The People's Government VIII
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VIII The People’s Government “I ask you to remember that the internal and international situation of Georgia demands from the Georgian Communists, not the application of the Russian pattern, but the skillful and flexible creation of a distinctive tactic based on the greatest compliance with all kinds of petty bourgeois elements.” —V. I. Lenin, concerning plans to take over Georgia in 1921 “The formation of the People’s Government was the beginning of the historically mature socialist revolution in Lithuania.” —Juozas Žiugžda “Today, the new government carried out a number of important tasks connected with the work of assuming power.” —from the protocol of the first meeting of the People’s Government When Vladimir Dekanozov began his talks with the Lithuanian government on June 16, he had already, informally, brought Lithuania into the web of the Soviet party-state. His program in Lithuania was to direct the process by which a non-communist, “popular front” government, representing cooperation with what Soviet commentators called “petty bourgeois elements,” would carry out reforms aimed at undermining the independent Lithuanian state. At the same time he was to help the Lithuanian Communist Party develop the institutions and cadres that would allow it to take and exercise power. His ultimate goals were the establishment of a Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and then of course its formal incorporation into the Soviet system. He had to draw attention away from the presence of the Red Army and to create the image that the Lithuanian people welcomed the opportunity to become part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Communist Party had considerable experience, both theoretical and practical, in the incubation and fostering of communist revolutions. In 1920, in a situation somewhat analogous to the situation in Lithuania, Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with the Caucasian state of Georgia, and the following year, when efforts to subvert the government had failed, Soviet troops moved in to establish a Soviet Socialist Republic. As the situation unfolded in March 1921, Lenin advised, “Essential is a special policy of concessions toward the Georgian intelligentsia and small traders... I ask you to remember that the internal and international situation of Georgia demands from the Georgian Communists, not the application of the Russian pattern, but the skillful and flexible creation of a distinctive tactic based on the greatest compliance with all kinds of petty bourgeois elements.” A month later, he went on to advocate “a slower, more careful, more systematic transition to socialism.” In practice the Soviet occupation of Georgia 136 Alfred Erich Senn proceeded more harshly, but the model of working with “the national bourgeoisie” became a standard Soviet policy.236 The thought of comparing Soviet policy in Georgia in 1921–1922 with Soviet policy in Lithuania in 1940 arises from the fact that in 1920 Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, the foreign minister in the new government that Dekanozov now formed, had been a member of the city council in Baku, Azerbaidzhan, and he mentioned the Georgian experience in his first reminiscences of his work as Acting Prime Minister in 1940, published in 1942.237 He did not, however, bring it up in his later writings. Pozdniakov surely knew of Krėvė’s having been in Baku, and he would have told this to Dekanozov, who had also been in Baku at this time. Did Dekanozov and Krėvė discuss their experiences in Baku when Krėvė came to him at the Soviet mission? Why did Krėvė raise the subject of the Soviet takeover in Georgia in that first memoir and then drop it? The question emerges: Did Krėvė possibly know Dekanozov from those revolutionary days in the Caucasus? To be sure, Krėvė wrote that Pozdniakov “introduced” him to Dekanozov. Not having any reliable documentation one way or the other, we are left to speculate. Perhaps Krėvė thought of the Georgian example simply in reaction to seeing Georgian communists take control of Lithuania. Another reference to Georgia appears in the memoirs of Aleksandr Slavinas, the head of counterintelligence in the new government’s police system. He recounted spending a day with a mysterious figure from Moscow, “comrade Petrov,” who instructed him on his work. This was probably Vsevolod Merkulov, USSR Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs. Slavinas described him as a Russian from Georgia: “Comrade Petrov” had served with Beriia in the Caucasus and had come to Moscow as part of his entourage in the NKVD. Like “comrade Petrov,” a number of other NKVD specialists followed Dekanozov to Kaunas, but Slavinas’s story adds to the significance of the “Georgian model.”238 Yet another factor in Soviet policy making in 1940 was the conclusion of Soviet ideologists and historians, made in the latter 1920s, that the effort to establish a Soviet Republic in Lithuania in 1919 had failed because the communist government had alienated the Lithuanian peasantry by advocating large scale agricultural land holding and also because it had not paid proper attention to the Lithuanians’ national consciousness. Now, in 1939–1940, after twenty years of independence, Lithuanian culture and national consciousness were considerably stronger and Lithuania had a stronger peasant class than had been the case a generation earlier. Dekanozov, therefore, had to focus the Lithuanians’ attention and thoughts on a common, external enemy, while he established a political base for his program. As events developed, moreover, the revolutionary propaganda avoided references to any thought that the Lithuanians themselves had rejected Soviet rule in 1919 and instead spoke of “restoring” the Soviet system that western powers had allegedly undermined..