The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert John Service

  Kolchak was defeated by the Reds in April 1919. Perm was back in their hands in July, Omsk in November. Kolchak himself was captured and executed in the following year. The Volunteer Army in southern Russia which had been founded by the anti-Bolshevik Generals Alekseev and Kornilov was taken over by General Denikin, who moved his forces into Ukraine in summer. Denikin seized Kharkov in late June and Kiev and Odessa in August. Orël, only 350 kilometres from the capital, fell to him in mid-October. His strategy was expressed in a Moscow Directive ordering a rapid advance into central Russia. Yet the Red Army had been able to regroup after seeing off Kolchak. A devastating counter-attack against the Whites was organized which, by mid-December, resulted in the capture of Kiev and the re-establishment of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Luck was again on the side of the Reds; for it was only in October that General Yudenich had crossed the Estonian frontier in the direction of Petrograd. There was no co-ordination between him and Denikin. By the middle of November, Yudenich’s army was retreating in tatters to Estonia. The Civil War in Russia, including Siberia, and Ukraine had been won by the Reds.

  This outcome of the war between the Reds and the Whites determined the result of most of the many armed conflicts elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. In the Transcaucasus, the Georgians contended against the Armenians; the Armenians also fought the Azeris. And each state in the region had internal strife. For example, battles and massacres occurred in Georgia between Georgians and Abkhazians.32 Consequently the armed struggle in the lands of the Romanov dynasty was never merely a ‘Russian’ Civil War. Indeed it was not just one Civil War at all: there were dozens of civil wars after 1917, wars in which the Red Army was able to intervene after its defeat of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich.

  The communists aimed to make their task easier by offering various concessions to non-Russians. This policy had already been implemented in the RSFSR itself. Lenin established a People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), headed by Stalin, to realize the official commitment to native-language schools and to cultural autonomy. Stalin and his subordinates did not merely allow non-Russians to exercise their freedom: they actively propelled them in this direction. Politically-compliant representatives of these nationalities were introduced to Narkomnats. Propaganda was prepared in each of their languages. Enquiries were put in hand to ascertain the boundaries of the territories inhabited mainly by these nationalities.33 The Russian Communist Party bent over backwards to appease non-Russians — and towards the end of the Civil War the Russian Cossacks in the North Caucasus were ejected from their farms in favour of the local Chechens, whose land had been seized by the tsars and given to the Cossacks in the nineteenth century.

  Both Lenin and Stalin, moreover, committed themselves to introducing a federal mode of rule once the Civil War had ended. From 1918, as proof of their intent, they started to set up internal ‘autonomous’ republics in the RSFSR wherever the Russians constituted a minority of the population. The first plan to set up a Tatar-Bashkir Republic within the RSFSR collapsed in some measure because Tatars and Bashkirs refused to collaborate with each other. There were also difficulties because ethnic Russians, too, lived among them, and the major towns had a Russian majority: not all Russians, by any means, felt that non-Russians should receive such apparent indulgence. Representations were made to Moscow that Russians were being done down. But the communists persisted and founded both a Tatar Republic and a Bashkir Republic.34 As Soviet-occupied territory was expanded, so the number of autonomous republics rose.

  Certain outlying regions had experienced years of independent statehood in the course of the Civil War, a statehood that in most cases was unprecedented for them. It would therefore have been difficult to incorporate them without further ado into the RSFSR. Ukrainians in particular did not take kindly to their resubjugation to Russian rule. Consequently Ukraine, once reoccupied by the Red Army, was proclaimed as a Soviet republic in its own right. This device was repeated elsewhere. By the time of the completed conquest of the Transcaucasus in March 1921, Soviet republics had been founded also in Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. And the RSFSR had bilateral relations with each of them.

  This had much cartographic importance. In January 1918, when the creation of the RSFSR had been announced, the assumption had been that each piece of land conquered by Soviet forces would be incorporated in the RSFSR through a federal arrangement of some kind. But the pressing need of the Bolsheviks to win support in the non-Russian borderlands had led to the creation of several Soviet republics. The RSFSR was easily the largest, the most powerful and the most prestigious; but formally it was only one Soviet republic among all the others. Quite what constitutional settlement there would be at the end of the Civil War had not yet been decided. But one thing had been resolved: namely that there was a place called ‘Russia’ which would occupy a defined territory on the map, a territory which was considerably smaller than the former Russian Empire. The RSFSR was the state that governed this Russia and the vast majority of its population consisted of Russians.

  Yet a distinct ethnically-based sense of Russian statehood could not develop. For the boundaries of the RSFSR were not set exclusively by considerations of national and ethnic geography. In particular, there was no Soviet republic in central Asia on the model of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Instead the lands of the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Tajiks and Uzbeks belonged to ‘the Turkestani Region’ and were included in the RSFSR. A so-called ‘Kirgiz (Kazakh) Republic’ was at last established in 1920, but only as an autonomous republic within the RSFSR.35

  At any rate, the fundamental reality was that the entire RSFSR was subjected to highly centralized authority and that both the RSFSR and all other Soviet republics were ruled by the Politburo. This was done in several ways. The most effective was the stipulation in the Party Rules drawn up in March 1919 that the communist organizations in the various Soviet republics were to be regarded merely as regional organizations of the Russian Communist Party.36 Thus the central party bodies of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks in Kiev were strictly subordinated to the Central Committee in Moscow. Party centralism was to prevail. Lenin and his colleagues also drew up a confidential instruction to republican governments to the effect that republican people’s commissariats were to act as mere regional branches of Sovnarkom.37 In addition, the new Soviet republics on the RSFSR’s borders were disallowed from having ties with any other republic except the RSFSR.38 The aim was not to reinforce the RSFSR but to consolidate the Politburo’s capacity to control all the republics, including the RSFSR, from Moscow.

  Yet enough concessions were being made to the sensitivities of non-Russians to make the Civil War easier for the Reds than for the Whites in the non-Russian regions. Jews in particular were terrified by the anti-Semitic mayhem perpetrated by the Whites.39 Yet the advantage held by the Reds was helpful without being decisive. Invading troops misbehaved in all the armies. The Reds frequently committed butchery against religious leaders. Twenty-eight bishops and thousands of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were killed; and the other Christian sects as well as Islam and Judaism were also subjected to a campaign of terror. Lenin’s policy was to introduce atheism by persuasion; but he, too, instigated the mass murder of clerics.40 For most people, religious belief was entwined with their national or ethnic identity. The rampaging of the Red Army — and especially its cavalrymen — undid much of the good done for Sovnarkom’s cause by the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities.

  Nevertheless the Whites had lost. The dispirited Denikin, as he retreated to Crimea, resigned his command to General Vrangel; Yudenich and his forces faded into inactivity. The Whites were in a hopeless position. Vrangel belatedly appreciated the damage done to their campaigns by their refusal to leave the peasants with the land taken by them since the October Revolution. Kolchak had given farms to landlords at the peasantry’s expense even in places where the landlords had not owned estates.41 By announcing their faith in ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, the Whites ali
enated those non-Russian nationalities who recognized the slogan as thinly disguised Russian imperialism. By hanging trade unionists, they made workers think twice before turning against the Russian Communist Party.

  Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich had rested their hopes in a military knock-out blow, and refused to fight a ‘political’ war. They were contemptuous of the Kadets who organized the civilian administration for them.42 Lip service was given by the White commanders to the ultimate goal of re-convoking a representative assembly of some kind; but their officers were hostile to this: their fundamental aim was a right-wing military dictatorship. Kolchak and Denikin came within striking range of Moscow; Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss their calculations out of hand. But they had the odds stacked against them. The Reds always held an area with a hugely greater availability of conscripts and military equipment;43 they also were based at the heart of the country’s network of telegraph, railways and administration. The Reds had high morale and felt certain that they were making a new, better world and that science and social justice were on their side.

  Indisputably, luck was with them. The Germans lost the Great War and stopped interfering in Russian affairs; the Allies donated money and guns to the Whites, but never seriously undertook the conquest of Russia themselves. The peoples of the West were in any event ill-disposed to fighting in eastern Europe once Germany had been defeated. Many Western socialists argued that the Bolshevik party should be given the chance to soften its dictatorial rule, and there were plenty of industrialists, especially in the United Kingdom, who wished to resume commercial links with Russia.44 In January 1920 the Supreme Allied Council lifted the economic blockade on the RSFSR. The Whites were left to fend for themselves.

  The Bolsheviks had won, and felt that their ideas had helped them to this end. They had become comfortable with the one-party, one-ideology state as the basis of their power. They legalized and reinforced arbitrary rule and had no intention of holding free elections. Dictatorship and terror appealed to them as modes of solving problems. They were convinced that Bolshevism was the sole authentic form of socialism. This internal party consensus contained its own disagreements. A group known as the Democratic Centralists sprang up in 1919 and contended that too few officials were taking too many decisions at both central and local levels of the party, that the party was run inefficiently, that the central party bodies too rarely consulted opinion in the local committees. Another Bolshevik group, the Workers’ Opposition, emerged in 1920; its complaint was that the aspirations of the factory labourers were being flouted. Workers’ Oppositionist leader Alexander Shlyapnikov urged that power should be shared among the party, the soviets and the trade unions and that ordinary workers and peasants should have influence over decisions on economic affairs.

  Neither the Democratic Centralists nor the Workers’ Opposition wished to stop the harassment of the other political parties or to end the requisitioning of grain. Their factional disagreements with the Central Committee took second place in their minds to the need for loyalty to the party. While they may have thought of themselves as the conscience of the Revolution, they, too, had given up part of the more idealistic heritage of 1917. At any rate their factions were numerically tiny: they could not hope to beat the Central Committee for votes at the yearly Party Congresses.

  A military-style approach to party organization and to politics in general had become customary in the Civil War. Orders replaced consultation. Having served in the Red Army, most Bolshevik officials had acquired the habits of command. Another novelty was the ‘cleansing’ of the party. The Russian word for this, chistka, is usually translated as purge; and the first purge in May 1918 was confined to the expulsion of ‘idlers, hooligans, adventurers, drunkards and thieves’ from the party’s ranks. By mid-1919 there were 150,000 party members: half the total claimed twelve months previously. The willingness to exclude people in order to maintain purity of membership can be traced back to Lenin’s wrangles with the Mensheviks in 1903. But practicality as well as ideology was at work; for the one-party state was attracting recruits to the party who were not even committed socialists. Periodic cleansings of the ranks were vital to raise the degree of political dependability.

  The political leadership at central and local levels distrusted the various state institutions, and repeatedly called for ‘the most severe discipline’. In 1920 a Central Control Commission was established to eradicate abuses in the party. But the party was not the only institution presenting problems of control. The People’s Commissariats gave even greater cause of concern to the Kremlin leadership, and a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was established in the same year to investigate the reliability and efficiency of the various civilian state bodies in their day-to-day work.

  Of all bodies, it was the party that underwent the largest change. Yet the habit of criticizing the leadership remained; and, while the official who counted for most in local party committees was the committee secretary,45 discussion with other committee members was still the norm. Furthermore, the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat lacked the accurate, up-to-date information which would have enabled them to intervene with confidence in local disputes. The Red Army, too, was resistant at its lower levels to tight detailed control. Ill-discipline among soldiers was notorious. There are thought to have been a million deserters and conscription defaulters by the end of 1919.46 Indisputably the Soviet state as a whole increased its internal co-ordination in the Civil War; but chaos remained in all institutions. And the proliferation of bodies such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate had the effect of enlarging the bureaucracy without increasing its efficiency.

  This sprawling state ruled a disgruntled society, and there was much to give rise to resentment. The food rations were poor. Disease and malnutrition killed eight million people in 1918–20.47 Political parties other than the Bolsheviks were persecuted or suppressed. ‘Barrier detachments’ were arresting persons carrying food for the black market.48 The workers were angry about such conditions and called for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly of political power. Strikes took place in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula and elsewhere during the Civil War; they became especially intense once the danger from the Whites had been eliminated. The women, girls, boys and residual skilled men in the Russian work-force had just enough energy left to make protest. Mutinies broke out in army garrisons, and by mid-1920 there were hints that the loyalty of the pro-Bolshevik sailors of the Kronstadt naval garrison might be fading.

  Peasants clashed with the food-supplies commissars across the country. According to official figures, 344 rebellions are reported as having broken out by mid-1919.49 In 1920, severe trouble was reported from the Volga provinces, especially Tambov, from Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus. The villages were in revolt. They hated the conscription of their menfolk, the requisitioning of foodstuffs, the infringements of customary peasant law, the ban on private trade with the towns and the compulsion of households to supply free labour to the authorities for the felling of timber and the clearing of roads.50 The Bolshevik party assumed that the answer was to intensify repression. Industry and agriculture, too, were to be brought more firmly under the state’s control. Trotski proposed that Red Army soldiers, instead of being demobilized, should be transferred into labour armies; Lenin was firmly attached to the policy of requisitioning foodstuffs through a centrally-assigned set of quotas: the economic programme of the Civil War was to be maintained in peacetime.

  The other way out of the emergency for the Russian Communist Party was socialist revolution in Europe. During 1919 they had continued to probe opportunities to link up with the Hungarian Soviet Republic until its collapse in August. The Bavarian Soviet Republic had been overturned in May. Yet the cities of northern Italy, too, were in ferment: as one door closed, another was thought to be opening. The party’s optimism was all the more striking since Red rule in the borderlands of Russia remained under threat. Conflicts with the Poles took
place in the course of the year, and erupted into full-scale war when Józef Piłsudski invaded Ukraine and took Kiev in May 1920. The Red Army gathered support at this conjuncture from Russians in general. The arthritic former Imperial commander Alexander Brusilov came out of retirement to urge his former subordinates to fulfil their patriotic duty by seeing off the Poles; and, by July, Piłsudski’s army was fleeing westwards.

  Lenin spotted his chance to carry revolution into central Europe. The Red Army was instructed to plunge into Poland and then into Germany. To his colleagues Lenin confided: ‘My personal opinion is that for this purpose it is necessary to sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too.’51 Italian communists in Moscow for the Second Congress of Comintern were told to pack their bags and go home to help organize a revolution. In fact the other Politburo members were doubtful about Lenin’s judgement; they especially questioned whether the Polish working class would rise to welcome the Red Army as its liberator. But Lenin had his way and the Reds hastened across eastern Poland. A pitched battle occurred by the river Vistula, short of Warsaw, in mid-August. The Reds were defeated. The dream of taking revolution to other countries on the point of a bayonet was dispelled.

  The débâcle in Poland concentrated minds upon the difficulties at home. Even before the Polish-Soviet War there had been attempts to modify economic policies. The most notable was Trotski’s proposal to the Central Committee in February 1920 that, in certain provinces and with certain restrictions, grain requisitioning should be replaced with a tax-in-kind that would be fixed at a lower level of procurement. He was turned down after a heated debate in which Lenin denounced him as an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism.52