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

by Orlando Figes

  The pogroms carried out by Denikin's troops were largely driven by the same simple instinct to rob, rape and kill a Jewish population which was

  * The myth gained currency in Western circles. General Holman, for example, the head of the British military mission to Denikin, told a Jewish delegation that of the thirty-six Commissars in Moscow, only Lenin was not a Jew (Shekhtman, Pogromy, 298).

  seen as wealthy, alien and weak. But in a way that was more apparent than in the earlier pogroms they were also motivated by a racial hatred for the Jews and by a hatred of them, in the words of one White officer, as the 'chosen people of the Bolsheviks'. Whole Jewish towns were burned and destroyed on the grounds that they had supported the Reds (was it any wonder that they did?). Red stars were painted on the synagogues. Jews were taken hostage and shot in reprisal for the Red Terror. Jewish corpses were displayed in the street with a sign marked 'Traitors', or with a Red Star cut into their flesh.41

  On seizing a town from the Reds, it was common for the White officers to allow their soldiers two or three days' freedom to rob and kill the Jews at will. This was seen as a reward for the troops and a just retribution for the part played by the Jews in supporting the Reds. There were no recorded cases of a White officer ever halting a pogrom, but several cases where even senior generals, such as Mamontov and Mai-Maevsky, ordered them. One of the worst pogroms took place in Kiev, right under the noses of the White authorities. From I to 5 October the Cossack soldiers went around the city breaking into Jewish homes, demanding money, raping and killing. The officers and local priests urged them on with speeches claiming that 'The Yids kill all our people and support the Bolsheviks.' Even Shulgin, an ardent anti-Semite, was disturbed by the climate of 'medieval terror' in the streets and by the 'terrifying howl' of the 'Yids' at night 'that breaks the heart'. Yet General Dragomirov, who ruled the city, did not order a stop to the pogrom until the 6th, the day after the orgy of killing had finally burned itself out.42

  Many pogroms were accompanied by gruesome acts of torture on a par with those of the Red Terror. In the town of Fastov the Cossacks hung their victims from the ceiling, releasing them just before they choked to death: if their relatives, who watched this in terror, could not pay up the money they had demanded, the Cossacks repeated the operation. The Cossacks cut off limbs and noses with their sabres and ripped out babies from their mothers' wombs. They set light to Jewish houses and forced those who tried to escape to turn back into the fire. In some places, such as Chernobyl, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was then burned down with them inside. In others, such as Cherkass, they gang-raped hundreds of pre-teen girls. Many of their victims were later found with knife and sabre wounds to their small vaginas. One of the most horrific pogroms took place in the small Podole town of Krivoe Ozero during the final stages of the Whites' retreat in late December. By this stage the White troops had ceased to care about world opinion and, as they contemplated defeat, threw all caution to the winds. The Terek Cossacks tortured and mutilated hundreds of Jews, many of them women and young children. Hundreds of corpses were left out in the snow for the dogs and pigs to eat. In the midst of this macabre scene the Cossack officers held a surreal ball in the town post

  office, complete with evening dress and an orchestra, to which they invited the local magistrate and a group of prostitutes they had brought with them from Kherson. While their soldiers went killing Jews for sport, the officers and their beau monde drank champagne and danced the night away.43

  Thanks to the newly opened archives, we now have a fuller idea of how many Jews were killed by pogroms in the civil war. The precise number will never be known. Even the pogroms by the Whites, which are the best known, raise all sorts of statistical problems; and there were many other pogroms against Jews (by the Ukrainian nationalists, by Makhno's partisans, by the invading Polish forces and by the Reds) whose victims were never counted at all. But one can say with some certainty that the overall number of Jewish murder-victims must have been much higher than the 31,071 burials officially recorded or indeed the estimates of 50,000—60,000 deaths given by scholars in the past. The most important document to emerge from the Russian archives in recent years, a 1920 report of an investigation by the Jewish organizations in Soviet Russia, talks of 'more than 150,000 reported deaths' and up to 300,000 victims, including the wounded and the dead.44

  * * * The fleeing thousands of Denikin's regime all piled into Novorossiisk, the main Allied port on the Black Sea, in the hope of being evacuated on an Allied ship. By March 1920, the town was crammed full of desperate refugees. Dignitaries of the old regime slept a dozen to each room. Typhus reaped a dreadful harvest among the hordes of unwashed humanity. Prince E. N. Trubetskoi and Purishkevich died in the awful conditions of Novorossiisk. No one gave any more thought to the idea of fighting the Reds, whose cavalry encircled the town. Seven years of war and revolution had bred in these people a psyche of defeat — and they now thought only of escape. British guns were thrown into the sea. Cossacks shot their horses. Everyone wanted to leave Russia but not everyone could be taken by the Allied ships. Priority was given to the troops, 50,000 of whom were carried off to the Crimea on 27 March. That left 60,000 Whites at the mercy of the Reds. Amidst the final panic to get on board there were ugly scenes: princesses brawled like fish-wives; men and women knelt on the quay and begged the Allied officers to save their lives; some people threw themselves into the sea.45

  For Denikin's critics, this botched evacuation was the final straw. A generals' revolt had been steadily gaining ground since the first reverses of the autumn, as it became clear that the Moscow Directive had been a strategic error. On arriving in the Crimea, they now demanded Denikin's resignation. General Wrangel emerged as the clear successor from a poll of the senior commanders. Because of their repugnance at the idea of 'electing' a new leader — that would smack of the democracy that had destroyed the army in 1917 — they prevailed

  upon Denikin to resign and 'appoint' Wrangel as his successor. This was the final insult for Denikin, who had only recently discharged his rival. He was now obliged to recall him from Constantinople, where Wrangel had been in exile. The same British ship that brought Wrangel back to Russia took Denikin to the Turkish capital. He would never see his fatherland again.

  Under General Wrangel the Whites made one last stand against the Bolsheviks. But it was obvious from the start that their task was doomed. The Soviet war against Poland, which diverted Red troops from the Southern Front, briefly enabled the Whites to gain a toe-hold in the Crimea. But it was only a matter of time before the Reds turned their attention to them again: and when they did so the outcome was never really in doubt. To all intents and purposes, the Whites were defeated in April 1920.

  What were the fundamental reasons for their failure? The White emigre communities would agonize for years over this question. Historians whose views are broadly sympathetic to the White cause have often stressed the 'objective factors' that were said to have stacked the odds against them.46 The Reds had an overwhelming superiority of numbers, they controlled the vast terrain of central Russia with its prestigious capitals, most of the country's industry and the core of its railway network, which enabled them to shift their forces from one Front to another. The Whites, by contrast, were divided between several different Fronts, which made it difficult to co-ordinate their operations; and they were dependent on the untrustworthy Allies for much of their supplies. Other historians have stressed the strategic errors of the Whites, the Moscow Directive foremost among them, and the Reds' superior leadership, commitment and discipline.

  All these factors were no doubt relevant — and in a conventional war they might well have been enough to explain the outcome. But the Russian civil war was a very different sort of war. It was fought between armies which could count neither on the loyalty of their mostly conscript troops nor on the support of the civilian population within the territories they claimed to control. Most people wanted nothing to do with the civil
war: they kept their heads down and tried to remain neutral. As one Jew told Babel, all the armies claimed to be fighting for justice, but all of them pillaged just the same.47 By 1920, when Russia was reduced to the brink of starvation, many people would no doubt have welcomed any 'tsar' so long as he could provide them with bread. Both the Reds and the Whites were constantly crippled by mass desertion, by the breakdown of supplies, by strikes and peasant revolts in the rear. But their ability to maintain their campaigns in spite of all these problems depended less on military factors than on political ones. It was essentially a question of political organization and mass mobilization. Terror of course also played a role. But by itself terror was not enough — the people were too many and the regimes too

  weak to apply it everywhere — and, in any case, terror often turned out to be counter-productive.

  Here the Reds had one crucial advantage that enabled them to get more soldiers on to the batdefield when it really mattered: they could claim to be defending 'the revolution' — a conveniently polyvalent symbol on to which the people could project their own ideals. Being able to fight under the Red Flag gave the Bolsheviks a decisive advantage. Its symbolic power largely accounts for the fact that the peasants, including hundreds of thousands of deserters, rallied to the Red Army during the Whites' advance towards Moscow in the autumn of 1919. The peasants believed that a White victory would reverse their own revolution on the land. It was only after the final defeat of the Whites that the peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks assumed mass proportions. This same 'defence of the revolution' also helps to explain the fact that many workers, despite their complaints against the Bolsheviks, rallied behind the Soviet regime during Yudenich's advance towards Petrograd.

  At the root of the Whites' defeat was a failure of politics. They proved unable and unwilling to frame policies capable of getting the mass of the population on their side. Their movement was based, in Wrangel's phrase, on 'the cruel sword of vengeance'; their only idea was to put the clock back to the 'happy days' before 1917; and they failed to see the need to adapt themselves to the realities of the revolution. The Whites' failure to recognize the peasant revolution on the land and the national independence movements doomed them to defeat. As Denikin was the first to acknowledge, victory depended on a popular revolt against the Reds within central Russia. Yet that revolt never came. Rather than rallying the people to their side the Whites, in Wrangel's words, 'turned them into enemies'.48

  This was partly a problem of image. Although Kolchak and Denikin both denied being monarchists, there were too many supporters of a tsarist restoration within their ranks, which created the popular image — and gave ammunition to the propaganda of their enemies — that they were associated with the old regime. The Whites made no real effort to overcome this problem with their image. Their propaganda was extremely primitive and, in any case, it is doubtful whether any propaganda could have overcome this mistrust. In the end, then, the defeat of the Whites comes down largely to their own dismal failure to break with the past and to regain the initiative within the agenda of 1917. The problem of the Russian counter-revolution was precisely that: it was too counter-revolutionary.

  With the defeat of the Whites the Old Russia of Prince Lvov had finally been buried. 'My heart bleeds', he wrote to Rodichev in November 1920, 'for my distant and unhappy native land. It pains me to think of the torments being suffered there by my friends and relatives — and indeed by all the people.'

  In 1918 Lvov had insisted on the need to fight the Reds by military means. He had not believed in the possibility of a democratic movement within Russia. Yet by 1920 even he had come to see that this was wrong. 'We were mistaken to think that the Bolsheviks could be defeated by physical force,' he wrote to Bakhmetev in November. 'They can only be defeated by the Russian people. And for that the Whites would need a democratic programme.'49

  ii Comrades and Commissars

  A shocking report landed on Lenin's desk in September 1919. It showed that the Smolny, citadel of the October Revolution, was full of corruption. 'Money flows freely from the coffers of the Petrograd Soviet into the pockets of the party leaders,' the head of its Workers' Section wrote to Lenin. For several months the Provisions Department had failed to release food to the workers' districts, and yet meanwhile from the back of the Smolny foodstuffs were being sold by the lorry-load to black-marketeers. 'The hungry workers see the well-dressed Tsarinas of the Soviet Tsars coming out with packets of food and being driven away in their cars. They say it's just the same as it was in the old days with the Romanovs and their Fraulein, Madame Vyrubova. They are afraid to complain to Zinoviev [the party boss in Petrograd] since he is surrounded by henchmen with revolvers who threaten the workers when they ask too many questions.' Shocked by this report, Lenin ordered Stalin, as the People's Commissar for State Control, to carry out an 'ultra-strict inspection of the Smolny offices'. He wanted it completed without the knowledge of Zinoviev or his officials. But Stalin refused to 'spy on comrades', claiming this would undermine the work of the party at a crucial moment of the civil war. It was typical of his attitude: the bonds of comradeship and the survival of the party were more important than any evidence of the abuse of power.50

  The incident was symptomatic of a general problem in the party: power was breeding corruption. This corruption was much more deep-rooted than the common or garden form of venality that grows in every government. The Bolsheviks were not like any Western party. They were more like a ruling class, similar in many ways to the nobility, with which Lenin himself often compared them. 'If 10,000 nobles could rule the whole of Russia — then why not us?' Lenin had once said. The comrades were indeed stepping into their shoes. Joining the party after 1917 was like joining the nobility. It brought preferment to bureaucratic posts, an elite status and privileges, and a personal share in the party-state. The ethos of the party dominated every aspect of public life in Soviet Russia, just as the ethos of the aristocracy had dominated public life in tsarist Russia. Perhaps this corruption was bound to happen in a party like

  the Bolsheviks whose own state-building in the civil war rested on the mass recruitment of the lower classes. In a social revolution, such as this, one of the main motives for joining the party was bound to be the prospect of self-advancement. But the problem was intensified by the fact that the Bolsheviks in office acted beyond any real control. It was, in effect, a clientele system, with powerful cliques and local networks of patronage and power beyond the control of any party organ in the capital. There were times when the Bolsheviks acted more like a local mafia than the ruling party of the largest country in the world.

  During the civil war the Bolshevik leaders turned a blind eye to such corruption. This was a time when the comrades were being called on to make great sacrifices for the revolution — many of them worked around the clock and showed a fanatical devotion to the party — and the odd indulgence seemed a small price to pay. In early 1918 Lenin himself had backed a plan to organize a special closed restaurant for the Bolsheviks in Petrograd on the grounds that they could not be expected to lead a revolution on an empty stomach. 'The workers will understand the necessity of it.'51 Since then the principle had been gradually extended so that, by the end of the civil war, it was also deemed that party members needed higher salaries and special rations, subsidized housing in apartments and hotels, access to exclusive shops and hospitals, private dachas, chauffeured cars, first-class railway travel and holidays abroad, not to mention countless other privileges once reserved for the tsarist elite.

  Five thousand Bolsheviks and their families lived in the Kremlin and the special party hotels, such as the National and the Metropole, in the centre of Moscow. The Kremlin's domestic quarters had over 2,000 service staff and its own complex of shops, including a hairdresser and a sauna, a hospital and a nursery, and three vast restaurants with cooks trained in France. Its domestic budget in 1920, when all these services were declared free, was higher than that spent on social welfare for the whol
e of Moscow. In Petrograd the top party bosses lived in the Astoria Hotel, recently restored to its former splendour after the devastations of the revolution as the First House of the Soviets. From their suites, they could call for room service from the 'comrade waiters', who were taught to click their heels and call them 'comrade master'. Long-forgotten luxuries, such as champagne and caviar, perfume and toothbrushes, were supplied in abundance. The hotel was sealed to the public by a gang of burly guards in black leather jackets. In the evening government cars were lined up by the entrance waiting to take the elite residents off to the opera or to the Smolny for a banquet. 'Grishka' Zinoviev, the 'Boss of Petrograd', often came and went with his Chekist bodyguards and a string of assorted prostitutes.52

  The top party leaders had their own landed estates requisitioned from the tsarist elite. Lenin occupied the estate of General Morozov at Gorki, just

  outside Moscow. Trotsky had one of the most resplendent estates in the country: it had once belonged to the Yusupovs. As for Stalin, he settled into the country mansion of a former oil magnate. There were dozens of estates dotted around the capital which the Soviet Executive turned over to the party leaders for their private use. Each had its own vast retinue of servants, as in the old days.53