests early failure to take action against Bolshevism. Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution, by Robert Service (PublicAffairs, 480 pp., $32.99)
Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time, observed Britains then-Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill in 1919. In his new book, Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution, Oxford historian Robert Service shows that not only Churchill, but also most of the West, were aware of the emerging Soviet presence. For a crucial five years, though, the West remained passive while the new Bolshevik government teetered on the brink of failure.
Service, who has authored biographies of the holy trinity of Russian Communism—Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky—as well as nine more books on the Soviet Union, is meticulous in his treatment of Communist rule. The new books only downfall is its misleading title, which sounds like a publishers choice. While spies and commissars do factor into the book, those looking for tales of espionage and intrigue will be disappointed. This is a study of the early years of the Russian Revolution through both Russian and Western eyes.
Service begins with the Bolsheviks narrow consolidation of power over the Russian government in 1917. The new regime became Lenins and Trotskys own: vicious in a fanatical pursuit of a better world for their preferred classes of workers and peasants. As a German Communist noted: One cant make a revolution in white gloves. . . it will be necessary to pass through rivers of blood and mud to get to the destination.
Regime leaders took pleasure in living lavishly while the masses suffered under police brutality, show trials, and state confiscations of food. While millions suffered in the name of progress, many top Bolsheviks enjoyed the pleasures of the old upper classes, including smoking cigars, wearing stylish fur coats, and having entire train cars to themselves. Not all were so hypocritical; some genuinely believed in the utopian dream of Communism. As the Bolsheviks solidified their power, they instituted reforms that met with mixed success. True to their revolutionary goals, they established free education (heavily censored by the state), housing for the poor (whenever possible), and even rudimentary health care (described by foreign witnesses as barbaric). The reforms were designed to build support among the masses; they were also part of a broader revolutionary idea of reengineering society. Marxism ultimately sought to transform the human soul. Service soberly notes, Much though Bolshevik doctrine pretended to scientific status, it was in fact rooted in blind faith and the Russian revolutionary tradition, Service notes soberly. Lenin and Trotsky never seriously took account of the dire warnings about the likely result of their project.
With the First World War at its height, and Germany making advances on the Eastern Front, the early Communists rallied around the banner of peace. Lenin and Trotsky knew that they could gain adherents and present themselves as the best solution to Russias problems. Service points out that even as they did so, the Bolsheviks sent out the newly created Red Army to terrorize the Russian people and crush dissent. Suing for peace in a farcical treaty with Germany, the Bolsheviks bought themselves time, troops, and supplies to inflict mass terror against their internal enemies.
Services book will be a valuable tool for policymakers, political scientists, and historians for its analysis of Western reaction to the Russian Revolution. Western Europe and America had already been wary of Communism long before October 1917, but once the threat materialized, the allies began taking covert action to learn what was happening inside Russian borders. Among the more notable secret agents was the famous Sidney Reilly, the Ace of Spies, who has recently gained notoriety from a British television series. Reillys intelligence-gathering and covert operations, along with the work of his fellow British secret agents, became the stuff of spy novels. The British, French, Americans, and Germans gathered and shared a wealth of information on the inner workings of the Soviet state. The West was aware, then, of what was happening inside Russia and was in unique position to do something about it.
The Western allies worried, of course, about an ideology that actively sought to undermine and destroy their political systems. Marxism-Leninism held that Communism must spread, and in the skillful hands of the Bolsheviks, this became a possibility. Moreover, as the allies learned, Communist goals would not be pursued as part of a process of withering away capitalism, as Marx believed, but instead, through inciting violent revolution—as Lenin had championed in his 1917 book, The State and Revolution. Bolsheviks infiltrated the high levels of state departments in both Britain and the United States as well as corporations and media outlets. The British Daily Herald owner, George Lansbury, approached the Bolsheviks in Moscow for financial help. They obliged him on the condition that he would publish Communist propaganda in his paper, which he agreed to do.
At wars end, the West faced a choice: intercede and crush the Bolshevik menace or stay out of the Russian struggle completely. The allies conflicting policies, rarely coordinated, became an odd compromise of both options. The British sent troops into the former trading port of Archangel with the order to wait for anti-Bolshevik Russian reinforcements. The plan was for a combined British and Russian push south to reclaim Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow from the Bolsheviks. The United States placed troops in Siberia with orders to protect the railroad and telegraph lines but not to confront the Red Army.
Inside Russia, anti-Communists and a small group of Czechs raised their own White Army and began forcing the Red Army back. Their momentum wouldnt last. After several months, the isolationist Americans pulled out, the British were eventually forced out, and the White Army began to retreat as the Communist propaganda machine churned out new recruits to fight them. Still, intelligence reports showed that Lenins popularity was waning, and that the Bolsheviks confiscations of land and grain were beginning to turn peasants against them.
Service makes clear that the Western allies had a real chance to stop the Soviet Union from achieving its full bloody potential. Allied intelligence revealed the terror within Russia. Winston Churchill warned: Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism. . . . Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.
By 1921, Soviet Russia was in shambles. Workers, peasants, and sailors began to revolt, and the Russian economy was failing. If ever there was a time for the Bolshevik regime to fall, it was now. At this moment, however, the British Parliament signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. British capital filled the regimes coffers and allowed it to survive. Under Stalin, the newly empowered Bolsheviks brought terror and destruction to millions of Russians. To this day, we dont know the full extent of the Soviet governments atrocities against its own people, and we probably never will.
Service offers an important lesson in international politics and foreign affairs. While diplomacy and peaceful negotiations should always be the preferred approach, early Soviet history proves that some situations call for military intervention. The millions of innocent Russian men, women, and children who perished under seven decades of Soviet rule would no doubt have traded everything for a chance at a government based on inalienable rights and free choice. By standing aside when they knew what was occurring in Russia, the allies condemned millions to tyranny. Services excellent book is a stark reminder to the free world that the price of freedom is high but sometimes needs to be paid.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
TIme to listen to...
In all fairness, there was little that the west could do in the circumstances, and even then it did not sit idly by.
To start with, the Russian monarchy, even with a German bureaucracy, was falling apart. The first revolutionaries, the democrats, tried to maintain the war, but the military command was incompetent and outdated. When the monarchy as much as resigned, the democrats took over and proved themselves utterly incompetent.
Not just incompetent, but amazingly incompetent, as if a politically correct California junior high school was put in charge of the fourth most industrialized nation on Earth. The laws they passed were “air headed” at best.
For example, abolishing the rank structure in the military, that all decisions were to be made by majority voice vote—in the middle of a war.
They only lasted six months, and the west encouraged them to continue to fight the war, which horribly depleted them. By the time the Bolsheviks became a menace, the situation looked like it was a choreographed farce, with equal parts Marx brothers, Three Stooges, and Monty Python.
Once the “red and white fight” began, the US tried to aid the white Russians by sending a support ship to the port of Archangel. But Russia was too far away, and very large, the west was still mired in World War I, and Democrat fool Woodrow Wilson was president.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear, you’ll let in the cold and storm
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”
And I constantly get grief from the locals when I suggest that we should ahhh,..."eliminate" commies.
Oh well, it's worth the expression on their face, and they don't throw trash on my lawn.
Reminds me of a certain "leader" at home who is spending $1.4 BILLION of our money each year on his own airplane, vacations, golf...more than ALL the kings and queens of Europe COMBINED, while the people suffer under gross incompetence and tyranny.
Reminds me of a certain "leader" at home who is spending $1.4 BILLION of our money each year on his own airplane, vacations, golf...more than ALL the kings and queens of Europe COMBINED, while the people suffer under gross incompetence and tyranny.
Oh. That famous leading from behind approach, eh?
I thought the same thing - love that poem to death. I read it nearly every year in the depths of winter to the appalled family.
“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon one night ...”
Then from another poem of the Yukon, this one is hilarious, but Robert Service may have just been reporting on local events:
“... I had to kill the galoot when he started to shoot electricity through my walls ...”
Service’s poetry is on the short list of good books for the fireside on a cold winter’s eve.
“Services poetry is on the short list of good books for the fireside on a cold winters eve.”
Man poetry! Like Kipling.
It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out - it’s the grain of sand in your shoe. - Robert Service
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.