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

by Orlando Figes

  Inevitably, given the general breakdown of order, criminal elements also attached themselves to the peasant armies, looting property and raping women, a factor which later helped the Bolsheviks to divide the rebels from the local population.40

  The strength of the rebel armies derived from their close ties with the village: this enabled them to carry out the guerrilla-type operations which so confounded the Red Army commanders. What the Americans later learned in Vietnam — that conventional armies, however well armed, are ill-equipped to fight a well-supported peasant army — the Russians discovered in 1921 (and rediscovered sixty years later in Afghanistan). The rebel armies were organized on a partisan basis with each village responsible for mobilizing, feeding and equipping its own troops. In Tambov and parts of western Siberia the STKs, which were closely connected to the village communes, performed these functions. Elsewhere it was the communes themselves. The Church and the local SRs, especially those on the left of the party, also helped to organize the revolt in some regions, although the precise role of the SR leadership is still clouded in mystery.41

  With the support of the local population the rebel armies were, in the words of Antonov-Ovseenko, 'scarcely vulnerable, extraordinarily invisible, and so to speak ubiquitous'. Peasants could become soldiers, and soldiers peasants, at a moment's notice. The villagers were the ears and eyes of the rebel armies — women, children, even beggars served as spies — and everywhere the Reds were

  vulnerable to ambush. Yet the rebels, when pursued by the Reds, would suddenly vanish — either by merging with the local population, or with fresh horses supplied by the peasants which far outstripped the pursuing Reds. Where the Reds could travel thirty miles a day the rebels could travel up to a hundred miles. Their intimate knowledge of the local terrain, moreover, enabled them to move around and launch assaults at night. This supreme mobility easily compensated for their lack of artillery. They literally ran circles around the Reds, whose commanders complained they were 'everywhere'. Instead of engaging the Reds in the open, the rebels stuck to the remote hills and forests waiting for the right moment to launch a surprise attack before retreating out of sight. Their strategy was purely defensive: they aimed not to march on Moscow — nor even for the most part to attack the local towns — but to cut themselves off from its influence. They blew up bridges, cut down telegraph poles and pulled up railway tracks to paralyse the Reds. It was difficult to cope with such tactics, especially since none of the Red commanders had ever come across anything like them before. The first small units sent to fight the rebels were nearly all defeated — Tukhachevsky said their 'only purpose was to arm the rebels' — and they soon became demoralized. Many Reds even joined the rebels.42

  The aims and ideology of the revolts were strikingly uniform and reflect the common aspirations of the peasant revolution throughout Russia and the Ukraine. All the revolts sought to re-establish the peasant self-rule of 1917—18. Most expressed this in the slogan 'Soviet Power without the Communists!' or some variation on this theme. The same basic idea was sometimes expressed in the rather confused slogans: 'Long Live Lenin! Down with Trotsky!' or 'Long Live the Bolsheviks! Death to the Communists!' Many peasants were under the illusion that the Bolsheviks and the Communists were two separate parties: the party's change of name in February 1918 had yet to be communicated to the remote villages. The peasants believed that 'Lenin' and the 'Bolsheviks' had brought them peace, that they had allowed them to seize the gentry's land, to sell their foodstuffs freely on the market and to regulate their local communities through their own elected Soviets. On the other hand, they believed that 'Trotsky' and the 'Communists' had brought civil war, had taken away the gentry's land and used it for collective farms, had stamped out free trade with requisitioning and had usurped their local Soviets.

  Through the slogan of Soviet power, the peasant rebels were no doubt partly seeking to give their protest a 'legitimate' form. They sometimes called their rebel organs 'Soviets'. None the less, their commitment to the democratic ideal of the revolution was no less genuine for this pretence. All the peasant movements were hostile to the Whites — and it was significant that none of them really took off until after the Whites' defeat. Many of the rebel leaders (e.g. Makhno, Sapozhkov, Mironov, Serov, Vakhulin, Maslakov and Kolesov) had

  fought with the Reds, and often with distinction, against the Whites. Others had served as Soviet officials. Antonov had been the Soviet Chief of Police in the Kirsanov district until the summer of 1918, when, like the rest of the Left SRs, he had broken with the Bolsheviks and turned the district into a bastion of revolt. Sapozhkov, who led a rebel peasant army in the Novouzensk district of Samara during the summer of 1920, had formerly been the Chairman of the Novouzensk Soviet, a hero of its defence against the Cossacks and a leader of the Bolshevik underground in Samara against the Komuch. Piatakov, a peasant rebel leader in the neighbouring Saratov province, had been a Soviet provisions commissar. Voronovich, one of the rebel leaders in the Caucasus, had been the Chairman of the Luga Soviet in 1917. He had even taken part in the defence of Petrograd against Kornilov.43

  The peasants often called their revolts a 'revolution' — and that is just what they aimed to be. As in 1917, much of the rural state infrastructure was swept aside by a huge tidal wave of peasant anger and destruction. This was a savage war of vengeance against the Communist regime. Thousands of Bolsheviks were brutally murdered. Many were the victims of gruesome (and symbolic) tortures: ears, tongues and eyes were cut out; limbs, heads and genitals were cut off; stomachs were sliced open and stuffed with wheat; crosses were branded on foreheads and torsos; Communists were nailed to trees, burned alive, drowned under ice, buried up to their necks and eaten by dogs or rats, while crowds of peasants watched and shouted. Party and Soviet offices were ransacked. Police stations and rural courts were burned to the ground. Soviet schools and propaganda centres were vandalized. As for the collective farms, the vast majority of them were destroyed and their tools and livestock redistributed among the local peasants. The same thing happened to the Soviet grain-collecting stations, mills, distilleries, beer factories and bread shops. Once the rebel forces had seized the installation 'huge crowds of peasants' would follow in their wake removing piecemeal the requisitioned grain and carting it back to their villages. This reclamation of the 'people's property' — in effect a new 'looting of the looters' — helped the rebel armies to consolidate the support of the local population. But not all the rebels were such Robin Hoods. Simple banditry also played a role. Most of the rebel armies held up trains. In the Donbass region such holdups were said to be 'almost a daily occurrence' during the spring of 1921. Raids on local towns, and sometimes the peasant farmers, were another common source of provisions. The appearance of these rebel forces, with their vast herds of stolen livestock and their long caravans of military hardware, liquor barrels and bags of grain must have been very colourful. Antonov's partisans made off from Kniazeva in the Serdobsk district with the entire contents of the costumes and props department of the local theatre, complete with magic lanterns, dummies

  and bustles. One eye-witness described Popov's rebel army in the Volga town of Khvalynsk as a long train of machine-gun carriers each drawn by six horses:

  the carriers were covered with bloodstains and the horses were decorated with brightly coloured ribbons and material. Ten of the carriers also bore gramophones, while others carried barrels of beer and vodka. All day long the bandits sang and danced to the music and the town was taken over by an unimaginable din.44

  By March 1921 Soviet power in much of the countryside had virtually ceased to exist. Provincial Bolshevik organizations sent desperate telegrams to Moscow claiming they were powerless to resist the rebels and calling for immediate reinforcements. The consignment of grain to the cities had been brought to a virtual halt within the rebel strongholds. As the urban food crisis deepened and more and more workers went on strike, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were facing a revolutionary situation. Le
nin was thrown into panic: every day he bombarded the local Red commanders with violent demands for the swiftest possible suppression of the revolts by whatever means. 'We are barely holding on,' he acknowledged in March. The peasant wars, he told the opening session of the Tenth Party Congress on 8 March, were 'far more dangerous than all the Denikins, Yudeniches and Kolchaks put together'.45 Together with the strikes and the Kronstadt mutiny of March, they would force that Congress to abandon finally the widely hated policies of War Communism and restore free trade under the NEP. It was a desperate bid to stem the tide of this popular revolution. Having defeated the Whites, who were backed by no fewer than eight Western powers, the Bolsheviks surrendered to the peasantry.

  * * * The wave of workers' strikes that swept across Russia during February 1921 was no less revolutionary than the peasant revolts. Given the punishments which strikers could expect (instant dismissal, arrest and imprisonment, even execution), it was a brave act, an act of defiance, to stage a strike in 1921. Whereas earlier strikes had been a means of bargaining with the regime, those of 1921 were a last desperate bid to overthrow it.

  'Workers, you have nothing to lose but your chains!' Marx's dictum had never been more true. The militarized factory had enserfed the working class. Lacking enough foodstuffs to stimulate the workers, the Bolsheviks depended on coercion alone. Workers were deprived of their meagre rations, imprisoned, even shot, if their factories failed to meet the set production quotas. With the poor harvest and the growing reluctance of the peasantry to relinquish their grain, food stocks in the cities shrank to dangerously low levels during the winter of 1920—I. The disruption of transport by heavy snows made the situation

  worse. On 22 January the bread ration was cut by one-third in several industrial cities, including Moscow and Petrograd. Even the most privileged workers were given only 1,000 calories a day. Hundreds of factories across the country were forced to close their gates for lack of fuel. The Menshevik Fedor Dan saw starving workers and soldiers begging for food in the streets of Petrograd. Women queued overnight to buy a loaf of bread.46 It was reminiscent of the situation on the eve of the February Revolution.

  Moscow was the first to erupt. A rash of workers' meetings called for an end to the Communists' privileges, the restoration of free trade and movement (meaning their right to travel into the countryside and barter with the peasants), civil liberties and the Constituent Assembly. White flags were hung in the factories as a traditional mark of working-class protest. The Moscow printers took the lead: they had staged a similar protest in May 1920 and both the Mensheviks and SRs were strong within their union. But such was the general level of discontent that the protest movement needed little encouragement. The Bolsheviks sent emissaries to the factories to try to defuse the situation; but they were rudely heckled. According to one (rather questionable) report, Lenin himself appeared before a noisy meeting of metalworkers and asked his listeners, who had accused him of ruining the country, whether they would prefer to have the Whites. But his question drew an angry response: 'Let come who may — whites, blacks or devils — just you clear out.' By 21 February thousands of workers were out on strike. Huge demonstrations marched through the streets of the Khamovniki district and, after attempts to disperse the crowds had failed, troops were ordered in. But, as in February 1917, the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and special Communist detachments (ChON) had to be called in which killed several workers. The next day even bigger crowds appeared on the streets. They marched on the Khamovniki barracks and tried to get the soldiers out; but the soldiers were now locked inside and Communist detachments once again dispersed the crowds by force. On 23 February, as 10,000 workers marched in protest through the streets, martial law was declared in the capital.47

  Meanwhile, the strikes spread to Petrograd. Numerous factories held protest rallies on the 22nd. As in Moscow, the workers called for an end to the privileged rations of the Communists, the restoration of free trade and movement, and, under the influence of the Mensheviks and SRs, free re-elections to the Soviets and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Over the next three days thousands of workers came out on strike. All the biggest metal plants — the Putilov, Trubochny, Baltic and Obukhovsky — joined the movement, along with most of the docks and shipyards. It was practically a general strike. On the Nevsky Prospekt and Vasilevsky Island there were clashes between strikers and troops. Some of the soldiers fired on the workers, killing and wounding at least thirty, but several thousand soldiers, including the Izmailovsky and Finland

  Regiments, went over to the crowd. Even the sailors of the Aurora, that floating symbol of Bolshevik power, docked in the city for winter repairs, disembarked to join the demonstrations.

  It did not take a genius to realize that this was exactly the same situation that, four years before to the day, had sparked the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison which led to the downfall of the tsarist regime. The Bolsheviks were petrified of another mutiny and did everything they could to keep the soldiers in their barracks. They even took away their shoes, on the pretext of replacing them with new ones, to stop the soldiers going out. The city was placed under martial law on the 25th. All power was vested in a special Committee of Defence with Zinoviev at its head. The party boss, who was always inclined to panic in such situations, made a hysterical appeal to the workers, begging them to return to work and promising to improve their economic situation. Meanwhile the Cheka was arresting hundreds of strikers — together with most of the leading Mensheviks and SRs in the city — while thousands of others were locked out of their factories and thus deprived of their rations. All of which was bound to exacerbate the strikes. The workers now called openly for the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. On 27 February, the fourth anniversary of the revolution, the following proclamation appeared in the streets. It was a call for a new revolution:

  First of all the workers and peasants need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies.

  We demand the liberation of all arrested socialists and non-party working men; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press, and assembly for all who labour; free elections of factory committees, trade unions and Soviets.

  Call meetings, pass resolutions, send delegates to the authorities, bring about the realization of your demands.48

  That same day the revolt spread across the Gulf of Finland to the Kronstadt naval base: a real revolution now moved one step closer. In 1917 Trotsky had called the Kronstadt sailors the 'pride and glory of the Russian revolution'.* They were the first to call for Soviet power, and they played a key role in the events of October. Yet Kronstadt had always been a troublesome bastion of revolutionary maximalism. Its sailors were Anarchist as much as Bolshevik. What they really wanted was an independent Kronstadt Soviet Republic — a sort of island version of the Paris Commune — as opposed to a

  * The term had originally been used by the liberal press to describe Kerensky in 1917.

  centralized state. Until the summer of 1918 the Kronstadt Soviet was governed by a broad coalition of all the far-left parties. Its executive was chosen for its competence rather than its party, and was strictly accountable to the elected Soviets (or 'toiling collectives') on the naval base. Such democracy was intolerable to the Bolsheviks. They purged the Soviet of all the other parties and turned it into a bureaucratic organ of their state. The sailors soon became disgruntled. Although they fought for the Reds during the defence of Petrograd, in October 1919, they only did so to defeat the Whites, whom they saw as an even greater evil than the Bolsheviks. Once the civil war was over the sailors turned their anger on the Reds. They condemned their treatment of the peasantry. Many of the Kronstadt sailors came from the countryside — the Ukraine and Tambov were especially well represented — and were shocked by what they found there when they returned home on leave. 'Ours is an ordinary peasant farm,' wrote one of the Petropavlovsk crew in November 1920 after learning that his family's cow had been re
quisitioned; 'yet when I and my brother return home from serving the Soviet republic people will sneer at our wrecked farm and say: "What did you serve for? What has the Soviet republic given you?" ' The feudal lifestyle of the Communist bosses was another source of mounting resentment among both the sailors and the party rank and file. Raskolnikov, the Kronstadt Bolshevik leader of 1917, returned to the base in 1920 as the newly appointed Chief Commander of the Baltic Fleet and lived there like a lord with his elegant wife, the Bolshevik commissar Larissa Reissner, complete with banquets, chauffeured cars and servants. Reissner even had a wardrobe of dresses requisitioned for her from the aristocracy. Half the Kronstadt Bolsheviks became so disillusioned that they tore up their party cards during the second half of 1920.49

  When news of the strikes in Petrograd reached the Kronstadt sailors they sent a delegation to the city to report on their development. When they returned, on 28 February, the crew of the Petropavlovsk, previously a Bolshevik stronghold, raised their own banner of revolt with a proclamation calling for free Soviet elections, freedom of speech, press and assembly (albeit only for the workers and peasants, the left-wing parties and the trade unions), 'equal rations for all the working people', and 'freedom for the peasants to toil the land as they see fit' provided they did not use hired labour. Whereas the workers' resolutions called for the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly, the sailors remained opposed to this. It had been an Anarchist group of Kronstadt sailors who had forcibly closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. Their programme remained strictly Soviet in the sense that they aimed to restore their own multi-party Soviet of 1918. Moreover, unlike the peasant rebels, whose slogan was 'Soviets without the Communists!', they were even prepared to accept the Bolsheviks in this coalition provided they accepted the principles of Soviet democracy and renounced their dictatorship. This helps to explain why—