A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  doubts nor differences of opinion.' The experience of 1917 — which taught him that the army fell apart when it dabbled in politics — strengthened Denikin's apoliticism. It bred in him, as in many officers, a contempt for all politicians. He wanted, in his own words, to keep it immune 'from the wrangling politicians' and to establish his 'own programme on the basis of simple national symbols that could unite everyone'.20

  The constitution served Denikin's aim. This verbose charter was a triumph of form over content, full of legal ideals that were quite impracticable in a civil war. It was, in short, just what one would expect from a constitution written by the Kadets. It promised everything to everyone; and ended up by giving nothing to anyone. All citizens enjoyed equal rights; yet 'special rights and privileges' were reserved for the Cossacks. The state was governed by law; yet there were no legal limits on Denikin's dictatorship (they called him 'Tsar Anton'). None of the basic political issues facing Russia was confronted seriously. What form of government should it have? Was the Empire to be revived? Were the rights of the landed gentry to be restored? All these questions were buried in the interests of the military campaign.

  Perhaps this was understandable given the divisions at Ekaterinodar. A multitude of groups and factions, from the Black Hundreds on the Right to the radical democrats on the Left, vied with each other for political influence over the White movement. None had a base of popular support; yet all strove for a 'historic role'. They bickered with each other and played at politics. The State Unity Council and the National Centre were the only two groups with any real influence, sharing the posts in Denikin's government. The former was monarchist and denied the legitimacy of the February Revolution. The latter was Kadet and pledged to restore the Constituent Assembly. It is little wonder that Denikin chose to avoid politics. He saw himself surrounded by scheming politicians, each trying to pull him in one direction or another. He tried to steer a middle course, keeping his pronouncements open and vague so as not to offend anyone, and increasingly withdrew into his own narrow circle of right-wing generals — Romanovsky, Dragomirov and Lukomsky being the most crucial — where the main decisions were made. The Special Council was a sorry phantom of a government. It rubber-stamped decisions already taken by the generals, and buried itself under paper decrees on such vital matters as the postal service or the minute details of finance and supply. Much of its time was taken up with the burning question of whether schools should use the old or the new orthography — and of course it opted for the old spelling. Senior politicians, such as Shulgin and Astrov, would not demean themselves with such work; and their absence from the Special Council downgraded its effectiveness even further.21

  During the early days this neglect of politics did not seem to matter.

  It was enough to place the military campaign before everything else, and to concentrate on promoting vague national symbols as an alternative to the Reds' propaganda. But later on, when the Whites could aim not just to conquer Russia but also had to try and rule it, this neglect of politics became a disastrous weakness. Their politics lost them the civil war, at least as much as their reverses on the battlefield.

  The White leaders — and this applies to Siberia as much as it does to the South — failed to adapt to the new revolutionary world in which the civil war had to be fought. They made no real effort to develop policies that might appeal to the peasants or the national minorities, although the support of both was essential. They were too firmly rooted in the old Russia. The vital importance of propaganda and local political structures passed them by almost completely: dominated by the narrow outlook of the army, they could not understand the need for mass mobilization in a civil war. It was not until 1919, and then only on the Allies' insistence, that the Whites began to devote any real resources to their own machinery of propaganda. And even then the whole thing was approached in a low-key and amateurish fashion compared with the brilliant propaganda of the Reds. OSVAG, Denikin's propaganda agency, was originally set up within the Department of Foreign Affairs: it saw its main aim as to convince the Allies, rather than the Russian people, of the merits of the White cause, and very little of its material ever reached the factories or the villages. It was grossly under-financed and under-valued by the White leaders, not least because it opposed their Rightist views, and for this reason the generals often claimed that it was staffed by 'draft-dodgers', 'socialists' and 'Jews'.22

  The Whites, in short, failed to understand the nature of the war in which they were engaged. They assumed that it could be fought in the manner of a conventional nineteenth-century conflict: by placing the army above politics. Yet this was to ignore the basic fact that in any civil or total war the ability of the armies to mobilize the population's resources in the territories which they occupied was bound to determine the outcome of the struggle. Their capacity to do this was precisely a question of politics: terror alone was not enough; it was also a question of tapping mass support or at least exploiting mass opposition to the enemy. This was especially so in the major campaigns of the Russian civil war (in 1919) when both the Reds and the Whites grew from small partisan forces to mass conscript armies which depended on the mobilization of the peasantry and its resources. For neither side could count on the peasantry's support, and they were both weakened by desertion and peasant revolts in the rear which were attributable as much to political failure as to military exactions.

  The Whites failed to develop a viable politics for the task of democratic mobilization. On the major policy questions — land and nationalities — they

  drew up voluminous but non-committal bureaucratic projects for future debate. Everything was put off until the Constituent Assembly had been reconvened; and then, under the pressure of the Rightists, the Constituent Assembly itself was postponed. The Whites could not free themselves from the bureaucratic customs of the old regime. They adopted a dead and legalistic approach to a revolutionary situation that cried out for bold popular reforms. They saw themselves as the representatives of the old Russian state in exile and postponed all politics until military victory had returned them to the old capital; they never understood that victory itself was dependent on forging a new type of state.

  * * * One of the Volunteers' most pressing problems was their relationship with the Cossacks. The White generals were Russian centralists. But the Don and Kuban Cossacks both wanted to establish independent states. They even sent their own unofficial representatives to the Versailles Peace Conference in an unsuccessful effort to get the backing of the Western Powers. Given their military dependence on the Cossacks, the Whites should have tried to placate them. Yet they never even came close to satisfying their demands. They looked on the Cossacks as ordinary Russians and dismissed their nationalism as the work of a few extremists. The Kuban government, led in the main by chauvinists and demagogues, flexed its muscles in an effort to behave like a sovereign power. It banned Russian immigration to the Kuban, closed its borders to exports, and took control of the railways. Such actions were a constant thorn in the side of the Volunteers. To keep the army fed and equipped, the Whites were forced to requisition foodstuffs from Cossack settlements, riding roughshod over the local organs of self-rule, all grist to the mill of the Cossack national leaders.

  Perhaps the Whites' intransigence was a blessing in disguise: the Cossacks' nationalism in action was not a very pretty sight. The Kuban Cossacks drove out thousands of non-Cossacks (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) from their farms and villages, expelled their children from the local schools, and murdered many hundreds of them as 'Bolsheviks'. The Krug even debated the idea of driving all the non-Cossacks out of the Kuban altogether.* It was a sort of 'ethnic cleansing' based on the idea that the Cossacks were a superior race to the non-Cossack peasantry. The Cossack leaders frequently expressed the opinion that their people were the only Russians of any value and that all the rest were 'shit'. The Krug did nothing to stop the persecutions. In one village a group of Cossack soldiers seized the school mistress, an imm
igrant Russian who had taught the local Cossack children for over twenty years, and beat her to death.

  * One Cossack delegate thought this was too kind and said it would be better simply to kill all the non-Cossacks.

  None of her Cossack neighbours tried to save her. The Whites had an obvious interest in protecting the non-Cossacks: they represented 52 per cent of the Kuban population. If the Cossacks were left to their devices, the others would be driven into the arms of the Reds. Yet the Whites' intransigence on Cossack independence merely fanned the flames of this racial hatred and led to the steady worsening of relations with the Kuban government. If only the Whites had made some gesture towards the idea of Cossack autonomy, albeit conditionally upon the defeat of the Reds, they might have stopped the rot. But they failed to seek a compromise. Trapped in the nineteenth-century world of the Russian Empire, they were as insensitive to the national aspirations of the Cossacks as they were to all nationalisms other than their own.23

  The Kuban Cossacks were just as unsuccessful in their campaign to establish an independent army. From a military point of view, this would have been disastrous for the Whites, for the Kuban Cossacks made up most of their troops and virtually all of their cavalry. The Don Cossack Army, moreover, which was independent, was hardly an encouraging example. Its loose detachments, each organized by a separate Cossack settlement, were outside the control of the central command. They fought bravely to defend their own local homelands but were reluctant to move away from them. This became a critical problem as the Whites advanced into central Russia during 1919. The Cossacks did not much care who ruled in Moscow so long as they were left to themselves. 'Russia is none of our business' — thus Denikin summed up their attitude. The failure of the Don Army to take Tsaritsyn, despite a two-month siege at the end of 1918, had already shown the limits of the Cossacks' morale outside their homelands. Once they were let loose on Russian peasant soil, they were always inclined to degenerate into looting; and in Jewish settlements they often indulged in pogroms. This was to be a major reason for the White defeat: the plundering and violence of the Cossack cavalry in 1919 did more than anything to rally the population of central Russia behind the Reds. It was also why Denikin resisted Cossack demands for an independent army. He would not even consider separate Cossack units.24

  The Whites manifested the same inflexibility towards the demands of the national minorities. A Russia Great, United and Indivisible' was the central plank of their ideology. Without any clear social alignment, the Whites relied on the idea of the Russian nation and the Empire to draw together their disparate elements. Their imperial policies owed as much to the ideas of the Kadets and the Octobrists as they did to the values of the old regime. Miliukov and Struve now defended a Great Russia as firmly as the most reactionary monarchist. This commitment to the Russian Empire was a fundamental weakness in the White movement, because its armies were based mainly in those territories (the Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Baltic) where the non-Russian

  population favoured at the very least more autonomy and perhaps complete independence from Russia. The Whites failed to see that a compromise with these national aspirations was essential if they were to build a broad base of support among the non-Russian peoples. Instead of making the nationalists their allies, they turned them into enemies.

  As an army staffed mainly by sons of the gentry, the Volunteers were even more at odds with the peasants. Although himself the son of a former serf, Denikin never saw the vital need to accept the revolution on the land if his army was to conquer peasant Russia. The Whites assumed they could win the civil war without the support of the peasantry; or, at any rate, they seemed to think that the whole question of land reform could be put off until after victory. Their view of the civil war — that its outcome would be decided by military force alone — ruled out the need to present popular policies as part of their campaign. Not that their agrarian policies could ever have been popular: the dominance of the landowning class among Denikin's followers made it impossible for the Whites in south Russia to advance a programme on the land capable of winning mass peasant support. The two commissions set up by Denikin to make proposals for land reform both stressed the sale of the gentry's surplus land (and then only three years after the end of the civil war) but ruled out any compulsory expropriation. This was basically the minimalist Kadet land programme of 1917. It refused to recognize the fact of the rural revolution and continued to defend — probably as much preoccupied with the sanctity of the law as with the interests of the gentry — the formal property rights of the landowners. Statisticians calculated that if a programme was introduced on the basis of the commissions' proposals, the peasants would have had to give back three-quarters of the land they had seized from the gentry since 1917. Thus the vast mass of the peasantry had every reason to oppose the Whites.25

  All the more so, since Denikin's armies and his local officials were notorious for helping the squires to reclaim their land in the territories which they reconquered. The policy was often justified on the grounds that gentry-farmed estates were more productive, but this was a flimsy excuse for the restoration of the old order. In any case, most of the land returned to the ownership of the gentry was rented back to the peasantry (usually at a fixed rate of one-third of the harvest). The system of local government in so far as there was one, as opposed to military rule and terror, was turned over to the local squires and the former tsarist police and officials acting in the name of district captains. The inescapable conclusion was that the Whites were seeking to restore the discredited local apparatus of the old regime. The district captains, for example, were remarkably similar to the tsarist land captains, who had ruled the villages like petty tsars. There were several cases of the same land captains returning as district captains to their former fiefdoms, where they took savage

  revenge on the villagers executing and flogging their leaders. The efforts of the liberals to restore the volost zemstvos met with stiff resistance from the Rightist elements in Denikin's regime on the grounds that this would undermine the status of the local nobility. The worst form of the gentry's reaction — that which had opposed the volost zemstvos under Stolypin — lived on at the heart of the White regime. As Denikin himself acknowledged, the rural power holders under his regime may have had the advantage of experience:

  but in terms of their psychology and world-view, their customs and their habits, they were so far removed and alienated from the changes that had taken place in the country that they had no idea how to act in the new revolutionary era. For them it was a question of returning to the past — and they tried to restore the past both in form and spirit.26

  This failure of the Whites to recognize the peasant revolution was the reason for their ultimate defeat. Denikin himself later admitted as much. It was only in 1920, after their failure to penetrate into the rural heart of central Russia, that the Volunteers finally confronted the need to appeal to the peasants; but by then it was too late. Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.

  * * * In November 1918, with the end of the fighting in Europe, the civil war entered a new phase. The rupture of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty after the German defeat and the retreat of German troops from the Baltic, the Ukraine and the Crimea gave the civil war armies the chance to step into the vacuum left by this withdrawal.

  The Volunteers had every reason to be optimistic. With the defeat of the Germans, they expected the Allies to increase their support for the White cause in the south. Until then, the Allies had looked at the civil war from the sidelines. Their main interest had been in the north and in Siberia, where they had been hoping to resurrect a Russian army to continue the war against Germany. A few hundred British marines had occupied the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to defend Allied military stocks. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk they had even become involved in minor skirmishes against the Reds. German occupation of the Ukraine and their cont
rol of the Black Sea had made it difficult for the Allies to get military aid to the Volunteers. But all that had now changed. The Allies recognized Denikin as the main White leader in the south and pledged material support, including twelve divisions, to help occupy the Ukraine. They also promised the Volunteers the Allied military supplies left behind by the Russian army on the Romanian Front — if only they could get their hands on them. The height of this wave of euphoria came

  on 23 November, when an Anglo-French fleet sailed into Novorossiisk. General Poole and Lieutenant Erlich disembarked and were met by vast cheering crowds. They assured them that Britain and France were committed to the same goals as the Volunteers. Everyone expected the Whites to march triumphantly on Moscow, now that the Allies were on their side. They had defeated the mighty German armies; it would surely be a simple task for them to see off the Bolsheviks. Such optimism was further strengthened by the rise of Admiral Kolchak on the Eastern Front.

  In fact the promise of Allied aid turned out to be empty. The involvement of the Western powers never amounted to much in material terms and always suffered from a lack of clear purpose or commitment. Western public opinion was divided between the Reds and Whites, while most of those in the middle, weary after four years of total war, were opposed to sending more troops abroad. Most of the Allied politicians were not sure why they should get involved in a foreign civil war now that the World War was over. Many of them knew very little about Russia — Lloyd George, for example, thought that Kharkov was a general rather than a city — and, as always in international matters, ignorance bred indifference. Some politicians, such as Churchill, wanted to launch a Western crusade against Communism, but others feared that a White victory would result in a strengthened Russia with renewed imperial ambitions, and preferred to see Russia Red but weak. The Western leaders wavered schizo-phrenically between these two views. They could not decide whether to make war or peace with the Soviet rulers — and thus ended up doing both. With one hand they gave military aid to the Whites; with the other they tried to force them into peace talks.*