Other mandated measures included the confiscation of grain and “all other agricultural products,” the mass resettlement of non-Cossacks in Cossack areas, and the execution of all Cossacks found to possess weapons after the “total disarmament” deadline.
Interpretations varied. Given the Don Host’s universal mobilization and requisitioning policies, the entire Cossack population had participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against the Soviet order. The determination of who was eligible for extermination was left to the local officials. The Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front, led by Khodorovsky, ordered the immediate execution of
(a) every single Cossack who has held a public office, either through election or appointment …;
(b) every single officer of Krasnov’s army;
(c) all the active participants in Krasnov’s counterrevolution;
(d) every single agent of autocracy who has found refuge in the Don area, from ministers to policemen;
(e) all the active participants in the Russian counterrevolution who have gathered in the Don area;
(f) every single rich Cossack.11
At the same time, the Council recommended “intensive political work” among the “middle” Cossacks, “with the purpose of splitting this social group and attracting a part of it to the side of Soviet power.” The less conciliatory Don Bureau of the Party’s Central Committee advocated indiscriminate violence by means of mass hostage-taking and the execution of hostages along with the owners of hidden weapons. A member of the Revolutionary Council of the Eighth Army, Iona Yakir, ordered “the extermination of a certain percentage of the entire male population.”12
Local officials tended to err on the side of more resolute action. According to a Trans-Moskva Bolshevik assigned to the Khoper District, members of the local revolutionary tribunal “were executing illiterate old men and women who could barely move their feet, Cossack corporals, and, of course, the officers, saying that they were following orders from the center. On some days, they killed groups of 50–60 people.” The Morozov District chairman later claimed that, having received a telegram urging a “more energetic … implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” he “got drunk to dull the pain, walked over to the jailhouse, picked up a list of prisoners, summoned them by number one by one, and executed the first sixty-four of them.”13 According to another Moscow Bolshevik sent to the Khoper District,
Executions were carried out during the daytime in plain view of the whole village. Groups of 30 to 40 people were led—with shouts, jeers, and insults—to the place of execution. At the place of execution, the convicted were stripped naked—and all this in plain sight of the villagers. When the women attempted to cover their nakedness, they were mocked and forbidden to do so. All the executed were buried in shallow graves by the mill, not far from the village. As a result, a pack of dogs formed by the mill, viciously attacking passers-by and carting off the arms and legs of the executed to various spots around the village.14
In mid-March, the Cossacks of the Upper Don rebelled again. According to a report sent to the Central Executive Committee, “the beginning of the uprising centered around one of the villages, which the revolutionary tribunal, consisting of Chairman Marchevsky, a machine gun, and twenty-five armed men, had entered sometime earlier, in order to as Marchevsky vividly put it, ‘pass through this village like Carthage.’” On March 16, faced with a serious threat to the rear of the Southern Front, the Central Committee passed a resolution suspending the policy of extermination. “Considering the obvious split between the northern and southern Cossacks and the fact that the northern Cossacks can be of help to us, we are hereby halting the application of anti-Cossack measures and withdrawing our objections to the policy of stratification.”15
■ ■ ■
The decision to suspend the “de-Cossackization” decree was made in the absence of its author and chief sponsor. In the first week of March, Sverdlov had traveled to Kharkov in order to supervise the election of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s central committee. As one of his assistants put it, “by constantly reshuffling the ‘left’ and ‘right,’ like pieces on a chessboard, Sverdlov was trying to preserve the unity of the party.” On the way back to Moscow, he began feeling sick. His wife, children, and brother Veniamin met him at the station and rushed him home. The Kremlin doctors diagnosed his illness as the Spanish flu. He continued to prepare for the Eighth Party Congress, but his fever kept getting worse and, on March 14, he lost consciousness. “In his delirium,” wrote Novgorodtseva, “he kept talking about the Eighth Party Congress and attempting to get out of bed to look for a set of resolutions. He thought the resolutions had been stolen by certain ‘Left Communists,’ and kept asking us not to let them in, to take the resolutions away from them, to kick them out. He kept calling for our son, in order to tell him something.” He died on March 16, the day the de-Cossackization decree was repealed. He was thirty-four years old.16
On March 18, Lenin made a speech at a special session of the Central Executive Committee. “In the course of our revolution and its victories,” he said, “Comrade Sverdlov succeeded in expressing more fully and consistently than anybody else the most important and fundamental features of the proletarian revolution.” Of those features, the most visible was the “resolute and ruthlessly determined annihilation of the exploiters and enemies of the working people,” but the most profound and durable was “the organization of the proletarian masses” and total dedication to Party work. “Comrade Sverdlov stood before us as the most perfectly complete type of professional revolutionary, a man who had entirely given up his family and all the comforts and habits of the old bourgeois society, a man who had devoted himself heart and soul to the revolution…. The illegal circles, the revolutionary underground work, the illegal Party, which nobody personified or expressed more fully than Yakov Sverdlov—such was the practical school through which he had passed, the only path that could have allowed him to reach the position of the first man in the first socialist Soviet Republic.”17
In the heat of revolutionary struggle, few things were as important as “absolutely unquestionable moral authority, the kind that derives its strength not from some abstract morality, of course, but from the morality of the revolutionary fighter.” Sverdlov had such authority. “One word from him was enough to be sure, on his say-so alone, without any debates or formal votes, that a particular problem would be settled once and for all.” (Or, as Osinsky put it two days later in a speech on “bureaucratism,” “the Central Committee did not, in fact, exist as a collegial organ…. Comrades Lenin and Sverdlov made all the decisions by talking to each other and to certain other comrades who represented particular branches of the Soviet apparatus.”) Great revolutions, in Lenin’s view,
develop talents that would have been unthinkable before…. No one could have believed that from the school of illegal circles and underground work, the school of one small, persecuted Party and the Turukhansk prison, would emerge an organizer of such absolutely unchallenged authority, the organizer of the whole Soviet order throughout Russia, the man, unique in his knowledge, who organized the work of the Party that created the Soviets and established the Soviet government, which is embarking on its arduous, painful, bloody but triumphant procession to all nations, to all the countries of the world.18
A year later, Kira Egon-Besser and her parents visited Novgorodtseva in the Kremlin. “When she saw us, Klavdia Timofeevna, usually a very calm and reserved person, began to cry. For several minutes, we stood in silence in the room in which Yakov Mikhailovich had died, though in our memories he would always be alive.”19
Meanwhile, Sverdlov’s legacy in “the Russian Vendée” was still in question. On the day the de-Cossackization decree was repealed, the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front ordered “(a) the burning of all insurgent villages; (b) the merciless execution of every single person who has taken a direct or indirect part in the uprising; (c) the execution of every fifth or
tenth adult male resident in all rebellious villages; and (d) the mass taking of hostages in villages located near the rebellious ones” (among other things). The next day, Iona Yakir and Yakov Vesnik, on behalf of the Revolutionary Council of the Eighth Army, ordered the total annihilation of all those connected to the uprising, “including the extermination of a certain percentage of the village population.” Trotsky agreed. “The nests of these dishonest traitors and betrayers must be destroyed,” he wrote in his May 25 order for a general counteroffensive. “These Cains must be exterminated.”20
But the real question was what to do next. The Don Bureau, led by Sergei Syrtsov, argued consistently that “radical reprisals” (as Syrtsov put it in conversation with Yakir) should be followed by a final solution: “The complete, immediate, and decisive annihilation of the Cossacks as a specific cultural and economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations; the physical elimination of all Cossack bureaucrats and officers, generally of the whole Cossack elite and any actively counterrevolutionary Cossacks, as well as the dispersal and neutralization of the rank-and-file Cossacks and the formal liquidation of the Cossackry.”21
Another prominent member of the Don Bureau, Aron Frenkel, agreed with the overall goal but argued (in a report to the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919) that the timing and priorities would have to change:
The terrorist method of physical extermination of as many Cossacks as possible cannot be effective alone while there is still no iron Soviet rule in the Don Area because it will be impossible to annihilate all the Cossacks, and, under such conditions, the uprisings will continue. The solution is to accompany this method with more radical terrorist methods, indicated in the original Central Committee resolution but so far not implemented, such as: the expropriation of the Cossacks (de-Cossackization), their mass resettlement in the Russian hinterland, and the settlement of immigrant working elements in their place.22
By August 1919, when the Don area, along with the rest of southern Russia and Ukraine, was lost to the Whites, Frenkel broke with Syrtsov and abandoned the goal of physical extermination. “I consider correct the change in the Central Committee’s Don policy…. The estate struggle between the Cossacks and the peasants (outlanders) in the Don area should, in my opinion, be conducted within the framework of class struggle, and not as an amorphous zoological struggle.” No one argued against terror as such; no one could argue against terror and remain a Bolshevik. The debate was over the appropriate targets of terror—or, in this case, over the social nature of the Cossacks as a caste. The two options had been clearly formulated by Sverdlov: “inciting civil war” versus the “total extermination of the rich.” The choice depended on whether some Don Cossacks were poor enough not to be considered rich.23
Valentin Trifonov, the commissar of the Special Expeditionary Corps for the suppression of the Upper-Don uprising, believed that they were. In a report sent to the Central Committee Orgburo on June 10 (and forwarded to Trotsky on July 5), he called the policy of indiscriminate terror “outrageously careless and criminally thoughtless.” Every Marxist knew, he argued, that consciousness was determined by social being; the social being of the northerners was radically different from that of the southerners; ergo, “there was more than enough justification for the policy of splitting the Cossacks and fomenting the ancient hostility felt by the north toward the dominant south.” Right now, what was needed for the conversion of all redeemable Cossacks was “skillful agitation and propaganda” that would “uncover all the dark aspects of Cossack life (there are many of them) and, through the practice of Soviet construction, demonstrate all the bright aspects of the new life.” Finally, it was “absolutely imperative for the Don Area that it be governed by comrades with Russian names.”24
Trifonov, who was thirty-one at the time, was born a Cossack (in a village in a southern district) but was orphaned at the age of seven and worked in a railroad depot in Maikop before moving to Rostov and joining the Bolsheviks at sixteen. Most of his prerevolutionary life was spent in prisons and exile, including three years in the Turukhansk region. His closest friend and mentor was Aron Solts, whom he met in exile when he was nineteen and Solts was thirty-five. After his release, Trifonov moved into the Petrograd apartment of Tatiana Slovatinskaia, where Stalin once stayed before his own exile to Turukhansk. As a young conservatory student, Slovatinskaia was recruited into the Party by Solts. She was married before (to Abram Lurye, Solts’s cousin) and had two children, but it appears that the people she felt closest to were Solts, her old friend, and Trifonov, her common-law husband. Trifonov was nine years younger than Slovatinskaia. In February 1917, he was, according to his son, “in the whirlpool of Tauride Palace.” During the October Revolution, he was one of the commanders of the Red Guard in Petrograd.25
Valentin Trifonov
(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
Filipp Mironov
(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
Trifonov’s mention of “comrades with Russian names” referred to the Cossack rebels’ attempts to distinguish between “Soviet power” and “Jewish Communists.” This was, in part, the tribal version of the “two hostile camps,” but it was also a reaction to what the Cossack socialist Filipp Mironov called a regime “headed for the most part by young men of eighteen to twenty who can’t even speak Russian properly.” This was an exaggeration (the head of the local regime and the most persistent advocate of indiscriminate terror against the Cossacks was Sergei Syrtsov, who came from nearby Slavgorod), but it is true that many of the Bolshevik commanders in the “Russian Vendée” were young men from the former Jewish Pale of Settlement. Aron Frenkel and Yakov Vesnik were both twenty-five, and Iona Yakir was twenty-three. Iosif Khodorovsky, at thirty-five, was from the same generation as Sverdlov (as was Grigory Sokolnikov, the most persistent opponent of indiscriminate terror against the Cossacks).26
The government officials in Moscow were not sure whose advice to follow. The Council of People’s Commissars did order a mass transfer of peasants to the Don Area, but the Whites continued to advance, and most of the settlers were stuck in overcrowded railway stations along the way. In early June 1919, when things at the front became desperate, Trotsky recalled Filipp Mironov from honorary exile in Serpukhov (where he had been sent at the request of the Don Bureau during the extermination campaign) and put him in charge of the Don Expeditionary Corps, with Valentin Trifonov as his commissar. Mironov issued several appeals (“Can Anti-Semitic and Pogrom Agitation Be Permitted in the First Socialist Republic in the World?”; “Should a Red Army Soldier, a Soldier of the People’s Army, Be Allowed to Refuse an Order?”), but within a short time the Don Area had been lost, the Expeditionary Corps dissolved, and Mironov sent to Saransk to form a regular Cossack Corps. Trifonov refused to “participate in the creation of units that will conquer the Don Area in order to defend it later from Soviet Russia.” In a letter to Solts, he called Trotsky a “completely inept organizer” and Mironov, an “adventurer.”27
■ ■ ■
Filipp Mironov was an adventurer insofar as he was a prophet of a different revelation. The swamp and flood produced many who, “whether within or without temples, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons.” When one of them proved his authenticity by moving into the house of government, all the others became adventurers. The choice they faced was to oust Lenin from the Kremlin, build their own house of government, or accept the truth of Bolshevism and renounce all claim to a separate prophetic vision.
Mironov tried all three possibilities. A forty-seven-year-old native of the Ust-Medveditskaia District and a much-decorated veteran of the Russo-Japanese and “imperialist” wars, he thought of himself as the voice and conscience of the “working Cossacks.” The Bolsheviks thought of him in the same way—and treated him accordingly, depending on what they thought of the working Cossacks. Some believed that a Soviet Cossack corps was a necessary condition for reconquering the Don Area; others believed that the whole thing was an act of treason
or gullibility. Meanwhile, Mironov sat in Saransk waiting for men and supplies, feuding with the local commissars (who kept warning Moscow of his unreliability), and trying to find out what had happened on the Don in his absence. Having been told about “Cain’s work done in the name of the government,” he wrote a letter to Lenin: “I cannot be silent anymore, for I cannot watch the people suffer for the sake of something abstract and remote.… The entire operation of the Communist Party over which you preside is aimed at the extermination of the Cossacks, the extermination of humanity as a whole.”
He was still for the “social revolution,” understood as “the transfer of power from one class to another.” He was still awaiting the true “apostles of communism,” who would bring to the people the gift of “the means of production.” But the Communists had gotten it backward: “We haven’t even built the foundation yet, … but here we are, in a hurry to build the house (communism). Our house is like the one Jesus spoke of when he said, ‘the winds blew away the sand, the stilts fell down, and the house collapsed.’ It collapsed because there was no foundation, just the stilts.” “Building” had become the central metaphor for reaching communism. Communism, like government and revolution, was a house. The building of the house of communism, according to Mironov, required “many decades” of “patient and painstaking example-setting…. I will not give in to the insanity that has only now revealed itself to me, and I will fight against the annihilation of the Cossacks and middle peasants with whatever strength I have left. Only now have I come to understand the devilish plan of the Communists, and I curse the day when, out of naïveté, I defended their position.”28
The House of Government Page 24