Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [20]
After the abdication of the Tsar in 1917, the provisional government tried to remain in the war, faithful to its obligations. It may well be that that, more than any one other decision, killed parliamentary government in Russia. The democratic slogan of “on with the war” was no match for the Communist, Bolshevik cry, “Peace, land, bread.” When the Bolsheviks seized power later in 1917, overthrowing the provisional government, the country broke up in civil war, which lasted until 1920. The Western Allied governments and Japan all intervened in Russia. They sent forces to Murmansk and Archangel, and to Vladivostok in the east, ostensibly to protect the war materials they had already sent Russia. Actually, they gave surreptitious and ineffective help to the counter-revolutionary movement, the Whites.
The Whites had little to offer except a return to the past, however, and they were finally defeated, partly by the genius of Trotsky as the organizer of the Red Army, partly by their own internecine squabbles. The White cause died. In 1920, there was a war with Poland, in which Poland tried to take over the Ukraine, which wanted to break away from Russia anyway. The Poles lost, and when the whole civil war period ended, three things were obvious: The Reds were firmly in power; they thoroughly distrusted the West; and the West already thoroughly distrusted them.
The policy that Lenin and later Stalin produced was as complete a dictatorship as any of those of the right wing; the only difference was that it masqueraded under a different set of slogans. A dictatorship of the proletariat was still a dictatorship, and the state did not wither away in the classic Marxist formula.
Karl Marx, laboring away in the British Museum in the nineteenth century, had discarded Russia as inappropriate for the kind of class revolution he prophesied. He may well have been right. When Lenin died in 1924, there was a power struggle for his mantle. The chief contenders were Leon Trotsky, brilliant, intellectually supple, a figure with a world view, and Joseph Stalin, once the bully-boy of the party, now its secretary, with a spider-like web through all the channels of command. Stalin ended up in control. Trotsky ended up in exile in Mexico City where an assassin buried a geology pick in the back of his head in 1940.
Whether communism might have developed differently had Lenin lived longer, or had Trotsky succeeded him, is impossible to say. Many authorities accuse Stalin of betraying the revolutionary cause, of being a Russian of the Russias, of succumbing to nationalism. He went his own way, he killed his millions, and he must therefore be accounted one of the great forces of the twentieth century.
In 1922, Russia and Germany had allied in the Treaty of Rapallo, the two pariahs of Europe getting together. It was this agreement that let Germany’s officially nonexistent airmen train in Russia, among other things. Then Britain finally accorded diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1924, followed by most of the other European states; it was not until 1933 that the United States acknowledged her existence. Through the late twenties and the early thirties Russia signed nonaggression pacts and mutual-defense treaties with most of the central and east European states, and in 1934, she joined the League of Nations. She was always foremost in saying everyone ought to disarm; perhaps Russia said it too often, because few believed her. More than the Fascists, the Bolsheviks were the bogeymen of the interwar period.
Nonetheless, in 1935, France and Czechoslovakia signed an alliance with her. The timing was by no means accidental: Hitler denounced the disarmament clauses of Versailles in March;