Bolshevism’s core convictions about capitalism and class warfare were held to be so incontrovertible that any and all means up to lying and summary executions were seen as not just expedient but morally necessary. The demonstrative Red Terror, like its French precedent, would make an indelible impression, on enemies and (newfound) supporters of the Bolsheviks alike.390 Faced with extinction, the Bolsheviks wielded the specter of “counterrevolution” and the willingness of masses of people to risk their lives defending “the revolution” against counterrevolution in order to build an actual state. What in summer and fall 1918 looked for all the world like political Dadaism would soon become an enduring, ambitious dictatorship.391
CHAPTER 8
CLASS WAR AND A PARTY-STATE
The world war formally ended with the conclusion of the armistice. . . . In fact, however, everything from that point onward that we have experienced and continue to experience is a continuation and transformation of the world war.
Pyotr Struve, Rostov-on-the-Don (held by the Whites), November 19191
Every military specialist must have a commissar on his right and on his left, each with a revolver in his hand.
Lev Trotsky, Commissar of War, 19182
BEYOND THEIR MONOPOLY OF 1917–18, the Bolsheviks created a state in 1918–20. The distinction is often lost. Forcibly denying others a right to rule is not the same as ruling and controlling resources. The new state took shape by means of the predation, confiscation, and redistribution of material things (grain, buildings, valuables) as well as the intimidation or conscription of people, refracted through notions of revolutionary class warfare. The resulting regime, one scholar observed, “necessarily also meant a burgeoning bureaucracy, needed both to expropriate the old owners and to administer the newly expropriated property.”3 In many cases, the bureaucrats, even when they themselves were not holdovers, continued to use the letterhead of the tsarist regime or Provisional Government. That said, this was a very particular state: an armed political police that resembled criminal bandits; a sprawling food procurement commissariat, which bested numerous rivals in a battle for bureaucratic aggrandizement; a distribution apparatus to allocate the spoils and to feed off them itself; an immense desertion-beset Red Army; an inefficient but—thanks to the aura of emergency—increasingly hierarchical party hydra, which absorbed and deployed personnel; and a propaganda machinery, with an estimated 50,000 activists already in 1918, wielding newspapers, posters, skits, films, and agitation trains, albeit largely confined to the towns and the army.4 Despite the existence of soviets as well as revolutionary tribunals, this was almost entirely an executive-branch state, but it roiled with rival executive claimants to power, as “commissars” went up against “commissars,” nationally and locally, those who were appointed and those self-appointed. Above all, the new state owed its existence to civil war, as most states do, but it remained in peacetime a counterinsurgency.5 Civil war was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them, indeed it saved them from the Dada and near oblivion of 1918.6 To be sure, even before the onset of full-fledged civil war, the Bolsheviks had not been shy about expropriation and terror. But the civil war provided the opportunity to develop and to validate the struggle against “exploiting classes” and “enemies” (domestic and international), thereby imparting a sense of seeming legitimacy, urgency, and moral fervor to predatory methods.7 “The ruling class,” as Lenin explained, “never turns its power over to the downtrodden class.”8 And so, power had to be claimed by force in an ongoing, not one-off, process. The “seizure of power” would be enacted anew, every day.9
Stalin, like Lenin, is rightly seen as an admirer of the grand trappings of statehood, but an idolatry of the state did not initially drive Bolshevik state building.10 Nor was the driver the shattering conditions of world war and revolution. Rather, it was a combination of ideas or habits of thought, especially profound antipathy to markets and all things bourgeois, as well as no-holds-barred revolutionary methods, which exacerbated the catastrophe in a self-reinforcing loop.11 Plenty of regimes justify martial law, summary shootings, roundups, and confiscations by citing emergency circumstances, but they do not, as a rule, completely outlaw private trade and declare industry nationalized, ration food by class (workers versus “non-laboring elements”), summon “poor peasants” and workers to dispossess “kulaks,” and try to subvert major world powers because they are capitalist (“imperialists”). Bolshevik state building was launched with desperate measures to address inherited, and then severely aggravated, urban food shortages, but every challenge was cast as a matter of counterrevolution, on the part of someone, somewhere. “In the name of saving the revolution from counter-revolution”: so began countless documents from the period, followed by directives to “requisition” flour, petrol, guns, vehicles, people.12 “Today is the first year anniversary of the Revolution,” remarked one former tsarist official (referring to the February Revolution). “A year ago nearly everyone became revolutionaries; and now, counterrevolutionaries.”13 The idea of counterrevolution was the gift that kept on giving.
Pitiless class warfare formed the core of Lenin’s thought—the Great War, to his mind, had irrevocably proven that capitalism had forfeited its right to further existence—but a Soviet state was not born fully armed from Lenin’s forehead. Among the broad masses there was an intuitive antibourgeois ethos—exploiters versus the exploited, haves versus have-nots—which could both motivate and justify an all-out mobilization to combat counterrevolution and defend the revolution. Consider a revolutionary episode in late summer 1918 in Kamyshinsk, on the Volga, a merchant town of sawmills, windmills, and watermelons. “The Cheka has registered all the big bourgeoisie, and at the moment they are being kept on a barge,” proudly proclaimed a group that had constituted itself as the local political police. “During the day the [prisoners] work in town.” No one had to explain to these local defenders of the revolution who the “bourgeoisie” were or why they were the enemy. And when members of the “bourgeoisie” on the Kamyshinsk barge suddenly fell ill, and the Cheka consented to an inspection by a physician from nearby Saratov, who prescribed better rations and release from forced labor, the suspicious Chekists decided to investigate the doctor’s background and discovered he was an impostor. “Now,” the operative gloated, “he too is on the barge.”14 Such prison barges for “class aliens” arose up and down the Volga—none more impressive than under Stalin at Tsaritsyn—as did barge equivalents all across the former Russian empire.15 The ideologically inflected practices that generated the barges enabled tens of thousands of new people in thousands of locales to entrench a new unaccountable power.16 (Apolitical gangsters and profiteers got into the act, too, to rob the “bourgeoisie.”) Violent actions against “counterrevolution” that flowed from the logic of socialist revolution also provoked outrage. “To whom does power in the provinces belong?” one angry commissariat official asked in fall 1918. “To the soviets and their executive committees, or to the Chekas?”17 The answer could not have been plainer: when villagers in Samara Province, also in the Volga valley, revealed that they wanted to hold a new election for the local Cheka’s leadership, the Chekists readied their weapons. As a frightened peasant ran away, a sixteen-year-old Chekist shot him in the back. “Pay special attention to this and write in the newspaper,” one peasant urged, “that here is a fellow who can kill whomever he wants.”18
Here was the eureka moment: from bottom to top, and places in between, the ideas and practices of revolutionary class war produced the Soviet state. Marx had written about emancipation, freedom—but he had also written about class war. For the revolution to succeed, for humanity to break free and advance, everything connected to “the bourgeoisie” and to capitalism had to be smashed. Everything that hindered annihilation of the bourgeosie and capitalism also had to be cleared away, including other socialists. True, far from everyone leapt into the mayhem. The vast majority of inhabitants just sought to survive by scave
nging, finagling, uprooting. At the same time, substantial numbers of people also sought to live the revolution right here and now, organizing communes, building children’s nurseries, writing science fiction. “All aspects of existence—social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial—were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands,” wrote Isaac Steinberg. “Everywhere the driving passion was to create something new, to effect a total difference with the ‘old world.’”19 But within the utopia, the class principle, fundamentally, was intolerant. Many Bolsheviks who were bursting with conviction to serve humanity began to see that their dedicated efforts to end suffering and level social hierarchies were producing the opposite. This realization proved shattering for some, but for most it constituted a way station on the ladder of revolutionary career advancement.20 True believers mixed with opportunists, revolutionary ascetics with swindlers, and together, in the name of social justice and a new world of abudance, they drove ineptitude, corruption, and bluster to heights scarcely known even in tsarist Russia.21
Peasant partisan armies fighting against Bolshevism forcibly requisitioned grain from villages under their control, while denouncing the injustices of the market, and instituted an organization similar to that of the Red Army, right down to the formation of units for deployment against the civilian population and the use of political commissars to ensure loyalty. The anti-Bolshevik Whites, too, had internal-order battalions, grain requisitioning, political commissars, and terror, as civilians lamented.22 But the Bolsheviks, unlike their enemies, boasted that they had an all-encompassing, scientific answer to everything, and they expended considerable resources to disseminate their ideology. Party thinking equated Bolshevism with the movement of history and thereby made all critics into counterrevolutionaries, even if they were fellow socialists. Meanwhile, in trying to manage industry, transport, fuel, food, housing, education, culture, all at the same time, during a time of war and ruin, the revolutionaries came face to face with their own lack of expertise, and yet the solution to their woes struck them with ideological horror: They had to engage the class enemy—“bourgeois specialists”—inherited from tsarist times, who often detested socialism but were willing to help rebuild the devastated country. “These people,” Alexander Verkhovsky, tsarist general and Provisional Government war minister, presciently wrote of the Bolsheviks immediately after the October coup, “while promising everything, will give nothing—instead of peace, civil war; instead of bread, famine; instead of freedom, robbery, anarchy and murder.”23 But Verkhovsky soon joined the Red Army. This provides a striking contrast to the extreme hesitancy of almost any German old-regime holdovers to cooperate with the Weimar Republic. But the cooperative tsarist experts were not trusted even if they were loyal, because they were “bourgeois.” Dependency on people perceived as class enemies shaped, indeed warped, Soviet politics and institutions. The technically skilled, who were distrusted politically, were paired with the politically loyal, who lacked technical competence, first in the army and then in every institution, from railroads to schools.24 The unintentional upshot—a Communist watchdog shadowing every “bourgeois expert”—would persist even after the Reds were trained and became experts, creating a permanent dualist “party-state.”
The revolutionary state became ever more powerful without ever overcoming its improvised, chaotic nature. Supervision was ad hoc, intermittent. Steinberg, a Left Socialist Revolutionary who served as justice commissar during the short-lived coalition government of 1918, tried but failed to curb the arbitrary power of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation. Bureaucratic infighting alone did not defeat him, however. When the capital had shifted to Moscow in March 1918, the central Cheka had a mere 131 employees, 35 of whom were rank-and-file soldiers, 10 chauffeurs, and many others who were secretaries or couriers, leaving no more than around 55 operatives.25 They carried the “budget” around in their pockets and holsters. Moreover, the carving out of a separate Cheka for Moscow came at the expense of the central apparatus. True, as of August 1918, even after the mass eviction from the Cheka of the Left SRs, the political police in the capital had grown to 683.26 But more important, by summer’s end 1918, Izvestiya would report the existence of local Chekas in 38 provinces and, lower down, in 75 counties (uezd).27 Also, a separate Railroad Cheka took shape to battle “counterrevolution” across the far-flung rail network, and Cheka “special departments” arose for security in the Red Army. No one coordinated or controlled these political policemen. The local Chekas and the sundry parallel Chekas formed largely on their own. One example was that Kamyshinsk barge, another, the Yekaterinburg Cheka, which “was quartered at No. 7 Pushkin Street; a two-story building of no great size, with a deep cellar into which the prisoners were stuffed,” wrote one operative who served there. “White Officers and priests [were] packed sardine-wise along with peasants who had concealed their grain against the requisitions. Every night we had a ‘liquidation’ of ‘parasites’”—that is, the prisoners were brought up from the dungeon, made to cross a courtyard, and gunned down. This operative added that, as a result of confiscations from “the bourgeoisie,” “there was a great mass of miscellaneous stuff: jewelry, banknotes, trinkets, garments, provisions. We brought it all together into one place and divided it up.”28 Overall, the political police were a mess, corrupt and at cross-purposes.29 But “the Cheka” constituted not just a formal state agency; it was also a deadly mind-set, a presupposition of the existence of class enemies and an injunction to employ any and all means in their eradication.30 Socialist critics of the political police, like Steinberg, were invariably told that the summary executions were “temporary,” until the class war had been won, or the world revolution had taken place, or some other point on the horizon had been attained. In the meantime, Chekists said, history would forgive an excess of harshness but not of weakness. Lynch law and self-dealing—otherwise known as class war—simultaneously discredited the cause and galvanized militants. Violent chaos was a form of “administration,” driven by a zealously held vision.
The fracturing of the imperial Russian geopolitical space, as well as the simultaneity of many civil war events from one end of Eurasia to another, militates against ease of narration. (Einstein once said that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”) Below we take up the dictatorship of Stalin in Tsaritsyn (1918), the founding of the Communist International (1919), the Versailles Treaty (1919), the leftist revolutions or near revolutions in Germany, Hungary, and Italy (1919), and the shifting combat between Reds and Whites (1918–20). The next chapter continues the civil war story with examination of the Soviet-Polish War (1919–20), the Congress of the Peoples of the East (1920), the reconquest of Turkestan (1920), the mass peasant uprisings in Tambov and elsewhere (1920–21), the Kronstadt sailor revolt (1921), the 10th Party Congress, the war of reconquest in Georgia (1921), and the creation of the first Soviet satellite in Mongolia. Even all that—a vast panaorama—falls short of a comprehensive account of what transpired. A single Russia ceased to exist, replaced by a proliferation of states, in which would-be governments rose and fell (Kiev changed hands nineteen times). What knit together the fractured space were the reconstitution of state authority, deep legacies of Russification, ideas, and accompanying intrigues and personal networks. Here we shall see Stalin emerging as the dominant force in the regime, second only to Lenin. “There is no doubt,” Trotsky later wrote, “that Stalin, like many others, was molded in the environment and experiences of the civil war, along with the entire group that later enabled him to establish a personal dictatorship . . . and a whole layer of workers and peasants raised to the status of commanders and administrators.”31 Russia’s civil war produced a surge of people, institutions, relationships, and radicalism. Inside the whirlwind could be discerned the possibilities of Stalin’s future personal dictatorship.
WHITES AND REDS, OFFICERS AND GRAINS
After General Lavr
Kornilov’s death in April 1918, one of his ex‒jail mates, Lieutenant General Anton Denikin (b. 1872), had assumed military command of the Volunteer Army. The son of an ethnic Polish seamstress and an ethnic Russian serf whose “emancipation” had come in the form of military conscription (for the usual term of twenty-five years), Denikin had served as chief of staff in succession to generals Alexeyev, Brusilov, and finally Kornilov. Initially he sought to keep the charismatic Kornilov’s demise a secret from the Volunteers, fearing mass defections.32 But the forces under Denikin, now numbering more than 10,000, held together and secured the southern Kuban River basin as a base. After the cancerous Alexeyev also died (October 8, 1918), Denikin catapulted to political command, too. His ascent in the south was paralleled in the northwest by that of General Nikolai Yudenich (b. 1862), the son of a minor court official, who was a former commander of Russian forces against the Ottoman empire, and “a man five foot two inches in height weighing about 280 pounds, [his] body shaped like a coupe, with unnoticeable legs.”33 Yudenich took advantage of sanctuary in breakaway Estonia to set up a second, smaller anti-Bolshevik base. Finally, there was Alexander Kolchak (b. 1874), the son of a major general in the artillery and himself the youngest vice admiral in Russian history (promoted in 1916), a man of valor and patriotism whose favorite reading was said to be the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.34 In 1918, he returned from a futile mission to the United States via Vladivostok, but, as he was en route to joining the Volunteer Army in the south, on November 16 a coup in Omsk (Western Siberia) brought Socialist Revolutionaries to power. Two days later, Siberian Cossacks arrested the socialists and invited Kolchak to take charge as “Supreme Ruler” of Russia. Kolchak did so, calling his new duties “a cross,” but he promoted himself to full admiral—3,500 miles from the nearest port, and without a fleet.35
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