Soviet Security and the German Revolution

Of all the countries with which the USSR had revolutionary and diplomatic relations during the 1920s, it was in Germany that the clumsy dialectic of "peaceful coexistence" and "world revolution" appeared most prominently. In the thirty months following the Genoa Conference, Soviet-German relations were infused with the "spirit of Rapallo," a "community of fate" the two countries shared as states excluded from the European order created by the victors of the World War. Relations between Berlin and Moscow—political, economic, and military—were closer during this period than at any time in Soviet history.^[1] They were nurtured by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, formerly German foreign minister, who was dispatched to Moscow as ambassador from Berlin (1922-28) and who quickly developed a close working relationship with Chicherin.^[2] Brockdorff was obsessed with the thought that politicians in Berlin might make the mistake of aligning Germany with England or commit some other diplomatic gaffe that would push the USSR into alliance with France. In his dispatches to Berlin, he continually and demonstratively insisted that nothing be done that might impair Germany's "special relationship" with the Soviet Union. However, because of the ideological differences separating the elites of the two countries, he did not expect German-Soviet relations to develop beyond a mutual hostility toward the postwar settlement. These relations were, he wrote to President Hindenburg in July 1926, "a marriage by force"; "a marriage by love was out of the question."^[3]

Nikolai Krestinskii, the Soviet polpred in Germany, was a lawyer by training, a former member of the party's Central Committee and Politburo, and people's commissar for finance (1918-22). Before the revolution he

had been both legal adviser to the Bolshevik faction in the Duma and a staff member of Pravda . His family was close to Lenin; his wife was the first doctor to examine and treat the leader in the Kremlin after the attempt on his life in 1918. Krestinskii was fluent in Latin as well as in modern European languages, and his memory was legendary. When Lenin failed to recall important information, he would say "you'd better ask Krestinskii." A man of strong convictions and exceptional courage, Krestinskii was the only defendant at the trial of the "right-Trotskyist bloc" in 1937 publicly to plead not guilty. He refused to state that he had been a spy and maintained that he always was and remained a Communist. The trial was disrupted for one day while Krestinskii was tortured severely; at the next session he nodded his assent to the guilty charge.^[4] It was political, legal, and personal credentials such as these that Krestinskii brought to Germany in 1922. He was an appropriate choice because within the NKID, ties to Germany were considered vital, and Berlin was considered the most important post in the Soviet diplomatic service.

It was the post-Versailles geopolitical situation that made relations with Berlin crucial. Germany was situated in the center of Europe, separating Russia from the powers of Western Europe, juxtaposed to Poland, France's chief ally in Eastern Europe, and adjacent to the newly independent Baltic states bordering Russia to the northwest. For this reason it would have been difficult for the Allies to launch a second military intervention, or even to threaten military action against the Soviet Union, without German cooperation. Diplomatically, too, decisions made in Berlin determined what pressure the former Allied powers could apply to Moscow. To be sure, the Treaty of Rapallo ensured that no full capitalist coalition based on denying diplomatic recognition to the Soviet regime until the debts of the Russian past were acknowledged could be formed; nevertheless, Soviet diplomatic isolation diminished or increased as Berlin's relations with the victors of the World War fluctuated between antagonism and partial integration. Militarily, diplomatically, and commercially, also, German foreign policy determined whether the imperialist powers could form a constellation of anti-Soviet states in Europe—what the Bolsheviks called "capitalist encirclement."

At times, Soviet intentions toward Weimar Germany have been described as ideologically driven and depicted as an effort to isolate Germany from the assistance of Europe and America, thereby leaving it vulnerable to economic dislocation and revolutionary upheaval. At other times, Soviet-German relations have been described in the terminology of political realism, as based on a community of interest between those against whom the World War peace settlement was directed. In both explanations, Mos-

3.  European USSR in 1923

cow's relations with Berlin after 1922 are represented as an effort to separate Germany from Western Europe and to form an exclusive Russo-German partnership. An alternative to both these explanations not only denies that the central intention of Russia's German policy in the 1920s was to preserve an exclusive relationship; it also rejects the notion that favorable relations with Germany were the primary goal of early Soviet diplomacy. It asserts instead that Soviet relations with Germany were regarded as a bridge to Europe.^[5] Their primary purpose was to facilitate

agreements with the other states and to gain entry into the association of world powers by serving as a model for relations with other capitalist states. Rather than being aimed at forming an exclusive relationship with Germany, Soviet policy at the time of the Genoa Conference was directed at forming a British-German-Soviet combination. In 1923 and again in 1927, it was aimed at making a German-French-Soviet combination, and then in 1928 at a German-American-Soviet understanding, and finally in 1931 at a five-power pact.

Such was the maximum goal of relations with Germany; the minimum goal was to prevent Germany from being absorbed into a coalition of European powers, one from which the USSR was excluded. Prior to the 1925 Locarno rapprochement between Germany and France and Britain, the minimal objective was a neutral Germany balanced between Russia and the West—if possible, with a tilt toward Moscow. After Locarno it was neutrality and balance—with a tilt toward the West, if necessary. To these ends the Russians employed two strategies. In Berlin, Soviet representatives promoted enmity toward the former entente by reminding the Germans of their defeat and by depicting France as an aggressive power capable of mobilizing Poland and its other client states in East-Central Europe against the USSR. In Paris and London, meanwhile, Soviet diplomats warned of the dangers of German militarism and revisionism.

The Soviet-German Rapallo relationship operated to greatest effect during the Ruhr crisis of 1923. When French and Belgian troops and engineers occupied the Ruhr district of Germany in January in an effort to enforce the reparations provisions of the Treaty of Versailles,^[6] the NKID feared for German independence. Were France to gain strategic control of western Germany, Chicherin believed, the geopolitical conditions for a second war of intervention would be established. Moscow responded by warning Poland against using the Ruhr occupation as an opportunity to attack Germany from the east, and the NKID undertook a diplomatic offensive in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland aimed at guaranteeing nonintervention in German affairs and at maintaining freedom of transit between the USSR and Central Europe.^[7]

At the same time, the collective leadership decided that the crisis to which the Ruhr occupation had brought the German economy and the Weimar political system meant that the day of proletarian revolution in Germany was imminent. Meeting on 23 August, the Politburo decided to take the measures necessary to prepare for that event and to supervise it when it occurred.^[8] With Lenin incapacitated, the collective leadership was led to a policy of insurrectionary initiative by the enthusiasm of Trotsky, a man with little actual experience in German affairs but with a strong

theoretical sense of the interconnection between the Russian and German situations. Zinoviev supported the initiative, but apparently did so with more prudence than Trotsky showed, forecasting that the outbreak of revolution in Germany was a matter of months rather than of weeks. More cautiously, Stalin did not think that a German revolution would occur in 1923, and he doubted whether one could take place by the spring of 1924.

The opinion of Karl Radek played a key role. Although he did not sit on the Politburo, he attended the meeting as the German affairs expert among the Bolsheviks and the Comintern's chief tactician. He had surveyed the German situation firsthand the previous May, and he concluded that the preconditions for proletarian revolution—a massive German Communist Party (KPD) with mass support—did not yet exist. His solution to this problem, which he had proposed at the Third ECCI Plenum in June (with the support of Zinoviev), was a new strategy—a direct appeal to those elements of the lower-middle class that had been drawn to nationalist and fascist politics out of a sense of social despair and national humiliation.^[9] It did not work; Communist speakers before nationalist audiences failed to attract many supporters. Radek therefore urged the KPD leadership to continue the "united front" strategy and warned them against premature insurrectionary action. However when asked to report on the German situation at the 23 August Politburo meeting, he reportedly gave an optimistic assessment. Perhaps he sensed the mood of Trotsky and Zinoviev, deferred to them, and gave a report that expressed their beliefs more than his own. A decision to instigate a revolution in Germany resulted.

By the end of September, plans formulated in the Politburo and the ECCI were put in place. The resistance of the cautious Heinrich Brandler, who was chairman of the KPD Central Committee (1921-23) and who complained that he was not "a German Lenin," was worn down. In a series of nighttime meetings in Moscow he succumbed to the enthusiasm of the experienced revolutionaries of Russia and to the criticism of the Left Opposition within the KPD Central Committee led by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. According to the plans formulated in Moscow, the German Communist Party, led by Brandler, would form a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and enter the government of Saxony. That government would, under the terms of a previous agreement between the two parties, organize the workers of Saxony into proletarian defense units designed to protect the state against fascist attack by arming what were presumed to be 50,000 to 60,000 workers eager for proletarian revolution.

Accordingly, a secret and illegal infrastructure was constructed. The proletarian defense units were formed under the supervision of Józef Unszlicht, deputy chairman of the GPU and a member of the Revolution-

ary Military Commission. Russian money and advisers were channeled through the diplomatic mission in Berlin. Weapons were shipped by cargo ship from Petrograd to Hamburg, where they were unloaded by Communist longshoremen and stored on wharves under their control. Radek was appointed head of a commission of four and sent to Germany to supervise the revolution. Larissa Reisner accompanied him and acted as courier and messenger between the Comintern delegation in Dresden and the KPD leadership in Berlin. Trotsky wanted to set a specific date for the uprising, 9 November, the anniversary of the revolution in Russia. Less commemoratively, the Politburo scheduled it for sometime during the six-week period of October through early November. Zinoviev activated the project in a telegram sent to the KPD Central Committee on 1 October.

From a historical perspective, it is evident that the Politburo majority that decided on a German insurrection in 1923, and the ECCI that engineered it, did so in an exercise of wishful thinking. Seduced by the prospect of "a German October," they mistook the Germany of 1923 for the Russia of 1917, and grasped at what looked to them like an opportunity to revive the momentum of proletarian revolution in Europe.^[10] Not surprisingly, the revolution aborted. Before the German Communists could act, the commander of the local Reichswehr ordered the dissolution of the proletarian defense units, took control of the Saxon police, and moved army units into Dresden. Without consulting Radek, the KPD leadership called off the mass uprising in Saxony. It was unable, however, to prevent the party in Hamburg from acting. An uprising there was crushed by the police. In Moscow, Kuusinen, Piatnitskii, and Manuilskii sat up all night smoking and drinking coffee while they waited in vain for a telegram from Germany bringing news of the success of the insurrection.^[11]

The failure of the "German October" was an event of importance in the seventy-four-year history of Soviet foreign relations. Six years after the revolution in Russia, it made evident, even to the most optimistic of Bolsheviks, that the prospects for successful proletarian insurrection in Europe were highly unfavorable—even in an industrialized capitalist state, and even in conditions of acute social and political crisis. The "stillborn revolution" in Germany confirmed the defensive stance for revolutionary strategy in Europe that had been adopted in 1920-21. Although revolution would be exported to the areas of East-Central Europe where it could be protected by Soviet armed forces in the years 1944-1948, the "German October" proved to be the last armed insurrection against any of the imperialist regimes. Never again would the leaders of the USSR risk their participation in the association of world powers by committing weapons and advisers to the overthrow of one of the major capitalist states.^[12]