WHITE OFFENSIVE OF 1919—FALL AND RISE OF TROTSKY
Russia’s would-be forces of order, the three different armies of the Whites in the east, south, and northwest, fought with one hand, sometimes both, behind their backs. Just like the Bolsheviks (and the okhranka before them), the Whites formed “information departments” to compile reports on the prevailing political mood from secret informants—refugees, actors, railway employees, obstetricians—but they made no effective use of the intelligence.240 They “neither understood nor showed any interest in societal problems,” one White political activist complained. “All of their interests were on military power, and all of their hopes were focused on military victory.”241 Under the slogan “Russia, One and Indivisible,” the Whites refused to acknowledge the aspirations of national minorities in whose territories they operated, precluding an alliance with Ukrainian or other anti-Bolshevik forces.242 Anti-Semitic outrages perpetrated by Denikin’s army, and especially by Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik troops, stamped the White movement.243 Between 1918 and 1920 in Ukraine alone, more than 1,500 pogroms resulted in the deaths of up to 125,000 Jews, who “were killed on the roads, in the fields, on trains; sometimes whole families perished, and there was no one left to report on their fate.”244 The Whites acted self-righteously toward their British and French patrons, and never moderated their hostility to Germany.245 Additionally, the Whites were arrayed outside the heartland in a 5,000-mile interrupted loop—from the Urals and Siberia, westward across the southern steppes, up to Petrograd’s outskirts—which presented immense logistical and communications challenges. The two main fronts, Denikin’s south and Kolchak’s east, never linked up.246 Denikin and Kolchak never met.
And yet, despite their lack of unity, alliances, or popular support, the Whites mounted an offensive in 1919 that threatened the Bolshevik grip on the Muscovite heartland.247 The offensive occurred in three separate advances: Kolchak’s from the east toward Moscow in spring 1919; Denikin’s from the south, also toward Moscow, in spring-summer 1919; and Yudenich’s from the north, toward Petrograd, in fall 1919. Each effort commenced only after the preceding one had fallen short.
Kolchak commanded around 100,000 men and even though the admiral lacked familiarity with land operations, his forces managed to advance westward, surprising the Reds by seizing Ufa in March 1919, splitting the Bolsheviks’ eastern lines, and threatening Kazan and Samara in the Middle Volga. (This is why Trotsky had received permission to skip the 8th Party Congress and return to the front.) Kolchak’s advance was halted by May 1919, however, thanks to Mikhail Frunze, a thirty-four-year-old millworker turned commander, who reestablished discipline and led a counterattack.248 But right then, Denikin, whose Volunteer Army—now renamed the Armed Forces of South Russia—had increased to 150,000 with the Cossacks as well as conscripted peasants in Ukraine, and whose supplies came from the Entente, made his move.249 A staff officer, Denikin had never commanded a large army in the field, but he proved a formidable soldier. On June 12, 1919, his forces captured Kharkov, in Ukraine. On June 30, they captured Tsaritsyn. (“The hordes surrounded it,” howled Pravda [July 1, 1919]. “The English and French tanks captured the worker fortress. . . . Tsaritsyn fell. Long live Tsaritsyn.”)250 All told, in 1919, Denikin would annihilate Red armies numbering close to 200,000 poorly led and equipped and in many cases starving troops. After Denikin triumphantly entered Tsaritsyn and attended services in its Orthodox cathedral, on July 3, he “ordered our armed forces to advance on Moscow.”251 Trotsky, as always, blamed Red partisan-warfare tactics for the establishment of an anti-Bolshevik front from the Volga to the Ukrainian steppes. And he had a point. Although he had issued a decree forbidding Voroshilov from commanding an army again, in June 1919 Voroshilov had received command of the Fourteenth Army in Ukraine—and promptly surrendered Kharkov to Denikin’s forces. This prompted Voroshilov’s remand to revolutionary tribunal, which would conclude that he was unfit for a high command. (“We all know Klim,” Moisei Rukhimovich, the military commissar in Ukraine and a Voroshilov friend, noted, “he’s a brave guy, but come on with commanding an army. A company, at most.”)252 As for captured Tsaritsyn, it had been Voroshilov’s recent previous command. But the twin setbacks against the Whites only emboldened Voroshilov’s clique—that is, Trotsky’s Bolshevik enemies.
Trotsky was rarely seen at the war commissariat, which was managed by Yefraim Sklyansky, a graduate of the Kiev medical faculty and a chain-smoker, still in his twenties, who proved an able administrator, and remained in constant contact with the front via the Hughes apparatus.253 (“One could call at 2 or 3 in the morning, and find him at his desk,” Trotsky would write.)254 Trotsky lived on his armor-plated train, which had been thrown together in August 1918 when he raced to Sviyazhsk.255 It required two engines and was stocked with weapons, uniforms, felt boots, and rewards for valiant soldiers: watches, binoculars, telescopes, Finnish knives, pens, waterproof cloaks, cigarette cases. The train acquired a printing press (whose equipment occupied two carriages), telegraph station, radio station, electric power station, library, team of agitators, garage with trucks, cars, and petrol tank, track repair unit, bathhouse, and secretariat. It also had a twelve-person bodyguard detail, which chased down food (game, butter, asparagus). Trotsky’s living quarters, a long and comfortable carriage, had previously belonged to the imperial railroad minister. Conferences were held in the dining car.256 The men were clad in black leather, head to toe. Trotsky, then with jet black hair to go with his blue eyes, wore a collarless military-style tunic (now known as a vozhdevka). While on board, he would issue more than 12,000 orders and write countless articles, many for the train’s newspaper (En Route).257 Stalin, too, spent virtually the entire civil war in motion, and he too had a train, but without cooks, stenographers, or a printing press. Trotsky’s train would log 65,000 miles, mobilizing, imposing discipline, boosting morale.258 It also evolved into an independent military unit (taking part in combat thirteen times), and took on mythic status. “News of the arrival of the train,” Trotsky would recall, “would reach the enemy lines as well.”259 Trotsky’s arrival, however, also meant a cascade of orders often issued without even informing, let alone consulting, the local Red commanders.260 Voroshilov was far from the only person with whom Trotsky clashed.261
Matters came to a head at a rancorous Central Committee plenum on July 3, 1919, the same day Denikin issued his order to advance on Moscow.262 Stalin had been clamoring for the dismissal of Jukums Vacietis, the Red supreme commander who had become close to Trotsky. On the Petrograd front in late May-early June 1919, Stalin unmasked a “conspiracy” of military specialists, a claim that helped set the July plenum in motion.263 Vacietis, for his part, was angered by the incessant accusations that former tsarist officers like himself were saboteurs, but he also clashed with another former tsarist colonel, Sergei Kamenev (no relation to Lev), who had his own ambitions. Kamenev, as the Red commander of the eastern front, had wanted to pursue a retreating Kolchak into Siberia, while his superior Vacietis, supported by Trotsky, feared being lured into a trap. Trotsky had Kamenev removed as eastern front commander, but after his replacement, a former tsarist general, changed the direction of the main attack five times over ten days, Trotsky agreed to reinstate Kamenev.264 (On the larger strategy issue, Trotsky would later admit that Kamenev had been correct.) Now, it was Vacietis who was sacked. Trotsky evidently suggested as his replacement Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, but he lost the vote. Sergei Kamenev became the new commander in chief.265 Unlike the Latvian Vacietis, Kamenev was an ethnic Russian and eight years younger. Lenin also unilaterally overhauled the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, sharply reducing its membership, from around fifteen to six, relocating its headquarters to Moscow from Serpukhov (sixty miles south of the capital), so that he could assert greater control; and expelling its ardent Trotsky supporters. Stalin, too, was taken off. Trotsky was to remain as chairman, and Sklyansky as deputy chairman; the additions were Sergei Kamenev
; Yakov Drabkin, known as Sergei Gusev, a Kamenev man and, initially, a Stalin nemesis; Ivar Smilga (another Latvian); and Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s deputy.266 Having lost the fight over the commander in chief, and having had the body under his chairmanship purged without his consultation, Trotsky submitted his resignation from all military and party posts. On July 5, the Central Committee refused to accept it.267
Sergei Kamenev’s promotion took effect on July 8, 1919.268 The next day, Trotsky, by then back at the front (in Voronezh), was notified that Vacietis had been arrested—nearly one year to the day after the Latvian saved the Bolshevik regime from the Left SRs. Whereas Stalin’s surrogate, Voroshilov, had been disciplined for cause (surrendering Kharkov), Vacietis, Trotsky’s surrogate, had been arrested for murky accusations of White Guard associations. Vacietis was soon released—someone at the top thwarted Stalin’s machination—but the shot across Trotsky’s bow had been delivered.269 It was an extraordinary added humiliation.270
Trotsky liked to portray himself as above it all, as if politics in the Bolshevik regime did not involve constant backbiting and smearing. A top Cheka official, Wiaczesław Mezynski, had confidentially informed Trotsky on a visit to his armored train that Stalin was “insinuating to Lenin and to some others that you are grouping men about you who are especially hostile to Lenin.” Instead of recruiting the powerful, sympathetic Chekist on the spot—as Stalin would have done—Trotsky claims he rebuked Mezynski.271 Be that as it may, Stalin was hardly the sole intriguer badmouthing Trotsky by pointing out that former tsarist officers were deserting the Red Army and taking their troops along. Denunciations of the war commissar flowed to Moscow, incited by his personal haughtiness and strident defense of old-regime officers’ supremacy in military decision making, which seemed to betray the absence of a class outlook.272 Trotsky even managed to anger the very tsarist officers he was accused of championing in his disdain for their proceduralism and narrow intellectual horizons, compared with his.273 Summer 1919’s battlefield crisis had enabled Trotsky’s opponents to claw back from their defeat only four months before at the 8th Party Congress, thanks to Lenin; belatedly, he got the Central Committee, if not to subordinate the military to the party, at least to affirm the party-military dual command as a special achievement of the revolution.274 But if Lenin sensed that his war commissar had gotten too big for his britches, the Bolshevik leader continued to give every indication that Trotsky remained indispensable. Trying to win over a skeptical Maxim Gorky in 1919, for example, Lenin said, “Show me another man able to organize almost a model army within a single year and win the respect of the military specialists. We have such a man.”275 Had Lenin allowed Stalin and his band a complete victory over Trotsky in July 1919, the outcome of the other battle—the civil war against the Whites—might have turned out differently.276
Trotsky rushed to the faltering southern front against Denikin as Sergei Kamenev, a graduate of the imperial General Staff Academy, devised a plan of counterattack down the Don toward Tsaritsyn, to outflank and cut Denikin off from his main base. Vacietis, supported by Trotsky, had argued for a drive down through the Donetsk coal basin, more hospitable territory (full of workers as well as railroads), rather than through the Cossack lands, where a Red offensive would rally the population against Bolshevism. The politburo, including Stalin, had supported Sergei Kamenev’s plan. The upshot was that Denikin seized Kiev and captured nearly all of Ukraine, even as he was advancing against the Red Army’s weakened center on Moscow. On October 13, Denikin’s forces seized Oryol, just 240 miles from the capital (about as far as from the German border to Paris, giving a sense of the distances involved in Russia). On October 15, the politburo reversed itself, belatedly endorsing the original battle plan of Vacietis and Trotsky; Stalin, too, now agreed that Trotsky had been right.277 With the engagement north of Oryol in full force, Trotsky rallied the Red side, which was twice as numerous, and began to take advantage of White overextension and other vulnerabilities. Right then, Yudenich’s forces, 17,000 troops along with six British-supplied tanks, advanced from Estonia on Petrograd, capturing Gatchina (October 16–17) and then Tsarskoe Selo, on the outskirts of Petrograd. The city, frozen and famished, had seen its population dive from 2.3 million to 1.5 million as workers fled idle factories for villages.278 The famed working-class Vyborg district, the “Bolshevik Commune” of 1917, had withered from 69,000 to 5,000 people.279 “Squads of half-ragged soldiers, their rifles hanging from their shoulders by a rope, tramped under the red pennants of their units,” one eyewitness said of Petrograd in 1919. “It was the metropolis of Cold, of Hunger, of Hatred, and of Endurance.”280 Lenin proposed the former capital be abandoned so that Red forces could be swung to Moscow’s defense; he was supported by Petrograd’s party boss, Zinoviev. Trotsky, along with Stalin, insisted that “the cradle of the revolution” be defended to the last drop of blood, with hand-to-hand combat in the streets, if necessary.281
Crucially, Admiral Kolchak, the White “supreme ruler,” refused to recognize Finnish independence, and so the Finnish leader Karl Mannerheim refused to provide troops or a Finnish base of operations for Yudenich’s assault on Petrograd, while the Entente withheld support as well.282 Trotsky rushed to the northwest, followed by reinforcements—Yudenich’s forces had failed to secure the rail line—and halted the Whites’ offensive. “Trotsky’s presence on the spot at once showed itself: proper discipline was restored and the military and administrative agencies rose to the task,” explained Mikhail Lashevich (b. 1884), a leading political commissar. “Trotsky’s orders, clear and precise, sparing nobody, and exacting from everybody the utmost exertion and accurate, rapid execution of combat orders, at once showed that there was a firm directing hand. . . . Trotsky penetrated into every detail, applying to every item of business his seething, restless energy and his amazing perseverance.”283 Yudenich went down to defeat, his troops driven back into Estonia, disarmed, and interned. He himself emigrated to the French Riviera.284 Denikin, despite having 99,000 combat troops, could muster just 20,000 to spearhead the assault on Moscow, and with his entire front distended—700 miles, from their base in the Kuban—great gaps had opened when his men advanced.285 Near Oryol, Denikin’s overextended, all-out gamble for Moscow went down to defeat as well.286 By November 7, 1919, the revolution’s second anniversary, Trotsky, having just turned forty, was suddenly, resplendently triumphant. His colleagues fêted both his armored train and his personage with the Order of the Red Banner, Soviet Russia’s highest state award. Lev Kamenev, according to Trotsky, proposed that Stalin receive the same distinction. “For what?” Mikhail Kalinin objected, according to Trotsky. Following the meeting, Bukharin took Kalinin aside and said, “Can’t you understand? This is Lenin’s idea. Stalin can’t live unless he has what someone else has.” Stalin did not attend the ceremony at the Bolshoi, and at the announcement of his Red Banner award almost no one clapped. Trotsky received an ovation.287
WHITE FAILURES
Petrograd and Moscow were held. Kolchak was taken prisoner in Irkutsk (Eastern Siberia) and, without trial, executed by firing squad at 4:00 a.m. on February 7, 1920, his body kicked down a hole cut in the frozen Ushakovka River, a tributary of the Angara—a watery river grave for the admiral.288 The “supreme ruler” would be the only top White leader captured. With Kolchak disappeared imperial Russia’s gold. Tsarist Russia had possessed some 800 tons of gold on the eve of the Great War, one of the largest reserves in the world, which had been evacuated from the State Bank vaults beginning in 1915 to Kazan and other locations for safekeeping, but the bulk of it was seized by the Czechoslovak Legion in 1918. (Trotsky summarily shot the Red commander and commissar who had surrendered Kazan and the imperial gold.) Eventually, the cache had made its way into Kolchak’s custody—480 tons of ingots as well as coins from fourteen states, more than 650 million rubles’ worth, shipped in thirty-six freight cars to Omsk, Siberia. Rumors had it sunk in Lake Baikal or seized by the Japanese government.289 In fact, Kolc
hak had chaotically doled out nearly 200 million rubles’ worth on his campaigns; most of the rest was spirited out via Vladivostok to the Shanghai Bank, and would be consumed in the emigration.290 Denikin had made no move to try to rescue Kolchak. His own armies, following their trouncing north of Oryol, undertook an uninterrupted retreat southward, and by March 1920, they had straggled onto the Crimean peninsula, salvaging a rump of perhaps 30,000 troops. Denikin, compelled to relinquish command to Lieutenant General Baron Pyotr Wrangel, fled to Paris. The baron, from a family with German roots, until relatively recently had commanded only a cavalry division. Tall and lanky, he theatrically wore a cherkeska, the North Caucasus long black caftan with bullet cartridges across the outside. Despite the change in leadership and the (temporary) Crimean refuge, the Whites were spent.
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