The Russian Revolution in Asia

From Baku to Batavia

Sabine Dullin, Étienne Forestier-Peyrat, Yuexin Rachel Lin, Naoko Shimazu, Sabine Dullin, Étienne Forestier-Peyrat, Yuexin Rachel Lin, Naoko Shimazu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000472240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The Russian Revolution in Asia: From Baku to Batavia presents a unique and timely global history intervention into the historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the centenary of one of the most significant modern revolutions.

It explores the legacies of the Revolution across the Asian continent and maritime Southeast Asia, with a broad geographic sweep including Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. It analyses how revolutionary communism intersected with a variety of Asian contexts, from the anti-colonial movement and ethnic tensions, to indigenous cultural frameworks and power structures. In so doing, this volume privileges Asian actors and perspectives, examining how Asian communities reinterpreted the Revolution to serve unexpected ends, including national liberation, regional autonomy, conflict with Russian imperial hegemony, Islamic practice and cultural nostalgia. Methodologically, this volume breaks new ground by incorporating research from a wide range of sources across multiple languages, many analysed for the first time in English-language scholarship.

This book will be of use to historians of the Russian Revolution, especially those interested in understanding transnational and transregional perspectives of its impact in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as historians of Asia more broadly. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Islam.

1 Transnational communism and Asia A precocious encounter

Sabine Dullin

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352195-2

In 1967, for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, Pierre Naville, a French Trotskyist, prepared for press a new edition of Trotsky’s military writings that had been completed during the Russian Civil War. Naville writes in its foreword that these texts were totally fresh and pertinent and a useful introduction to guerrilla warfare in North Vietnam.¹

I would like to begin with Naville’s intuitive and militant assertion dating from the 1960s. By that time, with the rapid expansion of communism around the globe, Asia had become its primary stronghold and battleground.² In the interval between Trotsky’s moment as the chief of the Red Army in 1918–1921 and General Giap’s time as the main Vietminh military strategist in the Indochina War in 1946–1955 and Vietnam War in 1955–1975, can we trace the genealogy of the political and military transfer from revolutionary Russia to Asia? When and where did it happen? The channel through China is the most well-known. Both the Guomindang (GMD) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) militaries were trained in the 1920s by the soviets in Huangpu Academy. Following the violent repression of the communism by the GMD in 1927, in May 1928, the Central Committee of the CCP issued a General Outline for Military Work and the guerrilla “people’s war” became the preferred strategy of the newly founded Jiangxi Soviet Republic. After Second World War, the communism guerrilla’s strategy was disseminated among anti-Japanese fighters from Manchuria and Korea to the Malaya jungle and Vietnam.³

Yet, this broad picture needs to be anchored in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and its impact on the eastern borderlands of Russia and beyond in the direction of the East. It has to be connected with the colonial context in which communism was taken up in Asia and the agency of Asian actors. Until recently, the transnational encounter between Bolshevism and Asia has not really been a topic addressed in Comintern studies, which have mostly favoured a country-by-country approach and a European perspective.

However, activists from the Caucasus, as well as Central, East, Southeast and South Asia, were among the first supporters of Bolshevism. And Lenin did not have his back turned to Asia. In his thoughts for revolutionising Asia, he followed two patterns. First, he was an anti-imperialist and the denunciation of the Russian colonial yoke in the Caucasus and Central Asia and of European imperialism in South and East Asia was at the core of his theory and political strategy.⁴ Second, the search for modernity and the fight against backwardness also enshrined the Leninist project into a colonial and Orientalist political legacy.⁵

Considering 1917 within the framework of imperial history helps us to rethink the classical periodisation of the Bolshevik Revolution and communist internationalism. Needless to say, progressist and socialist elite in Russia’s main cities had been obsessed by Europe since the nineteenth century. Socialist horizons were turned towards Europe, its model of modernisation and its huge potential for workers to engage in class struggle. An Orientalist and Westernised outlook through which Asian peoples were despised as a synonym for a sleepy peasantry and backwardness was thus dominant. The construction of the aziatchina (lit. Asianness) of the Russian muzhik as the primary obstacle to modernisation and revolution in the former Russian Empire was vividly outlined by Maksim Gorky.⁶ Lenin and his Bolshevik team shared this perception and the vision of history in which the East was positioned at a lower stage of development, but they were also politically sensitive to the revolutionary potential of rural Asian societies and of nationalist feelings in colonial territories.

Moreover, the new history of empires has increased the focus on borders and borderlands in the last few years and the field of communist studies has been profoundly transformed.⁷ This turn brings out the neglected and fascinating world of Eurasian communism, whose description is only possible if we drop the nation-centric framework. Locations such as Shanghai, Irkutsk, Kabul and Singapore were centres for cosmopolitan anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists attracted by the Bolshevik revolutionary know-how. Studies of national parties and organisations in their individual relationship with the Soviet centre characterise the major historiographical works on the Comintern, even after the opening of its archive.⁸ But for the past two decades, transnational history, which focuses on people and ideas travelling across borders, on diaspora and emigration and on international networks, offers new insights into communist and anti-communist activities and people. Revolutionaries who originated from dominated worlds and multinational empires proved to be able to think globally. This was less the case for the European socialist leaders who chose to join the new Communist International at the time of the Second Congress in summer 1920. On the other side of the class struggle, the British imperial elite thought of anti communism at a global level since they feared the international dissemination of the rebellious spirit of the Russian Revolution.⁹ They were far more aware of the global dimension of the new Red attraction force in Moscow than various political leaderships involved in domestic politics in Europe.¹⁰ With a focus on Asia, the history of internationalism and the Comintern takes on new colours and is more global.

New scholarship on transnational communism also helps us to rediscover and rethink the Leninist moment when Russia became a centre for anti-imperialism.¹¹ Defeat and humiliation, social hatred, self-defence, the idea of modernity and nationalism, and knowledge of multinational realities were the winning cocktail for a precocious political encounter between Leninist leaders, communists in the peripheries of the former Russian Empire and anti-imperialist activists in Asia.

Why has Asia occupied such a minor place in the historiography of international communism and the Comintern? How has the new history of empires and the recent focus on borderlands and transnational networks renewed the field of communist studies and given to the East a more adequate place in this story? And to what extent does a greater focus on Asia offer a new perspective on Bolshevism, the Comintern and communist revolutionary expansion?

First, I show that the opening of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in 1992 allowed historians to answer many questions, but in telling the history of the Comintern, they maintained a European perspective. However, if we broaden the enquiry beyond the Comintern documentation and quit Moscow for local centres of Bolshevism, then the East is at the fore. Second, I argue that Lenin’s anti-imperialism and the pariah situation in which the former Russian Great Power was placed played a major role in making the Soviet regime attractive in Asian countries. Moreover, the Bolshevik impact benefitted from the specific hybridity of the East in a Russian context, which was both domestic and foreign. Third, I demonstrate that revolutionary expansion lasted longer in Asia than in Europe because both national claims and transnational networks in Eurasian borderlands were powerful revolutionary tools that were less present in the West. And finally, I develop an argument about the limits of the political transfer from Moscow, focusing on the Indonesian and Chinese cases and later Asian adaptations and innovations in which the role of the peasantry in revolution became crucial.

Opening the archive, what's new?

After October 1917, communism was embodied in an International that was organised by and centred on Moscow. This was known as the Third International, the Communist International or the Comintern (1919–1943). Its archive, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, became accessible once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. At the former Institute of Marxism-Leninism, historians and archivists worked together in the Party’s and the Comintern’s collections. During the 1990s and 2000s, a series of edited collections of documents on key countries for expanding revolution were published. Eight volumes were compiled on China. Japan, Korea and Mongolia were included in the series as well as Germany, Finland and the Balkan countries.¹² Historians of different communist parties who had studied for a long time with scarce documentation and without primary sources from the Soviet side were for the first time able to write monographs based on materials from Moscow. A first map of the Comintern system emerged from the newly available documentation.

These new materials helped to solve the historiographical questions of the twentieth century. Had communist parties been vassals to Moscow or did they represent grassroots, autonomous and authentic political forces? Was Bolshevism a graft onto each national labour movement? After Lenin, had Stalin and the Communist International betrayed the revolution and sacrificed internationalism on the altar of Soviet state interests? The answers to these recurrent questions had long been floating due to the unsolved debate between the totalitarian and revisionist schools, the teleological or societal interpretation of communism, the focus on ideology or realpolitik in the Soviet strategy.

After working with the declassified records, historians came back with answers. Nobody could deny any longer that Moscow was the centre of the Comintern networks. On issues such as strategy development, financing and logistic support, the creation of communist cadres, surveillance and repression, Moscow’s tutelage had been inescapable and often burdensome. The archival sources confirm a periodisation and the non-democratic path imposed by Moscow on new or renewed parties: Congress July 1920 with the famous 21 conditions of admission, the Bolshevisation of parties in the mid-1920s, the Stalinisation after 1928, the purges of 1936–1938.

The rupture between Lenin’s internationalism and Stalin’s “socialism in one country”, underlined first by Trotsky himself, was also reconsidered. The sources do not show a real theoretical shift between the two men. Lenin was the first during the Russian Civil War to speak about the defence of the socialist fatherland and Stalin was not less driven than his mentor by anti-capitalism, class struggle and the desire to expand revolution. Diplomacy and bilateral agreements for implementing peaceful coexistence began to interfere with internationalist strategies of revolution very early on, but this quest for recognition and peaceful coexistence never implied the renunciation of revolutionary expansion in Lenin’s or in Stalin’s time.

The dissociation in the official rhetoric between communism as an international ideology and its organ the Comintern, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union as a national state, on the other hand, was instrumental for Moscow as it was for foreign partners who chose to believe it. While the commanders of the Japanese forces were burning Bolsheviks alive as devils on the harsh Siberian front of the Russian Civil War, Tokyo diplomats engaged in friendly negotiations with their luckier comrades in Moscow for fishery and oil concessions. On the Caucasian front, Bolshevik leaders could simultaneously push forward the limits of the revolution in Northern Iran and to the Black Sea, while considering openings to British diplomacy to consolidate their hold on South Caucasian republics in the early 1920s.

Research on biographical files gave birth to knowledge about the fascinating group of “Cominternians” (numbering roughly 400 men and a few women in the mid-1930s), who worked in the leading structures of the International or acted as its representatives in various countries. These people were previously largely unknown. The new research revealed singular tales of globe-trotters. Under false identities, these people lived as transnational shadows, invisible for the governments but key men for the Executive Committee of the Comintern and listened to as experts for the new communist parties. Studies of these missionaries of revolution also revealed the subtle and complex interplay between the instructions issued from the centre and the initiatives taken by the periphery.¹³

Despite these complexities, however, these issues clarified by the consultation of the Comintern’s archival documentation remained in the 1990s considered from a Europ...