For the moment the Bolshevik priority was simple survival. The first order of business in November 1917 was the war, and immediately after the Bolshevik revolution the new government proclaimed a truce with Germany and its allies and opened negotiations. Trotsky went to Brest-Litovsk on the Polish border, now under German occupation, to try to make peace. The German demands were exorbitant, and Trotsky dithered, proclaiming that the right policy was “neither war nor peace.” The Germans responded with a massive offensive, occupying all of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic provinces. Local nationalists proclaimed their independence of Red Petrograd, but the Kaiser’s armies paid them no attention. The Germans set up a puppet regime in Kiev with the Russian general Pavel Skoropadskii, a former adjutant of the tsar who had suddenly discovered his Ukrainian roots, as their instrument. Red Guards were too amateurish a force, and the Bolsheviks now formed a real army, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, in response, but the new army could not stop the Germans. The government moved to Moscow, farther from the German lines. Even so some of the Communist leaders, Nikolai Bukharin especially, and the Left SRs wanted to continue to fight a “revolutionary war.” Lenin realized that this was madness, and convinced the leadership to sign on to the German conditions. Peace came in March, with the loss of all the western territories to Germany and Austria, but it was peace and the Kaiser recognized the red republic. The Left SRs resigned in protest, leaving the Bolsheviks entirely in charge of the new state.
The fiasco at Brest-Litovsk encouraged opposition to the Reds in the south. The southern Cossack areas rose in revolt again, this time allied with the Volunteer Army of General Mikhail Alekseev formed from officers of the old army. On the Don the new Red Army managed to suppress the Whites, who fled south to the Kuban River area, but other troubles soon arose. Serious fighting began in May 1918, in a wholly different part of the country, after the actions of the Czechoslovak Corps. The Czechoslovak Corps had been formed under the tsar from prisoners of war, former Austro-Hungarian soldiers of Czech and Slovak nationality, to assist the Allies against Austria and Germany. After the Soviet peace with Germany, they wanted to continue to fight and the new government allowed them to exit the country through Siberia to Japan and the United States so as to be able to continue the war in France. A series of clashes with local Soviet authorities led them to seize control of the rail lines from European Russia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In Samara in June, guarded by the Czechs, some SR deputies of the dispersed Constituent Assembly formed a government that attempted to continue the practices of parliamentary democracy. It also managed to get together a “People’s Army” that moved toward Moscow against the Reds.
Figure 18. Trotsky, Lenin, and Lev Kamenev 1918–1920.
For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, this was a real crisis, aggravated by the revolt of their recent allies, the Left SRs. Enraged by the peace with Germany and out of power the Left SRs attempted a revolt in Moscow, assassinating the German ambassador in the process. Similar revolts took place in other Russian towns, all quickly suppressed but indicative of serious opposition to the new government. The main threat, however, was the Czechoslovak Corps and its Russian allies moving from the east, and the ramshackle Red Army, formed of poorly trained militias with inexperienced officers, fell back in retreat. This was the moment that Trotsky first showed his mettle as a military commander, as well as his ruthlessness in imposing order and discipline. He made full use of officers from the old army of the tsar, holding their families hostage to guarantee their loyalty. In addition the political commissars assigned to each military unit were to maintain and inspire its reliability. He had officers who failed, commissars, and simple soldiers shot in the hundreds. With this new organization, the Red Army recaptured the Volga towns and pushed the rapidly disintegrating People’s Army back to the Urals.
These crises sealed the fate of the former Tsar Nicholas and his family. Their presence in Siberian Tobolsk, where the Provisional Government had sent them, was too close to the emerging centers of resistance, and so the Reds brought them to Ekaterinburg in the Urals. In July 1918, as the Whites approached, the Soviets ordered the imperial family executed, the final end of the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries. The house where they lived and where they were killed remained unnoticed for decades until 1977, when an overzealous Communist party boss, Boris Yeltsin, had it razed to the ground. Back in Moscow, Lenin himself was the target of an assassin’s bullet at the end of August. The response of the Cheka was to declare Red Terror, arresting thousands from the middle and upper classes. Some were executed immediately, others kept as hostages against future attempts.
By the autumn of 1918, the new Red Army had retaken most of the Volga and the Urals, and the People’s Army melted away. Farther east in Siberian Omsk another White army had come into being, Siberian Cossacks and units formed by ex-imperial officers determined to fight the Reds. In November, Admiral Alexander Kolchak seized power as Supreme Ruler of Russia, and dissolved the remnants of the SR leadership from the Constituent Assembly. Kolchak also shot many of the SRs as well as any other Bolshevik or left-wing activists whom he could find. Kolchak was a military dictator, and there were to be no more games with democracy. In addition there was a new element coming into play, for the First World War ended on November 11, and allied commissioners, British, French, American, and Japanese, arrived in Omsk. The allies, too, were for dictatorship, and quickly moved to support Kolchak as the leader of the opposition to Bolshevism.
If Kolchak was the titular supreme leader, his was not the only White army in the field. After the Reds had retaken the Don early in 1918, the Volunteer Army had moved south through the winter to establish themselves on the Kuban. The death of Alekseev and his replacement Kornilov (of the 1917 putsch attempt) in rapid succession led to the emergence of General Anton Denikin as the supreme commander of the Volunteer Army in the south. While Trotsky was preoccupied on the Volga, Denikin had held on, and on the Don the Cossacks rose again later in 1918. With covert German support, they tried to move north and east. As yet they were too weak to break the Red resistance, though they did cut off much of the crucial grain producing areas, and if they crossed the Volga, they had a distant chance of linking with Kolchak. On the Volga at Tsaritsyn, the Cossacks and the Whites confronted Joseph Stalin, sent originally just to organize grain deliveries, but Stalin quickly moved to take control of the military apparatus and shore up resistance. His ally among the soldiers was Kliment Voroshilov, who had fled east with a ragtag workers’ militia from the Donbass ahead of the advancing Germans. Stalin and Voroshilov were also unhappy with Trotsky’s policy of extensive use of professional officers from the tsar’s army, but Lenin supported Trotsky on this issue and they had to back down. Red units commanded by professional officers were decisive in holding the line, but at Tsaritsyn the Commissar of Nationalities had his first taste of warfare. The Cossacks did not cross the river, and Kolchak was thousands of miles to the east, unable to join them.
Behind all these front lines the Reds proceeded to build utopia. While Marxism provided a detailed analysis of capitalism and the projected path to proletarian revolution, it provided almost nothing beyond generalities about socialism. The worsening crisis in food supplies caused by increasing chaos and the German seizure of the Ukraine had led to the proclamation of the “food dictatorship” in May 1918. Under the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies armed detachments went out into the countryside to seize “surplus” grain at fixed, pre-revolutionary prices or simply to confiscate it. The idea was to get at grain allegedly held back by kulaks and traders with the help of the poor peasants organized in committees, but in fact the distinctions among the peasants were hard to make, and the measures affected all of rural society. Continued hyperinflation and the disappearance of money worsened the ongoing economic collapse, and the Reds instituted rationing and a system of cooperatives to distribute food and consumer goods.
Early in 1919 the Soviet authoritie
s formalized the system of obligatory grain deliveries, to be accompanied by a centralized allocation of consumer goods to the peasants. Some sixty thousand men were now mobilized into a “food army” to extract grain from the countryside. The peasants responded by reducing the size of their crops, further plunging the cities into crisis. These new measures, in part the product of ideology and in part the necessity of war, lasted throughout the civil war. The Bolsheviks had always been hostile to markets, and the collapse of transport and general chaos broke down normal market ties. This situation gave them an opportunity to institute utopian schemes of distribution through the central allocation of goods. Virtually all factories and all trade were nationalized. Small retail shops disappeared, while the Soviet municipalities tried to set up large city-owned bread factories instead of small neighborhood bakeries, worsening the food situation. This was the system that came to be known as “War Communism.” Reality soon intervened, for local Soviet authorities regularly violated the rules, and the impossibility of full central control led the major factories and even the Red Army to set up their own procurement systems for food, including substantial numbers of farms operated by the factories and the army. The only remaining markets were the flea markets and the black market, both of which made simple survival easier for much of the urban population. The new central economic institutions were incapable of implementing their schemes, for they were not grand bureaucratic structures, but rather small offices staffed by former revolutionary activists with no relevant experience, assisted by a few engineers or economists and the more qualified workers.
The emerging Soviet state was also a party-state, for the Bolshevik party expanded in size, to over three hundred thousand in early 1919. These men and women were the cadre for the new state. The remaining Mensheviks and SRs were pushed out of political life by the end of 1918 and the new institutions required loyal officials to run them. The party itself became more centralized, especially with the establishment of the Politburo (Political Bureau) over the Central Committee in 1919. The new Politburo included only Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, and Nikolai Krestinskii as full members; Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin were included as candidates. Here was the core of the Bolshevik leadership. Zinoviev was the son of Jewish dairy farmers in the Ukraine and had been close to Lenin during his years of European exile. After the government moved to Moscow in 1918, Zinoviev headed the Petrograd party organization, effectively running the city until 1926, at the same time leading the new Communist International. Lev Kamenev was the son of a Jewish railroad worker, but had acquired some university education and was married to Trotsky’s sister. After 1917, he functioned as Lenin’s deputy and ran the Moscow party organization. Bukharin, the best educated of the Bolsheviks after Lenin, was something of a Marxist theorist and had spent time both in Western Europe and briefly in the United States. He was a bit younger than the others, and personally popular in the party. Like Lenin he was also actually Russian, as were Krestinskii and Kalinin, both minor figures. Krestinskii served as Commissar of Finance, while Kalinin, the only worker in the group and even born into a peasant family, headed the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets – in other words, he was the technical head of government. All of them shared, with Stalin, solid credentials of unwavering Bolshevism. Trotsky, in contrast, was a flamboyant ex-Menshevik who fit poorly into the group.
The crucial person in the whole party and government was Lenin. Until 1917 he had spent his life as a revolutionary organizer and journalist, turning out masses of articles explaining his position and denouncing his opponents. He was also more intellectual than the others, as his writings on philosophy and the economics of imperialism demonstrated. In such matters only Bukharin came close to him. As an orator he was clear and capable of moving an audience, but not on the level of Trotsky or Zinoviev. On taking power in 1917, he proved to have political and administrative skills far in excess of most of his comrades, as well as a powerful will and the ability to make decisions. He rapidly absorbed himself in the details of government, including the myriad economic problems that arose when the Bolsheviks nationalized the economy. He tried and largely succeeded in imposing a spirit of teamwork on the party leadership, getting contentious and often arrogant comrades to work together. When he argued his position in person, he could convince his opponents without belittling them (although his published polemics were another matter). Even if all of the other leaders disagreed with him on occasion, he remained the unchallenged leader of the party and hence of the state.
This highly effective leadership controlled a very imperfect state apparatus, but it had, besides the party, other instruments of power. The Red Army was five million strong by the end of the Civil War but “labor armies” made up much of its theoretical strength and it took on many economic functions, providing horses for plowing and restoring railroad service. The Cheka provided internal security, eliminated active and potential opponents, and tried to suppress the growing number of criminal bands in the cities. There were some twenty-five thousand people in the Cheka by the end of the Civil War, but it also controlled over a hundred thousand internal security troops, infantry, and cavalry. The party, the army, and the Cheka made possible the Red victory, but they could not stop the deepening economic crisis and accompanying anarchy. The near collapse of rail transport meant that the northern cities could be supplied only with great difficulty. Petrograd suffered in particular, losing some three quarters of its population by 1920. With the move of the government to Moscow the Reds evacuated a number of key factories with their workers and equipment, and hundreds of thousands of workers came to work in Moscow, joined the party apparatus, the Cheka, or the Red Army. Many simply went home to their native villages in search of food, heat, and work. As order collapsed, disease began to spread. Typhus, influenza, and other diseases were epidemic.
The spring of 1919 brought new life to the White movements. The end of the war in Europe in November 1918 meant the withdrawal of German troops from the western territories. In the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, local nationalists declared independence from the Bolsheviks, but the Red Army quickly returned power to the Soviets. The Reds drove out the nationalist Ukrainian Directory in Kiev. At the approach of the Red forces, the Directory’s peasant army simply melted away. Under their military leader Semyon Petliura the Ukrainian nationalists moved west, carrying out a ferocious massacre of the Jews in Proskurov on the way. Kolchak held Siberia and the Urals and Denikin moved north through the spring, taking the Donbass, most of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Denikin was able to advance as far as Orel, raiding far behind the Red lines with substantial groups of cavalry. The mobility of the Civil War put a premium on cavalry, and the Cossacks and the cavalry officers of the old army were a formidable challenge. The Reds answered with Semen Budennyi’s First Cavalry Army, formed in the middle of the battles against Denikin, at first a ragtag band of poorly disciplined men whipped into shape by Budennyi’s charisma. In July mass mobilization by the Reds allowed them to send substantial armies against Denikin and stopped him. Behind his lines in the southern Ukraine a new army appeared seemingly out of nothing, the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno, an ex-sergeant of the Russian Imperial Army and an instinctive guerilla leader. Makhno shredded Denikin’s communications, and with the Reds driving him from the north, he had to retreat.
Denikin was an accomplished general but this was a political war. The White governments were military dictatorships with civilian ministers recruited from former liberals to give them some minimal credibility. Their social policy was bound to antagonize the masses, as they opposed not only the Reds but also anything the workers saw as conquests of the revolution. In the cities, only the middle and upper classes supported them. Massacres of Jews were frequent. In the countryside their policy inevitably supported the noble landowners against the peasants and could not exploit rural antagonism to Bolshevik measures. To make matters worse, the White governments financed their operations by printing money and the
peasants were reluctant to sell grain for worthless currency. Like the Reds, the Whites turned to confiscation of grain. As in the Red-held areas, the peasants reduced their farming to subsistence, creating food shortages in the richest agricultural areas in the country, western Siberia and the south. As resistance to them grew, the Whites could only answer with repression, and the cities that the Whites occupied saw mass executions. Behind the White lines in Siberia and the Ukraine the peasants formed armed bands to confront the Whites. Not only Makhno but also hundreds of peasant bands bent only on preserving their own territory kept the Whites from effective control of the countryside.
Even foreign intervention could not save the Whites. With the end of the First World War the Allies had free access to Russia through the Black Sea and elsewhere, but the exhaustion of war meant that they could offer little in the way of actual troops. Japan sent some sixty thousand to Siberia as part of a scheme to take control of Russian territory (thereby antagonizing the United States), but the other powers sent fewer troops. A brief intervention in Odessa and other southern cities in 1919 ended after only a few months, although Britain, France, and the United States continued to send weapons. They were not of much use, for transportation bottlenecks (especially in Siberia) held up the supplies in the ports and massive corruption meant that arms and ammunition often ended up in the hands of the Reds. To make matters worse, the officers who formed the core of the White movement were intensely patriotic and many were offended by the need to rely on foreign armies. The intervention weakened morale as much as it strengthened it.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 37