by Riazanovsky
main party, only 170 Bolsheviks, and 34 Mensheviks, as well as not quite one hundred deputies who belonged to minor parties or had no party affiliation. In other words, the Socialist Revolutionaries possessed an absolute majority. Chernov was elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly. It should be remembered that that Assembly had been awaited for months by almost all political groups in Russia as the truly legitimate and definitive authority in the country. Lenin himself had denounced the Provisional Government for failing to summon it promptly. Yet, in the changed circumstances, he acted in his usual decisive manner and had troops disperse the Constituent Assembly on the morning of the nineteenth of January. No major repercussions followed, and Soviet rule appeared more secure than ever. The lack of response to the disbanding of the assembly resulted in part from the fact that it had no organized force behind it, and in part from the fact that on the very morrow of the revolution the Soviet government had declared its intention to make peace and also had in effect granted the peasants gentry land, thus taking steps to satisfy the two main demands of the people. The Bolsheviks even enjoyed the co-operation of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries who received three cabinet positions, including the ministry of agriculture.
But the making of peace proved both difficult and extremely costly, with the very existence of the Soviet state hanging in the balance. The Allies failed to respond to the Soviet bid for peace and in fact ignored the Soviet government, not expecting it to last. Discipline in the Russian army collapsed entirely, with soldiers often massacring their officers. After the conclusion of an armistice with the Germans in December 1917, the front simply disbanded in chaos, most men trying to return home by whatever means they could find. The Germans proved willing to negotiate, but they offered Draconian conditions of peace. Trotsky, who as commissar for foreign affairs represented the Soviet government, felt compelled to turn them down, proclaiming a new policy: "no war, no peace!" The Germans then proceeded to advance, occupying more territory and seizing an enormous amount of military materiel. In Petrograd many Bolshevik leaders as well as the Left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed with Trotsky that German demands could not be accepted. Only Lenin's authority and determination swung the balance in favor of the humiliating peace. By sacrificing much else, Lenin in all probability saved Communist rule in Russia, for the young Soviet government was in no position whatsoever to fight Germany.
The Soviet-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918. To sum up its results in Vernadsky's words:
The peace conditions were disastrous to Russia. The Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia received their independence. Part of Transcaucasia was ceded to Turkey. Russia lost 26 per cent of her
total population; 27 per cent of her arable land; 32 per cent of her average crops; 26 per cent of her railway system; 33 per cent of her manufacturing industries; 73 per cent of her iron industries; 75 per cent of her coal fields. Besides that, Russia had to pay a large war indemnity.
Or to put it in different terms, Russia lost over sixty million people and over five thousand factories, mills, distilleries, and refineries. Puppet states dependent on Germany were set up in the separated border areas. Only the ultimate German defeat in the First World War prevented the Brest-Litovsk settlement from being definitive, and in particular made it possible for the Soviet government to reclaim Ukraine.
Since Lenin's firm direction in disbanding the Constituent Assembly and capitulating to the Germans had enabled the Soviet government to survive, the great Soviet leader and his associates proceeded rapidly to revamp and even transform Russia politically, socially, and economically. In addition to letting peasants seize land, the government assigned control over the factories to workers' committees and nationalized all banks, confiscating private accounts. Foreign trade became a state monopoly, and a special commissariat was created to handle it. In December 1917, the existing judicial system was declared abolished: the new revolutionary tribunals and people's courts were to be guided by the "socialist legal consciousness." Titles and ranks disappeared. Authorities gradually assumed control over the scarce housing and other material aspects of life. Those who belonged to the upper and middle classes often lost their property, suffered discrimination, and were considered by the new regime to be suspect by definition. Church property was confiscated and religious instruction in schools terminated. The Gregorian or Western calendar - New Style - was adopted on January 31, 1918. The Constitutional Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries - except for the Left Socialist Revolutionaries until their break with the Bolsheviks - and to an extent Mensheviks, all of whom opposed the new regime, were to be suppressed and hunted down as counterrevolutionaries. As early as December 20, 1917, the government established the Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation, the dreaded "Cheka," headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky. From that time on the political police became a fundamental reality of Soviet life.
War Communism and New Problems
With the summer of 1918, War Communism began to acquire a definite shape. The nationalization of industry, which began shortly after the revolution, was extended by the law of June 28, 1918. To cite Carr's listing, the state appropriated "the mining, metallurgical, textile, electrical,
timber, tobacco, resin, glass and pottery, leather and cement industries, all steam-driven mills, local utilities and private railways together with a few minor industries." Eventually private industry disappeared almost entirely. Compulsory labor was introduced. Private trade was gradually suppressed, to be replaced by rationing and by government distribution of food and other necessities of life. On February 19, 1918, the nationalization of land was proclaimed: all land became state property to be used only by those who would cultivate it themselves. The peasants, however, had little interest in supplying food to the government because, with state priorities and the breakdown of the economy, they could not receive much in return. Therefore, under the pressure of the Civil War and of the desperate need to obtain food for the Red Army and the urban population, the authorities finally decreed a food levy, in effect ordering the peasants to turn in their entire produce, except for a minimal amount to be retained for their own sustenance and for sowing. As the peasants resisted, forcible requisitioning and repression became common. Communism, military and militant, swung into full force.
The rigors of War Communism on the home front largely resulted from and paralleled the bitter struggle the Soviet regime was waging with its external enemies. Beginning with the summer of 1918 the country entered a major, many-faceted, and cruel Civil War, when the so-called Whites - who had rallied initially to continue the war against the Germans - rose to challenge the Red control of Russia. Numerous nationalities, situated as a rule in the border areas of the former empire of the Romanovs, proceeded to assert their independence from Soviet authority. A score of foreign states intervened by sending some armed forces into Russia and supporting certain local movements and governments, as well as by blockading Soviet Russia from October 1919 to January 1920. In 1920, Poland fought a war against the Soviet government to win much of western Ukraine and White Russia. It appeared that everyone was trying to strike a blow against the Communist regime.
The Civil War
The counterrevolutionary forces, often called vaguely and somewhat misleadingly the White movement, constituted the greatest menace to the Soviet rule, because, in contrast to Poland and various border nationalities, which had aims limited to particular regions, and to the intervening Allied powers, which had no clear aims, the Whites meant to destroy the Reds. The counterrevolutionaries drew their strength from army officers and cossacks, from the "bourgeoisie," including a large number of secondary school students and other educated youth, and from political groups ranging from the far Right to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Such
prominent former terrorists as Boris Savinkov fought against the Soviet government, while the crack units of the White Army included a few worker detachments. Most intell
ectuals joined or sympathized with the White camp.
After the Soviet government came to power, civil servants staged an unsuccessful strike against it. Following their break with the Bolsheviks in March 1918 over the latter's determination to promote class struggle in the villages, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries tried an abortive uprising in Moscow in July. At about the same time and in part in response to the action of the Left SR's, counterrevolutionaries led by the local military commander seized Simbirsk, while Savinkov raised a rebellion in the center of European Russia, capturing and holding for two weeks the town of Iaroslavl on the Volga. These efforts collapsed, however, because of the insufficient strength of the counterrevolutionaries once the Soviet government could concentrate its forces against them. Indeed, it became increasingly clear that the Communist authorities, in particular the Cheka, had a firm grip on the central provinces and ruthlessly suppressed all opponents and suspected opponents. True to their tradition, the Socialist Revolutionaries tried terrorism, assassinating several prominent Bolsheviks, such as the head of the Petrograd Cheka, and seriously wounding Lenin himself in August 1918. Earlier, in July, a Left Socialist Revolutionary had killed the German ambassador, producing a diplomatic crisis. Yet even the terrorist campaign could not shake Soviet control in Moscow - which had again become the capital of the country in March 1918 - Petrograd, or central European Russia. And it provoked frightful reprisals, a veritable reign of terror, during which huge numbers of "class enemies" and others suspected by the regime were killed.
The borderlands, on the other hand, offered numerous opportunities to the counterrevolutionaries. The Don, Kuban, and Terek areas in the south and southeast all gave rise to local anti-Bolshevik cossack governments. Moreover, the White Volunteer Army emerged in southern Russia, led first by Alekseev, next by Kornilov, and after Kornilov's death in combat by an equally prominent general, Anthony Denikin. Other centers of opposition to the Communists sprang up in the east. In Samara, on the Volga, Chernov headed a government composed of members of the Constituent Assembly. Both the Ural and the Orenburg cossacks turned against Red Moscow. The All-Russian Directory of five members was established in Omsk, in western Siberia, in September 1918, as a result of a conference attended by anti-Bolshevik political parties and local governments of eastern Russia. Following a military coup the Directory was replaced by another anti-Red government, that of Admiral Alexander Kolchak. A commander of the cossacks of Transbaikalia, Gregory Semenov, ruled a part of eastern Siberia with the support of the Japanese. New governments
emerged also in Vladivostok and elsewhere. Russian anti-Bolshevik forces in the east were augmented by some 40,000 members of the so-called Czech Legion composed largely of Czech prisoners of war who wanted to fight on the side of the Entente. These soldiers were being moved to Vladivostok via the Trans-Siberian Railroad when a series of incidents led to their break with Soviet authorities and their support of the White movement. In the north a prominent anti-Soviet center arose in Archangel, where a former populist, Nicholas Chaikovsky, set up a government supported by the intervening British and French. And in the west, where the non-Russian borderlands produced numerous nationalist movements in opposition to the Soviet government, General Nicholas Iudenich established a White base in Estonia to threaten Petrograd.
The Civil War, which broke out in the summer of 1918, first went favorably for the Whites. In late June and early July the troops of the Samara government captured Simbirsk, Kazan, and Ufa. Although the Red Army managed to eliminate that threat, it immediately had to face a greater menace: the forces of Kolchak, supported by the Czechs, and those of Denikin, aided by cossacks. Kolchak's units, advancing from Siberia, took Perm in the Urals and almost reached the Volga. At this time, on the sixteenth of July, Nicholas II, the empress, their son, and four daughters were killed - apparently in compliance with Lenin's secret order - by local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg, where they had been confined, when the Czechs and the Whites approached the town. Denikin's army, after some reversals of fortune, resumed the offensive, and its right wing threatened to link with Kolchak's army in the spring of 1919. While Kolchak's forced retreat eliminated this possibility, Denikin proceeded to occupy virtually all of Ukraine and to advance on Moscow. In the middle of October his troops took Orel and approached Tula, the last important center south of Moscow. At the same time Iudenich advanced from Estonia on Petrograd, seizing Gatchina, only thirty miles from that city, on October 16, and besieging Pulkovo on its outskirts. As a recent historian of these events has commented: "In the middle of October it appeared that Petrograd and Moscow might fall simultaneously to the Whites."
But the tide turned. Iudenich's offensive collapsed just short of the former capital. Although the Red Army had had to be created from scratch, it had constantly improved in organization, discipline, and leadership under Commissar of War Trotsky, and it managed finally to turn the tables on both Kolchak and Denikin. The admiral, who had assumed the title of "Supreme Ruler of Russia" and had received recognition from some other White leaders, suffered crushing defeat in late 1919 and was executed by the Bolsheviks on February 7, 1920. The general was driven back to the area of the Sea of Azov and the Crimea by the end of March 1920. At that point the Soviet-Polish war gave respite to the southern White Army
and even enabled Denikin's successor General Baron Peter Wrangel to recapture a large section of southern Russia. But with the end of the Polish war in the autumn, the Red Army concentrated again on the southern front. After more bitter fighting, Wrangel, his remaining army, and a considerable number of civilians, altogether about 100,000 people, were evacuated on Allied ships to Constantinople in mid-November. Other and weaker counterrevolutionary strongholds, such as that in Archangel, had already fallen. By the end of 1920 the White movement had been effectively defeated.
Allied Intervention
The great Civil War in Russia was complicated by Allied intervention, by the war between the Soviet government and Poland, and by bids for national independence on the part of a number of peoples of the former empire of the Romanovs who were not Great Russians. The intervention began in 1918 and involved fourteen countries; the Japanese in particular sent a sizeable force into Russia - over 60,000 men. Great Britain dispatched altogether some 40,000 troops, France and Greece two divisions each, and the United States about 10,000 men, while Italy and other countries - except for the peculiar case of the Czechs - sent smaller, and often merely token, forces. The Allies originally wanted to prevent the Germans from seizing war materiel in such ports as Archangel and Murmansk, as well as to observe the situation, while the Japanese wanted to exploit the opportunities presented in the Far East by the collapse of Russian power. Japanese troops occupied the Russian part of the island of Sakhalin and much of Siberia east of Lake Baikal. Detachments of American, British, French, and Italian troops followed the Japanese into Siberia, while other Allied troops landed, as already mentioned, in northern European Russia, as well as in southern ports such as Odessa, occupied by the French, and Batum, occupied by the British. Allied forces assumed a hostile attitude toward the Soviet government, blockaded the Soviet coastline from October 1919 to January 1920, and often helped White movements by providing military supplies - such as some British tanks for Denikin's army - and by their very presence and protection. But they often avoided actual fighting. This fruitless intervention ended in 1920 with the departure of Allied troops, except that the Japanese stayed in the Maritime Provinces of the Russian Far East until 1922 and in the Russian part of Sakhalin until 1925.
The War against Poland
The Soviet-Polish war was fought in 1920 from the end of April until mid-October. The government of newly independent Poland opened hostili-
ties to win the western Ukraine and western White Russia, which the Poles considered part of their "historic heritage," although ethnically the areas in question were not Polish. The ancient struggle between the Poles and the Russians resumed its course, with this time the Russians, th
at is, the Soviet government, in an apparently desperate situation. Actually the war produced more than one reversal of fortune. First, in June and July the Poles overran western Russian areas; next the Red Army, led by Michael Tukhachevsky and others, staged a mighty counteroffensive that reached the very gates of Warsaw; then the Poles, helped by French credits and Allied supplies, defeated the onrushing Reds and gained the upper hand. The Treaty of Riga of March 18, 1921, gave Poland many of the lands it desired, establishing the boundary a considerable distance east of the ethnic line, as well as of the so-called Curzon Line, which approximated the ethnic line and which the Allies had regarded as the just settlement.
National Independence Movements
National independence movements in the former empire of the Romanovs during the years following 1917 defy comprehensive description in a textbook and have to be left to special works, such as Pipes's study. As early as 1917 Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and White Russia declared their independence. They were followed in 1918 by Estonia, Ukraine, Poland - once German troops were evacuated - the Transcaucasian Federation - to be dissolved into the separate states of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia - and certain political formations in the east. The Soviet government had proclaimed the right of self-determination of peoples, but it became quickly apparent that it considered independence movements as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. Those peoples that were successful in asserting their independence, that is, the Finns, the Estonians, the Latvians, and the Lithuanians, as well as the Poles, did so in spite of the Soviet government, which was preoccupied with other urgent matters. Usually they had to suppress their own Communists, sometimes, as in the case of Finland, after a full-fledged civil war. All except Poland and Lithuania became independent states for the first time. In other areas the Red Army and local Communists combined to destroy independence.