A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

16 War and Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 was one of the many consequences of the First World War. The war placed strains on the Russian state and society that neither could withstand. The result was six years of war and upheaval that created the Soviet Union.

WAR

Russia’s participation in the First World War was not an accident. After the Russo-Japanese War Russia’s foreign policy turned west. In 1907 Russia concluded the treaty with its long time rival, Great Britain, to establish a condominium over Iran. The Russians took control of the northern part of the country down to Teheran, and the British the south. This compromise put an end to Anglo-Russian imperial competition in Asia, and meant that Russia was now effectively allied with Britain as well as France. The only imaginable enemies were Germany and Austria. The agreement over Persia set the stage for 1914, but it was imperial rivalries in the Balkans that provided the spark for the explosion. There, Russia faced a resurgent Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria and Bulgaria tagging along. At this point Russia’s only ally was tiny Serbia, which stood right in the way of Austro-German expansion in the south. A series of Balkan crises in these years repeatedly showed Russia’s weakness in the area: it had no formal allies other than Serbia and none of the informal power that came from business ties established by the Germans and Austrians as well as the French and British. When Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, Vienna issued an ultimatum to Serbia and Russia had to back up Serbian resistance. Russia’s basic credibility was at stake, and the result was war. It had not sought the war, but had drifted into the crisis as it was doing in so many other areas.

If the government of the Russian Empire after the death of Stolypin merely drifted on the current of events, neither Russian society nor the revolutionary movement demonstrated such passivity. The years just before the First World War were years of dynamic economic growth for the islands of modern industry in the sea of rural backwardness. Industrial development meant growth in the size and to some extent in the sophistication of the working class, and the revolutionary parties were poised to make use of it. In some places the workers turned to strikes again. In 1912 on the Lena River in Siberia, several hundred workers perished when soldiers and police suppressed a strike at the English-owned gold fields. About this time the revolutionary parties had recovered from defeat in 1905–1907. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs were all reasonably well organized, and the labor movement recovered. In the spring of 1914 a wave of strikes swept St. Petersburg, one where the Bolsheviks for the first time seemed to be in the lead, not the Mensheviks or SRs. The rest of the country was relatively quiet, however, and the news of war hit Russia like a thunderbolt. Russia had actually devoted much effort to rebuilding its army and navy since the war with Japan, and one of the many factors encouraging the German General Staff and the Kaiser to push for immediate war was the fear that Russia would be much harder to defeat in only a few years. That being said, both planning and equipment were still deficient. At the insistence of the tsar huge sums had gone to rebuilding the Baltic Fleet, which in the event was far too small to challenge the German navy and never left port. Russia’s armaments industry was still inadequate to supply a modern army and its transport network, adequate for peacetime, was too small for rapid mobilization and supply of the army on the western frontier. To make matters worse, the rapid advance of the German army through Belgium and France created a crisis at the front. Under heavy French pressure the Russians dealt with the crisis by sending an unprepared army into East Prussia, an expedition that ended in defeat at Tannenberg in August 1914. Thus, Russia began the war with a defeat.

At home the war produced an orgy of patriotism at first. To universal acclaim the government changed the German name St. Petersburg to Petrograd, a Russian translation, more or less, of the same. Liberals and reactionaries in the Duma united on a war platform and the intelligentsia, like their counterparts farther west, poured out a flood of anti-enemy propaganda and nationalist ravings. The workers as well were swept up in the fever and the strike movement in the capital evaporated. The police came down hard on the revolutionary parties, particularly on the Bolsheviks, and within days their leaders inside Russia disappeared into prison and Siberian exile. Stalin was among them. The Bolsheviks were the particular object of the government’s wrath because of their position on the war, a position that transformed an obscure Marxist group into a world movement that fundamentally reordered the twentieth century. For it was out of Lenin’s reaction to the war, not as a response to the later Russian Revolution, that Communism was born.

Before 1914 the European Socialist parties had repeatedly pledged at their international meetings to oppose all wars among the European states as inimical to the interests of the working class. These were large powerful parties with mass membership, control of major labor unions, and elaborate social and cultural services, utterly unlike Lenin’s little band of underground fighters. As the declarations of war came thundering out of the governments in July and August 1914, the expectation was that the socialists would likely oppose the war, and even go on strike, as they had threatened earlier, in order to stop it. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, almost to a man the socialist leaders came out for the war, and joined the chorus of patriotism and hate in their respective countries. The few that dissented felt bound by party discipline to keep silent and follow the leadership. Among the Russians, the elderly founder of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, came out in support of the war, and the Mensheviks adopted a compromise position, not calling for Russian victory but not opposing the war. Alone among the European Socialists, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and a handful of dissident Mensheviks like Trotsky opposed the war from the first day.

Lenin was no pacifist, and his program on the war was not just to oppose it. He proclaimed that the defeat of the Russian Empire would be the best outcome for Russia and called for all socialists, in Russia and elsewhere, to turn the international war into a civil war. In other words, he was calling for armed insurrection in wartime. This position seemed to him the only correct Marxist attitude, but why did so few of the European Socialists agree? They had, he thought, betrayed the working class they were supposed to lead, but why? In despair at the future, Lenin turned to Marxist theory to try to understand what had happened. He reread Aristotle’s Metaphysics (in Greek; he was a product of the Russian gymnasium) and Hegel’s Science of Logic to try to recapture the original sense of dialectics as Hegel and Marx understood it. He also made a long study of recent economic developments. His aim was to understand the support for the war by the European Socialists. His conclusion was that the answer lay in imperialism, in the superwealth generated by the European empires in Africa and Asia, fuelled by the ever-growing concentration of capital. Empire was the real aim of the warring powers, concealed under a deceptive jargon about freedom or national honor. Wealth from empire also produced a labor aristocracy, happy with the status quo and thus unwilling to cause trouble in wartime. In the short term, it would benefit from imperialism. Both conclusions would have enormous effects after the Russian Revolution, but for the moment the reading did little more than keep Lenin busy while the world slipped deeper into the bloody swamp of war.

As the casualties piled up in the millions, opposition to the war began to surface among the socialists in Western Europe. The first to break ranks were the left wing of the German Social-Democrats, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and their followers, who voted against the war credits in the Reichstag in December 1914. Soon the anti-war socialists held small meetings in Switzerland to call for an end to the war and discuss tactics, and even here Lenin, with his uncompromising call for revolution, was in the minority. The Russian Bolsheviks for the first time came to the attention of the world, as a tiny band of revolutionaries who stuck to their position even though it seemed to doom them to isolation and defeat. Their position began to attract support among Western socialists, and out of these small groups meeting in Switzerland came a world movement with decisive consequences for Russia as well as for China, Vietnam, and other countries as well.

The consequences of these obscure meetings lay in the distant future. Back in Russia, the situation gradually deteriorated and offered no comfort to either the tsar and his government or the Bolsheviks. At the start of the war Nicholas suspended the Duma, hoping to rule alone. The initial defeat in East Prussia was followed in spring, 1915, by a general Russian retreat from Poland, and this retreat finally led to a government crisis. The Duma was recalled over the summer, and the Kadets and moderate conservatives managed to put together a “Progressive Bloc” that offered to cooperate in the war effort with the government. Ultimately the government did have to call on the zemstvos and various committees of businessmen to resolve the crises in supply, but only reluctantly and too late. New agencies appeared to regulate the economy for the war, as in Germany and other warring powers, but Russia lacked the infrastructure to make them work. The government regulated grain prices to supply the army and cities with cheap food, but the result was that the peasants began to cut back on their sowing, and food production began to fall, worsening the situation.

In late 1915 Nicholas himself took over command of the army, moving from Petrograd to the Stavka, the army headquarters near Mogilev. His move did the army no good and only further disorganized government in the capital, for he remained the sole authority and now it was even harder to get his attention. His repeated consultation with Empress Alexandra and Rasputin probably did not have much impact on policy but served to further alienate the public. The Russian army had mixed successes, for it could do little against the Germans but scored a major victory against Austria in 1916 (the “Brusilov Offensive” led by General Aleksei Brusilov) and against the Turks. Erzerum in eastern Anatolia fell to General Nikolai Yudenich the same year. These successes could not change the general stagnation in the war nor stop the bloodshed. Russia’s casualties mounted toward some two million dead, two-and-a-half million wounded, and five million prisoners of war. In the Duma the Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov spoke of treason in high places (a reference to the Empress Alexandra, among others) and then in December 1916, a group of young aristocrats fearful of the fate of the monarchy assassinated Rasputin. Inviting him to dinner, they first fed him heavily poisoned food and wine, and then when that had no effect on his massive frame, they shot him and put him under the ice of the St. Petersburg canals. Rasputin was gone, and the monarchy soon followed.

In many respects the fall of the Romanov dynasty was almost an anticlimax. In late February 1917, the worsening food situation in St. Petersburg led to long lines at bakeries and other food stores in working class parts of the city. On International Women’s Day (February 23/March 8; a socialist holiday) many women workers, exhausted by standing in the food lines on top of long work days, went out on strike. In a few hours the men in the factories heard the news and they went out on strike as well, soon shutting down the entire city. Students and the middle classes joined them. The government called out troops, who fired on the demonstrators, killing several dozen. The next day, however, the very same soldiers who had fired refused to fight and mutinied, taking other regiments with them, even the Cossacks. The ministers and the Duma sent increasingly desperate telegrams to the tsar, and Nicholas hurried back from the Stavka. Before he got to the capital he was met by representatives of the government who convinced him to abdicate. This he did, on March 2/15, and the monarchy abruptly came to an end.

REVOLUTION

Even before the tsar’s abdication two new governments were forming in Petrograd. As the tsar’s government collapsed, the Duma leaders formed a Provisional Government led by Prince Georgii Lvov, the head of the Union of Zemstvos, a liberal country gentleman with a law degree and a record of service in the local councils and the Duma. His foreign minister was the leader of the Kadet party, the historian Pavel Miliukov. The only more or less radical voice was that of Aleksandr Kerenskii, a lawyer known for defense work in political trials and a member of the Duma’s “Labor Group,” agrarian socialists close to the right wing of the SRs. His father had been the principal of the high school in Simbirsk when Lenin was one of the pupils. These men were the flower of liberal Russia, broadly conceived, but as a group had no idea how to lead the masses and spent much of their time worrying about the reactions of Russia’s wartime allies, Britain, France, and soon the United States. Their preferred solution to all problems facing Russia was to call a Constituent Assembly to write a constitution for a democratic republic that would address the peasants’ desire for the land and the grievances of the workers. In the meantime they would pursue the war, hopefully to an allied victory over Germany.

The other “government” was the Petrograd Soviet. On Menshevik urging, the workers at nearly every factory in the city elected delegates to the city Soviet, which numbered nearly a thousand members. Its first act was “Order no. 1” that specified that the army was to be run by elected soviets of the soldiers, the officers having command only during operations. As the revolutionary parties came out into the open for the first time in Russian history, the Mensheviks and SRs, not the Bolsheviks, quickly asserted dominance in the Soviet in Petrograd and most other towns. The Menshevik tactic was to refuse support to the Provisional Government and simultaneously push it toward a more radical direction, a hopeless compromise position. Right at the start, the war had to be faced as an issue. While the Russian Mensheviks differed from most European socialists by arguing that the war should be ended without victory for either side, they had no workable plan to stop it, nor did they advocate an immediate socialist revolution. Their position did reflect real popular hostility to the war, and in May Miliukov and others had to leave the Provisional Government, for they wanted to push the war to a victorious end and the Soviet would not have that. Lvov organized a new government with several moderate socialists, including Kerenskii who was in charge of the army and navy, and started a new offensive at the front. Soviets were also formed in Moscow and other cities, in the army, and even in some parts of the countryside. They represented workers, soldiers, and peasants only, not the middle or upper classes. Reelected every few weeks, the local soviets reflected the popular mood very closely.

In all these deliberations during the first months of the revolution the Bolsheviks remained a minority in the soviets. Lenin heard of the fall of the tsar in Switzerland and managed to return to Russia through Germany, having convinced the German government that he was more of a threat to Russia’s war effort than to their own. He traveled in a train whose doors were sealed until he reached neutral Sweden, reaching Petrograd via Finland on April 3/16, 1917, to the tumultuous welcome of his followers. He found that the Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, had returned from exile and were beginning to organize themselves. They all lacked, however, a clear idea of what their platform ought to be. Lenin’s was absolutely clear, as expressed in the “April Theses.” The fall of the tsar, he wrote, meant that the bourgeois revolution, the one the party had aimed for in 1905, had ended. In the country there was now dual power, the soviets alongside the Provisional Government. The aim should now be the seizure of power by the proletariat with the aim of transforming Russia into a socialist society. The instrument of that seizure was to be the soviets, primarily the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. The immediate aim of the Bolsheviks was thus to secure a majority in the Petrograd and other soviets.

The story of the next few months is the story of the fulfillment of that goal. It was the situation of Russia that made it possible, for the whole country entered a major crisis. The collapse of the old government left little effective authority in its place, and much of that was cowed by the revolutionary crowd. In the villages the peasants simply took the land during the summer. In many places there was violence, but often they simply ignored the noble landowner and began to plow up his fields for their own. Sometimes they came to the mansions of the aristocrats and politely told them to leave. However it occurred, the peasant seizure of the land was a cataclysmic change in Russian society, in a few months putting an end to a social order that had lasted for centuries. Most nobles were no longer the masters of the land but impoverished refugees in the big cities. In the cities the workers used their new freedom to demand an eight-hour day, higher wages, and to form factory committees that tried to take control of the work place.

The left parties all came out into the open and tried to become mass organizations. The time of the revolutionary underground was over. At first the most successful were the SRs, with their traditions of direct action and appeal to the peasantry. For the first time they actually managed to organize significant numbers of peasants into their party, and their working class following was very large. They had one deep problem, however – the war. Even before 1917 some of the SRs had come out against the war, with a position very close to Lenin’s, but remained part of the larger party. As the crisis deepened over the summer of 1917, the split widened. The Mensheviks, always hoping to build a mass party in freer conditions, benefited enormously from the new freedom. When the soviets held their first congress of delegates from all of Russia in June, the SR’s and Mensheviks had nearly three hundred deputies each, and the Bolsheviks only a little more than a hundred. Moderation seemed to triumph, but the mood changed very fast.

The Bolsheviks for the first time were becoming a mass party, too. In place of the few thousand professional revolutionaries the party grew rapidly to over two hundred thousand, with the largest concentration in the large cities and in Petrograd in particular. These new members were overwhelmingly young factory workers, most under twenty-five. As more and more revolutionaries returned from abroad, the Bolsheviks also began to attract dissidents from the Mensheviks, the most important being Trotsky, whose opposition to the war brought him to join Lenin for the first time. Trotsky was a powerful orator, and his speeches were a major weapon in winning the masses to Bolshevism. The new members transformed the Bolshevik party, especially at the level of the rank and file, whose radicalism came to the fore in early July. The Petrograd Bolsheviks staged an armed demonstration that seemed to be turning into a bid for power. The Provisional Government, with support from the city soviet, was able to put it down and arrest many Bolshevik leaders. Lenin went into hiding in Finland and Trotsky landed in jail. In reaction to the events Kerenskii replaced Prince Lvov as prime minister. For a few weeks the revolutionary wave seemed to subside, but that was not to be. The war ground on, discontent in the army multiplied into a gradual collapse of discipline and Kerenskii replaced Brusilov with general Lavr Kornilov as commander in chief, hoping that Kornilov could restore order in the army. The task was beyond his powers. The transport net of the country, already weakened by the war, began to collapse, as did many essential industries and services. In the cities the soviets organized Red Guards, who contributed as much to disorder as to order. Revolutionary organizations and groups “expropriated” buildings for their own use, the most famous example being the Petrograd Soviet’s seizure of the buildings of the Smolnyi Institute in Petrograd, the aristocratic girls’ school founded by Empress Elizabeth. Thus it came to serve as the Bolshevik headquarters. For the middle and upper classes, it was the beginning of anarchy; for the workers, it was the dawn of a new world, chaotic, but their own. Endless discussion and meetings further disrupted factory work but also built a constituency for ever more radical demands. Life in Petrograd was feverish, and in the provinces only a bit calmer. Moscow and all towns and settlements with any industry boiled with meetings, speeches, and demonstrations. On the fringes of the country nationalist movements appeared with demands for autonomy. In Kiev groups of nationalist intellectuals and party activists proclaimed themselves the Ukrainian Rada (council) alongside the Provisional Government and the local soviets. Other groups formed in the Baltics and the Caucasus, though none of them advocated actual independence as yet.

The July days had put a crimp in the Bolshevik organization and its rise to dominance among the workers. Then at the end of August general Kornilov advanced on the capital with the Mountaineer Cavalry Corps consisting of the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus – Chechens and Circassians – to restore discipline and order in the country. In the face of this challenge Kerenskii had to turn to the Petrograd Soviet, which armed the workers. The Bolsheviks had grown in strength since the July Days. They were now crucial for the defeat of Kornilov, and their leaders emerged from jail into the open again. The inability of Kerenskii to defend the revolution on his own was the last blow to his power, and from the time of the defeat of Kornilov on September 1/14, the Provisional Government essentially drifted. The locus of action had shifted to the soviets. During and right after the Kornilov episode the Bolsheviks finally secured a majority in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. As the weeks advanced and the economic and military crisis continued to worsen, another Congress of Soviets met, again with delegates from all over the country. Here the divisions in the SR party were to play a decisive role, for the Bolsheviks had clearly won the majority of the city workers, but in the villages they had no organization at all. The left wing of the SR party, increasingly radicalized by the revolution and demanding an immediate end to the war, was prepared to join the Bolsheviks. On October 10/23, Lenin returned from hiding in Finland and assembled the Bolshevik leaders. With the support of Trotsky and Stalin, he overcame the pessimists in the leadership, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the Bolshevik Central Committee voted to seize power. With the votes of the Left SRs the Bolsheviks captured the leadership of the Congress of Soviets, and on October 25/November 7, 1917, the Red Guards moved on the Winter Palace to eject the Provisional Government. Only a few hundred defenders were left in the palace, officer cadets and the “Women’s Batallion of Death,” a unit formed of mostly middle-class women to fight in the war. On a signal from the naval cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva River, several thousand Red Guards in a fast walk through the autumn chill took the palace with minimal firing and casualties. Attempts at looting the wine cellar and the many treasures of the palace were quickly suppressed, and the ministers of the Provisional Government were escorted to prison in the St. Peter and Paul Fortress. Kerenskii escaped south in a US embassy car in a fruitless attempt to rally support at the front.

Relying on their majority in the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs now took power, proclaiming Russia a Soviet and Socialist Republic. The Mensheviks and Right SRs walked out of the Congress in protest as Trotsky consigned them to the “garbage heap of history.” The first actions of the Reds were to organize the new government. The Congress of Soviets elected a government of People’s Commissars with Lenin at the head and Trotsky as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. The other positions went to prominent Bolsheviks and Left SRs, the most significant among the former being Joseph Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities. Trotsky went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Choristers’ Bridge near the Winter Palace, turned off the lights, and told everyone to go home. For the next few months, he ran foreign policy from a small office in the Smolny Institute.

The new Soviet government came into power with great support from the workers and intense opposition from the old upper classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia. These divisions were reflected in the Constituent Assembly that convened on January 5/18, 1918. Called by the Provisional Government, the Assembly elections had proceeded through the autumn, before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power. In the cities the Bolsheviks routed the moderate socialists (SRs and Mensheviks) leaving the increasingly more conservative and nationalistic Kadets as the second urban party. In the countryside, however, the SRs emerged with the most votes, though most candidates had not declared whether they supported the left or right, muddying the result. The Assembly met for some thirteen hours, after which the Bolshevik guard of Red sailors from the navy simply told the deputies to leave and go home. They obeyed. A few days later another Congress of Soviet Deputies proclaimed the new state, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with ringing declarations of the rights of the workers, peasants, and national minorities.

CIVIL WAR AND SOVIET POWER

By this time civil war had already begun, as groups of military officers in southern Russia came together to organize resistance to the new government and discontent grew among the Don Cossacks. The Cossack leader Kaledin formed a Cossack government of sorts on the Don, and the Reds quickly moved against him. Through the Civil War the Cossacks were to be the foundation of resistance to Soviet power. Living on the southern and eastern fringes of Russia, they were no longer the rebels of the eighteenth century. They combined peasant farming with service in the army, and secure in possession of their land, they had been the tsar’s most loyal servants since the 1790s. The largest and most prosperous of the Cossack hosts was on the Don, and there was the fiercest resistance to the new order. At the same time the nationalist intellectuals in the Kiev Rada declared themselves to be the supreme power in the Ukraine. A Cossack-Ukrainian front seemed to be forming against the Reds in the south. A motley collection of red guards and sailors were enough to defeat both the Don Cossacks and the Rada by January 1918. At the same time chaos spread through the country, along with episodes of resistance elsewhere. At the end of December 1917, to meet these threats, Soviet authorities also formed the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Banditism and Counterrevolution, an organization that combined security police functions with a sort of political army. Its first head was a Polish Communist, Felix Dzerzhinskii, incorruptible and ruthless.

The quick defeat of opposition to the Bolsheviks did not mean that order returned. The war had ruined the Russian economy. Inflation was out of control and the transport networks and the distribution of food were breaking down. Heat and light disappeared in Petrograd and other big cities, and workers began to return to their native villages, if they could. In the former capital of the Russian Empire the lights went out in the great palaces, the nobility fled to the south to warmth and food, along with much of the intelligentsia and the middle classes. As the army disintegrated, millions of soldiers clogged the trains going home, taking with them rifles and hand grenades. Criminal gangs terrorized many cities. The first measures of the Bolsheviks only increased the disintegration, for the new government set out to build a new socialist state in the midst of chaos. The workers frequently interpreted socialism to mean that they should physically eject the factory owners and managers and elect committees of workers to run the plants. These committees had no way to procure supplies or distribute the goods, and in the general social chaos labor discipline collapsed. It was a vicious circle. The Bolsheviks went along with this for several months, as part of the need to dissolve the old order, but by spring of 1918, the collapsing economy and the needs of civil war caused them to reverse themselves and begin to appoint single managers, former workers or party activists, to run the factories. In theory these Red managers were accountable to the newly established Supreme Economic Council and the various People’s Commissariats (Industry, Trade, Agriculture, Labor, Food Supplies). Here was the embryo of the later Soviet state.

For the moment the Bolshevik priority was simple survival. The first order of business in November 1917 was the war, and immediately after the Bolshevik revolution the new government proclaimed a truce with Germany and its allies and opened negotiations. Trotsky went to Brest-Litovsk on the Polish border, now under German occupation, to try to make peace. The German demands were exorbitant, and Trotsky dithered, proclaiming that the right policy was “neither war nor peace.” The Germans responded with a massive offensive, occupying all of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic provinces. Local nationalists proclaimed their independence of Red Petrograd, but the Kaiser’s armies paid them no attention. The Germans set up a puppet regime in Kiev with the Russian general Pavel Skoropadskii, a former adjutant of the tsar who had suddenly discovered his Ukrainian roots, as their instrument. Red Guards were too amateurish a force, and the Bolsheviks now formed a real army, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, in response, but the new army could not stop the Germans. The government moved to Moscow, farther from the German lines. Even so some of the Communist leaders, Nikolai Bukharin especially, and the Left SRs wanted to continue to fight a “revolutionary war.” Lenin realized that this was madness, and convinced the leadership to sign on to the German conditions. Peace came in March, with the loss of all the western territories to Germany and Austria, but it was peace and the Kaiser recognized the red republic. The Left SRs resigned in protest, leaving the Bolsheviks entirely in charge of the new state.

The fiasco at Brest-Litovsk encouraged opposition to the Reds in the south. The southern Cossack areas rose in revolt again, this time allied with the Volunteer Army of General Mikhail Alekseev formed from officers of the old army. On the Don the new Red Army managed to suppress the Whites, who fled south to the Kuban River area, but other troubles soon arose. Serious fighting began in May 1918, in a wholly different part of the country, after the actions of the Czechoslovak Corps. The Czechoslovak Corps had been formed under the tsar from prisoners of war, former Austro-Hungarian soldiers of Czech and Slovak nationality, to assist the Allies against Austria and Germany. After the Soviet peace with Germany, they wanted to continue to fight and the new government allowed them to exit the country through Siberia to Japan and the United States so as to be able to continue the war in France. A series of clashes with local Soviet authorities led them to seize control of the rail lines from European Russia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In Samara in June, guarded by the Czechs, some SR deputies of the dispersed Constituent Assembly formed a government that attempted to continue the practices of parliamentary democracy. It also managed to get together a “People’s Army” that moved toward Moscow against the Reds.

Figure 18. Trotsky, Lenin, and Lev Kamenev 1918–1920.

For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, this was a real crisis, aggravated by the revolt of their recent allies, the Left SRs. Enraged by the peace with Germany and out of power the Left SRs attempted a revolt in Moscow, assassinating the German ambassador in the process. Similar revolts took place in other Russian towns, all quickly suppressed but indicative of serious opposition to the new government. The main threat, however, was the Czechoslovak Corps and its Russian allies moving from the east, and the ramshackle Red Army, formed of poorly trained militias with inexperienced officers, fell back in retreat. This was the moment that Trotsky first showed his mettle as a military commander, as well as his ruthlessness in imposing order and discipline. He made full use of officers from the old army of the tsar, holding their families hostage to guarantee their loyalty. In addition the political commissars assigned to each military unit were to maintain and inspire its reliability. He had officers who failed, commissars, and simple soldiers shot in the hundreds. With this new organization, the Red Army recaptured the Volga towns and pushed the rapidly disintegrating People’s Army back to the Urals.

These crises sealed the fate of the former Tsar Nicholas and his family. Their presence in Siberian Tobolsk, where the Provisional Government had sent them, was too close to the emerging centers of resistance, and so the Reds brought them to Ekaterinburg in the Urals. In July 1918, as the Whites approached, the Soviets ordered the imperial family executed, the final end of the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries. The house where they lived and where they were killed remained unnoticed for decades until 1977, when an overzealous Communist party boss, Boris Yeltsin, had it razed to the ground. Back in Moscow, Lenin himself was the target of an assassin’s bullet at the end of August. The response of the Cheka was to declare Red Terror, arresting thousands from the middle and upper classes. Some were executed immediately, others kept as hostages against future attempts.

By the autumn of 1918, the new Red Army had retaken most of the Volga and the Urals, and the People’s Army melted away. Farther east in Siberian Omsk another White army had come into being, Siberian Cossacks and units formed by ex-imperial officers determined to fight the Reds. In November, Admiral Alexander Kolchak seized power as Supreme Ruler of Russia, and dissolved the remnants of the SR leadership from the Constituent Assembly. Kolchak also shot many of the SRs as well as any other Bolshevik or left-wing activists whom he could find. Kolchak was a military dictator, and there were to be no more games with democracy. In addition there was a new element coming into play, for the First World War ended on November 11, and allied commissioners, British, French, American, and Japanese, arrived in Omsk. The allies, too, were for dictatorship, and quickly moved to support Kolchak as the leader of the opposition to Bolshevism.

If Kolchak was the titular supreme leader, his was not the only White army in the field. After the Reds had retaken the Don early in 1918, the Volunteer Army had moved south through the winter to establish themselves on the Kuban. The death of Alekseev and his replacement Kornilov (of the 1917 putsch attempt) in rapid succession led to the emergence of General Anton Denikin as the supreme commander of the Volunteer Army in the south. While Trotsky was preoccupied on the Volga, Denikin had held on, and on the Don the Cossacks rose again later in 1918. With covert German support, they tried to move north and east. As yet they were too weak to break the Red resistance, though they did cut off much of the crucial grain producing areas, and if they crossed the Volga, they had a distant chance of linking with Kolchak. On the Volga at Tsaritsyn, the Cossacks and the Whites confronted Joseph Stalin, sent originally just to organize grain deliveries, but Stalin quickly moved to take control of the military apparatus and shore up resistance. His ally among the soldiers was Kliment Voroshilov, who had fled east with a ragtag workers’ militia from the Donbass ahead of the advancing Germans. Stalin and Voroshilov were also unhappy with Trotsky’s policy of extensive use of professional officers from the tsar’s army, but Lenin supported Trotsky on this issue and they had to back down. Red units commanded by professional officers were decisive in holding the line, but at Tsaritsyn the Commissar of Nationalities had his first taste of warfare. The Cossacks did not cross the river, and Kolchak was thousands of miles to the east, unable to join them.

Behind all these front lines the Reds proceeded to build utopia. While Marxism provided a detailed analysis of capitalism and the projected path to proletarian revolution, it provided almost nothing beyond generalities about socialism. The worsening crisis in food supplies caused by increasing chaos and the German seizure of the Ukraine had led to the proclamation of the “food dictatorship” in May 1918. Under the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies armed detachments went out into the countryside to seize “surplus” grain at fixed, pre-revolutionary prices or simply to confiscate it. The idea was to get at grain allegedly held back by kulaks and traders with the help of the poor peasants organized in committees, but in fact the distinctions among the peasants were hard to make, and the measures affected all of rural society. Continued hyperinflation and the disappearance of money worsened the ongoing economic collapse, and the Reds instituted rationing and a system of cooperatives to distribute food and consumer goods.

Early in 1919 the Soviet authorities formalized the system of obligatory grain deliveries, to be accompanied by a centralized allocation of consumer goods to the peasants. Some sixty thousand men were now mobilized into a “food army” to extract grain from the countryside. The peasants responded by reducing the size of their crops, further plunging the cities into crisis. These new measures, in part the product of ideology and in part the necessity of war, lasted throughout the civil war. The Bolsheviks had always been hostile to markets, and the collapse of transport and general chaos broke down normal market ties. This situation gave them an opportunity to institute utopian schemes of distribution through the central allocation of goods. Virtually all factories and all trade were nationalized. Small retail shops disappeared, while the Soviet municipalities tried to set up large city-owned bread factories instead of small neighborhood bakeries, worsening the food situation. This was the system that came to be known as “War Communism.” Reality soon intervened, for local Soviet authorities regularly violated the rules, and the impossibility of full central control led the major factories and even the Red Army to set up their own procurement systems for food, including substantial numbers of farms operated by the factories and the army. The only remaining markets were the flea markets and the black market, both of which made simple survival easier for much of the urban population. The new central economic institutions were incapable of implementing their schemes, for they were not grand bureaucratic structures, but rather small offices staffed by former revolutionary activists with no relevant experience, assisted by a few engineers or economists and the more qualified workers.

The emerging Soviet state was also a party-state, for the Bolshevik party expanded in size, to over three hundred thousand in early 1919. These men and women were the cadre for the new state. The remaining Mensheviks and SRs were pushed out of political life by the end of 1918 and the new institutions required loyal officials to run them. The party itself became more centralized, especially with the establishment of the Politburo (Political Bureau) over the Central Committee in 1919. The new Politburo included only Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, and Nikolai Krestinskii as full members; Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin were included as candidates. Here was the core of the Bolshevik leadership. Zinoviev was the son of Jewish dairy farmers in the Ukraine and had been close to Lenin during his years of European exile. After the government moved to Moscow in 1918, Zinoviev headed the Petrograd party organization, effectively running the city until 1926, at the same time leading the new Communist International. Lev Kamenev was the son of a Jewish railroad worker, but had acquired some university education and was married to Trotsky’s sister. After 1917, he functioned as Lenin’s deputy and ran the Moscow party organization. Bukharin, the best educated of the Bolsheviks after Lenin, was something of a Marxist theorist and had spent time both in Western Europe and briefly in the United States. He was a bit younger than the others, and personally popular in the party. Like Lenin he was also actually Russian, as were Krestinskii and Kalinin, both minor figures. Krestinskii served as Commissar of Finance, while Kalinin, the only worker in the group and even born into a peasant family, headed the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets – in other words, he was the technical head of government. All of them shared, with Stalin, solid credentials of unwavering Bolshevism. Trotsky, in contrast, was a flamboyant ex-Menshevik who fit poorly into the group.

The crucial person in the whole party and government was Lenin. Until 1917 he had spent his life as a revolutionary organizer and journalist, turning out masses of articles explaining his position and denouncing his opponents. He was also more intellectual than the others, as his writings on philosophy and the economics of imperialism demonstrated. In such matters only Bukharin came close to him. As an orator he was clear and capable of moving an audience, but not on the level of Trotsky or Zinoviev. On taking power in 1917, he proved to have political and administrative skills far in excess of most of his comrades, as well as a powerful will and the ability to make decisions. He rapidly absorbed himself in the details of government, including the myriad economic problems that arose when the Bolsheviks nationalized the economy. He tried and largely succeeded in imposing a spirit of teamwork on the party leadership, getting contentious and often arrogant comrades to work together. When he argued his position in person, he could convince his opponents without belittling them (although his published polemics were another matter). Even if all of the other leaders disagreed with him on occasion, he remained the unchallenged leader of the party and hence of the state.

This highly effective leadership controlled a very imperfect state apparatus, but it had, besides the party, other instruments of power. The Red Army was five million strong by the end of the Civil War but “labor armies” made up much of its theoretical strength and it took on many economic functions, providing horses for plowing and restoring railroad service. The Cheka provided internal security, eliminated active and potential opponents, and tried to suppress the growing number of criminal bands in the cities. There were some twenty-five thousand people in the Cheka by the end of the Civil War, but it also controlled over a hundred thousand internal security troops, infantry, and cavalry. The party, the army, and the Cheka made possible the Red victory, but they could not stop the deepening economic crisis and accompanying anarchy. The near collapse of rail transport meant that the northern cities could be supplied only with great difficulty. Petrograd suffered in particular, losing some three quarters of its population by 1920. With the move of the government to Moscow the Reds evacuated a number of key factories with their workers and equipment, and hundreds of thousands of workers came to work in Moscow, joined the party apparatus, the Cheka, or the Red Army. Many simply went home to their native villages in search of food, heat, and work. As order collapsed, disease began to spread. Typhus, influenza, and other diseases were epidemic.

The spring of 1919 brought new life to the White movements. The end of the war in Europe in November 1918 meant the withdrawal of German troops from the western territories. In the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, local nationalists declared independence from the Bolsheviks, but the Red Army quickly returned power to the Soviets. The Reds drove out the nationalist Ukrainian Directory in Kiev. At the approach of the Red forces, the Directory’s peasant army simply melted away. Under their military leader Semyon Petliura the Ukrainian nationalists moved west, carrying out a ferocious massacre of the Jews in Proskurov on the way. Kolchak held Siberia and the Urals and Denikin moved north through the spring, taking the Donbass, most of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Denikin was able to advance as far as Orel, raiding far behind the Red lines with substantial groups of cavalry. The mobility of the Civil War put a premium on cavalry, and the Cossacks and the cavalry officers of the old army were a formidable challenge. The Reds answered with Semen Budennyi’s First Cavalry Army, formed in the middle of the battles against Denikin, at first a ragtag band of poorly disciplined men whipped into shape by Budennyi’s charisma. In July mass mobilization by the Reds allowed them to send substantial armies against Denikin and stopped him. Behind his lines in the southern Ukraine a new army appeared seemingly out of nothing, the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno, an ex-sergeant of the Russian Imperial Army and an instinctive guerilla leader. Makhno shredded Denikin’s communications, and with the Reds driving him from the north, he had to retreat.

Denikin was an accomplished general but this was a political war. The White governments were military dictatorships with civilian ministers recruited from former liberals to give them some minimal credibility. Their social policy was bound to antagonize the masses, as they opposed not only the Reds but also anything the workers saw as conquests of the revolution. In the cities, only the middle and upper classes supported them. Massacres of Jews were frequent. In the countryside their policy inevitably supported the noble landowners against the peasants and could not exploit rural antagonism to Bolshevik measures. To make matters worse, the White governments financed their operations by printing money and the peasants were reluctant to sell grain for worthless currency. Like the Reds, the Whites turned to confiscation of grain. As in the Red-held areas, the peasants reduced their farming to subsistence, creating food shortages in the richest agricultural areas in the country, western Siberia and the south. As resistance to them grew, the Whites could only answer with repression, and the cities that the Whites occupied saw mass executions. Behind the White lines in Siberia and the Ukraine the peasants formed armed bands to confront the Whites. Not only Makhno but also hundreds of peasant bands bent only on preserving their own territory kept the Whites from effective control of the countryside.

Even foreign intervention could not save the Whites. With the end of the First World War the Allies had free access to Russia through the Black Sea and elsewhere, but the exhaustion of war meant that they could offer little in the way of actual troops. Japan sent some sixty thousand to Siberia as part of a scheme to take control of Russian territory (thereby antagonizing the United States), but the other powers sent fewer troops. A brief intervention in Odessa and other southern cities in 1919 ended after only a few months, although Britain, France, and the United States continued to send weapons. They were not of much use, for transportation bottlenecks (especially in Siberia) held up the supplies in the ports and massive corruption meant that arms and ammunition often ended up in the hands of the Reds. To make matters worse, the officers who formed the core of the White movement were intensely patriotic and many were offended by the need to rely on foreign armies. The intervention weakened morale as much as it strengthened it.

In the fall of 1919 the Reds pushed Kolchak’s forces back into Siberia, the first victories of the later Soviet marshal M. N. Tukhachevskii, an aristocratic guards officer turned revolutionary enthusiast. The Red Army finally defeated Kolchak, capturing and executing him in Siberian Irkutsk. There was another try at a White victory: General Iudenich, the victor of Erzerum in 1916, led an expedition from Estonia toward Petrograd. Zinoviev thought the city defenseless, and Lenin agreed with him. Trotsky and Stalin vehemently objected, and convinced Lenin to let them defend the city. They raced north to Petrograd, Trotsky personally jumping on a horse to rally the troops. In October of 1919, Iudenich began the retreat back to Estonia. In the south, Denikin gave up command early in 1920 and went into exile. The remains of the White Army retreated to the Crimea and set up a new army and government under Baron Peter Wrangel. At that point the new Polish state invaded the Ukraine. The aim of the Poles was to conquer the lands held by Poland before the partitions of the eighteenth century, and to do so they allied with Petliura, who thus further discredited himself with the Ukrainian peasantry for whom the Poles were only noble landlords, and as such, their enemies. The Red Army redeployed west to meet the new threat, mobilizing some half a million soldiers. Lenin was convinced that the Reds should go all the way to Warsaw, an attempt to help the spread of revolution in Europe as well as to defeat the Poles. Trotsky was skeptical. The Red Army, led before Warsaw by the brilliant but erratic Tukhachevskii, moved too far to the west in an attempt to encircle the city. A huge gap opened in the Red lines, but the Red troops farther south under Budennyi, with Stalin as political commander, delayed moving north to help close the gap. The Poles, with French advice and weapons, swept north in a maneuver of brilliant simplicity to encircle Tukhachevskii’s troops. The Reds retreated far to the east, their major defeat in the Civil War, and made peace with Poland. The treaty established a boundary that gave Poland large parts of western Belorussia and the Ukraine, but not the main cities, Kiev, Odessa, and Minsk.

At the critical moment of the Polish war Baron Wrangel had moved into the Red rear from Crimea. Now his was the only hostile force left in the field against the Bolsheviks. At the end of 1920 the Red Army stormed across the isthmus into Crimea with the help of Makhno’s irregulars, and the White cause was finished. The last refugees, soldiers and civilians evacuated the southern cities under the guns of the British navy, in a chaotic scene that marked the final end of the old Russia.

The revolution and civil war was largely a Russian event but it had profound effects for the various nationalities that made up the periphery of the Russian Empire. In Poland nationalism trumped class and socialism, and the transition to an independent government was (internally) fairly smooth. In Finland a vicious civil war in 1918 between the local Social Democrats and the Whites led to a White victory after the Kaiser sent an expeditionary force to aid Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former Imperial Russian general. In the Baltic provinces the collapse of the German occupation led to civil war as well, for Riga especially had a large and very radical working class. Britain, however, saw the Baltic as its sphere of influence and landed Freikorps soldiers, German right-wing nationalist paramilitaries, in 1919 to push out the Reds. The British then set up a nationalist government in their place, evicting the Freikorps as well. The Baltic Reds went into exile in Soviet Russia, providing in particular a major component in the Cheka and Red Army. In the Ukraine the task of the Reds was made easier by the fact that all of the cities were Russian-speaking. The largest urban minority was Jewish, not Ukrainian, and the local nationalist movement was a small layer of intellectuals trying to lead the peasantry. Their armies were totally disorganized, and in addition they were reluctant to be clear on the land question, the crucial issue to the peasants. The Reds easily swept them away.

In the Caucasus the Reds were also victorious. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had led to the German-Turkish occupation of the Caucasus, and the end of the war meant their withdrawal. The Reds tried to make a revolution in their wake, but local nationalist parties took power with British help. As Britain was busily occupying the nearby Middle East, it had few resources to spare, and the local governments were left to their own devices. In 1920 the Red Army came south under the command of Stalin’s fellow Georgian and close friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze and took Baku. The small Azeri army was largely led by Turkish officers, by now supporters of Kemal Ataturk’s resistance to the western powers in Anatolia, and greeted the Reds as allies. Furthermore, Baku itself was a city in its majority not Azeri but Russian, Georgian, and Armenian, a population drawn by oil to what was largely a European city. The Reds had plenty of allies. The Reds moved on quickly to eject the Armenian nationalists, and a few months later it was the turn of the Georgian Mensheviks. A new Soviet republic, the Transcaucasian Federation, came into existence, combining all of the area under one government. In Central Asia resistance to the Reds ended by 1922, and the Japanese were eventually persuaded to withdraw from eastern Siberia, so that everywhere but in the West the old boundaries were reestablished.

The new, Soviet, Russia that came into being was devastated by years of war and revolution, with its economy in pieces. Perhaps a million men had died on the many fronts of the Civil War and (estimates vary) five or six million civilians – the greatest number of these from typhus and other epidemic diseases, followed by hunger. Executions and massive reprisals by all sides made up the rest of the death toll. Some million or two Russians, including much of the old upper classes and the intelligentsia, left the country, never to return. Transport and production were at a standstill. For the time being, the Soviets continued the policy of War Communism and mobilized the Labor Armies under Trotsky to rebuild the damage. This was not a viable policy and resistance to the new order grew throughout the country. Lenin realized that some sort of compromise was needed, an economic policy that provided enough room for the population, particularly the peasantry, to work without state direction. This compromise would be named the New Economic Policy and it inaugurated a whole new era in the history of Soviet Russia and the other Soviet states under the rule of the Communist Party.