by Will Podmore
The October revolution was a democratic act, not the work of a minority. It was not a conspiracy or a coup. In the revolutionary days of 24-26 October, fewer than 15 people were killed. But on 28 October, there was a massacre – counter-revolutionary Cadet forces killed 500 unarmed soldiers of the captured Kremlin garrison. After the revolution, the Bolshevik forces swiftly defeated the counter-revolution. American historian Frederick Schuman judged, “[C]ontrary to the impression which soon became current in the West, the Soviet Government between November and June, 1917-18, established itself and pursued its program with less violence and with far fewer victims than any other social revolutionary regime in human annals.”27 There was no civil war until May 1918 when the Czech Legion, 60,000 POWs freed by the Soviet government, attacked Soviet forces.
If the Bolsheviks had not taken power, a parliamentary democracy would not have resulted. The class forces that backed Kornilov and the other counter-revolutionary generals would have reimposed absolutism. In the regions that the White generals governed, power moved fast from non-Bolshevik Soviets to anti-Soviet socialist régimes, then to socialist-liberal coalitions, then to the forces of counter-revolution. If the White generals had won, they would have enforced a dictatorship, just as General Francisco Franco did after the 1936-39 war in Spain.
By late 1917, the two alliances of rival empires had killed at least 10 million people and wounded 20 million. So when the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war a year early, they saved millions of lives, as well as helping to end the war. Even so, Russia had lost two million killed, five million wounded and 2.5 million POWs – more than any other belligerent and more than the other Allies’ total losses.
In the famous peace decree of 8 November 1917, a year and three days before the general armistice, the Soviet government “proposes to all belligerent nations and their governments to commence immediately negotiations for an equitable and democratic peace.”28 But the British and French governments refused to send representatives to the peace conference at Brest-Litovsk held in January and February 1918.
At the peace talks, Leon Trotsky, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, disobeyed the Soviet government’s order to sign the peace agreement. He ‘refused to listen’ to the warning from Major-General Max Hoffmann, the Chief of the General Staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the East, that Germany would resume the war.29 Trotsky said, “They [the Germans] will be unable to make an offensive against us. If they attack us, our position will be no worse than now …”30 Even Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher commented, “Not without reason, he was blamed for having lulled the party into false security by his repeated assurances that the Germans would not dare to attack.”31 Trotsky told the German and Austrian generals, “We are issuing an order for the full demobilisation of our army.”32 As Lenin told him, “If there is war, we should not have demobilised. … History will say that you have delivered the revolution [to the enemy]. We could have signed a peace that was not at all dangerous to the revolution.”33 Trotsky later admitted that “his plan had been to disrupt the negotiations and thus provoke a German offensive.”34 His actions were clearly treachery.35
The Soviet government promptly sacked Trotsky, but the damage was done. German and Austrian armies seized 1,267,000 square miles of land (equal in size to Germany and France combined), including all Ukraine, all the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces, southern Russia, a third of Russia’s crop area, three-quarters of her coal and iron, and over half her industrial plants. When they occupied Ukraine, they restored land to the landlords, seized food, military and industrial supplies, and imposed martial law, all the while promising not to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs. They aided the coup by General Skoropadsky, the leader of the Ukrainian Landowners’ Party, which killed 50,000 Ukrainians.36
But the German army became over-extended on this Eastern front and the Bolshevik party’s peace efforts undermined German soldiers’ morale. In October, the German General Staff decided not to move its 27 divisions on the Eastern front to the Western front. As Hoffmann explained, “Immediately after conquering those Bolsheviks, we were conquered by them. Our victorious army on the Eastern Front became rotten with Bolshevism. We got to the point where we did not dare to transfer certain of our eastern divisions to the West.”37 These 27 divisions might have prolonged the World War for months, but, as American journalist Louis Fischer commented, “sinister Communist propaganda spared the world this additional slaughter.”38
The war of intervention, 1918-21
In March, British troops occupied Murmansk. In April, British and Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok. Also in April, the British government sent troops to Central Asia to fight alongside Turkmen tribesmen against the Soviet government. (A year later, the British government withdrew these troops, although it continued to arm the rebels, who were only finally defeated in 1929.) In May, the Czech Legion started the war by attacking Soviet government forces.
Also in May, the Right Social Revolutionary party conference agreed to try to overthrow the Soviet government and set up a government willing to continue the world war. In July, SRs killed the German Ambassador, tried to seize power in Moscow and organised revolts in Yaroslavl, Murom, Nizhny Novgorod, Ekaterinburg, Penza and Vyatka. Fanny Kaplan, a member of the SRs, shot and wounded Lenin on 30 August. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British government representative in Moscow, kept Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon informed about his plot with Boris Savinkov: “Savinkov’s proposals for counter-revolution. Plan is how, on Allied intervention, Bolshevik barons will be murdered and military dictatorship formed.”39 Curzon replied, “Savinkoff’s methods are drastic, though if successful probably effective, but we cannot say or do anything until intervention has been definitely decided upon.”
From 1918 to 1921, fourteen states, led by the British, French and US governments, attacked Russia, backing Admiral Kolchak, General Denikin and General Yudenich. This was not a civil war, as the huge scale of foreign intervention proved. Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1918, observed, “In St James’s Palace is sitting the League of Nations, their principal business being the limitation of armaments. In Downing Street is sitting the Allied Conference of Lloyd George, Millerand, Nitti and a Japanese, who are feverishly arming Finland, Baltic States, Poland, Romania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Persia, etc.”40 War Minister Winston Churchill later asked, “Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war - shocking! Interference - shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial - Bang!”41
The Lloyd George government organised the intervention, armed the invading forces and led the drive to cut Russia off from all trade. This blockade, like all blockades, targeted civilians. The Allies’ wartime blockade of Germany, maintained until mid-1919, caused an estimated 500,000 famine-related deaths. The War of Intervention caused 7-10 million deaths, mostly civilians, largely through famine and disease.
Between October 1918 and October 1919, the Lloyd George government spent £94,830,000 on intervening in Russia.42 It sent Kolchak’s forces in the east 97,000 tons of supplies, including 600,000 rifles, 346 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 6,831 machine guns, 192 field guns, and clothing and equipment for 200,500 men. Alfred Knox, a military attaché at the British embassy in Russia from 1911 to 1918, wrote, “Since about the middle of December [1918] every round of rifle ammunition fired on the front has been of British manufacture, conveyed to Vladivostok in British ships and delivered at Omsk by British guards.”43 As Churchill told the House of Commons, “In the main these armies are equipped by British munitions and British rifles, and a certain portion of the troops are actually wearing British uniforms.”44 Kolchak had 90
,000 Russian soldiers and 116,800 foreign troops, including 1,600 British, 7,500 American, 55,000 Czechoslovakian, 10,000 Polish and 28,000 Japanese. The Middlesex battalion escorted Kolchak everywhere and he always wore a British military greatcoat. Knox attended Kolchak’s state banquets where ‘God save the King’ was always sung straight after the Russian national anthem, ‘God save the Tsar’.
The British state also backed and funded Denikin’s army in south Russia. The British Military Mission to South Russia reported that the White recovery under Denikin after March 1919 ‘was due almost entirely to British assistance’. During 1919, the British government sent Denikin 198,000 rifles, 500 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 6,200 machine guns, 1,121 artillery pieces, 1.9 million shells, 60 tanks, 168 aircraft, 460,000 greatcoats and 645,000 pairs of boots. The British government let Denikin use three RAF flights, British planes flown by RAF pilots, which used mustard gas bombs. Churchill urged the use of chemical weapons, calling them, ‘The right medicine for the Bolshevist’.45
General Bridges, who oversaw the Military Mission’s withdrawal from Novorossisk, summed up the effects of Britain’s war of intervention, “From time immemorial the classic penalty for mixing in family quarrel had been a thick ear, and our ill-staged interference in the Russian civil war cost us some thousands of British soldiers’ lives and £100,000,000 in money, while we earned the bitter enmity of the Russian people for at least a decade … On the credit side I can think of nothing.”46
Polish forces attacked Russia in January 1919. The Times claimed, “The Bolsheviki have forced the Poles to take up arms by their advance into Polish territory. … The Bolsheviki are advancing toward Vilna.” But Vilna was in Soviet Lithuania, not in Poland. There had been no Russian ‘advance into Polish territory’. As American journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz commented on the press, “in the guise of news they picture Russia, and not Poland, as the aggressor.”47 In April, Polish troops seized Vilna and in August they occupied Minsk, deep inside Russia. By 2 December, Polish armies were more than 180 miles inside Russian territory. On 21 January 1920, The Times stated as fact this fiction: “The strategy of the Bolshevist military campaign during the coming Spring contemplates a massed attack against Poland, as the first step in a projected Red invasion of Europe and a military diversion through Turkestan and Afghanistan toward India.”48 On 29 January, the Soviet government, with Polish forces still 180 miles inside its borders, invited the Polish government to enter peace talks.
From 1917 to 1920, the New York Times headlined 18 times that Lenin had been overthrown, six times that he had fled, three times that he had been arrested and twice that he had been killed; Petrograd had been taken by the Whites ten times and burnt to the ground twice, its inhabitants had been massacred twice, starved to death constantly and revolted against the Bolsheviks ten times.49 On 28 December 1918, the New York Times’ headline was, ‘Ludendorf Chief of Soviet Army’.50 “[N]inety-one times was it stated that the Soviets were nearing their rope’s end, or actually had reached it.”51 The New York Times carried fourteen dispatches in January 1920 warning of Red Peril to India, Poland, Europe, Azerbaijan, Persia, Georgia and Mesopotamia.52 The dispatches were from ‘British military authorities’, ‘diplomatic circles’, ‘government sources’, ‘official quarters’, ‘expert military opinion’ and ‘well-informed diplomats’. But there followed no such invasions. Lippmann and Merz summed up, “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all.”53
In 1920, the French government supplied Poland with huge amounts of military aid. Polish forces attacked Russia again in April in an attempt to annex parts of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania, in coordination with General Wrangel’s offensive in the Crimea. Ex-Prime Minister Herbert Asquith said, “it was a purely aggressive adventure … It was a wanton enterprise.”54 British warships supported the Polish attack by shelling Black Sea towns. British and French leaders, who had refused to feed Soviet Russia unless she stopped defending herself against attack, sent food to Poland without any effort to stop its government’s aggression. 80,000-85,000 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner and held in POW camps. At least 16,000 Soviet POWs died from brutal treatment, hunger, disease and executions.
The White generals’ regimes had no economic basis for independent existence. The Soviet government kept control of Russia’s good farm land, factories and arsenals. Only aid from the intervening powers kept the White armies going for so long. The White Army of the North lasted only four months after the British government withdrew its support. Nor did the White armies have any political base. As the British government’s Committee to Collect Information on Russia acknowledged, “the political, administrative and moral bankruptcy of the White Russians gained for the Reds the active or tacit support of the majority of the Russian people in the civil war.”55 Sir Paul Dukes, formerly chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in Soviet Russia, wrote, “The complete absence of an acceptable programme alternative to Bolshevism, the audibly whispered threats of landlords that in the event of a White victory the land seized by the peasants would be restored to its former owners, and the lamentable failure to understand that in the anti-Bolshevist war politics and not military strategy must play the dominant role, were the chief causes of the White defeats.”56 Major General William Graves, the US commander-in-chief in Siberia, said, “At no time while I was in Siberia was there enough popular support behind Kolchak in eastern Siberia for him to have lasted one month if all allied support had been removed.”57 British General Edmund Ironsides admitted, “the majority of the population is in sympathy with the Bolsheviki.”58 One Russian White fighter later noted, “Our rear was a cesspool. We lost this war because we were a minority fighting with foreign help against the majority.”59 General Sir Brian Horrocks admitted, “the only reason that the Reds were victorious was that they did have the backing of the people.”60
Recent scholars agreed. Statiev pointed out, “After the Bolshevik government gave land to the peasants, the Red Army was always larger than the forces of all its opponents taken together, which shows that even during War Communism, most politically active peasants sided with the Bolsheviks.”61 Michael Hughes wrote that the Whites lost ‘because no individual or group among them managed to attract any genuine measure of popular support’.62 Clifford Kinvig noted, “the Reds also enjoyed more popular support than their opponents.”63 Edward Acton summed up that the Whites “were never able to mobilize more than a fraction of the number of men who fought for the Reds. Indeed, in a sense the Bolsheviks were saved by the preference of the vast majority of the population, including most of their socialist critics, for the Reds over the Whites. … any chance the Whites would attract popular support was ruled out by the social policies they adopted. Kolchak’s government smashed workers’ organizations and attempted to halt and reverse peasant land seizures offering no more than vague intimations of subsequent land reform.”64
Without popular support, the White forces resorted to terror. From the start, the generals waged a brutal war. General Wrangel boasted, “I ordered three hundred and seventy of the Bolsheviks to line up. They were all officers and non-commissioned officers, and I had them shot on the spot.”65 Kornilov also took no prisoners.66 The US commander-in-chief in Siberia said, “I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed a hundred people in eastern Siberia to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.”67
A representative of the Czech Legion said of Kolchak’s regime, “our army has been forced against its convictions to support a state of absolute despotism and unlawfulness which had had its beginnings here under defense of the Czech arms. The military authorities of the Government of Omsk are permitting criminal actions that will stagger the entire world. The burning of villages, the murder of masses of peaceful
inhabitants and the shooting of hundreds of persons of democratic convictions and also those only suspected of political disloyalty occurs daily.”68
General Rozanov, Kolchak’s commander in Krasnoyarsk, western Siberia, ordered, “Burn down villages that offer armed resistance to government troops; shoot all adult males; confiscate all property, horses, carts, grain and so forth for the treasury.”69 General Budberg, who served in Kolchak’s war ministry, wrote in his diary, “The lads do not seem to realize that if they rape, flog, rob, torture and kill indiscriminately and without restraint, they are thereby instilling such hatred for the government they represent that the swine in Moscow must be delighted at having such diligent, valuable and beneficial collaborators …”70 Ralph Albertson, a British soldier, admitted, “night after night the firing squad took out its batches of victims.”71 The British Military Mission admitted that Kolchak’s troops ‘had undoubtedly been guilty of atrocities’.72
Schuman summed up, “The injuries inflicted upon Russia by the Western democracies between 1918 and 1921 not only exposed innocent millions to hideous suffering but disfigured the whole face of world politics for decades to come.”73
Socialism in one country
After the Soviet working class defeated the intervention, it had to build socialism in a ruined and backward country, isolated by the failure of the working classes of more advanced countries to make their own revolutions. It could rely only on its own resources: there was no chance of aid from the West.
Lenin urged, “Socialism is no longer a matter of the distant future, or an abstract picture, or an icon. We still retain our old bad opinion of icons. We have dragged socialism into everyday life, and here we must find our way. … we shall all - not in one day, but in the course of several years - all of us together fulfill it whatever happens so that NEP [New Economic Policy] Russia will become socialist Russia.”74 He also wrote, “As a matter of fact, state power over all large-scale means of production, state power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat, etc. - is not this all that is necessary for building a complete socialist society …?”75 As the British historian E. H. Carr commented, “Socialism in one country was a declaration of independence of the west … It was a declaration of faith in the capacities and in the destiny of the Russian people.”76