The War Scare of 1927

If socialism in the USSR was to develop out of NEP conditions and if industry, both civilian and military, was to be constructed in Russia with imported capital and foreign technology, then an extended period of respite from crises at home and abroad was a political necessity. Such crisis-free conditions were not in the offing, however. Within months of the resolutions "to catch up and surpass" and to seek agreements with the capitalist powers, there occurred what Trotsky called "the worst crisis since the revolution."^[29] It originated in Russia's international situation, and it did not subside until it had fully engulfed the economy and polity of the USSR.

The October Revolution could not change geography. Soviet Russia, like tsarist Russia, remained vulnerable to attack from Europe. From the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, Russia's frontier on the northwest and the west was 2,000 miles long and without natural barriers on which to anchor defensive preparations.^[30] The geographic problem was aggravated by a post-Civil War political situation that confronted the USSR with a chain of potential enemies in East-Central Europe. The key link in that chain was Poland, which had an army of a quarter of a million men, enjoyed favorable relations with Romania to its south, claimed a kind of diplomatic hegemony over the Baltic states to the north, and maintained a close alliance with a major European power, France. This political and geographic problem was in turn mediated by an ideology of inevitable conflict between the forces of imperialism and those of proletarian revolution. The result was a strategic doctrine that divided world politics into two camps, that rejected the possibility of a durable and stable peace between capitalist and socialist states, and that designated the leading imperialist country as the international headquarters at which anti-Soviet coalitions were designed and armed interventions planned.

The possibility of a British-organized capitalist coalition against the USSR had been a feature of Soviet discourse on world politics since late 1924, the time of the "Zinoviev letter" and of what Chicherin called "the English crisis." However, during the summer of 1926 the content of foreign relations pronouncements made in Moscow changed from a generalized fear of diplomatic and economic isolation leading eventually to war to a more concrete and specific fear of imminent military attack.^[31] By September, party, government, and Comintern leaders were all denouncing what they saw as a British-led scheme to launch a second war of intervention against the USSR. They were encouraged in this by the increasing volume of anti-Soviet statements by the diehards in London following the General Strike in May and by Pilsudski's seizure of power in Poland the same

month—a coup d'état which, it was believed in Moscow, was engineered from London.

As the Polish general who had inflicted a serious defeat on the Red Army in 1920, Józef Pilsudski symbolized in Moscow the threat of counterrevolutionary military intervention, and he was believed to harbor a scheme for an East-Central European federation made up of Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. While Chicherin characterized Pilsudski as "unpredictable" and Litvinov thought him enigmatic, Stalin and Radek, in articles appearing in Izvestiia and Pravda , charged him with "fascism."^[32]

The basic outline of a scenario for an interventionist war became incrementally more detailed during the following months until in the early summer of 1927 the now elaborate script turned into a full-scale war scare crisis. By diplomatic means, it was believed, Britain would form an anti-Soviet bloc of European countries. Germany would be won over to the coalition by promises of reparations relief and the return of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Poland would be compensated with Memel, all or part of the rest of Lithuania, and an international loan. Finland and Romania would be involved as well. Pilsudski would create an incident involving the USSR, France would come to his assistance, and the second imperialist onslaught against the USSR would then begin.

War was not imminent, however. From January to March 1927 both the NKID and the Stalin-Bukharin-Rykov leadership indicated that they did not believe the scenario would be played out soon. Stalin, who was already on record as stating that another military intervention was a remote possibility "at some future date," assured a meeting of Moscow railway workers that "we shall not have war this year, neither in the spring nor in the autumn." Bukharin recited the many indications of British-led encirclement and preparations for a new imperialist war, but added that "we need not be particularly alarmed at all this." Rykov too pointed to "the number of international events of the kind which, in the history of international affairs, have more than once occurred on the eve of armed conflicts," but he concluded that it was impossible to state whether they would result in any military action against the USSR.^[33]

The NKID did take precautionary diplomatic measures. Litvinov called on the British representative in Moscow in February to impress upon him the Soviet desire for peace as the necessary condition for the construction of socialism in the USSR.^[34] And in March, following a meeting of the Locarno foreign ministers in Geneva, he sought and received assurance from Stresemann that the Locarno powers were not considering any plans to redistribute territory in Eastern Europe or to launch a capitalist crusade against the Soviet Union. From these contacts, the NKID concluded that no

immediate danger of war existed, and that none would exist unless and until London was able to include Germany in an anti-Soviet bloc of European powers and gain the collaboration of Poland. This sanguine sense of foreign relations ended in April, however, when a series of incidents led to the war scare of 1927, a crisis that peaked in late May and early June in an atmosphere of acute panic and fear of imminent invasion. These incidents began in China, where the Bukharin-Stalin "bloc within," united front strategy of alliance between the CPC and the Guomindang ended in disaster.

Following the advance of the Nationalist Revolutionary Army into central China between July and December 1926, the Chinese Revolution split into two factions, each with its own territorial base and military forces.^[35] The left wing of the Guomindang established itself in Wuhan, where it was advised by Borodin and supported by the Chinese Communist Party. It was intent on curbing the power that Chiang Kai-shek had assumed over the revolutionary movement since his March 1926 coup. Borodin publicly denounced Chiang in January 1927, and in March the Wuhan-dominated Third Plenum of the GMD Central Committee resolved to end Chiang's position of domination over party affairs, to restore civilian control to the GMD, and to elevate Wang Jingwei, Chiang's chief rival, to important positions in both the GMD and the Nationalist government. It also called for a joint GMD-CPC conference to decide on the joint direction of the mass movements of farmers and laborers organized since May 1925 and on Communist participation in the Nationalist government. From such statements it would appear that the alliance of the CPC and the GMD left wing was in control of the Chinese revolution, or at least believed that it was.

The other faction, based in Nanjing, was composed of Chiang himself, most of the Nationalist government, and much of the apparatus of the GMD Central Party Headquarters, both of which had moved there from Guangzhou. The Nanjing group was intent on continuing the Nationalist conquest of China by means of forming alliances with independent war-lords, winning foreign acceptance of the Nationalist regime, and dispatching troops to capture Shanghai and the lower Yangtze. (Bliukher and the Soviet military aid mission remained at Chiang's headquarters and planned strategy and operations). The Nanjing faction became increasingly intent on suppressing Communism within the areas of China that they controlled and on expelling Borodin from the country. However, when they telegraphed the Comintern in Moscow asking for Borodin's recall, they received no reply.

The conflict between Nanjing and Wuhan was a conflict between Chiang

and Borodin; it was also a political and ideological struggle for control of the Chinese Nationalist Revolution. Significant issues were at stake. Should mass social movements in the cities and the countryside be encouraged, or should they be suppressed lest they provoke a counterrevolutionary reaction that would prevent the national unification of China? And what was to be done about the grass-roots anti-imperialist movement? Should it be supported, or ought it to be stifled lest the foreign powers in China (Great Britain, Japan, the United States, France, and Italy) intervene and thwart the Nationalist Revolution?

The strategy adopted by the Soviet/Comintern political mission to the GMD was to channel popular antiforeign sentiment against Great Britain, the principal foreign power in China, rather than against the United States and France, the two other powers with important economic positions in China, and, above all, it was to avoid confrontation or conflict with Japan.^[36] This strategy had been devised in the early stages of the Chinese Revolution, and it accorded well with the counter-British policy line articulated in RCP(B)/CPSU and Comintern resolutions since the beginning of the Dawes Plan-Locarno treaty capitalist stabilization era. It was moreover the policy recommended by the Politburo special committee on East Asian affairs in March 1926. With it came significant risks and dangers. Possibly, the British government could respond by intervening directly in the Chinese Revolution, or indirectly by rendering assistance to the warlords of north China, the principal potential military opposition to the Chinese Nationalist movement.

This strategy formed the basis of the activities continually advocated by Borodin in his advice to the left GMD-CPC regime in Wuhan. The leftists organized massive anti-British rallies there in December 1926 and January 1927 that resulted in the surrender of British concessions to Nationalist authorities. These events made the security of Shanghai a matter of concern for the China powers. The largest concentration of foreign residents in China resided in the International Settlement there, and the city was the center of British economic interests. To protect them, the government in London immediately dispatched to Shanghai a battalion of Indian troops from Hong Kong and made plans to send a cruiser squadron and an entire army division. While the threat of retaliation hung in the air, the ambassadors of Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy met in Beijing. There they decided on a set of demands for retribution—without, however, being able to agree on any sanctions to enforce them.

The China policy that British governments followed for the next twenty years emerged from this crisis.^[37] That policy took Bolshevik influence in China to be the fundamental problem faced by the British Empire in Asia,

and it assumed that if Communism were defeated in China, the threat it posed to India would also be reduced. The most effective way to do this was to come to terms with the Chinese Nationalist movement, which was believed to possess a dynamic of its own that was not Communist and could not be controlled by Russians. In East Asia Austen Chamberlain and his advisers in the Foreign Office advanced a strategy that was remarkably similar to the one they pursued with Germany in Europe during the same period. In China as in Germany, British policy worked to conciliate nationalist political forces by the gradual revision of the system of unequal treaties, to promote a political regime that would regard Britain favorably, and to keep the country out of the clutches of the USSR. At the same time, the British Cabinet aimed to protect British life and property in the coastal areas of China accessible to British naval forces. Accordingly, British and other foreign troops and gunboats, along with Chinese police, defended European and American property and persons from popular anti-imperialist demonstrations. At the same time, action was taken directly against the Soviet advisers in China. With the permission of the foreign diplomatic corps, the Beijing metropolitan police on 6 April raided the compound of the Soviet embassy in that city^[38] and there arrested twenty-two Russians and thirty-six GMD workers. They discovered and seized CPC and GMD documents, in all carting away seven truckloads of papers from the office of the Soviet military mission.

Parallel to these events, the antagonism between the two factions of the Chinese Nationalist movement became open and violent. Conservative and radical forces fought armed battles in major Chinese cities—Hangzhou, Nanchang, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Radicals mounted propaganda campaigns, mobilized mass demonstrations, and denounced conservative GMD leaders. Uniformed and armed workers from the General Labor Union ("the inspection corps"), usually controlled by the CPC, protected the infrastructure of radical institutions and enforced strike orders. Conservative counterdemonstrations were organized under the slogans of "Uphold Commander-in-Chief Chiang" and "Expel Borodin." With the assistance of NRA troops, rival labor organizations attacked the headquarters of the General Labor Union, closed its offices, and disarmed "the inspection corps." On the orders of local military commanders, Communists were arrested and often summarily executed. The massacre of the Communists of Shanghai and of the workers they organized between 12 and 14 April marked the final break between Chiang and those allied with him, on the one hand, and Borodin, the Wuhan regime, and the CPC, on the other Research done in the CPC Central Committee Archives has found that 30,000 to 40,000 people were killed as a result of anti-Communist terror,

3,000 to 4,000 of them party members. In all, 25,000 persons were arrested, and more than 30,000 were made refugees.^[39] In a famous incident, the Comintern instructed the CPC in Shanghai to order the workers of the city to bury their weapons so as to avoid a conflict with Chiang's forces. Apparently the order was not carried out.^[40]

The German Foreign Ministry in Berlin watched events in China with concern. An Anglo-Soviet conflict would confront the Wilhelmstrasse with the decision it wished above all others to avoid, that of having to choose to support one of its two most important treaty partners in opposition to the other. Could the Locarno relationship with Britain be sustained if Berlin did not side with London in the event of a diplomatic crisis, and would not the relationship with the USSR begun at Rapallo be damaged beyond all repair if it did? If England became involved in a war with Russia, would the Germans be able to remain neutral by citing the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin? They could do so only if Russia were attacked despite having maintained a peaceful stance. At this point the China crisis threatened to complicate German diplomacy severely. Would not Soviet support for the revolutionary forces that attacked British property in China be regarded as an act of provocation? If so, Stresemann would be compelled to make a decision of high policy, the seriousness of which would be apparent throughout Europe.

One way to stave off the dilemma of having to choose between England and the USSR was to mediate the Anglo-Russian conflict. The Wilhelmstrasse pondered this course of action beginning in January, and on 19 February Schubert formally instructed Brockdorff-Rantzau to suggest to the NKID—without proposing mediation as such—that the gains made by the advance of the revolution in China were not worth the risks Soviet involvement there imposed on both the USSR and Germany. Berlin was always disposed, Brockdorff was instructed to add, to make available its good offices to find a way out of the difficulties. Brockdorff, however, ignored these instructions and conveyed to Chicherin only part of what Schubert had instructed—an assurance that the Wilhelmstrasse would stand loyally behind the Berlin Treaty and a request for a regular exchange of information on the situation. Then, after Chamberlain made clear to Stresemann, at the March meeting of the League Council, that only his regard for Stresemann's dilemma prevented him from recommending to the Cabinet an immediate break in relations with Moscow, Stresemann returned to Berlin intent on insisting that Brockdorff propose to the NKID German mediation of the Anglo-Soviet conflict.^[41] However, his plans were aborted by the rapid deterioration of relations between Moscow and London begin-

ning with the Beijing raid in early April and culminating with an invasion of the offices of the Soviet trade delegation in London a month later, an event which set off a major war scare crisis in the USSR.

On 12 May, some 150 to 200 London police accompanied by interpreters from the Foreign Office raided the office of the Anglo-Russian Cooperative Society (ARCOS Ltd.) and entered the premises of the Soviet trade delegation next door, premises that were extraterritorial property and enjoyed diplomatic immunity. They searched at will for four days and removed numerous documents. Two weeks later the Baldwin government severed diplomatic relations with Moscow and terminated the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement entered into in 1921. An agreement recently concluded between the Soviet government and the Midland Bank extending credits for the purchase of British machinery was also canceled.^[42] The break in relations with England exposed one of the basic contradictions inherent in Soviet foreign relations: Ultimately, the "united front" policy counteracted "peaceful coexistence." The British government, in effect and by intention, was refusing to allow Soviet Russia to support strikes by British coal miners and attacks on British property in China while at the same time conducting normal diplomatic relations and acquiring loans from London banks.

On 7 June, Petr Voikov, the Soviet polpred in Poland (1924-1927), was assassinated in the Warsaw central railway station by a nineteen-year-old counterrevolutionary Russian émigré named Boris Koverda.^[43] On the same day, a bomb was set off at the Communist Party Clubhouse in Leningrad, an action planned, directed, and equipped from Paris by Russian émigré General Kutepov and executed by one of his six terrorist teams, called the Combat Corps, who infiltrated the USSR from Finland. The attack caused a dozen injuries. The OGPU responded by executing without trial twenty alleged enemy agents, five of whom were said to be working directly for British intelligence. A wave of OGPU house-to-house searches, arrests, deportations, and executions all over the USSR followed.^[44] The OGPU reported to the Politburo that nationalist underground movements in Georgia and the Ukraine, which were believed to have ties to émigré organizations and to British intelligence, were making preparations for armed struggle. At the height of the crisis, articles positing the threat of imminent war filled the Soviet press. The German embassy in Moscow reported to Berlin, incorrectly, that the Red Army was concentrating troops and equipment in battle positions on the western frontier of the USSR. The NKID made representations abroad linking the events in China, London, and Warsaw to a "systematic and organized struggle against the USSR by the dark forces of world reaction and the enemies of peace."^[45] The Politburo

seems to have become confused and disoriented and, above all, anxious. The population at large engaged in panic buying and hoarding.

It was Stalin who articulated what would become the official account of the war scare crisis in a statement to the Central Committee in late July: The British bourgeoisie and its general staff, the Conservative party, were creating a coalition of imperialist powers to make war on the USSR. They struck their first blow with a raid on the embassy in Beijing designed to discover evidence of subversion and to provoke the USSR into war over China. They struck their second blow in London, a move aimed at drawing the other powers of Europe into a diplomatic blockade of the USSR. The third blow, the assassination of Voikov in Warsaw, was intended "to play a role similar to that of the Sarajevo assassination" and embroil the USSR in a war with Poland. In preparation for this war the British government was organizing a financial blockade of the USSR, subsidizing underground movements in the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, and financing "bands of spies and terrorists, who blow up bridges, set fire to factories and commit acts of terrorism against USSR ambassadors."^[46]

However, if we consider the events of the war scare in the broader context of Soviet foreign relations, politics, and ideology, the dynamics of the crisis look remarkably different. By 1927 the strategy of the "united anti-imperialist front," developed over the preceding six years, had become an important measure of political integration, or "solidarity" in Leninist terms. It was the ideological vehicle by which the exploited of Europe, the oppressed of Asia, and the peoples of the USSR were identified with the revolution in Russia, the Soviet regime, and the leadership of the CPSU. To promote that identification, party and Comintern spokesmen repeatedly issued urgent appeals to the Soviet population, to foreign Communist parties, and to the workers of Europe to mobilize to resist the imperialist drive toward war—even when they discounted the imminent threat of war, as they did in the winter of 1926-27. With solidarity and security so closely related, any struggle among the leadership for the allegiance of the party cadres and the international Communist movement could become an ideological struggle over foreign policy. And it did. The contradictory complex of foreign relations with which Stalin and Bukharin had identified themselves in their struggle with the Opposition, and for which they had taken responsibility since late 1926, was vulnerable to criticism on grounds of both ideology and policy. This is what happened. The foreign relations reversal in China revived the Opposition, which launched an attack on the foreign and domestic policies of Stalin and Bukharin. This attack coincided with the ARCOS raid (12-15 May) and with the action of the British government in breaking off relations with Moscow. All this surprised the

NKID and discombobulated the Politburo, which responded by proclaiming that Britain was preparing for war against the USSR and by introducing measures of preventative political and social terror.

Some members of the Central Committee, led by Stalin, advocated a hard-line response to the external-internal threat and directed a get-tough policy against the USSR's perceived enemies both at home and abroad. This response combined repressive OGPU terror measures at home, threats and near ultimatums delivered to Warsaw, and a series of provocative notes to the European powers whose wording increased the level of international tension.^[47] Because Chicherin was in Germany and on the French Riviera when the crisis began, seeking rest and treatment for the effects of his ailments (diabetes and polyneuritis), Soviet diplomacy lacked the subtlety, nuance, and complexity he customarily gave to it. Litvinov felt Chicherin's absence both in the conduct of foreign policy and in the management of the NKID's relations with the Politburo.^[48]