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

by Orlando Figes

  The Finnish Defence Corps under General Mannerheim had grown into a major national army since its defeat of the Reds at Helsingfors during

  the spring of 1918. It was the Finns rather than the Whites whom the Bolsheviks feared most in Petrograd. By June 1919, it was reckoned that there were up to 100,000 Finnish troops around Lake Lagoda. One quarter of them were facing Petrograd. The price of Finland's support for Yudenich was simple: a guarantee of its independence. This should have been a formality: Finland was already, to all intents and purposes, an independent state and was recognized as such by most of the Western powers. Yet the Whites thought that even this small price was still too much to pay. Their simple-minded nostalgia for the Russian Empire, which they were committed to restore, prevented them from making deals with nationalists. 'History will never forgive me if I surrender what Peter the Great won,' Kolchak had declared with typical bombast when urged, as the supreme leader of the Whites, to yield to the Finnish demand. Prince Lvov and the Political Conference in Paris were adamantly opposed to the idea of granting Finland recognition until its status had been finally resolved by the Constituent Assembly in Russia. This was also typical of the Whites' fixation with the legal framework of the past — a fixation which prevented them from engaging with the political realities of the present. Mannerheim was well disposed to the anti-Bolshevik cause. But not even he could persuade the war-weary Finns to support the Whites without a guarantee of recognition. The Reds, on the other hand, had granted Finland recognition eighteen months before. They were now offering a peace accord with the Finns if they remained neutral in the civil war, while threatening them with 'merciless extermination if they joined the Whites. The Allies urged Yudenich to recognize Finland, realizing that without its support his offensive was doomed to fail. But the White general refused to budge. This gave Mannerheim, facing an election in July, no choice but to wash his hands of the Whites. He refused to give Yudenich troops or to let his army operate from Finnish soil. It was a crucial setback for the Whites, forcing them to advance on Petrograd by the longer and more hostile route through Yamburg and Gatchina.

  Yudenich made a last desperate effort to enlist the support of the Estonians. But they were a small nation, and a young and fragile one, and they were unwilling to give the Whites many troops, especially when the latter would not even recognize Estonian independence in return. The Reds were quick to exploit the situation — just as they had been in the Finnish case — offering Estonia a peace accord if it remained neutral in the civil war. The natural inclination of the Estonians to avoid involvement in the civil war thus coincided with their best interests as an independent state forced to live next door to the Soviets.

  Left to his own devices, Yudenich ordered a dash for Petrograd on 10 October. He was banking on the Reds being caught short by the fighting on the Southern Front. To begin with, the gamble paid off. The Bolsheviks had

  indeed transferred units to the south. The 25,000 troops of the Seventh Red Army, left to defend Petrograd, were utterly demoralized and beginning to desert. Aided by Colonel Liundkvist, the Chief of Staff of the Seventh Army who defected to the Whites and supplied them with details of the Red positions, Yudenich's 18,000 troops advanced rapidly. By the 20th they had reached the Pulkovo Heights, overlooking the Petrograd suburbs. 'There was the dome of St Isaac's and the gilt spire of the Admiralty,' one his officers recalled, 'one could even see trains pulling out of the Nikolai Station.' So confident were they of victory on that day that one of their generals even refused the offer of field-glasses to survey the city because, as he put it, they would in any case be walking down the Nevsky Prospekt the next day.33

  News of the White advance created panic among the Reds. Lenin wanted to abandon Petrograd and concentrate on the Southern Front. But Trotsky was adamant that the birth-place of the revolution should be defended at all costs, even if that meant fighting in the streets, and he persuaded Lenin to change his mind. On 16 October Trotsky was despatched to the old capital to take charge of its defence. Zinoviev, the Petrograd party boss, had completely lost his nerve and could do nothing but lie down on a sofa in the Smolny. This was one of the few occasions in the civil war — much fewer than claimed by his acolytes — when Trotsky's presence at the Front helped to decide the outcome of the battle. At one point he even mounted a horse, rounded up the retreating troops and led them back into battle.

  Trotsky's first task was to boost morale — and this he did with his brilliant talent for mass oratory. He urged the soldiers not to give up and made fun of the enemy's British tanks, from which the Reds had run away, describing them as nothing more than boxes 'made of painted wood'. He even ordered the Putilov plant to knock up a few vehicles resembling tanks to give the troops reassurance that they too had these machines on their side. Trotsky's next task was to transform Petrograd into a fortress and prepare its population for a battle in the streets. Martial law was declared in the city and a night-time curfew was imposed. Thousands of workers and bourgeois residents were mobilized to erect barricades on the streets and squares. Lenin urged Trotsky to raise 30,000 people, to 'set up machine-guns behind them and to shoot several hundred of them in order to assure a real mass assault on Yudenich'. The city's sewage system was pulled up and used to build the barricades. Trenches were dug in the southern suburbs and machine-guns were posted on top of all the buildings along the main roads into the centre. Military trucks and motorcycles hurtled around Petrograd by day and night; Bolsheviks in leather jackets stood around at road blocks with guns around their shoulders; and all the major buildings were guarded by teams of worker volunteers.34

  Although Petrograd, like every other city, had been troubled by frequent

  strikes, the threat of a White breakthrough seemed to galvanize many workers into defending the Soviet regime. As one of the Whites' spies in Petrograd put it:

  The worker elements, at least a large section of them, are still Bolshevik inclined. Like some other democratic elements, they see the regime, although bad, as their own. Propaganda about the cruelty of the Whites has a strong effect on them . . . Psychologically, they identify the present with equality and Soviet power and the Whites with the old regime and its scorn for the masses.

  Hundreds of workers armed themselves with rifles and turned out to defend the Smolny. Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the Soviet headquarters, a dozen motorcars were kept ready to whisk away the party leaders should Petrograd fall. Viktor Serge and his pregnant wife abandoned their room in the Astoria Hotel and spent the night in an ambulance parked in the suburbs. With a little case and two false passports, they were ready to flee at a moment's notice.35

  In their rush to get to Petrograd, the Whites had failed to cut the railway link to Moscow. This crucial blunder allowed the Reds to bring up reinforcements in time for a counter-offensive on 21 October. It was a sign of their desperation that even at the height of the battle against Denikin the Reds were prepared to transfer vital reserves from Tula to Petrograd. Lenin made the crucial decision, directly telephoning Os'kin himself. 'I was literally caught for breath when a voice on the telephone said "Lenin here",' Os'kin later wrote. He promised Lenin a whole brigade of highly disciplined Communist reserves who were to play a vital role in the counter-offensive. Kamenev, the Red Commander-in-Chief, called them 'our Queen of Spades' — the last trump card needed to win the game. Against Yudenich's 15,000 troops, the Reds now had almost 100,000 — enough even by their own wasteful standards to turn the tables against the Whites. After three days of brave and bloody fighting for the Pulkovo Heights — the Reds courageously held off Yudenich's tanks with nothing but their rifles — the Whites were pushed back towards Estonia. Without reserves, their retreat was just as quick as their advance had been. In mid-November the Estonians allowed Yudenich's forces to enter their country, although only after disarming them. Trotsky wanted to pursue the Whites into Estonia ('the kennel for the guard dogs of the counter-revolution'). But this proved unnecessary. Yudenich resigned and his arm
y was disbanded. On New Year's Eve Estonia signed an armistice with Soviet Russia, followed by a peace treaty — Moscow's first with its border states — on 2 February 1920.36

  To honour Trotsky's role in the defence of Petrograd, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the first such order of its kind. Trotsky attained the

  EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER THE BOLSHEVIKS

  81-2 The fuel crisis in the cities. Above: Muscovites dismantle a town house for firewood. Below: a priest is commandeered to help transport timber. Many horses died for lack of food so human draught was used.

  83-4 Selling to eat. Above: women of the 'former classes' sell their last possessions on the streets of Moscow. Below, a soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhooi fallen on hard times.

  85-6 Selling to eat. Above: a low-level party functionary haggles over a fur scarf with a female trader at the Smolensk market, Moscow, 1920. The woman on the left has the appearance of a burzhooika. Below: traders at the Smolensk market, Moscow, 1920. The woman with the string bag and the loaf of bread is almost certainly a prostitute.

  87 Putting the gentle classes to work. Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets under the inspection of a commissar with guards, the Apraksin market in Petrograd, 1918. The main purpose of this sort of forced labour was to humiliate and degrade the privileged classes of the old regime.

  88 The Bolshevik war against the market. Cheka soldiers close down traders' stalls on the Okhotnyi Riad (Hunters' Row) in Moscow, May 1919.

  89 Requisitioning the peasants' grain.

  90 'Bagmen' travelled to and from the countryside exchanging food for manufactured goods. The result was chaos on the railways.

  91 The 1 May subbotnik ('volunteer' labour on Saturday) on Red Square in Moscow, 1920.

  92 By 1920 the state was feeding - or rather underfeeding - thirty million people in makeshift cafeterias like this one at the Kiev Station in Moscow.

  93 The new ruling class: delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress, Moscow, 1920.

  94 A typical example of the new bureaucracy: the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern Region. Note the portrait of Marx, the leathered commissar, and the bourgeois daughters who served in such large numbers as secretaries.

  95 The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup. But it was fast becoming not so much a bastion of the Marxist revolution as one of the corruption of the party elite.

  status of a hero.* Gatchina, where much of the fighting had taken place, was renamed Trotsk. It was the first Soviet town to be named after a living Communist.

  * * * As Denikin's forces fled southwards they lost all semblance of discipline and began to break up in panic. Napoleon had once remarked about his own retreat from Moscow: 'from the sublime to the ridiculous it is only one step'. Much the same could be said for Denikin's.

  It was not just the Reds who had caused, the Whites to panic. Makhno's partisans, Petliura's Ukrainian nationalists and various other partisan bands ambushed the White units from all sides as they retreated towards the Black Sea. Denikin's forces were passing through terrain where the local population, in Wrangel's words, 'had learned to hate us'. Then, in late November, came the shocking news that the British were ending their support for the Whites. Coupled with the news of Kolchak's defeat, this had a devastating effect on morale. 'In a couple of days the whole atmosphere in South Russia was changed,' remarked one eye-witness. 'Whatever firmness of purpose there had previously been was now so undermined that the worst became possible. [Lloyd] George's opinion that the Volunteer cause was doomed helped to make that doom almost certain.' The optimism that had so far maintained the White movement — Sokolov compared it to the gambler's desperate belief that his winning card would somehow turn up — now collapsed completely. Soldiers and officers deserted en masse. The Cossacks became disenchanted with the Whites. Many of the Kuban Cossacks refused to go on fighting unless Denikin satisfied their demands for a separate state.37

  There was similar disenchantment within the huge White civilian camp. People no longer believed in victory, and thought only of how to flee abroad. Shops and cafes closed. There was a mad rush to exchange the Don roubles issued by Denikin for foreign currency. In a repeat of the panic scenes in Omsk, thousands of officers and civilians struggled to get aboard trains for the Black Sea ports. The wounded and the sick, whose numbers were swollen by a raging typhus epidemic, were simply abandoned. This could no longer be called a 'bourgeoisie on the run'. Most of the refugees were now penniless, whatever their former fortunes. It was a poor mass of naked humanity fleeing for its life. One witness saw this in the flight from Kharkov:

  As the last Russian hospital train was preparing to leave one evening, in the dim light of the station lamps strange figures were seen crawling along the platform. They were grey and shapeless, like big wolves. They

  * And his opponents, notably Stalin, warned for the first time of the dangers of Bonapartism.

  came nearer, and with horror it was recognized that they were eight Russian officers ill with typhus, dressed in their grey hospital dressing-gowns, who, rather than be left behind to be tortured and murdered by the Bolshevists, as was likely to be their fate, had crawled along on all fours through the snow from the hospital to the station, hoping to be taken away on a train.38

  In the context of this moral collapse the White Terror reached its climax and the worst pogroms against the Jews were carried out. It was a last savage act of retribution against a race whom many of the Whites blamed for the revolution.

  Anti-Semitism was a fact of life in Russia throughout the revolutionary period. Attacks on Jews often played a part in the violence of the crowd. The word pogrom could mean both an attack on the Jews and an assault on property in general. The tsarist regime, in stirring up the one, had always been careful not to let it spill over into the other. The scapegoating of Jews for the country's woes became much more widespread after 1914. The Pale of Settlement was broken down by the war and the Jews dispersed across Russia. They appeared in the major cities of the north for the first time in large numbers. During the revolution Jews entered the government and official positions also for the first time. Not many Jews were Bolsheviks, but many of the leading Bolsheviks were Jews. To large numbers of ordinary Russians, whose world had been turned upside-down, it thus appeared that their country's ruin was somehow connected with the sudden appearance of the Jews in places and positions of authority formerly reserved for the non-Jews. It was a short step from this to conclude that the Jews were plotting to bring about Russia's ruin. The result was mass Judeophobia. 'Hatred of the Jews', wrote a leading sociologist in 1921, 'is one of the most prominent features of Russian life today; perhaps even the most prominent. Jews are hated everywhere — in the north, in the south, in the east, and in the west. They are hated by people regardless of their class or education, political persuasion, race, or age.'39

  During the early stages of the White movement in the south anti-Semitism played a relatively minor role. There were even Jews in the Volunteer Army, some of them heroes of the Ice March. OSVAG, Denikin's propaganda organ, employed many Jews. But as the Whites advanced into the Ukraine, where the Jewish population was more concentrated than in the Don, their ranks were engulfed by a vengeful hatred of the Jews. The initiative came from the Cossacks and their regimental officers, although Denikin, a passive anti-Semite, did little to resist it and several of his generals encouraged it. Jews were forced out of Denikin's army and administration. White propaganda portrayed the Bolshevik regime as a Jewish conspiracy and spread the myth that all its major leaders

  were Jews apart from Lenin.* As the head of the Red Army, Trotsky (or Bronstein, as he was parenthesized in the White press) was singled out as a monstrous 'Jewish mass-killer' of the Russian people. The Jews were blamed for the murder of the Tsar, for the persecution of the Orthodox Church and for the Red Terror. Now it is true that the Jews were prominent in the Kiev
and other city Chekas. But this was used as a pretext to take a bloody revenge against the Jewish population as a whole. As the Chief Rabbi of Moscow once put it, it was the Trotskys who made the revolutions but it was the Bronsteins who paid the bills. Most of the White leaders, including Denikin, took the view that the Jews had brought the pogroms on themselves because of their 'support' for the Bolshevik regime. The whole of the White movement was seized by the idea that the persecution of the Jews was somehow justified as a popular means of counter-revolution. The Russian Rightist Shulgin, a major spokesman on the Jews' collective guilt, later acknowledged that the pogroms were a White revenge for the Red Terror. 'We reacted to the "Yids" just as the Bolsheviks reacted to the burzhoois. They shouted, "Death to the Burzhoois!" And we replied, "Death to the Yids!"'40

  The first major pogroms were perpetrated by Petliura's Ukrainian nationalist bands in the winter of 1918—19. The partisans of Makhno and Grigoriev also carried out pogroms, as did the Poles in 1920, and some units of the Red Army. In all these pogroms, except those of the Poles (which were racially motivated), anti-Jewish violence was closely associated with the looting and destruction of Jewish property. The Ukrainian peasant soldiers hated the Jews mainly because they were traders, inn-keepers and money-lenders, in short the 'bourgeoisie' of the 'foreign' towns who had always exploited the 'simple villagers' and kept them living in poverty. It was common for pogrom leaders to impose a huge revolutionary tax on the Jews — in the belief that they were fantastically wealthy — and then to kill the hostages taken from them when the taxes were not paid. The Bolsheviks employed the same methods during the Red Terror. It was also common for the pogrom leaders to license their soldiers to loot Jewish shops and houses, murdering and raping the Jews in the process, and to allow the local Russian population to help themselves to a share of the spoils, under the pretext that the Jews had grown rich from speculating on the economic crisis and that their wealth should be returned to the people. The Bolsheviks called this looting the looters.