The use of terror and violence by both sides in the civil war is well illustrated by memoirs in the collection Arkhiv russkoi revolyutsii, published in Berlin in the 1920s. Former White officer V.Yu. Arbatov recalled: ‘The head of the Cheka in Yekaterinoslav, Valyavka, used to release a dozen or so prisoners into a small, high-walled yard at night. Valyavka himself with two or three comrades would go into the middle of the yard and open fire on these utterly defenceless people. Their cries could be heard throughout the town on those quiet May nights … The Whites were no better; they would loot any town they entered for a whole day.’13
If the period from October 1917 to March 1918 was what Lenin called ‘the victorious triumphal march of Bolshevism’,14 then from March, when Trotsky became War Commissar, began the long counter-revolutionary rebound. And if the ‘triumphal march’ was accompanied, in Lenin’s words, ‘less by military action than agitation’,15 then the counter-revolutionary wave was a bloody one. Every day Trotsky read reports of new uprisings, White advances, landings by intervention expeditionary forces sent by former allies of pre-Soviet Russia to stifle the revolution, the defection of entire units and garrisons. In the volume of his collected works devoted to the civil war, he called the period beginning in March 1918 ‘the first wave of the counter-revolution’.
There was the revolt led by Kaledin in the Don region, Dutov’s campaign in the Southern Urals, Dovbor-Musnitsky’s uprising in Belorussia, the German and Austro-Hungarian advance into Ukraine, the incursion by Turkish forces into the Transcaucasus, rebellions by Armenian Dashnaks and Azerbaijani Mussavatists. Little blue flags showing the locations of anti-Bolshevik forces were appearing in increasing numbers on the map hanging on the wall of Trotsky’s office. He was in constant consultation with representatives from the fronts, he called in former regular officers, telephoned Lenin in his efforts to do something to alter a situation that was rapidly becoming catastrophic. He formed a commission under his own chairmanship to discuss the creation of an army air force,16 and also concerned himself with land forces. He sent a telegram to his deputy, Ye.M. Sklyansky: ‘It is essential to start producing tanks in the Urals or in other plants, using tractor parts, if possible. The presence of a certain number of tanks on the southern front would have enormous psychological significance.’17 At a critical moment in the spring of 1919 Trotsky was prepared to take an appalling step. He cabled Moscow: ‘It is necessary to find a possible way of using asphyxiating gases. We must find a responsible person to head this responsible work.’18
Trotsky’s own responsibilities were extraordinarily wide-ranging—from setting up courses for camouflage19 to proposals for improving the purging of Soviet institutions locally and catching deserters,20 requisitioning a repair rail-car from the tsar’s former train for one of his aides,21 issuing orders to throw cowards out of the army,22 and sending the following telegram to Sverdlov, with a copy to Lenin: ‘I categorically insist Stalin be recalled. The Tsaritsyn front is going badly, despite superior forces.’23 The work of Trotsky’s department in those difficult days of spring and early summer 1918 bears the stamp of spontaneity and improvisation, if not simply chaos. The new regime was facing its worst moments. Only when Denikin was approaching Tula in 1919 would the situation seem worse. Meanwhile, there was the intervention of the British, French, American and Japanese forces at Murmansk, Archangel, in Turkestan, the Caucasus and Vladivostok, and the revolt of the Czech Legion.* New political formations made their appearance in the reports: in Samara there was the Committee of Members of the Constitutional Assembly, an SR government in Yekaterinburg, a Directory in Ufa, Hetman Skoropadsky, and many more. Trotsky later wrote of this period: ‘Could much more be needed to overthrow the revolution? Its territory was now reduced to the size of the ancient principality of Muscovy. It had hardly any army; it was surrounded by enemies on all sides. After Kazan would have come the turn of Nizhni-Novgorod, from which a practically unobstructed road lay open to Moscow.’24
On 29 July 1918 Lenin convened an extraordinary joint meeting of the VTsIK and the Moscow City Soviet, at which he made a speech on the present position, followed by Trotsky, whose speech was given the now-familiar tide ‘The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger’. Lenin declared that the Soviet Republic was again embroiled in a war foisted on it by internal and external counter-revolution. Since the future of the Republic depended on the outcome of this war, the slogan ‘Everything for the Front’, must be the top priority. Trotsky also spoke of the seriousness of the situation, but stressed the fact that it was not hopeless, and that the energy of the revolution had not yet dried up. Many of the solutions he proposed, however, were harsh, even savage.
‘Our Red Army units,’ he declared, ‘lack the necessary mental and fighting cohesion, as they don’t have the fighting experience … Here in this hall we are some 2000 people or more, and the overwhelming majority of us share the same revolutionary point of view. We are not a regiment, but if they made us into a regiment right now and armed us and sent us to the front, I don’t think we’d be the worst regiment in the world. Why? Is it because we are trained soldiers? No, it’s because we are united by a particular idea, inspired by the firm awareness that at the front history is putting the question point-blank, and we must either win or die right there.’25 He at once transformed this idea into a concrete proposition, that every army formation should have its own rock-hard Communist nucleus, what he called ‘the heart of the regiment and the company’. The most politically conscious workers, Communists and agitators should be sent to the front from Moscow, Petrograd and other cities. ‘The Petrograd Soviet,’ he announced, ‘has already decided to send a quarter of its staff, numbering about 200 members, to the Czechoslovak front as agitators, instructors, organizers, commanders and fighters.’
As for dissident ex-tsarist officers, ‘they must be curbed with an iron bit’. All former officers who refused to collaborate should be registered and ‘locked up in concentration camps’. If any officer with command rights should behave suspiciously, ‘then it stands to reason the accused—there can be no argument about it, the question is open and shut—must be shot … There is no one in the high command who should not have a commissar to the right and left of him, and if a specialist is not known to us as someone dedicated to the Soviet regime, then the commissars are duty-bound to keep a constant watch on him, not taking their eyes off him for a single hour. And if these commissars, standing to right and left with revolvers in their hands, see that specialist falter and betray, then he must be shot in good time.’26 ‘The commissar’s right of the revolver,’ Trotsky said, was no more than the inevitable expression of ‘the severity of the proletarian dictatorship’.27
After Lenin and Trotsky had made their speeches, a resolution drafted by Trotsky was passed, reflecting his arguments and proposals. In these harsh times, he and Lenin were in their element.
Head of the Revolutionary War Council
When the revolution, in Trotsky’s words, reached ‘its lowest point’, the VTsIK issued a special decree on 2 September 1918 declaring that the socialist Fatherland was in danger and the Soviet Republic a military camp. The same decree created the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic, the supreme military-political organ. Sverdlov proposed Trotsky as chairman. A few weeks earlier, Trotsky and a group of Communist agitators had travelled to the eastern front, where the position was close to catastrophic. Simbirsk, and then Kazan, had fallen to the Whites. Trotsky’s train could get no further than Sviyazhsk, a large station before Kazan. Throughout the journey from Moscow he had conferred with the other leaders, giving instructions on what military and organizational measures they must take. During one such meeting, a Communist worker asked: ‘What’s to be done with Left SR commissars, and how should we regard them in general?’ Without hesitating, Trotsky repeated what he had said on 9 July 1918 at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets: ‘The party, led by a small clique, that could be so insane as to oppose the will and the consciousness of the overwhel
ming majority of workers and peasants, killed itself off forever on 6 and 7 July. That party cannot be resurrected!’ ‘Does that mean we get rid of all of them?’ the excitable agitator asked. ‘Leave only those who publicly condemn the [Left SR] uprising and break with the adventurists!’
At the Fifth Congress of Soviets, Trotsky had been charged by Lenin with explaining the uprising of the Left SRs: ‘Should the whole party be blamed for the actions of its leaders?’ Such leaders, he said, were foolish and ignorant. ‘Comrade Lenin has spoken here of Spiridonova as a most honest person, a sincere person. But woe to the party whose most honest people have to resort to slander and rabble-rousing in the struggle!’ By demanding a renewed war with Germany, they were trying to fool the masses. But ‘the regime is now facing the most critical question, the question of war and peace. If the regime cannot answer this question, and a bunch of rogues think they can, then we have no power.’
To a hushed audience in the Bolshoi Theatre, Trotsky outlined the details of the Left SR uprising. A contingent of 2000 men, some guns and around sixty machine-guns, had seized the telegraph office and the People’s Commissar for Posts, Podbelsky, held Dzerzhinsky and opened random fire on the Kremlin: ‘When we saw some, fortunately only a few, of their shells fall into the precinct, we thought to ourselves, the Sovnarkom is a natural trap for the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.’ Bolshevik units, he went on, were posted at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, on Passion Square at Pushkin’s monument, on Arbat Square and in the Kremlin. Seven days later, after Podvoisky, Muralov and Vatsetis had done their work, the insurgents moved away towards Kursk Station. Units which had come from Petrograd and the western border provinces to help the insurgents were disarmed without incident. The only small skirmish took place at the Corps of Pages, where a Left SR unit was disarmed: ten Bolsheviks were killed and ten injured.28
Thus ended the brief alliance between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs. Trotsky proposed, and the Congress passed, a resolution declaring that henceforth there could be no place for Left SRs in Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.29 Many aspects of the affair were left unexplained. For instance, on whose orders did the Left SR Blyumkin assassinate the German Ambassador Count Mirbach on 6 July 1918? Was it a decision of the Left SR Central Committee? Why was there no proper investigation? One thing is plain, and that is that the assassination gave Lenin the chance to settle the score with the Left SRs. In a telegram to Stalin in Tsaritsyn, Lenin gave the order to start mass terror against them.
All that, however, was in the past. Now, Trotsky had to try to make a breakthrough or expect the worst and to die in the last battle. In his memoirs of this time he wrote:
The army at Sviyazhsk was made up of detachments which had retreated from Simbirsk and Kazan, and of assisting units rushed in from all directions. Each unit lived its own distinct life, sharing in common only a readiness to retreat—so superior were the enemy in both organization and experience. Some White companies, made up exclusively of officers, performed miracles. The soil itself seemed to be infected with panic. Fresh Red detachments, arriving in vigorous mood, were immediately engulfed by the inertia of retreat. A rumour began to spread among the local peasantry that the Soviets were doomed. Priests and tradesmen lifted their heads. The revolutionary elements in the village went into hiding. Everything was crumbling; there was nothing to hold to. The situation seemed hopeless.30
Even before his arrival at Sviyazhsk, on 8 August Trotsky had dictated his Order No. 10:
The struggle with the Czecho-White Guards is taking too long. Slovenliness, carelessness and faint-heartedness in our ranks are our enemies’ best allies. In the War Commissar’s train, where this order is being written, there is a Military Revolutionary Tribunal which has unlimited powers. Comrade Kamenshchikov, whom I have made responsible for defending the Moscow-Kazan railway line, has seen to the creation of concentration camps at Murom, Arzamas and Sviyazhsk, where shady agitators, counter-revolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators will be locked up, except for those who will be shot at the scene of the crime or sentenced by the tribunals to other punishment.31
In a telegram to the Revolutionary War Council of the Eastern Front, Lenin declared: ‘The entire fate of the revolution now stands on one card: a quick victory over the Czechoslovaks on the Kazan-Urals-Samara front.’32 The Supreme War Council was sending everything it could find to the eastern front. The former tsarist generals on the Supreme War Council, who readily collaborated in repelling external enemies, participated less willingly in organizing campaigns against the internal counter-revolution. Lenin rebuked the Council for their delay and demanded the despatch of trained units. By the time Trotsky arrived 11,500 men had been shipped there, plus nineteen field guns, 136 machine-guns, sixteen aircraft, six armoured trains and three armoured cars.33 This was as much as the beleaguered Soviet Republic could do, but Trotsky knew well that the Red Army was facing significantly superior forces: 50,000 bayonets and sabres, up to 190 field guns and twenty armed river vessels.34 Trotsky agreed with the advice of the specialists to shift from the unit form of organization to the old, classical arrangement of three divisions, a cavalry corps and an air squadron to each regiment. By the end of August five armies had been formed on the eastern front, numbering in all about 70,000 men, more than 250 field guns and over 1000 machine-guns.35
While I.I. Vatsetis was engaged in reorganizing the eastern front for a counter-offensive, a White brigade under Colonel V.O. Kappel carried out a raid on the rear of 5th Army and also attacked Sviyazhsk, from where a route to the centre of the country could be opened up. Trotsky’s train was at Sviyazhsk. ‘This move caught us quite off our guard,’ he later recalled. ‘We were afraid to disrupt the already shaky front, and so we withdrew only two or three companies. The commander of my train again mobilized everyone he could lay his hands on, both in the train and at the station, including even the cook. We had a good stock of rifles, machine-guns and hand-grenades. The train crew was made up of good fighters. The men took their posts about a [kilometre] from the train. The battle went on for about eight hours, and both sides had losses. Finally, after they had spent themselves, the enemy withdrew. Meanwhile the break in the connection with Sviyazhsk had stirred up Moscow and the whole line.’36
On Trotsky’s orders, a field court martial sentenced every tenth deserter to death, including the regimental commander and commissar. In defending his decision to have them executed, Trotsky stressed as late as 1927 that they had been shot not as Communists, but as deserters. A special commission exonerated him. Nevertheless, throughout the civil war, and after it, rumours circulated to the effect that Trotsky had personally executed commissars and commanders.
When Trotsky managed to communicate this event to Lenin, having been cut off for some time, Lenin replied in a coded cable: ‘I received your letter. If there is superiority and the soldiers are fighting, then special measures should be taken against the high command. Shouldn’t we tell them that henceforth if there is delay and failure we’re going to apply the model of the French revolution and put Vatsetis on trial and even execute him, as well as the army commander at Kazan and the top commanders? I advise you to bring in many known energetic and militant people from [Petrograd] and other places on the front.’37
Trotsky evidently felt that Lenin’s radical telegram had been provoked by his news about Kappel’s breakthrough. Whether or not his actions caused in him a conflict of reason and conscience, the fact is that neither Vatsetis nor the commander of 5th Army was charged. In any case, next day Trotsky was handed a telegram from Sverdlov informing him that Lenin had been wounded in an assassination attempt, how dangerously was not yet known, that the country was calm and that Trotsky should come to Moscow at once.38 There he found the Party leaders in a sullen mood, ‘but they were absolutely unshakeable. The best expression of this determination was Sverdlov. The physicians declared that Lenin’s life was not in danger, and promised an early recovery. I encouraged the Pa
rty with the prospects of success in the east, and returned at once to Sviyazhsk.’39
In his ‘encouraging’ speech to the Party on 2 September 1918, Trotsky declared:
A new front has been created alongside those which we already have—in Vladimir Ilyich’s chest cavity, where even now life is struggling against death and where, as we hope, the struggle will end in victory for life. On our military fronts victory takes turns with defeat; there are many dangers, but all the comrades undoubtedly recognize that this front, the Kremlin front, is now the most worrying … As for the front I have just come from, I regret to say I cannot report decisive victories, but I can say with complete confidence that there are victories ahead; that our position is strong and steady; that a decisive break-through has taken place; that we are now insured against major surprises, and each week will strengthen us at the expense of our enemies.40
Trotsky remained himself: as long as there was the smallest chance, he was optimistic. And he soon fulfilled his promise of victory. On 5 September he approved an order by the front commander to commit two armies to a counter-offensive.
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