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

by Orlando Figes

  Kolchak headed towards his new intended capital in Irkutsk, 1,500 miles east of Omsk. The longest of his six trains, with twenty-nine cars, was taken up by the tsarist gold reserve, which had been captured from the Reds at Kazan and handed over to Kolchak. Three hundred miles from his destination, Kolchak's train was held up by the Czechs, and for most of December it remained stranded in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, in Irkutsk, the Political Centre, a coalition of the trade unions, the zemstvos and the left-wing parties took over the city and proclaimed itself the government of Siberia. Kolchak was declared an 'enemy of the people' and ordered to be brought to trial. On 4 January 1920 Kolchak resigned, transferred the command of his army to Semenov and travelled with the Czechs to Irkutsk, where he expected to be handed over to the Allied missions. But somehow he was betrayed and delivered to the Irkutsk Bolsheviks. From what we know, it seems most likely that he and his gold were handed over by the Czechs in exchange for a guaranteed passage to Vladivostok, where at last they could set sail for the United States on their journey round the world to return home. Neither the Political Centre nor the Allied missions did anything to save the Admiral. On 21 January a five-man commission (two Bolsheviks, two SRs and one Menshevik) interrogated him. There were plans to bring him back to Moscow and place him on public trial. But, as with the trial of Nicholas, these plans were aborted and, on 6 February, he was sentenced to execution. Perhaps the Reds feared Kolchak's capture by the remnants of his army, which were assembling just outside the city. Or perhaps the Bolsheviks simply preferred to have him dead.* Early the next morning Kolchak was shot. His body was buried beneath the ice of the Ushakovka River.

  * There is an order from Lenin to Smirnov, Chairman of the Siberian MRC, instructing him to explain Kolchak's execution as a response to the threat of the Whites (RTsKhlDNI, f. 2, op. I, d. 24362). But the date of this order is unclear. Richard Pipes believes it was written before 7 February, thus suggesting a plot by Lenin to camouflage the reasons for the execution (Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 117—18). But there is no corroboration of this.

  If Kolchak's final defeat had taken so long, it was largely because the Reds had been forced to divert a large proportion of their troops from Siberia to the Southern Front, where Denikin was threatening to break through during the summer of 1919.*

  During March and April, at the height of the Kolchak offensive, Denikin's forces broke out from Rostov to occupy the crucial Donbass coal region and the south-east Ukraine. Some historians have seen this as a critical strategic mistake. Denikin's original plan had been to strike towards Tsaritsyn in order to link up with Kolchak's forces. But this plan was abandoned in late March, when the Reds, who were desperate for coal, invaded the Donbass and the northern Don. Faced with the choice between saving the Don or linking up with Kolchak on the Volga, Denikin opted for the former. He had always given top priority to the defence of his Cossack strongholds. That had been the reasoning behind his preference the previous summer to launch a Second Kuban Campaign rather than attack towards Tsaritsyn; and now those same priorities came into play. Denikin's decision was bitterly opposed by several leading generals, notably Baron Wrangel, the lofty six-foot-six leader of the Caucasian Army, who constantly intrigued against Denikin. Wrangel denounced the decision not to advance towards Tsaritsyn as a 'betrayal of Kolchak's troops', allowing the Reds 'to defeat us one by one'. Given that Kolchak's troops in March were barely 200 miles from Tsaritsyn, perhaps Denikin was wrong not to run the risk of losing the Don to link up with them. The Reds were certain that they would be defeated if the two White armies combined. However, it must be said in Denikin's defence that he was responding to what can only be called a war of genocide against the Cossacks. The Bolsheviks had made it clear that their aim in the northern Don was to unleash 'mass terror against the rich Cossacks by exterminating them to the last man' and transferring their land to the Russian peasants. During this campaign of 'decossackization', in the early months of 1919, some 12,000 Cossacks, many of them old men, were executed as 'counterrevolutionaries' by the tribunals of the invading Red Army.18

  * This was the first major strategic disagreement among the Bolshevik leadership. Trotsky and Vatsetis, his Commander-in-Chief, argued against pursuing Kolchak beyond the Urals so that troops could be withdrawn to the Southern Front. But Kamenev, the Eastern Front Commander, backed up by Lenin and Stalin, insisted on the need to pursue Kolchak to the end. The conflict went on through the summer, weakening the Red Army leadership at this critical moment of the civil war. It showed, above all, that Trotsky's authority was in decline. His strategy, both on the Eastern and the Southern Fronts, was rejected in favour of Kamenev's, who replaced Vatsetis on 3 July. Trotsky was furious, suspecting that Stalin and the Military Opposition were trying to oust him from the leadership. He wrote a letter of resignation, which was rejected by the Central Committee on 5 July. Trotsky's authority was further weakened by the reconstitution of the RVSR with four new members (Kamenev, Gusev, Smilga and Rykov) who all had differences with its Chairman.

  It was the spontaneous Cossack uprising against this terror which enabled Denikin to break through. Thousands of Cossacks joined his troops as they advanced northwards in the spring. The main White force in the Donbass was led by General Mai-Maevsky. A chubby pear-shaped man with small piggy eyes and a pince-nez, he was the most unlikely military hero. 'If he had not worn a uniform,' Baron Wrangel wrote, 'you would have taken him for a comedian from a little provincial theatre.' Mai-Maevsky was notorious for his drunken orgies: by the end of the civil war there were few brothels in southern Russia where he was not known. Yet he was also one of the Whites' most able generals — a brilliant tactician, physically courageous and idolized by his 12,000 'coloured troops' (so-called because of their multi-coloured caps). Under his command the Volunteer Army advanced from the Donbass into the south-east Ukraine, easily defeating Makhno's Red partisans on the way. Kharkov was captured on 13 June, Ekaterinoslav on the 22nd, as the Red peasant conscripts ran away at the first sight of these crack White forces. Meanwhile, in one of the most remarkable campaigns of the civil war, Wrangel's Caucasian Army marched for forty days across the sun-baked south-eastern steppe — and at the end of it captured Tsaritsyn against superior forces on 19 June. The Red defenders of the Volga city fled in panic as soon as they saw Wrangel's British tanks approach. Forty thousand Reds were captured by the Whites along with a huge store of munitions.19

  Denikin's breakthrough had been facilitated by a number of factors. The Whites had the advantage of superior cavalry and supplies, thanks in large part to the Allies. Despite his own physical immobility, the rotund Mai-Maevsky was a master improviser of the war of movement. He used his British aeroplanes for reconnaissance of enemy terrain and despatched his cavalry by railway to those points where they could inflict the most damage. One unit could fight at three different places in a single day. The Reds, meanwhile, were clearly overstretched by the climax of the fighting on the two main Fronts — the Southern and the Eastern. They were also suffering from a crisis in supplies. According to Trotsky, this was the main reason for the collapse of the Southern Front. 'Nowhere do the soldiers suffer so much from hunger as in the Ukraine,' he told the Central Committee on 11 August. 'Between a third and a half of the men are without boots or undergarments and go about in rags. Everyone in the Ukraine except our soldiers has a rifle and ammunition.' The supply crisis led to indiscipline and mass desertion. In the seven months of Denikin's advance, from March to October 1919, the Reds registered more than one million deserters on the Southern Front. The rear was engulfed in peasant uprisings, as the Reds resorted to the violent requisitioning of horses and supplies, forcible conscription of reinforcements and repressions against villages suspected of hiding deserters.20

  The south-eastern Ukraine, where Makhno's partisans were in control,

  became a major region of peasant revolt just at the height of the Denikin offensive. Nestor Makhno was the Pancho Villa of the Russian Revolution. He
was born in 1889 in Hulyai Pole, the centre of his peasant insurrection. During 1905 he had joined the Anarchists and, after seven years in the Butyrka jail, returned to Hulyai Pole in 1917, where he formed the Peasant Union — later reformed as the Soviet — and organized a brigade, which carried out the seizure of the local gentry's estates. During the civil war Makhno's partisans fought almost everyone: the Rada forces; Kaledin's Cossacks; the Germans and the Hetmanates; Petliura's Ukrainian Nationalists; the rival bands of Grigoriev and countless other warlords; the Whites; and the Reds. The strength of his guerrilla army lay in the quality and the speed of its cavalry, in the support it received from the peasantry, in its intimate knowledge of the local terrain and in the fierce loyalty of its men. Makhno's alleged exploits, which included drinking bouts of superhuman length, gave him a legendary status among the local peasants (they called him 'Batko', meaning 'father'). It was not unlike the myth of Stenka Razin as a peasant champion of truth and justice who was blessed with supernatural powers. Under the black flag of the Anarchists, Makhno stood for a stateless peasant revolution based on the local self-rule of the free and autonomous Soviets that had emerged in the countryside during 1917. When the Whites advanced into the Ukraine Makhno put his 15,000 men at the disposal of the Reds. In exchange for arms from Moscow, his troops became part of the Third Division under Dybenko, although they retained their own internal partisan organization. Trotsky made a point of blaming their lack of discipline for the Red defeats.* In June he ordered the arrest of Makhno as a 'counter-revolutionary' — his anarchist conception of a local peasant revolution was inimical to the Proletarian Dictatorship — and had several of his followers shot. Makhno's partisans fled to the forests and turned their guns against the Reds. Most of the peasants in the south-east Ukraine supported his revolt.

  From Tsaritsyn, on 3 July, Denikin issued his Moscow Directive. The three main White forces were to converge on the capital in a gigantic pincer movement along the main railways, thus cutting off its main lines of supply. Wrangel's Caucasian Army was to march up the Volga from Tsaritsyn to Saratov, and turn in from there to Penza, Nizhnyi Novgorod and on to Moscow; General Sidorin and the Don Army were to advance north via Voronezh; while Mai-Maevsky's Volunteer Army was to march from Kharkov via Kursk, Orel and

  * It is true that Makhno's partisans often broke down under pressure from the Whites. But given how poorly they were supplied by the Reds, this was hardly surprising. They certainly did not deserve the vilification they received from Trotsky. This in fact had less to do with Makhno than it did with Stalin. By laying the blame for the Red defeats on the guerrilla methods of Makhno's partisans, Trotsky could attack the 'guerrilla-ism' of the Military Opposition and thus reinforce his argument for military discipline and centralization.

  Tula. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, counting on the speed of the White cavalry to exploit the temporary weakness of the Reds. Wrangel bitterly opposed the Directive. He called it the 'death sentence' of the White Army. In his view it ran the risk of advancing too far and broadly without adequate protection in the rear in the form of trained reserves, sound administration and lines of supply to maintain the offensive. Wrangel preferred to concentrate the troops and advance more slowly in one sector — namely his own on the Volga. But when he put this to Denikin, the latter exclaimed: 'I see you want to be the first man to set foot in Moscow!'21

  With hindsight it is clear that the Directive was a disastrous mistake: it cost the Whites the civil war. Denikin himself later admitted that the Front became much too broad, mainly because the cavalry commanders, whom he could not control, took it upon themselves to expand the territory under their occupation. It was a case of too many generals and not enough authority. As the Front grew, so too did the need for fresh troops and supplies. Yet the frontline units were by this stage several hundred miles from their bases in the rear. They resorted to violent requisitioning and conscription from the local population, thereby alienating the very people they were supposed to liberate. Denikin had always said that the advance on Moscow would depend on a 'national uprising of the people against the Soviet regime'; but the effect of his armies' actions was to rally them behind it.22

  The offensive started well enough. On 31 July Denikin's forces captured Poltava, followed by Odessa and Kiev in August, as Soviet power in the Ukraine crumbled. Meanwhile, in August, Mamontov's Cossacks, 8,000 strong, broke deep into the Red rear towards Tambov, blowing up munition stores and railway lines and dispersing newly drafted Red recruits. Tambov and Voronezh were both briefly occupied and looted as part of Mamontov's plan to disrupt the rear. During September Mai-Maevsky's advance continued into central Russia. Kursk was taken on the 20th and Voronezh, once again, ten days later. On 14 October the Whites took Orel. Only 250 miles from Moscow, this was the closest they would come to victory. The Bolsheviks were thrown into panic. Precisely at this moment, just as Denikin was threatening to capture Moscow from the south, another White army under General Yudenich was being amassed on the outskirts of Petrograd. For once the Whites had managed to co-ordinate the attacks of their two main armies, and for a few crucial days in mid-October it seemed that this would be enough to defeat the Reds.

  Bunkered in the Kremlin, Lenin received hourly telephone reports from his commanders at the two Fronts. Desperate measures were put into action for a last-ditch defence of Moscow: 120,000 workers and peasants were forcibly conscripted into labour teams to dig trenches on the southern approach roads. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks prepared for the worst. Many of them tore up their

  party tickets and tried to ingratiate themselves with the Moscow bourgeoisie in the hope of saving themselves when the Whites arrived. Others got ready to go underground. Secret plans were laid for the evacuation of the government to the Urals. Some of the senior party leaders even prepared to flee abroad. Elena Stasova, the Party Secretary, was ordered to procure a false passport and a wad of tsarist banknotes for each member of the Central Committee.23

  But the signs that the Whites had overstretched themselves soon became apparent. While their armies had more than doubled in size since the spring, they still lacked enough troops to sustain their advance towards Moscow. Deni-kin's 150,000 soldiers were very thinly spread along the thousand miles of the Southern Front, making them vulnerable to a counter-offensive. In the rear the Whites had left themselves without enough troops to defend their bases against Makhno's partisans, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Chechens in the Caucasus, and at the height of the Moscow offensive they were forced to withdraw vital troops to deal with them. They were also hampered in part by the lack of reinforcements. The Kuban Cossacks, whom Wrangel was counting on to reinforce his campaign against Saratov on the Volga, refused to leave their homelands. It was the old problem of Cossack localism: without guarantees of autonomy for the Kuban — which the Whites were not prepared to give — they would not take part in the fighting in Russia. But the real problem for the Whites — and the single biggest reason why their offensive ran out of steam — was their inability to mobilize enough troops within the newly occupied regions of the Ukraine and Russia. And here the Whites were defeated by their own political failures.

  In the Ukraine the Whites were crippled from the start by their Great Russian chauvinism. This guaranteed the opposition of the richer peasants, much of the rural intelligentsia and the petty-bourgeoisie, all of whom were sympathetic to the Ukrainian nationalist cause. Of all the contenders for power in the Ukraine — the Greens, the Blacks, the Reds and the Whites — Denikin was the only one who made no concessions to the nationalists. This was not a mistaken calculation: the need to defend the Great Russian Empire was the essential belief of the White regime. Even if they had been told that without such concessions they could not succeed, the Whites would still have refused to make them. Dragomirov, Lukomsky and Shulgin, the three Kievan Russians who dominated the White movement in the south, were more Russian than the Russians in Russia. Denikin satisfied their nationalist demands. He appointed Russians to
all official posts; suppressed the agrarian co-operatives, strongholds of the nationalist movement; and forbade the use of the Ukrainian language in all state institutions including schools. He even denied the existence of a Ukraine — which he called 'Little Russia' in all his pronouncements. His clumsy 'Proclamation to the Little Russian People', in which he pledged to reunite

  Russia with its 'little Russian branch', merely helped to drive the Ukrainian peasants into Petliura's nationalist army, which did so much to weaken the White rear. During the decisive battles of the autumn the Whites were forced to withdraw 10,000 troops from the Front against the Reds to fight Petliura's and other nationalist bands.

  An even more crucial weakness was the failure of the Whites to build up an effective system of local administration in the newly conquered territories. It meant they lacked the means to mobilize the peasantry and its resources without the use of terror. This became critical as they advanced into Soviet Russia and were cut off from their bases of supply. At the height of the offensive it became very difficult to get food and equipment to the soldiers. Makhno had occupied the key supply bases in the rear — Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdi-ansk — and, along with Petliura's nationalists, was holding up the military trains from the south. Then there was the problem of the railway workers, who by and large were against the Whites and could often only be made to work for them at the point of a gun. Within the Whites' own industrial bases there were similar tensions with the workers, as Denikin rolled back the rights of the trade unions and returned plants to their former owners. Coal production in the Donbass fell dramatically, bringing much of industry and transport to a halt. The Whites responded with a reign of terror, shooting workers in reprisal for the 'Bolshevik' decline in production. In Yuzovka one in ten workers was routinely shot whenever mines and factories failed to meet the output targets for coal and iron. Some workers were shot for simply being workers under the slogan 'Death to Callused Hands!' It was a sort of class revenge for the Red Terror with its own slogan 'Death to the Burzhoois!' But even such repression was unable to reverse the decline in production. The White economy was thrown into chaos as factories closed down, inflation spiralled and workers went on strike. Vital supplies for the army were either not produced or not transported to the Front.24