5
Soviet Russia and the British Empire

Commerce and the "Curzon Ultimatum"

In explaining the Bolshevik grand strategy for internationalizing the October Revolution, a favorite device of Western scholarship has been what might be called "the East-West alternation thesis." It can be stated as follows: Those who made the Russian Revolution turned to Asia as they lost confidence in revolution in Europe. After the defeat of proletarian revolutions on the Continent in 1919, the Bolsheviks, switching targets 180 degrees, promoted anticolonial rebellions in Asia. Lenin's theses on the colonial question at the Second Comintern Congress, the convocation of the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, and revolutionary involvement in Islamic Asia followed. Later, after the abortive 1923 revolution in Germany, an increasingly bolshevized Comintern turned eastward a second time and channeled resources toward China. In both instances the revolution in Asia was supported to redress an unfavorable correlation of forces in Europe. Promoting revolution in "the East" compensated strategically for defeats in "the West."

A different pattern of events, perceptions, policies, and strategies is presented in this study. During the initial phase of "world revolution" in Europe (November 1918-August 1919), the common assumptions regarding proletarian insurrection held by Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev in 1917 were first confirmed and then contradicted. In the second phase (April-October 1920), the victories of the Red Army in its reconquest of the borderlands of the former Tsarist Empire in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Eastern Europe provided the basis for establishing and protecting revolutionary regimes in Bukhara, Persia, and, prospectively, Poland. In the third phase (October 1920-May 1921), the center of revolutionary initiative shifted to the ECCI and its Small Bureau, which authorized

operations to be conducted by trained cadres in India and Germany. Heavy opposition and disappointing results in both instances seem to have led to a more institutionalized and easily controlled mode of internationalizing revolution, one that utilized the apparatus of Soviet diplomatic missions in places like Tehran and Kabul, not always with the approval of the NKID in Moscow or of the polpred on the scene. Initiatives along these lines on the southern rim of the socialist republics evoked the "Curzon ultimatum" in May 1923. The acquiescence of the Soviet government to this ultimatum did not mark the end of support for "world revolution" in either Asia or Europe, however. In the summer of that year, projects were conceived (presumably in the Politburo and the ECCI) that culminated in an abortive revolution in Germany in November and in the dispatch of political and military advisers to the nationalist revolutionary movement in China at almost the same time. What seems most remarkable about the pattern of revolutionary insurrection during the five years from 1918 to 1923 is not the alternation of attention between Europe and Asia but the simultaneity of advance, withdrawal, and advance in both regions.

The British counteraction against Soviet/Comintern revolutionary activity in Islamic Asia that culminated in the Curzon ultimatum was formulated first in the spring of 1920, at the time British forces were withdrawn from the Caspian and northern Persia. The policy on which the government settled at that time would constitute the primary counterrevolutionary strategy of the British government for the next seven years. It was to tie diplomatic and commercial relations to the cessation of revolutionary activity. On the eve of the arrival of a Russian trade delegation in May, the Cabinet agreed that the pending trade negotiations would be an occasion "to effect an all-round settlement which would include the East." It was time to drive "a good bargain," Lord Curzon thought. The Soviet government was willing to "pay almost any price for the assistance which we . . . are in a position to give," and that price, he recommended, was best "paid in a cessation of Bolshevik hostility in parts of the world important to us."^[1]

Revolution in Asia became an integral part of the negotiations that led to the conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in March 1921.^[2] The opening phase of these negotiations coincided with the meeting of the Second Comintern Congress, and the attention given to Asia in CI grand strategy did not go unnoticed at the Foreign Office's listening post at the British embassy in Copenhagen. It reported that "a general revolt in the East next autumn" was being planned in order to "hurry up the World Revolution, for which the chiefs of Soviet Russia have still great hopes."^[3] From the first meeting between the two trade delegations in London until

the day the treaty was signed almost ten months later, British negotiators— Lloyd George, Lord Curzon, and Sir Robert Horne, president of the Board of Trade (1920-21)—repeatedly charged Soviet Russia with activities hostile to Britain, first in Transcaucasia and Asia Minor and then in Persia, Afghanistan, and India. As evidence of these activities, Curzon specified, in notes dispatched to Moscow in October, "a revolutionary conference of Asiatic peoples at Baku," which was "clearly directed against British interests," and a school at Tashkent that was organizing forces for an attack on them.^[4] The preamble to the trade agreement signed in London stated that both parties would refrain "from conducting outside its own borders any official propaganda direct or indirect against the institutions of the British Empire or the Russian Soviet Republic respectively."^[5] And a letter from London to Moscow that accompanied it listed the conditions on which continued Anglo-Russian commerce depended. All pertained to revolutionary agitation and propaganda in Afghanistan and India. Among the items specified in the letter were Roy's school in Tashkent, "a forward base for work in India," the money, ammunition, and airplanes provided to the government in Kabul, and plans to establish consulates in eastern Afghanistan adjacent to the North-West Frontier Province.^[6]

The trade agreement negotiations raise interesting questions. Why were the Bolsheviks willing to negotiate the end of support for revolutionary operations in Asia at the very moment the Communist International was initially developing an Asian strategy and the ECCI was beginning to make it operational? Why was the British government willing to grant trading rights to a country that was intent on bringing revolution to the heart of the Empire? How did they know Soviet/Comintern revolutionary activities in Afghanistan and India in such full detail? The answers to these questions are to be found in a consideration of Anglo-Soviet relations in the years 1921-1923.

The policy adopted by the government of Great Britain toward Soviet Russia was influenced from two directions. Lloyd George believed that the way to alleviate postwar unemployment in England was through the restoration of prewar world trade patterns, and the orders placed by Krasin with British factories were crucial to his hopes. At one point in the trade treaty negotiations, the only textile mills in Yorkshire working full-time were those with Russian contracts. Krasin was able to threaten Horne with a cancellation of these contracts should negotiations fail, and he did so.^[7] On the other hand, Curzon was obsessed with the Russian threat to the British Empire in Asia, and he and Churchill would agree to a trade treaty only as a way of ending revolutionary activity there. Therefore the foreign policy on which the Lloyd George government resolved was one that deployed a

counterrevolutionary strategy combining both détente and intransigence and promoting both foreign trade and imperial security.

To counteract what was referred to in Cabinet minutes as "Russian hostility and anti-British propaganda in Afghanistan and elsewhere,"^[8] the Foreign Office drew up a list of complaints that the British representative in Moscow delivered to Chicherin on 7 September 1921. The Soviet government was not threatened with cancellation of the trade agreement, something the Cabinet agreed "should at this stage be held in reserve." However, the note did demand that the complaints listed be remedied forthwith. The most serious complaints were directed at the Soviet-Afghan treaty concluded the previous February, and specifically at the provision for consulates in eastern Afghanistan, which appeared to be intended, the note stated, as "prospective centers of propaganda." The present aim of Soviet policy in Asia, the note concluded, was to form a "powerful united Muslim movement which would deal a final blow against the power of capital" by destroying the colonial base on which it was believed to rest.^[9] However, although the Foreign Office rightly recognized the purposes of Soviet policy, many of the particulars of the charges leveled were incorrect, half correct, or could not be substantiated. For this, the organization of the British intelligence services was at fault.

During the years 1920-1927 British intelligence was able to intercept and decode much of the diplomatic traffic of the government in Moscow with its posts in London and the Middle East. The Foreign Office paid close attention to these intercepts and eventually took over direct responsibility for the activities of the organization that provided them, the Government Code and Cipher School. "GC & CS," as it was called, had in its employ one of the leading cryptanalysts of tsarist Russia, and intelligence from decoded Soviet diplomatic correspondence began to flow in late May 1920, at the very time the Soviet trade delegation arrived in London.^[10] Soon the Foreign Office learned on what issues Krasin was given latitude to negotiate and what Lenin thought of Lloyd George ("That swine Lloyd George has no scruples of shame in the way he deceives. Don't believe a word he says . . .").^[11] The intercepts did much to discredit Chicherin at the Foreign Office during the trade negotiations. When he denied Soviet involvement in Bukhara, Persia, and Tashkent and on the northwestern frontier of India, intercepted messages conclusively proved otherwise. "With so colossal and finished a liar," Curzon wrote to the Cabinet, "it is useless to cope."^[12]

Additional information came through other sources. Colonel F. M. Bailey, a daring intelligence officer, reported directly from Soviet Central Asia.^[13] The intelligence bureau of the Home Office of the Government of India, known as the Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB), and headed by Colo-

nel Cecil Kaye, kept track of Roy and other Indian revolutionaries through intercepts and an extensive network of informers. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in London collected information on subversion in India through its post in Berlin.^[14] The latter was the source of the information— much of it unreliable—that was used to substantiate the charges lodged in Moscow in September 1921. The NKID spotted the inaccuracies and informed the Foreign Office that its charges were "either unfounded or based on false information and forgeries."^[15] A Foreign Office check confirmed that much of the information did indeed come from a tainted source—a publication issued by a White Russian intelligence organization in Berlin— and concluded that only two or three of the charges could be verified. Curzon was enraged. His only recourse with Moscow was to reaffirm his original charges feebly and to refuse to specify the source of his information.^[16]

The Foreign Office protest was badly timed as well as badly informed. Soviet/Comintern-sponsored revolutionary activity in southwest Asia was dramatically cut back following the friendship treaties concluded with Persia and Afghanistan in February and the trade agreement signed in London in March. The treaty with Persia bound both parties to "strictly abstain from intervention in the internal affairs of the other," while the treaty with Afghanistan merely pledged respect for "mutual independence."^[17] Accordingly, the Soviets closed down the Indian Military School in Tashkent and informed Indian revolutionaries that they would no longer receive funds previously allocated to them. In June, Chicherin instructed the Soviet representatives in Kabul and Tehran to "categorically avoid the fatal mistake of undertaking artificial attempts to plant communism" in Persia and Afghanistan and to maintain the "strictest non-interference in internal affairs."^[18] The activities of the Council of Action and Propaganda based in Baku were curtailed, much to the dismay of its members who regarded the trade agreement as a "fatal blow" to their work.^[19] In July, at Chicherin's request, the Politburo reined in the Communist Party of Azerbaijan—the spearhead of the Soviet revolution in northern Persia. Ordzhonikidze, the party chairman, was instructed "to in no instance violate the Soviet-Persian treaty and the directives of the Central Committee [of the RCP(B)] and the NKID." Similar instructions were issued to other party and Soviet organizations in Caucasia.^[20]

British intelligence attributed this cutback in revolutionary activity to the famine and the financial difficulties in which Russia found itself following the Civil War. When they observed what seemed to be a resurgence of revolutionary activity in the summer of 1922, they correlated it with a new aggressive confidence given to Soviet foreign relations by the conclusion of the Rapallo agreement with Germany in April—apparently overlooking

the impact of the better harvest in 1921. What GC & CS reported at this time was that large amounts of money and propaganda were being distributed to nationalist, anti-British movements in Persia and on the frontier of India through the Soviet missions in Tehran and Kabul.^[21] This perceived renewal of revolutionary activity may have been the result of the newly acquired capability of GC & CS to intercept and decode telegrams between the NKID in Moscow and its posts abroad as well as of renewed revolutionary aggressiveness projected from Moscow.

In any case, the intelligence was accurate this time. The Kabul mission was dispensing weapons and ammunition, and in Tehran a major propaganda organization was operating out of the Soviet mission. The polpred there was Fedor Rothshtein, a prominent journalist and former editor of the Manchester Guardian and a secret Comintern emissary in Great Britain. The mission staff was unusually large; it directly financed several nationalist, anti-British newspapers; occasionally it sponsored pro-Soviet articles in anti-Western, clerical Islamic publications. During Rothstein's tour in Tehran (1920-22), the mission there also became a center of almost constant intrigue in Persian politics. Among its endeavors were efforts to organize a body of pro-Soviet opinion within the Persian merchant class and to prevent the growth of American economic influence over what were formerly Russian concessions in northern Persia.^[22]

Of all the intelligence received at the Foreign Office, news of revolutionary activity directed at India and the North-West Frontier Province disturbed Curzon most. When the Lloyd George government fell in November 1922, and a Conservative Cabinet was installed with Andrew Bonar Law as prime minister, Curzon was able to operate with less constraint than before. Thereafter, in the absence of the détente-oriented Lloyd George, Curzon's own intransigent policy toward Russia played an increasingly significant role in British foreign relations. His aim in 1922-23 was to sever the relations with Russia into which Lloyd George had led the government. His policy found ready support from John D. Gregory, head of the Northern Division at the Foreign Office and its expert on Russian affairs, who weighed the tactical considerations. Gregory calculated that a break in relations with Russia was a weapon that could be used only once, and then only "if and when there is a reasonable chance of upsetting the Soviet government or at least dealing an effective blow to its stability." And when the Cabinet accepted the idea of sending an ultimatum to Moscow in the spring of 1923, Gregory called it a "great opportunity for us who would like a break anyhow . . . I cannot believe that we shall ever get so good a one again."^[23]

What has generally been called "the Curzon ultimatum" was delivered

to the NKID in Moscow on 8 May 1923.^[24] It complained of a wide range of offenses to British interests and to British citizens. The most important of them were termed the "pernicious activities" conducted by Soviet authorities in Asia—the financial support given to revolutionary anti-British movements channeled through the diplomatic missions in Tehran and Kabul and the infiltration into India of revolutionaries trained in Tashkent and Moscow. Unless these and the other actions were apologized for and repudiated, Curzon's ultimatum stated, unless those responsible for them were "disowned and recalled," and unless the terms of the note were "fully and unconditionally complied with" in ten days, the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement would be terminated and British representatives in Moscow would be withdrawn. To substantiate the charges contained in the note, the Foreign Office relied exclusively on GC & CS decodes of intercepted diplomatic correspondence. The ultimatum made repeated and specific reference to them, although to do so risked revealing to the Soviet government the sources of British intelligence.^[25]

The Foreign Office apparently took the NKID by surprise, and the in-house reaction was one of outrage. Litvinov found the ultimatum generally offensive. Chicherin objected particularly to the demand for the recall of the Soviet representatives in Afghanistan and Persia^[26] —Raskolnikov at Kabul and Boris Shumiatskii, who had played an important role in organizing the Comintern Secretariat for the Far East in Irkutsk and attended the Third Comintern Congress in 1921 as a delegate, and then replaced Roth-stein in Tehran in 1922. Nevertheless, it was the skill of Soviet diplomacy that made it impossible for the British Cabinet to hold to the demand for unconditional compliance within ten days, and its skill that succeeded in removing the element of ultimatum from the situation, thereby preventing a break in Anglo-Soviet relations. The response transmitted by the NKID was prompt and conciliatory and contained a minimum of what Robert Hodgson, the British representative in Moscow, called "communist verbiage."^[27] It appealed deliberately and directly to the most "reasonable" elements of British politics: Curzon's note was unnecessarily hostile; ultimata and threats were inappropriate to the situation; Anglo-Soviet trade benefited both countries; the matters at issue were insignificant when compared to the contribution that peaceful relations between Great Britain and Soviet Russia could make to the peace and prosperity of Europe.^[28] Krasin, who had been in Moscow, returned to London, where he succeeded in getting the ten-day time limit lifted.^[29] This gave to Soviet diplomacy the time and the opportunity needed to work.

Both the NKID and the Foreign Office recognized Soviet/Comintern

support for revolutionary activities in Persia and Afghanistan as the crucial issue at stake. Narkomindel attempted to make this the topic of separate negotiations and suggested that Chicherin come to London to conduct them. The Foreign Office both rejected this proposal and advanced a definition of the term "propaganda" that extended its meaning from that contained in the 1921 trade agreement: The Soviet government was "not to support with funds or in any other form persons or bodies or agencies or institutions whose aim is to spread discontent or to foment rebellion in any part of the British Empire . . . and to impress upon its officers and officials the full and continuous observance of these conditions."^[30] Given the firmness of London's position, the crisis was resolved only when Moscow gave way in notes dispatched on 4 and 9 June, in which they agreed both to the demands made in Curzon's ultimatum and to the expanded definition of propaganda.^[31] Curzon claimed what he called "a considerable victory over the Soviet government";^[32] Stanley Baldwin, who was appointed prime minister during the crisis, agreed, and so did the London press. But the outcome was a success for Russia too. The NKID's skillful, cautious, and conciliatory diplomacy thwarted the primary intention of Curzon and the Foreign Office—either to break off relations or to inflict a humiliating defeat on Soviet policy in Asia.

Authoritarian Modernization, Nationalist Revolution, and Socialist Internationalism

Despite the deliberations of the Second Comintern Congress, the rhetoric of Baku, and the plans made in the Small Bureau of the ECCI, those who made the October Revolution proved willing to bargain away support for revolutionary insurrection in Persia and India in order to establish and maintain normal relations with the leading nation of the capitalist world. Following the Curzon ultimatum, the NKID directed diplomatic personnel in Afghanistan to have nothing to do with revolutionary elements, and ordered embassy officers in Persia to cease temporarily all political activities and work with secret agents.^[33] Although the content of the discussions among the leadership of the RCP(B) is not known in any detail, these choices seem to have been made with consciousness and foresight. Trotsky, a consistent "Westerner" when it came to revolutionary grand strategy, stated most clearly the advantages to be gained from promoting and then restraining the forces of revolution in Asia. "A potential Soviet revolution in the East is now advantageous for us," he wrote to Chicherin six weeks before the Second Comintern Congress, "chiefly as a major item of diplomatic barter with England." He rejected the idea of military support for

Asian revolution and urged the NKID to "continue in every way to emphasize through all available channels our readiness to come to an understanding with England with regard to the East."^[34]

Chicherin, meanwhile, strongly opposed accepting any limitations on Soviet/Comintern activity in Asia unless and until the problems of the region were discussed and resolved at a full-scale Anglo-Soviet peace conference. He was, however, unable to control the negotiations that led to the conclusion of the trade agreement with England in March 1921. They were in the hands of Krasin, who adopted a flexible stance. In July 1920 he put the matter of a quid pro quo directly to Lloyd George: "If we promise not to make trouble for you in the East, will you promise that France will not make trouble for us [in Poland]?"^[35] Lloyd George responded by rejecting the idea of a general Europe-Asia security trade-off. Curzon was unwilling to delete the prohibition against propaganda from the agenda for negotiation. The matter was settled by Lenin. In January 1921, faced with the impending collapse of the Russian economy, he sided with Krasin and "categorically insisted," as Chicherin wrote later, that the agreement be concluded.^[36] The Central Committee apparently gave Krasin full power to conclude the negotiations and sign the treaty, and at the same time authorized Chicherin to attempt to modify the preamble to the agreement in which the prohibition against propaganda was included. He succeeded in deleting mention of Asia Minor and Persia from the text of the preamble, and the British undertook a reciprocal promise not to interfere in the affairs of the territories of the former Tsarist Empire. But Chicherin was by no means satisfied. His major concern was that the British were gaining so much from the treaty that they would have no incentive to proceed further with political negotiations with Moscow. Consequently, he predicted in one dispatch to Krasin, "our Eastern policy will suffer a heavy blow."^[37] This did not happen, for while Krasin negotiated in Europe, Chicherin laid the basis for long-term Soviet relations in Asia by treaties with Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey.

Why then were the Bolsheviks willing to withdraw assistance for revolution among the Muslims of Asia in order to achieve a trade agreement with England? First of all, the negotiations with London were expected to yield full diplomatic recognition and a subsequent Anglo-Soviet political conference and peace agreement—an agreement that would resettle the international relations of southwest Asia so as to account for Soviet interests there—and win for the new Soviet state a place of legitimacy among the great powers of Europe. The prospective rewards of relations with the premier imperialist power were tempting enough to compensate for a retreat from revolution in Islamic Asia, particularly in that both Lenin and

Krasin expected the commercial agreement to open the way to similar agreements with the more technologically advanced United States and Germany. And in fact, Germany and many other European states, with the exception of France, did sign commercial agreements with Soviet Russia in 1921.

Second, support for revolutionary activity in Central and southwest Asia became a strategic liability rather than an asset once the prospects for proletarian revolution in Europe faded and anti-Communist regimes were consolidated there. In the post-Civil War global political situation, insurrection, subversion, and propaganda on the southern perimeter of Soviet sovereignty could only attract the attention of the imperialist states and invite diplomatic, if not military, intervention. Such activities put at risk the foreign policy on which Soviet security was based, one aimed at the prevention of "capitalist encirclement" and the end of diplomatic and economic isolation.^[38]

Third, the leadership of the RCP(B) was very hesitant about employing the considerable Muslim forces that had joined with the Red Army against the counterrevolution during the Civil War as a means of exporting revolution to the southern periphery of the Russian Federation. Those Muslim national communists within the RCP(B) who called upon the party to do so were removed from positions of influence within the party organization.^[39] Hostility toward all religion, including Islam, and a fear and distrust of independent and uncontrollable local revolutionary movements, it has been suggested, were the major reasons for this unwillingness to deploy "the Islamic weapon." Very likely, the Russians among the party leadership understood that to use Soviet Muslims to promote national self-determination in Islamic Asia, even if it seriously dislocated the British Empire, would only encourage a Muslim desire for national self-determination within the reconquered Russian Empire.^[40] Consequently, the revolutionary movement in Islamic Asia was brought increasingly under the control of the Euro-Russian leadership in Moscow and Petrograd. This control was constructed, beginning at the Second Comintern Congress and culminating at the Fourth, by defining the revolutionary movement in Asia as nationalist, as bourgeois-democratic, as anti-imperialist, and as the ally of the proletariat of Europe and Russia. While the Baku Congress was a dramatic expression of uncomplicated, anti-European Islamic nationalism, the Communist International under whose auspices it was convened remained the domain of Europeans and Russians who asserted the theoretical and strategic primacy of proletarian-based class struggle within advanced capitalist society.

Finally, Muslim culture was stronger and more impervious, and the

social structures of Central and southwest Asia more complex and heterogeneous, than was recognized by those who argued within the Comintern for the immediate and integral internationalization of the October Revolution to Persia and India.^[41] These conditions dimmed the prospects for a rapid social revolution in Islamic Asia. From a historical perspective, therefore, the decision to restrict support for revolution there seems well taken.

The twelve-month period from the declaration of the Gilan Soviet Republic in May 1920 to the withdrawal of Roy from Tashkent and the disbandment of the Comintern's Central Asian Bureau in May 1921 was the moment of international socialist revolution in Central and southwest Asia. Thereafter the expectation that the October Revolution might be continued in these areas was decreasingly present as a factor either in Soviet foreign relations or in Comintern affairs, and insurrection ceased to be the primary means of "anti-imperialist struggle" in the Middle East. Instead Moscow supported neutralist-nationalist and modernizing regimes on the southern perimeter of the Russian Federation, and did so through normal relations conducted by the NKID. The drive for friendly relations with stable neutralist regimes based on a mutual anti-imperialism was incorporated into the treaties concluded with Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey in February-March 1921.^[42] Each of these agreements explicitly expressed mutual solidarity against British imperialism. They also guaranteed the right of self-determination to the peoples of Asia, precluded interference in their internal affairs, and strictly forbade direct or indirect conduct of revolutionary agitation or propaganda. Together the treaties established a model of insurrection renunciation that was continued in the commercial agreement signed in London during the same period. In Asia as in Europe the price of normal and stable political and economic relations was the promise to halt revolutionary activities.

In actuality, revolutionary socialism did not do well in the formally independent or semidependent states of Central and southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean.^[43] In Afghanistan there was no Communist or socialist party, and the Comintern made little effort to encourage one. Elsewhere, nationalist-minded authoritarian modernizers persecuted Communist parties while they railed against British imperialism. In Egypt, the nationalist Wafd Party achieved power for the first time in January 1924 when a decisive electoral win resulted in a government led by Saad Zaghlul Pasha. Although the Wafd stood for the independence of the Egyptian economy from foreign domination, it represented landowner and employer interests domestically and was hostile to the labor movement and, in particular, the Egyptian Communist Party. Within a month of coming to

power, Zaghlul took advantage of a series of strikes and factory occupations in Alexandria to forbid Communist gatherings, and by October he had decimated the party leadership by imprisoning some and forcing others into retirement. When the Comintern attempted to reconstitute the party Central Committee with foreigners—primarily Jews from Palestine—who were dispatched to Cairo for the purpose, the government arrested the entire CC membership. By 1928 the Egyptian Communist Party had disappeared as an organization and was represented at the Sixth Comintern Congress by the Communist Party of Palestine.^[44]

In Persia, Colonel Reza Khan emerged as the ambitious and energetic commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade. Created in 1879 as a bodyguard for the shah, it was composed of 6,000 Persian troops and noncommissioned officers led by 237 Persian officers, 56 Russian officers, and 66 Russian noncoms. The Persian Cossacks, along with the British Indian South Persian Rifles, comprised the only effective military forces in the country. General William Edmund Ironside, commander of British forces in north Persia, manipulated the dismissal of the Russian commander of the Persian Cossacks, Colonel Petr Storroselskii, in October 1920, and in his place promoted Reza Khan.^[45] Reza in turn engineered the dismissal of Russian military advisers in Tehran, led a successful coup d'état, and established himself as minister of war and commander in chief of the army the following February. The new government immediately concluded the treaty with Soviet Russia—and put clown the Gilan revolution. Reza Khan, whom the British minister in Tehran called "an honest and capable officer without political ambitions,"^[46] ousted the old elite associated with the Kadjar dynasty and reformed state finances. He distrusted the British, recognized the dangers of Russian power, and was intent on effecting greater central authority and national unity. The Soviet government assisted him by crushing the semiautonomous Talysh and Khalkhahli principalities on the Soviet border, by turning a blind eye to the repression of leftist movements in Persian Azerbaijan, and by lending direct assistance to Reza's suppression of pro-British Baludji tribal chiefs in southern Persia.^[47] After being proclaimed shah in December 1925, Reza suppressed the independent press, disbanded independent trade unions, arrested 800 leading Communists, and forced the party organization underground.^[48]

Mustafa Kemal Pasha formed his Turkish Nationalist Party in 1919 intent on rejecting the Treaty of Sévres and preventing the partitioning of Anatolia among Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds. The first foreign policy action of his nationalist government was to send a high-ranking delegation to Moscow empowered to open relations with Soviet Russia. Kemal was unconcerned with the ideological differences between the two regimes. As

he subsequently told members of the Turkish National Assembly, "Our impoverished and distressed Fatherland, besieged by enemies on all sides, need not care about the inner beliefs of the enemies of our enemies."^[49] Under the terms of the April 1920 military agreement with Moscow, the Turkish army received light weapons and munitions, and three ships of the former Ottoman navy were armed in Russia. Communism in Turkey was another matter. When the Comintern founded the Communist Party of Turkey, Turkish authorities created their own police-sponsored "Zubatovite" communist party, assigned it an annual budget of 15,000 lires, and decreed that no person could call himself a Communist without registering in this party.^[50] And in January 1921, Mustafa Subhi, the leader of the Communist Party of Turkey, and the entire membership of its Central Committee were drowned while in the hands of Turkish authorities as they were entering Turkey from Batum. No note of protest arrived from Moscow.

Turkey was the keystone of Chicherin's policy in southwest Asia. Lenin believed that the "mad oppression" (beshenoe ugnetenie ) of Turkey by the Entente powers would promote favorable Soviet-Turkish relations despite the fact that the country was led by "Kadets, Octobrists, and nationalists,"^[51] and Chicherin saw a nationalist Turkey as protection against Allied-sponsored interventionists showing up again on the Transcaucasian "underbelly" of the new Soviet republics.^[52] (The armies of both Denikin and Wrangel had been supplied through the Straits and the Black Sea.) The Soviet-Turkish treaty of March 1921—the first treaty concluded by either country with another state that was a major player on the international scene—made the Straits the concern of the Black Sea powers. And Chicherin went to the Lausanne Conference (November 1922-July 1923) to gain international recognition for the principle that the Straits should be closed to all warships other than those of Turkey. There he found himself isolated and without bargaining power. The Turkish delegation agreed to a modified form of the Allied position, which demilitarized the Straits and put them under international control. Following the conference, Kemal was elected president of the newly founded Turkish Republic. He consolidated his rule, abolished the caliphate, and introduced reforms. He also banned Communist newspapers and demonstrations, suppressed the Communist-controlled labor federation, arrested more than three hundred members of the Turkish Communist Party, and banned it. It has been illegal ever since.

Observing these events from within the Communist International, the delegates of the Russian Communist Party—from Zinoviev and Radek to Bukharin and Stalin—insisted that "the anti-imperialist struggle" was advancing in Asia. The authoritarian modernizers there were objectively

revolutionary, the RCP(B) leadership reported to both Comintern and party congresses. The nationalist reformers undermined both indigenous "feudalism" and global imperialism, even if their movements did not have a proletarian base or a socialist program. For this reason and because the time for emancipatory class struggle had not arrived in Asia, Asian Communists should continue to support movements of national liberation in "united anti-imperialist fronts."^[53] This line was opposed by M. N. Roy, who argued that the revolutionary setbacks in Asia testified to the unreliability of the nationalist bourgeoisie there. His view was supported intermittently by delegates from the Persian, Turkish, and Chinese parties.^[54] They did not prevail.

By the time of the Fifth Comintern Congress in June-July 1924, revolutionary strategy and tactics were premised on a different set of beliefs from those on which the CI was founded six years earlier, when it was thought that global revolution would be a single continuous process, taking place on many fronts at the same time, and that proletarian insurrections in Europe were only days or weeks from success. One of the new premises was that the forces of nationalist revolution arrayed against local "feudalism" and foreign imperialism were as important to "the world revolutionary process" as was conventional class struggle. Another was that differing national conditions would produce a succession of revolutions in separate countries rather than a unitary movement. Still another was that revolutionary breakthroughs would come where and when the power of the state was least strong and least able to suppress them, that is to say, in the least developed rather than in the most developed regions of the globe.^[55] The remarkable implications of these strategic turnabouts are seen most vividly in the instructions issued by the ECCI to the various "sections" of the Communist International throughout the colonial and semidependent world in 1924-25.

The primacy of anti-imperialist nationalism at the expense of the conventional class struggle was obvious in the Comintern theses that sanctioned the support given by the Soviet government to authoritarian nationalists in Egypt, Turkey, and Persia while at the same time neither opposing nor criticizing the Communist-bashing of all three regimes. Elsewhere, long-standing religious, ethnic, and racial differences were to be submerged in the struggle against the British Empire. The Communist Party of Palestine was composed almost exclusively of Jewish Social Democratic émigrés from tsarist Russia. The ECCI instructed them to draw the Arab masses into their organization and to support Arab nationalists in the struggle against the British mandate over Palestine on the one hand and against bourgeois Zionism on the other. Jews and Arabs were to unite in a

single movement aimed at an independent Palestine. Equally remarkable was the action taken by the Communist Party of South Africa. In the spirit of anti-imperialist national liberation, it decided to form a trade union that would incorporate whites, blacks, Coloreds, and Indians in a common struggle against British imperialism.^[56]

China: Comintern and Guomindang

According to the "East-West alternation thesis," Soviet/Comintern involvement in China began as a reaction to the failure of the KPD to seize power in Germany in 1923. In fact, both the motivation and the timing of Soviet and Comintern participation in the Nationalist Revolution in China were more complex and more interesting than is suggested by the notion that revolution in Asia was a form of compensation for disappointments in Europe. Soviet involvement there is also of great historical significance, for it was in China that revolutionary Russia posed its most substantial challenge to the British Empire.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, China, like Russia, was a great land empire; again like Russia, it was not fully incorporated into the system of colonies and dependencies controlled by Europe and the United States. With its strong civilization and cultural traditions, China resisted European political control, and although the Chinese economy was penetrated by Euro-Americans, with its immense hinterland China was geographically unconquerable in a way that India and Africa were not. However, the Chinese state did come near collapse as the pressures for incorporation into a global system increased—just as did the Russian state.

Although the Chinese Revolution of 1911 preceded the upheaval of 1917 in Russia, the October Revolution did have a powerful demonstration effect for Chinese revolutionaries. It showed the possibility of escaping conquest and dismemberment by Europe and America, of transforming an empire and a national identity without relying on the old bureaucracy and state apparatus controlled by the traditional aristocracy, and of resisting Euro-American domination and control by means that were Westernized, modern, and nationally particular. By the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century, Russia and China seemed to be in similar positions with respect to the world economy and geopolitics. Was this similarity not the basis for strong bonds between those who had made the Chinese Revolution and those who had made the one in Russia? Were they not "natural allies"? In June 1919, as the victors of the World War were settling their affairs with the defeated Central Powers in Paris, an editorial in Izvestiia recognized China as Soviet Russia's potential partner against

Great Britain, Europe, and America: "Revolutionary Russia will find in China a faithful ally in the struggle against the imperialist predators who are now busy in Versailles soaping the rope for the peoples of the East!"^[57]

In the Bolshevik calculus of anti-imperialist resistance, world socialist revolution, and international power politics, China was an integral of great significance. European, Japanese, and American concessions and privileges in China were, along with British rule in India, the most crucial links in the postwar "imperialist chain." A revolution of national liberation expelling foreigners and their capital from China would disrupt the imperialist world system, critically wound the British Empire, make global politics safer for the new Soviet state, and constitute a first big step toward a revolution of class emancipation in Asia. Ultimately the vast population of what Lenin called "Russia, China, India, etc." guaranteed that the cause of global socialist revolution could not fail. Not surprisingly, the revolutionaries of Russia were eager to establish relations with China. They did so at three levels—with the government in Beijing, with the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CPC), and with the Guomindang (GMD), the revolutionary movement from Chinese national independence, state unity, and constitutional republicanism based in Guangzhou (Canton) and led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

The NKID made its first serious efforts to establish diplomatic relations with the Chinese government in Beijing in September 1920, as part of its diplomatic campaign to normalize relations with the states of Europe and Asia.^[58] Both the incentives and the obstacles to regularizing relations between Russia and China were significant. The two countries shared a long border The Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), which joined the Russian Maritime Provinces with central Siberia, traveled through northern Mongolia, making that area one of special interest to Moscow. Outer Mongolia, considered by Beijing to be Chinese territory, was occupied by the Red Army and governed by an autonomous and pro-Soviet Mongolian People's Republic. To consider these matters and to open negotiations toward a Sino-Soviet treaty of mutual recognition, Moscow dispatched a succession of diplomatic delegations. However, no significant progress was made until May 1924, when the Chinese government followed the lead taken by Great Britain, Italy, and much of the rest of the world and granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR. The Sino-Soviet treaty concluded at that time provided for mutual de jure recognition and special Russian privileges in China. The status of the Mongolian People's Republic was regularized as "an integral part of the Republic of China." The Soviet Union retained control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, but

provision was made for China to repurchase it at a future date. The NKID took over the Russian embassy in Beijing, which until that time had been occupied by holdover representatives from the tsarist regime.

Credit for this success went to Lev Karakhan, who, after months of skillful diplomacy and an adept public relations campaign, concluded a settlement with the Chinese minister for foreign affairs and acting prime minister, V. K. Wellington Koo. Karakhan, the Soviet polpred in Beijing until 1926, was thirty-four years old at the time, a veteran revolutionary, and a former Russian and then Soviet deputy commissar of foreign affairs. Since the end of the Civil War he had played a prominent role in shaping Soviet policy in East Asia, and he was one of the strongest voices among the Bolsheviks in favor of turning the world revolutionary process eastward. Shortly before departing for Beijing in June 1923, he stated to Chicherin: "The arena of the internationalist imperialist struggle is moving from Europe, from the Atlantic, to the Pacific, and China is emerging as its focal point. The imperialist powers dread a unified, strong and independent China. Only the Soviet Union is ready to support China in her struggle for total independence."^[59]

Meanwhile, the Communist International was instrumental in the formation of the Chinese Communist Party. In April 1920, even before the Second Comintern Congress, Grigori Voitinskii, a twenty-eight-year-old Civil War veteran and subsequently chief of the Comintern's Far Eastern Secretariat (1921-24), was dispatched to China along with a small number of comrades. There he worked among the radicalized students and aspiring Marxists of Shanghai, Beijing, Jinan, and Wuhan, spending the spring and summer informing them about the Bolshevik Revolution, conditions in Russia, and the revolutionary program of the Comintern. In each city he assisted in establishing party cells and in training cadres in party work. Marxism did not come to China from Russia; it had arrived via Japan, and Voitinskii did not create the CPC. The party was the result of multiple initiatives taken by Chinese revolutionary intellectuals both in China and in Europe.^[60] However, as recent research indicates, Voitinskii was much more than a catalyst or a guide.^[61] His ability to interpret the October Revolution in Chinese terms transformed radicals into Communists, and his considerable organizational skills and efforts started them on the road to forming a party on the model of the RCP(B).

The tactics of the "united anti-imperialist front"—as advanced by Lenin at the Second CI Congress in 1920 and worked out in the ECCI the following year—mandated that the Chinese Communist Party ally itself with the party of national independence and unity, the Guomindang, while

keeping its organization separate and intact. This two-party alliance, which was expected to give CPC organizers access to the proletariat of south China, was rejected by Sun Yat-sen, however. In turn, the ECCI adopted what was called the "bloc within" strategy; members of the CPC were instructed to enlist as individual members in the GMD and to obey its rules. The chief Comintern representative in China personally accompanied Chen Duxiu, CPC party founder and its secretary general (1921-27), and other members of the party's Central Committee to be sworn into the GMD in a special ceremony presided over by Sun Yat-sen.^[62]

That representative was H. Maring (Hendricus "Hank" Sneevliet), who devised the "bloc within" strategy. Maring was a Dutch citizen and a founding member of the Communist Party of Indonesia (1920). He attended the Second CI Congress, served as secretary of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question, and supported Lenin's position in opposition to that of M. N. Roy. Following the congress, he was dispatched to China as the Comintern delegate to the CPC. By July 1922, Maring had convinced the Presidium of the ECCI (including Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Béla Kun, and Boris Souvarine) that the best revolutionary nationalist ally for the CPC was the GMD and that "bloc within" was the strategy to adopt. An ECCI missive, signed by Voitinskii (as chief of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern at Irkutsk), instructed the CPC to work closely with Maring, who personally carried the instruction back to China along with a certificate signed by Radek providing him with cover as the East Asian correspondent for the Communist International and the International Press Correspondence .^[63] To further strengthen Maring's position, the "bloc within" strategy was made public and official in two directives from the ECCI to the CPC in January and May 1923. These stated that the first item on the revolutionary agenda in China was a nationalist revolution against the imperialist powers and their internal "feudal" agents (principally the warlords), that the GMD was the only "serious nationalist-revolutionary group in China," and that the membership of the CPC was to work within the GMD and reform it for the purposes of proletarian revolution and agrarian revolt.^[64]

The "bloc within" strategy was to prove highly controversial and a source of deep disagreement within both the CPC and the Communist International. The Third Congress of the CPC adopted it in June 1923 by a margin of only 21 to 16. It was widely unpopular, could be implemented only very slowly, and inspired continuing debate. Beginning in mid-1924, one element of the party represented by Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong repeatedly and unsuccessfully petitioned the Comintern to approve a break with the GMD.^[65] In opposition, Voitinskii, speaking for the ECCI, per-

sistently insisted that the "bloc within" be sustained. The strategy remained the rule of the CPC-GMD alliance until 1927, when the alliance came to a violent end, and the "bloc within" strategy became the major issue in the struggle between the United Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek on the one hand and the forces of Bukharin and Stalin on the other.

The third Soviet presence in China was the money, the military training, the advice, and the weapons the Russians provided to the nationalist movement—the Guomindang—based in Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen, its founder and leader, was one of the first revolutionaries in Asia to be attracted to the Russian Revolution. As early as February 1918 he had sent a telegram of congratulations to Lenin hailing the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and urging him to continue the struggle against imperialism. He made contact with the Comintern in 1920 and consulted with CI representatives—Voitinskii in autumn 1920, Maring in August-September 1921, and S. A. Dalin in April-June 1922—during their missions to China. Sun's representative to the Congress of the Working Peoples of the East, which met in Moscow in January-February 1922, consulted with Chicherin and Karakhan, two of the leading figures in the NKID most in favor of giving Soviet foreign relations an Asian emphasis, and negotiated what was probably an oral agreement granting the GMD de facto recognition by the Comintern.^[66]

There were nevertheless major impediments to Comintern-Guomin-dang cooperation. Sun Yat-sen was wary of "peaceful coexistence," suspecting that it implied a retreat from the anti-imperialism which he believed united the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Chicherin reassured him however: "Regardless of the future development of our political positions in Europe and elsewhere, our government will never abandon the road of the most sincere, cordial, and faithful friendship and cooperation with the Chinese people."^[67] Moreover, Soviet policy toward the government of China posed difficulties. Moscow regarded the government in Beijing as the official central state authority in China, and the NKID persistently strove to conclude a treaty of mutual recognition with it. Sun Yat-sen tried to derail these negotiations by inviting Karakhan to Guangzhou for talks. When his efforts failed, and the Moscow-Beijing treaty was signed, a majority of the GMD membership reacted with hostility, and Sun Yat-sen found it necessary to take serious steps to quell anti-Soviet opinion in his movement. He dismissed one journal editor who published an article critical of the treaty and he personally orchestrated a favorable official response to the agreement: "Our party thinks that the Chinese people

should express its deepest gratitude to Russia for the Russian-Chinese treaty."^[68]

Preliminary steps toward Comintern assistance to the Chinese Nationalist movement came at about the time that the ECCI publicly instructed the CPC membership to join the GMD. Ioffe, who was in Beijing attempting to negotiate a recognition agreement with the Chinese government, found his efforts obstructed by differences over the Russian presence in Manchuria and the future of Outer Mongolia. In January 1923 he traveled to Shanghai, where he held a series of meetings with Sun Yat-sen.^[69] He found Dr. Sun eager for foreign assistance but disillusioned with the prospect of obtaining it from Europe or America. The two of them agreed that the purpose of the GMD was the independence and unity of China, and that neither Communism nor Soviet institutions should or could be introduced there. Sun Yat-sen informed Ioffe that he intended to reorganize the Guomindang, reform its army, and launch a military expedition against the Beijing regime.^[70] Ioffe relayed his request for financial assistance and for military and political advisers to Moscow. After considerable debate in both the Politburo and the ECCI, the collective leadership (Lenin no longer participated in foreign-policy decision making) decided to aid the GMD, offering 2 million gold rubles, a limited number of weapons, and assistance in creating a training school at which the officer corps of a Chinese army of nationalist revolution would receive both military and political education.

On 21 June 1923—two weeks after the Soviet government had given way on the "Curzon ultimatum" and formally renounced support for revolution in Persia, Afghanistan, and India—five Russian army officers arrived in China. They were the first members of what would eventually become a Soviet/Comintern mission of more than 250 military and political advisers, many of them veterans of the Civil War and graduates of the Frunze Military Academy.^[71] In south China the mission was led initially by General P. A. Pavlov and subsequently by General Vasilii Bliukher (code-named "Galen" in China), the former minister of war, military commander, and head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Far Eastern Republic, who served through 1927.^[72] The first significant efforts of the south China mission were directed at establishing and staffing a military academy at Whampoa (an island south of Guangzhou) and channeling Soviet financial support to it. (During its first year of operation, the USSR paid the entire costs of the academy.) Beginning in the spring of 1924, the officer corps of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), the military wing of the Guomindang, was organized, trained, equipped, and politicized at Whampoa. The Political Training Department, headed intermittently between

1924 and 1926 by CPC organizer Zhou Enlei, directed the work of GMD party representatives who were appointed to each of the larger units of the army. By March 1926 there were 867 political workers in the NRA, an estimated 75 percent of whom were Communists or members of the left wing of the GMD. Their task was to identify the Communism of Lenin with the nationalism and republicanism of Sun Yat-sen. To that end, the walls of the academy were adorned with the slogans "Down with Feudalism!" "Let us defend the Three Principles!" and "The People's Welfare Means Communism!"^[73]

The political reorganization of the Guomindang party was the assignment and the achievement of Mikhail Borodin (born Mikhail Markovich Grusenberg).^[74] Borodin was a veteran revolutionary who had done underground work for the Communist International in Spain, Mexico (in collaboration with M. N. Roy), and the United States. His most recent mission before going to China had been in England, where as "George Brown" he guided the reorganization of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He arrived in Guangzhou in October 1923, just prior to the abortive Communist revolution in Germany. There he became, arguably, the most influential foreign adviser of all time.

When Borodin arrived, the Guomindang had no coherent organization, no clear revolutionary strategy, little popular support, and only a few thousand party members, very few of whom supported Sun Yat-sen's collaboration with Communism.^[75] Throughout his stay in China, which lasted until 1927, Borodin worked without adequate information regarding the political situation within the GMD, without much opportunity for contact with the Chinese people, and without reliable communications with Moscow.^[76] However, during his first seven weeks in Guangzhou, Borodin and Sun Yat-sen met regularly and frequently and the two of them reorganized the Guomindang along Leninist lines. Borodin personally drafted a new constitution for the GMD and modeled its organization on that of the RCP(B). At the First Party Congress in November, he saw to it that the resolution of the ECCI Presidium entitled "On the National Liberation Movement in China and the Guomindang Party" was incorporated in the party's manifesto. Communists were accepted as individual members of the Guomindang and three of them were elected to its Central Executive Committee. In 1923-24, Soviet advisers even arranged unofficial discussions between Dr. Sun and representatives of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, talks that laid the basis for subsequent cooperation between Chinese and Mongolian revolutionaries during the Nationalist Revolution.^[77]

Despite the introduction of Soviet military and political advisers into the

Chinese Nationalist movement in 1923 and the incipient Leninization of both the CPC and GMD that same year, China played no more than a minor role in the grand strategy of revolution formulated within the Communist International at this time.^[78] The Comintern-sponsored Congress of the Working Peoples of the East in January-February 1922 did not signal a major revolutionary initiative in East Asia. When the tactics of the "united anti-imperialist front" were initially developed in the ECCI, China was not discussed. Even in 1923-24, Chinese affairs received only limited coverage in Inprecor and the Communist International .^[79] And when the strategic problems of global revolution were debated at the Fifth Comintern Congress in June-July 1924, the "national question" (the failure of the October 1923 uprising in Germany) and the "Russian question" (the Opposition within the Russian Communist Party) all but pushed the "colonial question" (revolution in Asia) out of the discussion.^[80] China was comparatively absent from the formulation of the theory and strategy of global revolution until the spring of 1925, with the beginnings of the Chinese Nationalist Revolution, and only in the summer of 1926 did the Politburo and the ECCI decide to support a revolutionary offensive in China. Then the Chinese situation came to occupy the place of prominence within the Comintern's strategic conception of world revolution, and China policy became a major factor in Soviet foreign relations. These matters are discussed in Chapter 8. Meanwhile, as will be seen next, the challenges of capitalist stabilization in Europe and America compelled the Soviet party/state elite to undertake an extensive reappraisal of the future of socialism in Russia, the place of the USSR in the world economy, and the direction of Soviet foreign policy.