243. Baron, The Russian Jew, 219.
244. Quotation and statistics in Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi, 275–6. Antisemitism cut both ways, attracting (especially in Ukraine) and repulsing followers. Kenez, “The Ideology of the White Movement,” 83.
245. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, I: 281–4; Filat’ev, Katastrofa Belogo dvizheniia, 144.
246. Exchanging messages between Denikin and Kolchak could take up to one month. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, V: 85–90.
247. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, II: xiii. Former tsarist diplomats still resident in Allied capitals—Sergei Sazonov (Paris), Boris Bakhmeteff (Washington), Vasily Maklakov (London)—transferred funds from the Provisional Government’s old accounts to the White armies, even as the diplomats viewed the anti-Bolsheviks as incompetent.
248. Erickson, Soviet High Command, 59–63.
249. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, I: 90.
250. See also Smilga’s telegrams to Lenin and Trotsky in October 1919 on saving the Tsaritsyn front: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 48–50.
251. Lincoln, Red Victory, 217 (citing “Rech’ generala Denikina v Tsaritsyne, 20 iiunia 1919 g.,” Bakhmeteff Archive, Denikin Collection, box 20); Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, V: 108–9; Piontkowski, Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii, 515–6. The Whites refused to recognize the Bolshevik-decreed change to the Gregorian calendar and remained thirteen days behind.
252. Suvenirov, Tragediiv, RKKA 1937–1938, Medvedev, Oni okruzhali Stalina, 229–30; Rapoport and Geller, Izmena rodine, 385.
253. Trotskii, Sochineniia, VIII: 272–81.
254. Trotsky, My Life, 359.
255. Argenbright, “Documents from Trotsky’s Train,” which includes Trotsky’s farewell letter to the staff of his train (July 15, 1924).
256. Trotsky, My Life, 411–22 (esp. 413); Volkogonov, Trotsky, 164 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 1, d. 25, l. 16–44). Many of the crew were Latvians and headed by Rudolf Peterson. Eventually, Trotsky’s train had to be divided in two.
257. Tarkhova, “Trotsky’s Train,” 27–40.
258. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 68.
259. Argenbright, “Honour Among Communists,” 50–1.
260. Vospominaniia o Vladimire Il’iche Lenine [1979], III: 446 (K. Danilevsky).
261. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 123–8. Trotsky had written urgently to Lenin to remove Antonov, Podvoisky, and Bubnov from overseeing military engagements in Ukraine on May 17, 1919. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 12, l. 17 (sent via Sklyansky for Lenin).
262. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 578–80 (minutes of the July 3 plenum).
263. Sochineniia, IV: 273; Kornatovskii, Stalin—rukovoditel' oborony Petrograda; Kornatovskii, Razgrom kontrrevoliutsionnykh zagovorov. Stalin had wanted the plenum immediately in June. Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 183–5. Over Petrograd, Stalin clashed again with Alexei Okulov, and Lenin recalled Okulov for a second time (the first having been over Tsaritsyn). Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 94–5.
264. Erickson, Soviet High Command, 63. See also the memoirs of the errant brief replacement, Samoilo, Dve zhizni, 250ff.
265. Trotsky, Stalin, 313–4. The pursuit of Kolchak into the Urals would have the unexpected bonus of expanding Red ranks with Urals factory workers.
266. Close Trotsky supporters removed were Ivan Smirnov and Arkady Rosengoltz; another Trotsky man, Fyodor Raskolnikov, had already been removed in May 1919. Others taken off included Konstantin Mekhonoshin, Semyon Aralov, Nikolai Podvoisky, Konstantin Yurenev, Alexei Okulov. Stalin was returned May 18, 1920 (through April 1, 1922). Bonch-Bruevich’s account of the expanded session of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic is largely fanciful. Bonch-Bruevich, Vsia vlast’ sovetam, 351–2. Bonch-Bruevich and Vacietis had bad blood (ibid., 334–5).
267. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 590–3; Trotsky, My Life, 453.
268. Kamenev’s command of the eastern front was assumed by Mikhail Frunze.
269. Izvestiia, July 8 and 10, 1919; Trotsky, My Life, 398, 452.
270. There are indications Trotsky refused to continue in his work as head of the military, and had to be begged to do so. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 705 (September 8, 1927, politburo stenogram).
271. The information could hardly have been the surprise Trotsky asserts it was. Trotsky, My Life, 448–9.
272. PSS, XXXVII: 525–7; Bubnov, Grazhdanskaia voina, I: 246–9.
273. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 413.
274. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 143–61, 216–7.
275. Gorky, Lenine et la paysan russe, 95–6. This passage disappeared from Soviet republications of Gorky’s work.
276. In the spring of 1919, Lenin had disparaged the tsarist officers (“the old command staff was made up mainly of the spoiled and depraved sons of capitalists”) and contemplated making a party official, Mikhail Lashevich, military commander in chief, but gave in to Trotsky’s demand for a real military specialist; still, now Lenin supported Sergei Kamenev, with whom Trotsky had clashed. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 178–9.
277. Stalin would soon cover up his earlier opposition. Stalin, “Novyi pokhod Antanty na Rossiiu,” Pravda, May 26, 1920, in Sochineniia, IV: 275–7. Stalinist historiography would use Trotsky’s theory of hospitable versus inhospitable terrain, without mentioning Trotsky, to mitigate the embarrassment that Tsaritsyn had fallen. Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918.
278. Nash vek, July 10, 1918: 4.
279. Williams, The Russian Revolution, 63.
280. He added that “in spite of my special rations as a Government official, I would have died of hunger without the sordid manipulations of the black market, where we traded the petty possessions we had brought in from France.” Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 70–1, 79.
281. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 442–3.
282. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 93–5.
283. Zinov’ev, Bor’ba za Petrograd, 52–3. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 445. In 1925 Lashevich became deputy commissar for the army and navy. That year, he would side with Zinoviev and, in 1926, with the United opposition (Zinov’ev and Trotsky); Stalin sent him to Harbin as representative of the Soviet-controlled Chinese Eastern Railroad (1926–8). He was expelled at the 15th Party Congress in 1927. He died the next year in Harbin, China, under mysterious circumstances.
284. Yudenich would die in quiet exile on the French Riviera in 1933. Rutych, Belyi front generala Iudenicha.
285. Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/ii: 196–7.
286. Kakurin, Kak srazhalas’, II: 242–5, 306.
287. Trotsky, My Life, 432–3; Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/ii: 310. Trotsky is the only source for the November 1919 Order of the Red Banner episode; his civil war account stands up everywhere it can be confirmed by other documents.
288. Kvakin, Okrest Kolchaka, 175–6.
289. New York Times, September 30, 1919.
290. Budnitskii, Den’gi russkoi emigratsii.
291. Litvin, Krasnyi i belyi terror, 55–6; Holquist, “State Violence,” 19–45 (at 27, citing Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 150).
292. Krivosheev, Grif sekretnosti sniat, 54.
293. “We took too long over every battle, every war, every campaign,” Trotsky conceded. Trotskii, “Rech’” [November 2, 1921], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, III/i: 57–71 (at 60).
294. The Whites read intercepts of Red wireless communications yet still lost; each side maintained spies in the other camp, but each had difficulty identifying which, if any, were not double agents.
295. Already in September 1918, Trotsky had argued that because a new and potentially long war was again on the horizon, the Bolsheviks had to plan for equipping the army, restoring all existin
g military factories to production, and mobilizing society for military needs. (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 6, l. 10.) Sometimes locals managed to restore some production. Sokolov, Ot voenproma k VPK, 8–28.
296. Manikovskii, Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi armii [1930], II: 332–5.
297. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 184–5.
298. Even with tsarist stockpiles, the Reds were hard-pressed to mount operations. Some tsarist stockpiles were said to be still serving the Reds in 1928: A. Volpe, in Bubnov, Grazhdanskaia voina, II: 373.
299. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 89–90.
300. Mel’gunov, Tragediia Admirala Kolchaka, III/i: 69–70; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 214. Pipes deems the White burden “insuperable.” Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 10.
301. Kakurin, Kak srazahals’, I: 135.
302. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 69–79; Schapiro, “The Birth of the Red Army,” 24–32.
303. Gaponenko and Kabuzan, “Materialy sel’sko-khoziastvennykh perepisei 1916–1917 gg,” 102-3.
304. The Bolsheviks, for their part, did not send enough troops to win civil wars in the Baltic states or Finland, but the fact that they did send troops damaged the defense of the Red heartland. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 123.
305. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, II: 268–9; Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 119–21.
306. Leninskii sbornik, XXXVII: 167.
307. Pravda, September 23, 1919; Izvestiia, September 27, October 5, and October 12, 1919. See also Dzerzhinskii, Izbrannye proizvedennye, I: 197–8 (speech of September 24, 1919, to Moscow party committee); and Fomin, Zapiski starogo chekista, 108.
308. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, 315–6; Iz istorii VChK, 325–6, 349–54 (internal Cheka report, December 28, 1919).
309. Once, sometime after December 11, 1919, Lenin, unannounced, turned up at the offices of Supreme Commander Sergei Kamenev at 2:00 in the morning, asked some questions, spoke on the direct wire with Kharkov, and returned to the Kremlin.
310. In the hagiography, not one major decision of the civil war was taken without Lenin. Aralov, Lenin i Krasnaia Armiia, 32.
311. Volkogonov judged Trotsky a military “dilettante.” Volkogonov, Trotskii, I: 254. Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, a former tsarist officer close to Trotsky, judged his boss to be lacking interest in the technical side of military art but an effective high-profile spokesman for the military. Bonch-Bruevich, Vsia vlast' sovetam, 269–71.
312. The contrast between Trotsky and Kolchak could not have been starker. “He is bursting to be with the people, with the troops,” one eyewitness remarked of Kolchak, “but when he faces them, has no idea what to say.” Guins, Sibir’, II: 367.
313. Trotsky, “Hatred of Stalin?,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 67–71; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 64–5 (translator’s note, 72).
314. Trotsky, Stalin, 243, 270 (quoting Leonid Serebryakov).
315. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, II: 61. E. H. Carr’s harsh judgment still stands: “It is no longer possible for any sane man to regard the campaigns of Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin and Wrangel otherwise than as tragic blunders of colossal dimensions. They were monuments of folly in conception and of incompetence in execution; they cost, directly and indirectly, hundreds of thousands of lives; and except in so far as they may have increased the bitterness of the Soviet rulers against the ‘White’ Russians and the Allies who half-heartedly supported them, they did not deflect the course of history by a single hair’s breadth.” If Carr had only been as clear-eyed on Bolshevism. Davies, “Carr’s Changing Views,” 95.
316. Soviet officials who returned from China saw parallels. The Karakhan Declaration (July 25, 1919) characterized Kolchak as a “counterrevolutionary tyrant who depends upon military might and foreign capital for the strengthening of his own position in Russia.” Waldron, “The Warlord.” See also Sanborn, “Genesis of Russian Warlordism.”
317. An embittered Alexeyev had told the British agent Bruce Lockhart in 1918 that he would sooner cooperate with Lenin and Trotsky than with Kerensky. Lockhart, British Agent, 288. Throughout the civil war, Kerensky, whose Soviet police code name was “Clown,” hid inside Russia or neighboring Finland. He would depart for good in 1922 for Berlin, and then for Paris.
318. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 99.
319. Pereira, White Siberia.
320. Budberg, “Dnevnik,” 269; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 155.
321. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 262–3, IV: 45–8.
322. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 215 (citing “Final Report of the British Military Mission, South Russia” [March 1920], PRO, WO 33/971: 29).
323. Ushakov, Belyi iug; Slashchov-Krymskii, Belyi Krym, 185–93. Wrangel’s civilian ministers included Pyotr Struve and Alexander Krivoshein, the head of agriculture and land resettlement who had accompanied Stolypin to Siberia in 1910.
324. Lazarski, “White Propaganda Efforts.” Boris Bakhmeteff, the Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States, who was still in the embassy in Washington, wrote to Vasily Maklakov on January 19, 1920, that the anti-Bolshevik movements failed because they lacked a compelling counter-ideology. Bakhmeteff yearned for a “platform of the national-democratic revival of Russia” based upon private property, genuine sovereignty of the people, democracy, patriotism, and a decentralized political system. Such was the classical liberal view of the failure. Budnitskii, “Sovershenno lichno i doveritel’no!,” I: 160–5 (at 161).
325. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, V: 118.
326. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 14 (citing Russkaia mysl’, May–July 1921: 214). “The country needed victory at any costs, and every effort had to be exerted to secure it,” Kolchak told a Bolshevik inquisition right before his death. “I had absolutely no political objectives.” Of course, military victory could only be achieved with successful politics. Varneck, Testimony of Kolchak, 187. Similarly, Denikin later wrote that he had tried “to fence off ourselves and the army from the raging, struggling political passsions and to base ideology on simple, incontestable national symbols. This proved extraordinarily difficult. ‘Politics’ burst into our work.” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 129.
327. Notes for a speech to the Tenth Congress of Soviets, scheduled for December 1922: Getzler, “Lenin’s Conception”; “Za derev’iami ne vidiat lesa,” PSS, XXXIV: 79–85 (at 80); “Tretii vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh i krest’ianskikh deputatov,” PSS, XXXV: 261–79 (at 268); “I vserossiiskii s”ezd po vneshkol’nomy obrazovaniiu,” PSSS, XXXVIII: 329–72 (at 339); “Konspekt rechi na X vserossiiskom s”ezde sovetov,” PSS, XLV: at 440–1 (440). Usually, scholars quote Lenin complaining about the “bureaucratic deformities” and stifling qualities of the apparatus that socialism conjured into being, but such complaints would emerge mostly during his period of illness and incapacitation. During the civil war, Lenin’s views on state building were militant. “It was a great and exalting work,” he rhapsodized about the civil-war administrative machinery. PSS, XLIV: 106.
328. Keep, Russian Revolution, ix–x, 471.
329. McAuley, Bread and Justice.
330. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 162.
331. Thomas F. Remington, “The Rationalization of State Kontrol,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 210–31.
332. MChK, 247; Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 136.
333. Krasnaia Moskva, 631.
334. Trotsky, My Life, 477.
335. The Menshevik Martov, in a private letter, pointedly used the old-regime social vocabulary, noting that “as far as the ‘commissars’ estate’ [soslovie] is concerned, its superior standard of living is almost out in the open.” Brovkin, Dear Comrades, 210 (Martov to David Schupack, June 20, 1920). Leni
n was sensitive to perceptions; in a letter to Molotov (May 4, 1921), Lenin, noting that he had discovered a resort (dom otdykha) expressly in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars, wrote, “I fear that this may cause complaints.” The facility was renamed Recreation Building no. 9, and was supposed to be shared with the agriculture commissariat. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 18552, l. 1–2.
336. Similarly, Adolf Joffe wrote confidentially to Trotsky in May 1920, “There is enormous inequality, and one’s material position largely depends on one’s post in the party; you’ll agree that this is a dangerous situation.” Joffe added of Communists in power that “the old party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion!” The Tula Bolshevik and Joffe quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 695–6 (citing GARF, f. 5972, op. 1, d. 245, l. 397–8; RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 46, l. 143).
337. PSS, XVL: 14–15; Rykov, Izbrannye proizvedenniia, 10; Iroshnikov, “K voprosu o slome burzhuaznoi gosudarstvennoi mashiny v Rossii.”
338. Annenkov, Dnevnikh moikh vstrech, II: 120–8; Fulop-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism [1928], 136. See also Piotrovskii, Za sovetskii teatr!; Nikulin, Zapiski sputnika; Evreinoff, Histoire du Theâtre Russe; Petrov, 50 i 500. Sponsored by the Political Administration of the Red Army, the show was choreographed by a non-Bolshevik, Nikolai Yevreinov, who lost his voice screaming instructions, but was awarded a fur coat (fox); others got tobacco or frozen apples. The battleship Aurora, brought in specially from Kronstadt, was supposed to give off three shots, after which the orchestra would play the victory music, but even though technicians kept pressing the button to halt the cannonade, it would not stop firing. Yevreinov burst out laughing.
339. Trotsky, Stalin, 279.
340. In late 1919, Ivar Smilga, at a meeting of political workers in the army, stated: “We must now consider how to abolish the institution of the commissar.” His proposal did not carry. Pravda, December 13, 1919; Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 155–7.
341. Molotov, Na shestoi god.
342. Tucker came close to the mark when he wrote that “Whereas Trotsky emerged from the [civil] war with much glory and little power, Stalin emerged with little glory and much power,” but Tucker underestimated the negativity toward Trotsky. Tucker also applied a perhaps false standard: “Although Stalin acquired valuable military experience in the civil war, he did not emerge from it with a party reputation for having a first-class military mind.” But who did? Lenin? Zinoviev? Kamenev? Even Trotsky? Tucker did, though, underscore that Stalin had “recommended himself by his wartime service as a forceful leader with an ability to size up complex situations quickly and take decisive action.” Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 206, 209.
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