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This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War
(1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces
of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet
Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the
Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state,
but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows
that while the Red Army’s rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in
summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent
collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet
military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that
they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of
the capitalist world – Britain and France – who were perceived
as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback
by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced
they had been overcome by the capitalist powers. The Soviet-Polish
War and its Legacy reveals that – in the aftermath of the
catastrophe at Warsaw –Lenin, Stalin and other senior Bolsheviks
were convinced that another war against Poland and its capitalist
backers was inevitable with this perpetual fear of war shaping the
evolution of the early Soviet state. It also further encouraged the
creation of a centralised and repressive one-party state and
provided a powerful rationale for the breakneck industrialisation
of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The Soviet
leadership’s central preoccupation in the 1930s was Nazi Germany;
this book convincingly argues that Bolshevik perceptions of Poland
and the capitalist world in the decade before were given as much
significance and were ultimately crucial to the rise of Stalinism.
How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up
delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were
totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was
responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a
microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the
journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled
with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic,
self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the
emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in
fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition.
Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research,
this fascinating volume brings together an international team of
leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and
controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the
rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up
delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were
totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was
responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a
microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the
journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled
with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic,
self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the
emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in
fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition.
Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research,
this fascinating volume brings together an international team of
leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and
controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the
rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of
a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army
officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged
with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph
Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer
corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor
in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German
invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major
war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military
conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The
Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely
new explanation for Stalin's actions-an explanation with the
potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great
Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in
which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps
and over 750,000 executed. Framing his study within the context of
Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution,
Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army
not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of
weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been
poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw
spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long
believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by
foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the
Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to
counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories
that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military
purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror
demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were
purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers
and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With
its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light
on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military
relations under the Stalinist regime.
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