A people's tragedy

For the so-called ‘former people’, without employment or a living ration, the daily hunt for food was soul-destroying. Once mighty scions of the aristocracy were reduced to selling their last precious possessions on the streets. The fat classes became thin. When asked how they were, people would joke: ‘It could be worse. At least, I’m managing to lose some weight.’ Even the Brusilovs often went hungry, despite the regular gifts of butter, milk, honey and sour cream that were sent to them by loyal peasant veterans of the war. In 1919 Brusilov agreed to accept a position in the archives office of the Red Army Staff to supervise a compilation of Russia’s part in the Great War. This paid him a wage of 3,500 roubles a month, which was hardly enough to live on. ‘It was painful to see how they lived,’ recalled a close friend of the Brusilovs. ‘Their main meal was a single dish, usually consisting only of potatoes.’30

Gorky took up the cause of the starving intelligentsia. He publicized their desperate plight in his editorials in Novaia zhizn’. Professor Gezekhus, the famous physicist, now an old man of seventy-two, was ill in hospital, ‘blown up with hunger’, like some African famine victim. Vera Petrova, a zemstvo physician, was ‘dying of hunger, helpless, dirty, in a dusty awful room’. Glazunov, the famous composer, had grown ‘thin and pallid’, and lived with his aged mother in two unheated rooms in Petrograd. When H.G. Wells came to visit him, Glazunov begged him to send him some paper so that he could write out his compositions. Even Pavlov, Russia’s only Nobel scientist, was forced to spend his time growing carrots and potatoes. Gorky appealed to the Bolshevik leaders for special rations, a better flat and other requirements on behalf of these starving geniuses. Lenin indulged most of his requests: he had always retained a special fondness for Gorky and, perhaps more relevantly, was very aware of his influence abroad. Gorky used this to save as much of the old Russian culture as he could: he became its self-appointed curator (sometimes using his position to buy up works of art cheaply for himself). The threat to culture posed by the revolution had been one of Gorky’s constant themes. On the morning of the Bolshevik seizure of power he had headlined his column in Novaia zhizn’ CULTURE IS IN DANGER! He established a writers’ refuge in the former house of Yeliseev, a wealthy merchant, on the corner of the Nevsky Prospekt and the Bolshaia Morskaya. At night the pointed building looked like a boat, so that it became known as the ‘ship of fools’. Later Gorky set up a House of Artists too. He also established his own publishing house, World Literature, to publish cheap mass editions of the classics. Its offices employed hundreds of writers, journalists, academics, musicians and artists as translators and copy-editors who would otherwise have been left to fend for themselves. Gorky saw it less as a business than as a charity. And indeed many of the greatest names of twentieth-century literature — Zamyatin, Gumilev, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasevich, Mandelstam, Shklovsky, Piast, Blok and Zoshchenko — owed their survival through these hungry years largely to the patronage of Gorky. Although in later years many of them condemned Gorky for his close links with the Bolsheviks, they themselves would not have survived the civil war without his contacts.31

Gorky turned his enormous flat on the Kronversky Prospekt into a refuge for the penniless and the persecuted victims of the civil war. Compared with the cold and the dampness in which most of the population lived, it was something of a paradise. Viktor Serge described it as ‘warm as a greenhouse’. Gorky accumulated various ‘wives’ and ‘sisters’, ‘daughters’ and ‘brothers’, all of them in some way victims of the terror, whom he allowed to shelter in his home. So many people came to Gorky’s flat — at first simply to drink tea and chat but they somehow ended up by staying several years — that the wall between it and the neighbouring flat had to be knocked through and the two apartments made into one. Gorky’s mistress, Moura Budberg (then still Baroness Benckendorff), lived in one room, and cooked most of the meals with a girlfriend of the artist Tatlin, who lived in another. There was always an interesting and motley collection of people around the lunch and dinner tables. Famous writers and artists would rub shoulders with the workers and the sailors whom Gorky had picked up on the streets. H. G. Wells stayed when he came to Russia in 1920. Shaliapin was a frequent visitor, and always cursed the Bolsheviks; yet so too were the Bolshevik leaders, Lunacharsky and Krasin, and the deputy head of the Petrograd Cheka, Gleb Bokii, who must have met many of his victims there. There was even a former Grand Duke, Gavril Konstantinovich Romanov, together with the former Grand Duchess and their dog. Gorky had taken pity on them and rescued them from the Cheka jails after Gavril had fallen ill. The couple lived on the top floor, in a room filled with antique furniture and Buddhist statues, and hardly ever left the house for fear of arrest. At meals they would sit in haughty silence. For, as the former Grand Duke later wrote, there were the sort of people at Gorky’s table ‘that rejoiced at our misery’, and ‘it was distasteful for us to have to mix in such society’.32

It did not take long before the rumour spread that Gorky could help anyone, and he was besieged by begging letters. A certain professor wanted Gorky to procure a special pair of spectacles for him. A poetess begged for a ration of milk for her baby. A provincial doctor needed a new set of premises since the old ones had been requisitioned by the Soviet. A widow wanted a railway ticket to return to her family in the countryside. One old man even wrote with a request for false teeth. Many people wanted Gorky to help them get their relatives released from the Cheka jails — and he did try to intervene on behalf of many (see here). But others asked for the impossible. One man, for example, wrote to ask what Gorky was going to do about the fact that he had been robbed. And a prisoner wrote to ask if there would be an amnesty to celebrate the occasion of Gorky’s fiftieth birthday — and, if so, if he could be released.33 Like Rasputin, Gorky had become a sort of maître de requêtes for all those who were too powerless to penetrate the offices of the state.

*

The urban food crisis was, in the main, a problem of distribution and exchange rather than production. The railway system had virtually collapsed, largely as a result of the economic crisis and the chronic shortages of fuel, and could not cope with the transportation of foodstuffs to the cities. The railway depots were graveyards of broken-down locomotives. More than half the rolling stock was in need of repair, yet the railway workshops were totally run down. The main problem was lack of parts. In one repair shop, for example, the workers were found to be stripping the parts from one engine in order to repair another, so that for every engine that was repaired several others would be even further disrepaired. The railways were thrown into further chaos by the vast crowds of hungry townsmen, soldiers and refugees from the war zones, who stormed every train bound for the countryside, where they hoped to settle or buy up cheap food. Railway officials were easily bribed, and many goods trains were pilfered or diverted. Food wagons which left the countryside full would arrive empty in Petrograd or Moscow.34

But the real root of the urban crisis was the peasantry’s reluctance to sell foodstuffs for paper money. With the wartime collapse of consumer production and the huge inflation of prices, peasants could buy less and less with the rouble fortunes they were being offered for their produce. Government efforts to buy the food at fixed prices, going back to 1916, had only encouraged the peasants to withdraw from the market. They reduced their production, shifted to crops not subject to state control, or hid their surpluses from the government’s procurement agents. Many peasants used their grain to fatten up the cattle, or sold it to black-market traders from the towns, while many others turned it into vodka.

Cottage industries boomed, largely undetected by statisticians, as the peasants sought to manufacture all those household products they had once bought from the towns but which were now either unavailable or too expensive for them to buy. Rural craftsmen fashioned simple ploughs and sickles out of old scrap iron. Flax and hemp were grown for clothes and rope; timber was cut to make wheels and furniture; reeds were gathered to make baskets; clay was dug for pottery; and oil-producing seeds were grown for fuel. Old rural handicrafts that had gone to the wall in the age of steam were now resurrected. Rural Russia was slowly returning to the methods of the Middle Ages, when, in the words of one official:

Rus’ had neither railways nor steamboats, nor steam-mills, nor factories, nor any other ‘European invention’, when handicraftsmen fed, clothed, and heated the whole of Russia and made all its footwear, when everything was done by them on a tiny scale and very coarsely — with a hand chisel instead of a lathe, with an axe instead of a saw.35

The countryside, in short, was becoming more archaic and more autarkic. It was learning to live without the towns and, on the whole, was doing very well without them. True, there were places where the peasants themselves went hungry during the spring of 1918, especially in the northern regions, which had always been dependent upon importing grain. It was nonsense for the Bolsheviks to claim that any peasant hoarding food was a ‘kulak’, or capitalist, since many did so to avoid starvation in the winter months. The harvest of 1917 had been small and, with the gentry’s extra land now to sow, many of the peasants had no surplus. In Tver, for example, they were said to be eating ‘cakes made of linseed oil and straw’. Even Semenov, a model peasant farmer, wrote to a friend in April 1918 that he did ‘not have nearly enough grain to eat or feed my cattle’. Like thousands of other peasant communities, Semenov and his fellow villagers of Andreevskoe were forced to mount an expedition to buy up and import grain from the fertile south.36

Which is just what the townspeople did as well. Millions fled from the hungry cities and tried to settle in the countryside to be closer to the sources of food. The great industrial cities of the north lost half their populations as Russia returned to its rural past. ‘The city is in danger!’ declared Viktor Serge. Petrograd lost nearly three-quarters of its population between 1918 and 1920. Moscow’s population was more than halved. Railway stations were thrown into chaos as crowds battled to get on to trains bound for the countryside. People travelled on the roofs of the carriages, and hung on to the windows and the brake-pads, risking life and limb. One train left Petrograd so overcrowded that it overbalanced on a bridge and fell into the Neva River, drowning hundreds of passengers.37

The nobility fled to what remained of their landed estates. Tanya Kuzminsky, Tolstoy’s sister-in-law, travelled from Petrograd to Yasnaya Polyana. Her niece helped her on the way, pleading with the porters to find her a seat on the train: ‘She was Natasha Rostova in War and Peace.’ But this meant nothing to the guards. It was only thanks to a group of commissars that the frail old woman, dressed in her furs, was finally given a wooden box to sit on in one of the goods wagons. Other nobles, without estates, tried their luck in the countryside in any case. The Brusilovs went to stay in a village north of Moscow on the invitation of the peasants. Marina Tsvetaeva, the poetess, went to live in the rural backwaters of Tambov province, where she could trade her last possessions for pork fat, pumpkins and potatoes. Countess Meshcherskaya, a scion of the Russian aristocracy, went with her daughter to the sleepy rural town of Rublev, where they worked in the kitchens of a water-mill and lived in the workers’ dormitory. All that she had left of her inheritance — which had once included three huge estates, two palaces and a famous Botticelli — was a china teapot in the rococo style which she donated to the workers’ tea-room.38

But it was the workers who made up the bulk of those who fled the starving cities. Many of them had been laid off by their factories as a result of the industrial crisis of 1917–18. Although no one knows the precise figure, something like a million workers were unemployed by the spring of 1918. The war industries were the hardest hit, particularly munitions and chemicals, losing in all some half a million workers. The metal industries of Petrograd, in particular, were devastated by fuel shortages, demobilization and the evacuation of the capital. The workforce of these factories declined from a quarter of a million to barely 50,000 during the first six months of 1918. It was a catastrophe for the Bolsheviks. Their once mighty strongholds, the New Lessner and the Erickson plants, each of which had had more than 7,000 workers during the autumn of 1917, were reduced to a skeleton workforce with only 200 workers between them by the following spring. During the first six months of the Bolshevik regime, the number of Bolsheviks in Petrograd fell from 50,000 to a mere 13,000. The Bolshevik Party, in the words of Shliapnikov, was becoming ‘the vanguard of a non-existent class’.39

According to the Bolsheviks and their historians, it was the skilled and ‘class conscious’ workers who mainly fled the cities. The depopulation of the cities thus paralleled their ‘declassing’, to adopt the rather ugly Marxist phrase, meaning the breakdown of the working class. It was important for the Soviet establishment to argue this because it allowed them to depict the growing wave of workers’ strikes and protests from the spring of 1918 as the work of ‘backward’ or ‘petty-bourgeois’ types stirred up by the Mensheviks and the SRs. How embarrassing it would have been for them to have to admit that the very workers who had helped to bring them to power in October were calling for their downfall six months later. Yet that was more or less what happened. Those most likely to flee to the countryside were those workers who had arrived in the cities last — especially the women who had come during the industrial boom of the First World War — and who thus had retained the closest ties with their native villages. These were the unskilled and semi-rural workers — invariably the first to be laid off by the factory employers — so that the workers who were left in the cities tended to be the most skilled and proletarian (i.e. those who had been born in the cities and who had no real links with the countryside). It was these workers who led the strikes and protests against the Bolsheviks in 1918 (see here).

The prospect of a share in the communal land or of setting up in some rural trade was usually enough to lure semi-rural workers back to their native villages. According to a report from the Briansk metallurgical factory in 1920, ‘all the workers with a tie to the village want to leave the factory and settle there’. Generally, the peasants welcomed those workers who had relatives in the village or who had some useful trade to contribute (e.g. carpenters and blacksmiths); but they were very rarely willing to give either land or food to those who had neither. These immigrants were usually left to support themselves by casual labour, and their plight was often desperate. One memoirist from Tambov province recalls these workers and their families ‘walking across the fields after the rye harvest looking for any ears of grain that had been dropped’.40

It was not just the flight of the workers with which the Bolsheviks had to contend. Industry and transport were thrown into chaos by the endless travelling of city people to and from the countryside to buy up stocks of food. Millions of townspeople, from all classes, relied on this petty trade — or ‘bagging’, as it was called — to feed themselves. They would leave the cities with bags of clothes and household goods to sell or exchange in the rural markets, and return with bags of food. The railways were paralysed by the armies of ‘bagmen’. The Orel Station, a major junction en route to the south, had 3,000 bagmen pass through it every day. Many of them travelled in armed brigades which hijacked trains, leaving the local authorities powerless. The most popular destinations — Tambov, Kursk, Kazan, Simbirsk and Saratov provinces — were each invaded by something in the region of 100,000 bagmen every month.41

For the hungry cities of the north this primitive trade was a universal means of livelihood. Virtually everyone was forced to turn themselves into a part-time trader — workers, officials, even Communists. It was a natural and spontaneous response to the economic crisis and the breakdown of the market between town and country. But it brought chaos to industry. Nearly all the workers were engaged in the bag trade in some form. Many of them travelled into the countryside with tools, fuel and scrap-iron, which they had stolen from their factories. Others fabricated primitive goods in their factories to barter with the peasants. Primus stoves, penknives and cigarette lighters were the most common trade. But shoe soles were also made from conveyor belts; candlesticks from bits of piping; axes and ploughs from iron bars. The whole phenomenon became known as ‘cigarette lighterism’ (zazhigolochnichestvo), one of the longest and hardest words to pronounce in the Russian language. It was not uncommon for factory committees to sanction or at least to turn a blind eye to these spontaneous initiatives. Many of the committees gave their own anarchic gloss to the Decree on Workers’ Control, taking it to mean the right of the workers to divide between themselves the products of their labour — or, if there were none, the assets of their factory — just as the peasants had divided up the land. Industry was brought virtually to a halt as most of the workers spent most of their time fabricating these black-market goods and running off to the countryside to barter them for food. On the average day in the average factory 30 per cent of the workforce would be absent. In some metal factories the rate of absenteeism could be as high as 80 per cent.42

During their first precarious months in power the Bolsheviks could do very little to stop this ‘bagging’. Any restrictions they tried to impose were bound to be evaded by the workers who depended on the bag-trade to survive. The right to travel to the countryside for food was a major demand of the workers’ strikes and protests during the spring of 1918. Many of the factories and even some of the district and city Soviets organized this trade on a collective basis. Without recourse to some form of trade, industry would have to come to a complete halt. The factory or the Soviet would make an agreement with a village or a rural Soviet to exchange a certain number of factory goods for an equivalent amount of foodstuffs. A brigade of workers would then be sent to complete the exchange. Try though they did, the Bolsheviks were powerless to prevent this collective bartering. One commissar in Samara province claimed that it was useless trying to stop the bagmen ‘since they all travel with passports from their Soviet’. Local rates of natural exchange began to take the place of money. In Kaluga, for example, a yard of cloth was worth a pound of butter, or two pounds of peas; a pound of soap was worth two pounds of millet; and a pair of boots a pound of potatoes. Flour was the gold standard of this medieval system: a pound was worth thirty pounds of kerosene, or three pounds of tobacco, or a winter coat.43

The co-operatives played an important part in this local trade, often setting the terms of barter and exchange. The co-operatives had flourished during the war as one of the main means of trade between town and country. By 1918, they claimed to serve the needs of a hundred million consumers (70 per cent of the population).44 Factories, trade unions, professional groups and resident associations formed themselves into urban co-operatives for the procurement of goods. Peasants joined co-operatives to market their goods and obtain the manufactures they needed in exchange. The rural co-operatives also served as a conduit for agricultural improvements, offering the peasants advanced tools, fertilizers, credit and advice on the latest farming techniques. For Semenov, a pioneer of the co-operative movement in Volokolamsk, this was one of the revolution’s main achievements.

*

Had they not been so hostile to the market, the Bolsheviks might have used this collective barter system to help feed the cities and supply industry. Primitive and chaotic though it was, it would still arguably have been more efficient than the state monopoly of food supply which they began to introduce from May 1918 as the foundation of their planned economy. War Communism, as this system became known, was in many ways a prototype of the Stalinist economy. It aimed to abolish all private trade, maximize the state’s control of distribution and the labour market, nationalize all large-scale industry, collectivize agriculture, and at its height in 1920 replace the money system with a universal system of state rationing.

The origins of War Communism have long been a subject of intense debate between historians. To those on the Left it was essentially a pragmatic response to the military exigencies of the civil war; while to those on the Right it was derived directly from Leninist ideology. The argument has broader implications for the nature and development of the Soviet regime. According to the leftwing view, War Communism was no more than a temporary diversion from the mixed economy that Lenin had outlined during the spring of 1918 and to which he returned in the New Economic Policy of 1921. This implies that the ‘soft’ or pro-market socialism pursued by the Bolsheviks in these two periods was the real face of Leninism as opposed to the ‘hard’ or anti-market socialism of the War Communist and Stalinist eras. Hence the ‘Leninism’ proclaimed for Gorbachev’s reforms. In the rightwing view, however, the ‘hard socialism’ of the civil war was directly inspired by the statist methods at the heart of Lenin’s revolutionary ideology. The Bolsheviks, in this account, adopted War Communism as a means of introducing socialism by decree, and made concessions to the market only when they were forced to do so. There was thus a logical progression, a historical continuity, between Lenin’s programme of 1902, War Communism and the Stalinist planned economy.

While both pragmatism and ideology were relevant factors, neither is sufficient as an explanation of the way in which the world’s first planned economy was organized.

The pragmatic argument has fundamental flaws. As a purely pragmatic response to the chaos of the spring, the Grain Monopoly of May 1918 — the first major element of War Communism — was disastrous. Its futile and absurd efforts to stamp out the free market merely caused more chaos, as thousands of commissars and much of the state’s resources had to be diverted to the war against free trade. On purely practical grounds, it would have been better to retain the market rather than to try and stamp it out, as Lenin himself recognized in 1921. And indeed at crisis points throughout the civil war the Bolsheviks were forced to lift the bars on private trade in recognition of the fact that the state distribution system was unable to feed the cities. Amongst themselves the Bolsheviks acknowledged that, despite their own anti-market rhetoric, they could not survive without the market.

What about the argument that War Communism was a reponse to the exigencies of the civil war? To be sure, the Bolsheviks, like all the wartime governments in Europe at this time, were trying to control the economy in the military interests of the state (much of the Bolshevik economic programme was modelled on the German war economy). But War Communism was not just a response to the civil war; it was also a means of making civil war. The civil war was not fought only on the battlefields. It was a fundamental aspect of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary strategy, and was also fought on what they called the ‘internal front’, in society and the economy, through the policies of War Communism. Unless one acknowledges this fundamental fact — that the policies of War Communism were seen by the Bolsheviks as an instrument of struggle against their social or ‘internal’ enemies — it is impossible to explain why these policies were kept in place for more than a year after the White armies had been defeated.

The case for War Communism as inspired by ideology is also insufficient. Certainly, the Bolsheviks were all united by a fundamental belief in the possibility of using state coercion to effect the transition to socialism in a backward peasant country such as Russia. This was the essence of their ideology. They also shared a deeply ingrained mistrust of the market which could be defined as ideological. Foreign socialists were shocked by the violence of the Bolsheviks’ hatred of free trade. The Bolsheviks did not just want to regulate the market — as did the socialists and most of the wartime governments of Europe — they wanted to abolish it. ‘The more market the less socialism, the more socialism the less market’ — that was their credo. This crude political economy was no doubt the result of the Bolsheviks’ own life experience. Most of the party’s rank and file were peasant sons and workers, young men like Kanatchikov, who had suffered from the worst of both rural and urban poverty. Marx had taught them that all this was the result of ‘capitalism’. They saw the workings of the market as a simple expression of capitalist exploitation. Even the primitive trade of the bagmen would lead in their view, if unchecked, to the resurrection of the capitalist system. Although the overwhelming majority of the bagmen were trading for consumption rather than profit, the Bolsheviks depicted them as ‘speculators’, ‘profiteers’ and ‘parasites’. All the social evils of the postwar world, from unemployment to prostitution, were blamed by them on the workings of the market.

It could not be said, however, that this dirigiste and militantly anti-market ideology had been expressed in a clear economic strategy before the introduction of War Communism. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were sharply divided over economic policy during 1918. Whereas the Left Communists wanted to move immediately towards the abolition of the capitalist system, Lenin talked of using capitalist methods for the revolutionary reconstruction of the economy. These divisions resurfaced repeatedly throughout the years of the civil war — especially over fiscal policy and the use of ‘bourgeois’ managers — so that the policies of War Communism had to be chopped and changed in the interests of party unity. Hence, whereas rightwing historians may think of War Communism as a monolithic programme integral to Bolshevik ideology, much of it was in fact improvised.

The introduction of War Communism was essentially a political response to the urban crisis of 1918. During that spring the Bolsheviks were obsessed by the example of the Paris Commune. They constantly compared their own position to that of the Parisian revolutionaries of 1871, and debated their own policies by the light of historical analogy, trying to work out whether they might have saved the French revolutionaries from their defeat. The Bolsheviks were all too conscious of the fact that their power base, like that of the Communards, was confined to the major cities, and that they were facing defeat because they were surrounded by a hostile peasantry with whom they had no goods to trade for food. They had convinced themselves that, unless they extended their power to the countryside and launched a crusade against the ‘grain-hoarding’ peasants, their urban revolution, like that of the Commune, would be destroyed by starvation. The flight of the workers from the cities and their strikes and protests against food shortages were seen as the first signs of this collapse. It was essential, as the Bolsheviks saw it, to seize the peasantry’s grain by force, to stem the chaos of the bag-trade and to get a firm grip on industry, if they were to avoid certain defeat.

*

When Trotsky defended the introduction of the grain monopoly at a Soviet assembly on 4 June, he was heckled from the floor. The Left SRs accused him of ‘waging a civil war against the peasantry’. On 9 May the Bolsheviks had indeed declared that all the peasants’ surplus grain would henceforth become the property of the state. They were now despatching armed brigades to requisition the grain from the peasantry by force; and their propaganda made it clear that this was to be seen as a ‘battle for grain’. Trotsky himself told the meeting on 4 June: ‘Our Party is for civil war! Civil war has to be waged for grain. We the Soviets are going into battle!’ At this point a delegate had shouted: ‘Long live civil war!’ No doubt he had meant it as a joke. But Trotsky turned on him and replied with deadly seriousness: ‘Yes, long live civil war! Civil war for the sake of the children, the elderly, the workers and the Red Army, civil war in the name of direct and ruthless struggle against counter-revolution.’45

For Lenin and most of his followers, civil war was a vital phase in any social revolution. ‘Civil war is the same as class war,’ declared one of the Bolshevik leaders in Baku. ‘We are supporters of civil war, not because we thirst for blood, but because without a struggle the oppressors will not give up their privileges to the people.’46 As the Bolsheviks saw it, a civil war was no more than a violent form of class struggle. There was no real distinction in their view between the military conflict and the social conflict in every town and village.

As such, in Lenin’s view, the civil war was to be welcomed as a necessary phase of the revolution. He had always argued that the civil war had been started by the forces of the Right during the summer of 1917, and that the Bolshevik seizure of power should be seen as the joining of the armed struggle by the proletarian side; the class conflicts of the revolution were unresolvable by political means. Russia was split into two hostile camps — the ‘military dictatorship’ and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ — and it was a question of which side would prevail. All Lenin’s policies, from the October seizure of power to the closure of the Constituent Assembly and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, could be seen (and were seen by the opposition) as a deliberate incitement to civil war. Lenin himself was doubtless convinced that his party’s best hope of building up its own tiny power base was to fight a civil war. Indeed he often stressed that the reason why the Paris Commune had been defeated was that it had failed to launch a civil war. The effects of such a conflict were predictable — the polarization of the country into ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ forces, the extension of the state’s military and political power, and the use of terror to suppress dissent — and were all deemed by Lenin to be necessary for the consolidation of the dictatorship. Of course Lenin could not have foreseen the full extent of the civil war that would unfold from the following autumn — in April 1918 he had even declared that the civil war was already won — and, if he had, he might have thought again about using civil war to build up his regime. But even so, it is surely true that the Bolsheviks were psychologically prepared for a civil war in a way that could not be said of their opponents. One might compare it to the Spanish civil war: Franco’s side was ready — and eager — for a civil war; the same could hardly be said of the Republicans.

The ‘battle for grain’, the Bolsheviks’ civil war against the countryside, was rooted in a fundamental mistrust — bordering on hatred — of the peasantry. As Marxists, they had always viewed the peasantry with something akin to contempt. ‘Anarchic’, ‘backward’, ‘counter-revolutionary’ — thus began their peasant lexicon. The peasants were too illiterate and superstitious, too closely tied to the Old Russia, to play a role in the building of their new society. They were too ‘petty-bourgeois’ (O most heinous of Marxist sins!), too imbued in the principles and habits of private property and free trade, to become comrades. This contempt for the peasantry was often most marked among those worker Bolsheviks of peasant stock — the Kanatchikovs of the party — who as young men had run away from the crushing poverty and the boredom of the village, from the domination of the priests, and the violence of their heavy-drinking fathers, to roam the cities in search of work. For them the city was a world of progress and opportunity, symbolized by school and industry, whereas the village stood for everything — backwardness, poverty and stupid superstition — they wanted to sweep away. ‘I am not village’ was the first expression of their adopted working-class identity. And through the proletarian culture of the cities, which had first led them to Bolshevism, they sought to banish their peasant past.

A clear sign of this anti-peasant attitude — which was so vital to the whole development of the Soviet regime — may be found in the small biographies that all Bolsheviks were asked to write about themselves on taking up Soviet office. A quarter of them came from peasant backgrounds; yet few spoke of their past in positive terms. ‘From an early age’, recalled one Bolshevik from Vologda, ‘education was my only chance to escape from the impoverished and idiotic life of the village. I wanted to run away, anywhere, as far away from the village as possible.’47

Marxism gave a pseudo-scientific respectability to this hatred of the peasantry. Its ‘laws’ of historical development ‘proved’ that the peasantry was doomed to extinction. The penetration of the market and of capitalist relations into the countryside would inevitably result in the class division of the peasantry. Lenin had shown that the village was becoming divided into two hostile classes — the poor peasants, who were said to be the allies of the proletariat, and the ‘kulaks’, or ‘capitalist farmers’, who were said to be its enemies — and this schema became the guiding principle of Bolshevik policy in the countryside. In fact the analysis was pure fantasy: the number of peasant capitalists was very small indeed — certainly not enough to constitute a ‘class’. Even the number of peasant households employing regular wage labour had numbered less than 2 per cent before the revolution and declined considerably in 1917. In the vast majority of villages all that distinguished the richest from the poorest peasant was the ownership of an extra horse or cow, or a house made out of brick, as opposed to one of wood, with a raised floor instead of boards laid on the ground.

The peasants whom the Bolsheviks categorized as ‘kulaks’ were usually no more than the patriarchal leaders of the village. These were the Maliutins of Russia, the white-bearded peasant elders like the one in Andreevskoe who stood in the way of all Semenov’s reforms. These, it is true, were often the richest farmers, to whom the rest of the villagers might well have been indebted, either for the use of a horse or for the loan of money. But this did not make them ‘kulaks’ in the eyes of the peasants — and even Semenov, who had good reason to despise Maliutin, never called him one. Many of the peasants looked up to these elders with a mixture of fear and respect. As the most successful farmers in the village, they were often seen as the natural leaders of the community. They were usually the staunchest upholders of communal traditions, the people who dealt with the outside powers, and their neighbours naturally went to them for advice on agricultural matters. The first peasant Soviets were often headed by these village elders.

The Bolsheviks had given vocal support to the peasant Soviets during the first months of their regime. This enabled them to neutralize the peasants during their struggle for power in the cities. But as a result Soviet power in the countryside had been decentralized — which had made the task of extracting food and soldiers from the peasantry all the harder. The peasant Soviets naturally defended the economic interests of the local population. They tried to block the export of grain to the cities or at least to demand a price high enough to allow them to buy the goods they needed in return. As the urban food crisis deepened, the Bolsheviks increasingly blamed it on so-called ‘kulak hoarders’. Their propaganda portrayed the typical ‘kulak’ as a fat and greedy capitalist who speculated on the hunger of the urban workers. The ‘kulak’ took his place alongside the burzhooi as the ‘internal enemy’ of ‘the revolution’. For the Bolsheviks the ‘kulak’ was a scapegoat, a means of focusing the anger of the workers against the ‘counter-revolutionary’ village rather than themselves. The Bolsheviks now claimed that the peasant Soviets were dominated by the ‘kulaks’ and were being run by them in league with the SRs to starve the revolution out of existence. This was false — and Lenin knew it. The rural Soviets, as he himself had acknowledged, were general peasant bodies. They had merely put their own interests before those of the cities. But the myth of a ‘kulak grain strike’ gave his party the pretext it needed to launch a civil war against the peasantry.48

Lenin gave the battle cry in a speech of astounding violence during the summer of 1918:

The kulaks are the rabid foes of the Soviet government … These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the hunger of the people … These spidersfn4 have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved … Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to all of them.49

The ‘Food Army’ led this onslaught on the ‘kulak hoarders’. Its armed requisitioning brigades (prodotriady) were empowered to occupy the villages and extract their surplus grain by force. Before they left the cities, they would pose for a photograph, like an army going off to battle. The brigades were supposed to consist of the cream of the working class. But in fact, like the first Red Army units, their 76,000 members were made up mainly of the unemployed, the rootless and migrant lumpen elements, and former soldiers with nowhere else to go. The provincial provisions authorities constantly complained that the brigades were ‘of poor quality and indisciplined’, that they ‘carried out their work without the slightest plan’, that they ‘often used coercion against the peasantry’, and that they took from them not only surplus grain but vital stocks of seed, private property, guns and vodka. In the words of one provincial commissar, their work amounted to little more than ‘organized robbery from the peasants’.50

‘At times’, wrote Tsiurupa, the People’s Commissar for Provisions, ‘the food brigades would emulate the methods of the tsarist police.’ Sometimes they occupied a village and tortured the peasants in a brutal fashion until the required amount of food and property was handed over. ‘The measures of exaction are reminiscent of a medieval inquisition,’ reported one official from Yelets, ‘they make the peasants strip and kneel on the floor, and whip or beat them, sometimes killing them.’ The approach of a food brigade was enough to make the peasants flee in panic. One shocked commissar in Ufa province reported the following incident. He had entered the hut of a peasant woman who, it seemed, had failed to run away when his small platoon, which she had mistaken for a food brigade, had arrived in the village. She began to scream and seized her little boy. ‘Cut me down and kill me but don’t take my child,’ she cried. The commissar tried to calm her down by telling her that she was safe, whereupon the peasant woman said: ‘I thought you were going to kill me. I had no idea that there were Bolsheviks who did not murder peasants. All those we have seen are oprichniki [the detested henchmen of Ivan the Terrible].’ In the Borisoglebsk district of Tambov province — a future stronghold of the Antonov revolt (see here) — there was a barbarous brigade leader named Margolin, who stole indiscriminately from the peasants, and raped their women or took away their horses when they could not pay the levy. Many of the peasants were forced to buy up grain from the neighbouring province of Voronezh, or part with their last vital stocks of food and seed, to keep Margolin satisfied. Another local tyrant, a brigade leader named Cheremukhin, turned the southern villages of Balashov, just behind the Red Front against Denikin, into his corrupt private fiefdom. Peasant food and property were requisitioned with brutal force, often leaving the farmers with nothing to eat or sow, and peasant women were routinely raped. The leader of a nearby food brigade left a vivid impression of the peasant mood on passing through one of ‘Cheremukhin’s villages’:

The peasants mistook us for some of Cheremukhin’s assistants and all fell down on to their knees and bowed before us. One could feel that the spirit of the Revolution among the people of this village had been entirely suppressed. The slavery of Tsarism was again clearly visible on their faces. The effect upon us was one of overwhelming demoralization.51

Most peasants tried to hide their precious grain stocks from the food brigades. Bags of flour were buried under floorboards, in the lofts of barns, deep in the woods and underground. The brigades assumed that all the villages did this and that the hidden grain was surplus, whereas in fact it often found vital reserves of seed and food. A ‘battle for grain’ thus began, with the brigades using terror to squeeze out the stocks and the peasants counteracting them with passive resistance and outright revolt. During July and August 1918 there were over 200 uprisings against the food brigades. The Bolsheviks tried to portray them as ‘SR-kulak revolts’; but they were in fact general village rebellions, in which the poorest peasants (who were left the hungriest by the requisitions) often played a leading role. These uprisings were violent and spontaneous, usually in response to some atrocity perpetrated by the brigades. In one village of Samara province, where the food brigade had robbed and murdered several villagers, the peasants exacted a savage revenge. One night in November, they decapitated the twelve members of the brigade as they slept in the party offices and placed their heads on poles at the village entrance as a gruesome warning to other brigades. Three weeks later the Red Army bombarded the village with artillery and, when all the villagers had fled to the woods, burned it down.52

Inside the village the brigades were supposed to be assisted by the new Committees of the Rural Poor (kombedy). Lenin heralded their institution, on 11 June, as the moment when the countryside embarked on the Socialist Revolution. This was to be the peasants’ October, when the ‘rural proletariat’ would join the ‘class struggle’ against the ‘kulaks’, the ‘rural bourgeoisie’. By helping the brigades to extract their grain, the kombedy were to bring about the ‘socialist transformation’ of the village, replacing the ‘kulak Soviets’ and completing the expropriation of other ‘kulak’ property, such as surplus land and livestock. As Sverdlov put it, the aim was to ‘split the village into two warring classes’ and ‘inflame there the same civil war as in the cities’. Upon that depended the survival of the Soviet regime in the countryside.53

The kombedy failed dismally to ignite this ‘class war’ in the village. This was where Marxist dogma collapsed under the weight of peasant reality. Most villages thought of themselves as farming communities of equal members related by kin: they often called themselves a ‘peasant family’. That was the basic idea (if not the reality) of the peasant commune. As such, they were hostile to the suggestion of setting up a separate body for the village poor. Didn’t they already have the Soviet? Most village communes either failed to elect a kombed, leaving it to outside agitators, or else set up one which every peasant joined on the grounds, as they often put it, that all the peasants were equally poor. In this case, the kombed was indistinguishable from the Soviet. The peasants of Kiselevo-Chemizovka in the Atkarsk district, for example, resolved that a kombed was not needed, ‘since the peasants are almost equal, and the poor ones are already in the Soviet. The organization of a separate kombed would only lead to unnecessary tensions between citizens of the same commune.’ The Bolshevik agitators were quite unable to split the peasants on class lines. The poor peasants were simply not aware of themselves as ‘proletarians’. Nor did they think of their richer neighbours as a ‘bourgeoisie’. They all thought of themselves as fellow villagers and looked at the efforts of the Bolsheviks to split them with suspicion and hostility.54

So the kombed in many places was set up by elements from outside the commune. These were not the poor peasant farmers but immigrant townsmen and soldiers, landless craftsmen and labourers excluded from the commune. A study of 800 kombedy in Tambov province found that less than half their members at the volost level had ever farmed the land; 30 per cent of them were soldiers. In the semi-industrial villages of the north these social types may well have been ‘insiders’; but in the agricultural south they were strangers to the village core. Disconnected from the peasant commune, upon which all rural government depended, they were unable to carry out their tasks without resorting to violence. They requisitioned private property, made illegal arrests, vandalized churches and generally terrorized the peasants. They were more like a local mafia than an organ of the Soviet state. In one Saratov volost, for example, the kombed was run by the Druzhaev brothers in alliance with the chief of the regional police, comrade Varlamov. They went around the villages extorting money, guns and vodka from the terrified peasants. Livestock was also confiscated and handed over to their henchmen among the ‘village poor’. One peasant who could not pay was forced to watch them rape his wife. This state of terror lasted for six months. The villagers petitioned ‘comrade Lenin’ in the hope of ending it. As one of them put it: ‘The people are beginning to say that life was better under the Tsar.’55

Along with the food brigades, the kombedy sparked a huge wave of peasant revolts. These reached a peak in November, the height of both the ‘battle for grain’ and the first major Red Army mobilizations. Whole districts of Tambov, Tula and Riazan’ were swallowed up by peasant bands armed with pitchforks and guns. Elsewhere the uprisings were more sporadic but no less violent. The peasants lynched and murdered the kombed members, the local Bolsheviks and the leaders of the Soviets. The Bolshevik Central Committee member Smidovich, who was sent to report on the Tula revolts, concluded in November that ‘the peasants are beginning to feel as if they are being ruled by the arbitrary will of an alien set of masters; they no longer believe in the promises of Soviet Power and only expect bad from it’.56

At the Sixth Soviet Congress in November Lenin called for the abolition of the kombedy. This was the start of a new policy, endorsed by the Eighth Party Congress the following March, to improve relations with the middle peasantry. It was an admission that the kombedy had, as Lenin put it, waged a ‘reckless war of destruction against the interests of the peasants’. The whole attempt to divide the village into two hostile classes had, as he admitted, been misconceived, and it was now to be abandoned.57 But it was surely too late for the Bolsheviks to repair their relations with the peasantry.

A few weeks after the abolition of the kombedy, in January 1919, the Bolsheviks also changed their tactics in the ‘battle for grain’. The requisitioning of the 1918 harvest, the first carried out by Soviet power, had been nothing less than disastrous. Only a fifth of the levy had been collected by the end of the year. Of course the Bolsheviks blamed it on the ‘kulaks’; but in fact the weakness of their own procurement infrastructure was to blame. The food brigades had no effective means of accounting for the harvest. The kombedy pursued their own local interests at the expense of the centre, sometimes even keeping the grain for themselves. The collection depots were unable to cope with the volume of grain because of fuel shortages. And the chaos on the railways often meant that grain did not reach the towns. The January reform, known as the Food Levy or prodrazverstka, had been intended to reinforce the system. It differed from the grain monopoly of May 1918 in two main respects. First, whereas the grain monopoly had been limited to cereals, all the major foodstuffs, including livestock and vegetables, were subjected to the food levy.fn5 And second, whereas the quotas of the grain monopoly had been set by the local food organs in accordance with the harvest estimates, the quotas of the food levy were set from above, by the central state, in accordance with its general needs and then simply divided among the provincial authorities. Thus the principle, however loosely it may have been applied, that the quotas should match the actual harvest surplus was abandoned altogether. Increasingly, the levies bore no relation to the peasantry’s ability to pay. The requisitioning brigades were simply instructed to extract the necessary amounts of food by force, even if this meant taking the peasants’ last vital stocks of food and seed. It was assumed, in this terrifyingly ignorant calculus, that an empty barn was a sign that its owner was a ‘kulak’ hiding food.58

And so as the civil war moved towards its climax, during the spring of 1919, the ‘battle for grain’, that other civil war behind the Red Front, also reached its own insane heights. It became a life-and-death struggle between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry.

*

Stamping out the bagmen was the final element of the Bolshevik ‘battle for grain’. Flying brigades (zagraditel’nye otriady) were set up to police the roads and railways. They were ordered to confiscate all foodstuffs from the passengers coming into town, leaving them only their legal allowance of one-and-a-half puds (hence the bagmen became known as the ‘one-and-a-half puders’). Trains were stopped and searched, their passengers forced to disembark and open up their luggage. The brigades behaved more like bandits than government officials. They confiscated money, clothes and drink from the passengers. The Cheka carried out similar raids on the urban markets, hunting out bagmen from the countryside.

All this of course was a futile exercise. It was impossible to stamp out the market, just as King Canute could not force back the sea. Throughout the period of War Communism the trains continued to be filled by bagmen (it was easy for them to bribe the railway officials). Lenin himself acknowledged that at least half the foodstuffs reaching the towns had been brought in by the bagmen; and at times the figure was much higher. The Bolsheviks had little choice but to tolerate this private trade, without which the workers would have starved. Their policy towards the bagmen vacillated in fact: at critical moments of the civil war, when they needed to keep the railways free for the military, they would clamp down on them and try to ban all passenger transport; but at other times the bagmen were allowed to continue more or less without hindrance. Bolshevik policy on the urban markets was equally fitful. The Cheka would occasionally carry out a raid, seizing goods and arresting vendors, after which business would slow down for a few days, but then the markets would return to normal. The enormous Sukharevka market in Moscow flourished throughout the civil war years, despite constant Cheka raids. Most of the state’s own textile factories in the capital purchased their cloth from private salesmen there. The Sukharevka came to symbolize the old world of free trade which the Reds could not conquer. Lenin himself once lamented that in the soul of every Russian there was a ‘little Sukharevka’.59

Futile though it may have been to try, squeezing out the bag-trade was essential for the Bolsheviks in industry. It was impossible to maintain industrial production if the workers kept running off to the countryside for food. Control of the food supply went hand in hand with the control of labour. The Bolsheviks were adamant on the state’s need to control the movement of labour. This was the essence of War Communism — ‘the right of the dictatorship’, as Trotsky put it, ‘to send every worker to the place where he is needed in accordance with the state plan’. To advocate the freedom of labour, as the Mensheviks did, was, in Trotsky’s words, the ‘milky way to Socialism’. Without the food monopoly or the abolition of the labour market, the economy would be ruined and the working class destroyed by the ‘chaotic movement of the workers from one factory to another.’ The high road to socialism, in his view, entailed ending all free labour and imposing state control on all large-scale industry. This was to be a completely planned economy.60

Throughout the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks had been moving towards the nationalization of industry. Imposing their own managers in the factories seemed the only way to stop the chaos brought about by the 14 November Decree on Workers’ Control, which had been a vital political concession to the factory committees and trade unions. Control by the factories through collegial management boards had helped the Bolsheviks to win the support of many of the workers, and dealt a blow to the factory owners during the regime’s struggle for the control of the industrial capitals. But the economic effect of the policy had been catastrophic. The workers’ bodies in control of the factories had merely voted themselves huge pay rises, fuelling the inflation. They had also carried out a destructive campaign of terror and violence, often motivated by revenge, against the old managers and technicians, which had disrupted the management of production. The workers’ bodies had done very little to stop the decline of labour discipline and the constant thefts of tools and raw materials to make cigarette lighters and other illegal goods for the bag-trade.

Even more importantly, the factory committees and trade unions had become part of a growing workers’ protest movement against the Bolshevik dictatorship. The working class remained just as militant as in 1917 — only now their anger was focused on the party that ruled in their name. Strikes and workers’ protests engulfed all the country’s major industrial districts, including the former Bolshevik strongholds in Petrograd and Moscow, during the spring of 1918. Much of the discontent was of the most basic economic kind. Workers complained about the shortages of bread and the threat of unemployment; they were disgusted that the so-called Workers’ State had done nothing to improve their lives. This gave rise to a general disillusionment with politics, often combined with vague hostility towards the Bolsheviks as the ruling party, among many workers. According to Gorky, many ‘workers spat whenever they heard the name of the Bolsheviks mentioned’. This sort of cynical — but essentially pre-political — attitude was best summed up by the slogan which began to appear on city walls: ‘Down with Lenin and horsemeat! Give us the Tsar and pork!’61 But for other workers politics still mattered, especially for those with a background of Menshevik or SR activism who had an alternative political vision to counterpose against that of the Bolsheviks; and their reaction to the crisis of the spring was to form themselves into a protest movement, the Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives, which was by far the most powerful threat the Bolsheviks ever encountered from the working class.

The Extraordinary Assemblies were a grass-roots workers’ movement. Established in March, they had a membership of several hundred thousand workers at the height of their influence in June. The Mensheviks and SRs played a prominent role in their leadership at the national level, and it was often their local activists who were to the fore in factory assemblies. The spring marked a general resurgence of these parties’ fortunes in the industrial cities. By establishing an electoral pact they were able to defeat the Bolsheviks in several city Soviet elections. But it does not follow that the workers’ assemblies were a protest movement for the Mensheviks and the SRs as opposed to one (which happened to include them) against the Bolsheviks.62 True, many of the factories’ protest resolutions voiced the same concerns as the Mensheviks and the SRs: they condemned the closure of the Constituent Assembly, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the repression of the opposition. But this may only go to show that Mensheviks and SRs wrote these resolutions and either added these demands to those of the workers or else framed the workers’ demands in their own terms. In any case, judging from the minutes of the factory meetings, the thing that exercised the workers most was a general feeling that the promise of a ‘workers’ revolution’ — a promise that had led many of them to support the Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1917 — had not been fulfilled. As the striking workers of the Sormovo factory declared in June: ‘The Soviet regime, having been established in our name, has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the workers Socialism but has brought them empty factories and destitution.’ This, as far as one can tell, was a general feeling shared by all the politicized workers — including a large proportion of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks, many of whom joined the Extraordinary Assemblies movement. Even the Vyborg district party committee in Petrograd, that bastion of militant Bolshevism in 1917, distributed the propaganda of the Extraordinary Assemblies to its members.63

By April 1918, Lenin had come round to the view that industry had to be brought under state control, as opposed to workers’ control through collegial boards, with a traditional management structure (‘one-man management’) capable of restoring labour discipline. In ‘The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power’, written that month, Lenin demanded that the working-class offensive against the capitalist industrial system should be halted in the broader interests of economic reconstruction. The expertise of the ‘bourgeois’ managers had to be tapped in the interests of the state; this, he admitted, meant using capitalist methods to construct the socialist order. It would be necessary to pay the bourgeois managers a high salary, and to restore their authority on the shopfloor, in order to ensure their co-operation with the Soviet regime, even though this went against the egalitarian principles of the Left. But, he argued, since the working class had not yet been trained for the tasks of management, this was a ‘tribute’ that had to be paid. The ideals of equality had to be sacrificed in the interests of efficiency.64

From this point on the Bolsheviks began to encourage the process of nationalization, the second major plank of War Communism after the war against the market. Until then, it had developed largely from below, on the initiative of the local Soviets and workers’ organizations, and had assumed the character of a revolution in the factories with the workers using the process to impose their own control on the managers. Now, with Lenin’s backing, it was taken over by the central state and its All-Russian Council for the Economy (VSNKh), which used the process to replace the workers’ system of factory management with state-appointed (‘bourgeois’) managers aiming to restore discipline on the shop floor. This in effect meant shifting the centre of industrial power from the factory committees and the trade unions to the managerial apparatus of the party-state.65

The change in policy was clearly motivated by the growing threat from the working class. The easiest way to stop the factory organizations from acting as a channel for the workers’ opposition movement was to bring them under central dictation. The Sovnarkom Decree of 28 June, by which most of Russia’s large-scale industry was nationalized, came just three days before a general strike in Petrograd called by the Extraordinary Assemblies in protest against the Bolshevik regime. Although the decree had been in preparation for several weeks, there is no doubt that its precise timing was largely dictated by the need to preempt this strike.fn6 Since 9 May, when the Cheka had opened fire on a crowd of demonstrating workers in the Petrograd suburb of Kolpino, there had been a spiral of strikes and workers’ protests, industry had been brought to a virtual halt, and in those cities where free polling was allowed, the Mensheviks and SRs had swept the board. In short, it appeared as if the Petrograd strike, if it was allowed to go ahead, might easily develop into a national strike, perhaps leading to the downfall of the regime. This was also a critical moment in the civil war, with the Czechs and the SRs building up a power base on the Volga and widespread revolts in the Red rear. The Bolshevik Commissar for the Press, Volodarsky, was assassinated by an SR on 20 June. The Bolshevik leadership was afraid that this might be the start of a coup d’étât by the SRs and the Mensheviks. They thought it was essential to bring the factories under state control and to head off the threat of a general strike in their last remaining stronghold of power.

The Decree on Nationalization transferred the management of the factories from the workers’ organizations to the party apparatus. The party bosses used it to threaten the workers with dismissal if they went ahead with their planned strike. The strike organizers were arrested — especially those who were known to be connected with the SRs and the Mensheviks — and dozens of them shot as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Not surprisingly, given this intimidation, very few workers came out on to the streets for the general strike. The Bolsheviks drove home their victory: the Extraordinary Assemblies were outlawed, their leaders imprisoned and the dissident trade unions purged. The Mensheviks and SRs were now expelled from the Soviets, denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, and driven underground. The last of the opposition newspapers were shut down. Even Gorky’s Novaia zhizn’, which had helped to organize the Petrograd strike and which had often declared its support for the Extraordinary Assemblies, was finally closed on 16 July. ‘We are heading for a total civil war,’ a despondent Gorky wrote to Ekaterina, ‘and it seems that the war will be a savage one … Oh, how hard it is to live in Russia! We are all so stupid — so fantastically stupid.’66

iii The Colour of Blood

Strange though it may seem, Lenin only became a Russian household name and image in September 1918 — and then only because he had nearly died. During the first ten months of Bolshevik rule, he was rarely seen in public. Shots fired at his car on New Year’s Day had left the leader of the world revolution fearful for his life; and after that he seldom ventured out of his closely guarded quarters in the Smolny or the Kremlin. ‘Nobody even knew Lenin’s face,’ Krupskaya wrote of those early weeks. ‘In the evening he would often stroll around the Smolny and nobody would ever recognize him, since there were still no portraits of him then.’fn767

All that changed on 30 August. Lenin had gone to the Mikhelson Factory in the southern Moscow suburbs to deliver a standard harangue to the workers on the need to defend the revolution, as was the custom of the Bolshevik leaders on Friday afternoons. Earlier that day news had reached him that Uritsky, the Bolshevik chief of the Petrograd Cheka, had been killed by an SR assassin, Leonid Kanegiser. Lenin’s family had pleaded with him to call off his visit; but Lenin this time chose to go ahead. As he left the factory, a woman named Fanny Kaplan approached him through the crowd and shot three times at him. Lenin fell to the ground, while his bodyguards pursued the assassin. By the time he was brought back to the Kremlin, he seemed on the point of death. One of the bullets had lodged in his neck and he was bleeding profusely. Blood had entered one of his lungs. (It did not stop him from making sure his doctors were Bolsheviks.) For the next few days his life hung in the balance. But then he began to recover and by 25 September was declared well enough to go with Krupskaya to convalesce at Gorki, a village outside Moscow, where an estate had been requisitioned for his private use.

Lenin’s quick recovery was declared a miracle in the Bolshevik press. He was hailed as a Christ-like figure, blessed with supernatural powers, who was not afraid to sacrifice his own life for the good of the people. Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, claimed fantastically that Lenin had refused help after the shooting and, ‘with his pierced lungs still spilling blood’, had gone back to work immediately so as to make sure that the ‘locomotive’ of the revolution did not stop. Zinoviev, in a special pamphlet for mass distribution, extolled Lenin as the son of a peasant who had ‘made the revolution’: ‘He is the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the grace of God. Such a leader is born once in 500 years in the life of mankind.’ Dozens of other eulogies appeared in the press during the weeks after the shooting. The workers were said to be concerned only for one thing: that ‘their leader’ should recover. Lenin’s poster-portrait began to appear in the streets. He himself appeared for the first time in a documentary film, Vladimir Ilich’s Kremlin Stroll, shown throughout Moscow that autumn to dispel the growing rumour that he had been killed. It was the start of the Lenin cult — a cult designed by the Bolsheviks, apparently against Lenin’s will,fn8 to promote their leader as the ‘people’s Tsar’.68

The cult was reminiscent in some ways of the ancient cult of the divine Tsar. It went back to the medieval practice of canonizing princes who were prematurely killed whilst serving Russia. But the Lenin cult was new in the sense that it also fed into folklore myths of the popular leaders against the Tsar, such as Stenka Razin or Emelian Pugachev, blessed with magical and Christ-like powers. Here was the mixture of peasant Christianity and pagan myth that had long associated revolution with the hunt for truth and justice (pravda) in the popular consciousness. The orchestrators of the Lenin cult consciously played upon this theme. ‘Lenin cannot be killed’, declared one of his hagiographers on 1 September, ‘because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. So long as the proletariat lives — Lenin lives.’ Thus Lenin as the Workers’ Christ. Another propagandist claimed that it had been the ‘will of the proletariat’ that had miraculously intervened, like some crucifix or a button on his chest, to deflect Kaplan’s bullets from causing a fatal wound. Poems were published depicting Lenin as a martyr sent by God to suffer for the poor:

You came to us, to ease

Our excruciating torment,

You came to us a leader, to destroy

The enemies of the workers’ movement.

We will not forget your suffering,

That you, our leader, endured for us.

You stood a martyr …

A biography of Lenin for the workers was rushed out after the shooting. With the sort of title that one more readily associates with the cults of Stalin or Mao, The Great Leader of the Workers’ Revolution, it depicted Lenin as supremely wise, a superhuman God-like figure, beloved by all the workers. A similar pamphlet for the peasants, The Leader of the Rural Poor, V. I. Ul’ianov-Lenin, was printed in 100,000 copies. It read a bit like the Lives of the Saints, the favourite reading of the peasants. All sorts of myths about Lenin, the fighter for truth and justice, began to circulate among the peasantry. Photographs of him appeared for the first time in remote villages. These were often placed in the ‘red corner’, the ‘holy spot’ inside the peasant hut where icons and portraits of the Tsar had been traditionally placed.69

Lenin’s failed assassin, Fanny Kaplan, was a young Jewish woman and former Anarchist turned SR, who told the Cheka that the plot to kill him had been all her own. She said that Lenin had betrayed the revolution, and that ‘by living longer, he merely postpones the ideal of socialism for decades to come’. Kaplan was detained in the same Lubianka cell as the British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, whom the Bolsheviks had also arrested on suspicion of involvement in the plot. He described her entering the cell:

She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colourless. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition.

But she did not. Soon she was removed to the Kremlin, where she was almost certainly tortured before being shot (and her remains destroyed without trace) on 3 September. According to Angelica Balabanoff, soon to become the Secretary of the Comintern, Krupskaya wept at the thought that, in Kaplan, the first revolutionary had been killed by the revolutionary government.70 One wonders how much she wept for the thousands of other revolutionaries shortly to be killed in revenge for the wounding of her husband.

Although Kaplan had always denied it, she was at once accused of working for the SRs and the Western Powers.fn9 It was yet another ‘proof’ in the paranoiac theory that the regime was surrounded by a ring of enemies; and that, if it was to survive, a constant civil war had to be waged against them. The Bolshevik press called for mass reprisals. Having drummed up a rage of adulation for the Bolshevik leader, it did not take much to turn this passion into violent hatred for his enemies. The mass circulation Krasnaia gazeta set the tone on 1 September:

Without mercy, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky let there be floods of bourgeois blood — more blood, as much as possible.

Peters, the deputy head of the Cheka, denounced Kaplan’s shot at Lenin as an attack on the working class and called on the workers to ‘crush the hydra of counter-revolution’ by applying mass terror. The Commissar for Internal Affairs ordered the Soviets to ‘arrest all SRs at once’ and take ‘hostages’ en masse from the ‘bourgeoisie and officers’: these were to be executed on ‘the least opposition’.71 It was the signal for the start of the Red Terror.

*

The Red Terror did not come out of the blue. It was implicit in the regime from the start. As Kamenev and his supporters had warned the party in October, the resort to rule by terror was bound to follow from Lenin’s violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy. The Bolsheviks were forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means.

Lenin had always accepted the need to use terror in order to ‘defend the revolution’. It was a weapon in the ‘civil war’. Of course he was careful to distance himself in public from the institutions of the Terror — others put their signatures to its death warrants — and this helped to fuel the myth that Lenin was a good and gentle ‘Tsar’ who had nothing to do with the evil actions of his oprichniki. But behind the scenes Lenin was a stalwart champion of the Red Terror. On 26 October 1917 the Second Soviet Congress had passed a resolution proposed by Kamenev to abolish the death penalty. Lenin was absent from the session and, when told of it, flew into a rage:

Nonsense, how can you make a revolution without firing squads? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war?

Lenin looked upon the use of terror as a means of class war against the ‘bourgeoisie’. From the start, he had encouraged the mass terror of the lower classes against the rich and the privileged through the slogan ‘Loot the Looters!’ ‘We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror,’ he wrote the following June.72 As we saw in Chapter 11, this mass terror had given the Bolsheviks a strong base of emotional support among those elements of the poor who derived a certain satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty fall regardless of whether it brought any improvement in their own lot. The early Cheka system was directly shaped by the local initiatives of this mass terror.

Since its establishment in November 1917, the Cheka had grown by leaps and bounds. When it moved into its first headquarters in Petrograd, the Cheka had a tiny staff. Dzerzhinsky, its chief, carried all its records in his briefcase. But by the end of March, when the government moved to Moscow and the Cheka occupied the infamous Lubianka building (formerly occupied by Lloyd’s Insurance), it had a staff of more than 600, rising to 1,000 by June, not including the security troops. Provincial Chekas were slower to develop; but nearly all the provinces and most of the districts had a Cheka branch by September, when the order came down to unleash the Red Terror.73

The Cheka was a state within a state. There was scarcely any aspect of Soviet life, from the struggle against counter-revolution to the issuing of dog licences, that it did not cover. From the start it worked outside the law. The Commissariat of Justice struggled in vain to subordinate it to the courts. The knock on the door in the middle of the night, interrogations and imprisonment without charge, torture and summary executions — these were the methods of the Cheka. In the words of one of its founders:

The Cheka is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war … It does not judge, it strikes. It does not pardon, it destroys all who are caught on the other side of the barricade.74

During the early months of Bolshevik power the Cheka was not as murderous as it would later be. One source counted 884 executions listed in the press between December and July. The presence of the Left SRs — who joined the Cheka in January and remained in it even after they resigned from Sovnarkom in March — had a restraining influence. So too did public protests, especially from the workers, whose strike resolutions nearly always condemned the Terror. The time when the public lived in terror of the Cheka had still not arrived. Take, for example, the famous incident in the Moscow Circus. The humourless Chekists had taken exception to the anti-Soviet jokes of the clown Bim-Bom and burst into the middle of his act in order to arrest him. At first the audience thought it was all part of the act; but Bim-Bom fled and the Chekists shot him in the back. People began to scream and panic ensued. News of the shooting spread, giving rise to public condemnations of the Cheka Terror. Hundreds turned out for the clown’s funeral, which became in effect a demonstration.75

During these early stages of the Terror arrests were often random. This stemmed from the chaotic nature of the newly emergent police state: virtually anyone could be arrested on denunciation by an enemy or on the whim of the local Cheka boss. All sorts of people filled the Cheka jails in these early months. Prince Lvov, who was arrested by the Cheka in Ekaterinburg, described his fellow prisoners in February as a ‘very motley public’, from princes and priests to ordinary peasants. Even Lenin’s cousin, Viktor Ardashev, was arrested and shot by the Ekaterinburg Cheka in January 1918. The Bolshevik leader only found out some months later, when he ordered an official to convey his greetings to Ardashev and was told that he had been killed. It seems he was very fond of his cousin. But the affection was not returned. Ardashev was a prominent Kadet in Ekaterinburg and had organized a Civil Service strike against Lenin’s government.76

*

Two landmarks stand out in the progress of the Terror: the Left SR uprising and the murder of the imperial family.

The Left SR uprising was one of the most farcical episodes in the history of the revolution. It epitomized the naiveté of the Left SRs. The remarkable thing is that at its crucial moment the Left SRs might have overthrown the Bolshevik regime: only, it appears, success was not part of their plan. This was not a coup d’étât but — not unlike the Bolsheviks’ own July uprising of 1917 — a suicidal act of public protest to galvanize ‘the masses’ against the regime. At no point did the Left SRs ever really think of taking power. They were only ‘playing’ at revolution.

The ideals that had brought the Left SRs into Sovnarkom in December all seemed to them to be in jeopardy by the following June. The freedom of the Soviets had been stifled by the dictatorship. The interests of the peasantry had been trampled on by the grain monopoly and the kombedy. Civil liberties had gone down the drain, along with the Left SRs’ foolish notion that, by joining the Bolsheviks in government, they might restrain their abuses of power. But the greatest of their disappointments was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Like the Left Communists, the Left SRs believed that the treaty had transformed Russia into a vassal of the German Empire, and that it had given up the only hope of spreading socialism to the West through a revolutionary war against the imperialists. On the signing of the peace, the Left SRs condemned the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution and resigned from Sovnarkom, although they remained in the Soviet Executive and ironically the Cheka. Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador, who arrived in the latter half of April to resume diplomatic relations between Berlin and Moscow,fn10 became a target of terrorist threats from the Left SRs, who were out to disrupt the peace.

Their campaign of noisy opposition reached its peak at the Fifth Soviet Congress, which opened in the Bolshoi Theatre on 4 July. Given the swing away from the Bolsheviks in the Soviets during the spring, the Left SRs had a large delegation, although not as many as they had expected, and it was suspected that the Bolsheviks had packed the congress with their own supporters. The Left SRs claimed to represent ‘the masses’ who had supported the ‘Soviet revolution’ but who felt betrayed by the Bolsheviks. Kamkov and Spiridonova, the party’s two main leaders, denounced the Bolsheviks’ policies. Top of their list was the ‘shameful peace’, which they said had sold out the workers and peasants of the Ukraine to the German imperialists. They vowed to resume a revolutionary war and waved their fists at the imperial loge, where, symbolically, Count Mirbach was in attendance.

Two days later he was assassinated. This act of terror was supposed to disrupt the peace by provoking Germany to attack Russia. Like the terrorists’ bombs of the nineteenth century, it was also meant to spark a popular uprising against the regime. The decision to assassinate Mirbach had been taken by the Left SRs on the evening of the 4th, after the first session of the Congress, when it became clear that they could not win the majority they needed to bring about a change in the government’s pro-German and anti-peasant policies. A Left SR motion of no-confidence in the Bolsheviks — designed to win the support of the Left Communists — had been defeated, and the Left SRs had walked out. Spiridonova — who despite her genteel appearance had never wanted for terrorist verve — masterminded Mirbach’s murder. She recruited Yakov Bliumkin, a Left SR Chekist suitably placed in charge of counter-espionage against the Germans, and his photographer, Nikolai Andreev, to do the bloody deed. In the afternoon of the 6th they arranged a meeting with the Ambassador on the pretext of discussing the case of a Count Robert Mirbach, believed to be a relative of his, arrested on suspicion of spying. After a brief conversation, the Chekists pulled out revolvers and opened fire. Their shots missed and Mirbach began to escape. But Bliumkin threw a bomb after him, causing fatal injuries. The two men escaped through a window, Bliumkin taking a bullet in the leg, and fled in a waiting car to the Pokrovsky Barracks of the Cheka Combat Detachment, commanded by Dmitrii Popov, another prominent Left SR in the Cheka, which became the headquarters of the uprising. Lenin was at once summoned to the German Embassy to apologize for the murder. Never before in diplomatic history had a Russian head of state been humiliated in this way.

Later that afternoon Dzerzhinsky went to the Pokrovsky Barracks and demanded that Bliumkin and Andreev be turned over for arrest. But the Cheka Combat Detachment arrested him instead and declared its allegiance to the uprising. The insurgents then occupied the Cheka headquarters at the Lubianka, capturing Latsis, Dzerzhinsky’s makeshift replacement. This was not a street uprising but a palace coup inside the Cheka: it owed everything to the uncharacteristic negligence of the Bolsheviks. The Left SRs had been allowed to fill seven of the twenty seats in the Cheka Collegium. Dzerzhinsky had appointed the Left SR Alexandrovich as his own deputy and allowed him to build up the Combat Detachment as an exclusively Left SR unit. On the evening of the 6th Alexandrovich — who according to Spiridonova had known nothing of the plot to murder Mirbach and had only joined the Left SR uprising on the 6th itself — took command of the insurgent troops.

At this point there was virtually nothing to prevent the Left SRs from seizing power. They had 2,000 well-armed troops in the capital compared to the 700 loyal to the regime. The bulk of the Latvian Rifles, the only crack troops in the capital upon which the Bolsheviks could rely, had been celebrating St John’s Day at the Khodynka Field — scene of the disaster on the coronation of the last Tsar in 1896 — on the outskirts of the capital. The Latvians were unable to return to Moscow because of fog, torrential rain and thunderstorms. Lenin was in a state of utter panic: like Kerensky in October, he had no troops to defend his regime. Vatsetis, the Latvian commander placed in charge of the government’s defence, recalls being summoned to the Kremlin after midnight, where ‘the atmosphere was like the Front in the theatre of a war’. Lenin’s first question to him was: ‘Comrade, can we hold out till morning?’77

But the Left SRs showed no inclination to press home their military advantage. They were much less interested in seizing power themselves than they were in calling for a popular uprising to force the Bolsheviks to change their policies. The Left SRs had no idea where this uprising would end up: they were happy to leave that to the ‘revolutionary creativity of the masses’. They were the ‘poets of the revolution’ and, like all poets, were anarchists at heart. At every stage of their relationship with the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs had been outsmarted by them; and even now, when they had them at their mercy, they soon lost the upper hand. Instead of marching on the Kremlin, the Left SR leaders went to the Bolshoi Theatre, where the Soviet Congress was in session. Spiridonova gave a long and characteristically hysterical speech denouncing the Bolshevik regime. Yet while she spoke the guards in charge of security at the congress surrounded the building and sealed off all the exits. The Bolshevik delegates were allowed to leave but all the others were arrested. The Left SRs had walked into a trap.

Later that night the Bolsheviks recaptured the Lubianka. Then, in the small hours of the morning, Vatsetis’s forces overcame the Combat Detachment in the Pokrovsky Barracks. Vatsetis was rewarded by the grateful Bolsheviks with 10,000 roubles and the Command of the Eastern Front: in September he was given the command of the whole Red Army. And yet the Left SRs were defeated less by him than they were by themselves. As their own party comrade Steinberg put it, they were beaten ‘not because their leaders were not brave enough, but because it was not at all their purpose to overthrow the government’.

Several hundred rebels were arrested. Alexandrovich and twelve other leaders of the Combat Detachment were summarily executed on the 7th. Most of the other Left SR leaders were imprisoned and placed on trial in November, when, given the climate at that time, they received extraordinarily lenient sentences (some of the Bolsheviks did not want to punish them at all) and indeed were later amnestied. Spiridonova was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and then amnestied, only to be rearrested in February 1919, declared a lunatic and incarcerated in the Kremlin barracks. But she soon escaped, having won the sympathy of her guards. Bliumkin also managed to escape and later joined the Bolsheviks. As a party, the Left SRs were finished after the failed uprising of July. Its activists were forced out of the Soviets and driven underground. Hundreds were imprisoned or executed.78 Others — who had opposed the July uprising — broke away to form a new party called the Revolutionary Communists. With the removal of the Left SRs, who alone had acted as a brake on the lawlessness of the Cheka, a new wave of terror now began. Ironically, given their involvement in the Cheka, the Left SRs were its first victims.

*

After his abdication in March 1917, Nikolai Romanov (as he was now called) had been kept under house (or rather palace) arrest along with his family and their retinue at Tsarskoe Selo. Apart from the limitations on their movement, they suffered few privations: the huge costs of feeding and dining all of them were kept from the press for fear of causing public outrage.79 Their lives in these months were not unlike a long Edwardian house party — only with the difference that the ‘house guests’ were confined to certain rooms and, instead of the normal hunting, had to limit their exercise to a short walk around the garden supervised by guards.

Nicholas showed no real signs of missing power. Judging from his diaries, these were among the happiest days of his whole life. Liberated from the burdens of office, which he had always unhappily borne, he was free to pursue the private bourgeois lifestyle he had always hankered for. Kerensky, who visited the former Tsar on several occasions at Tsarskoe Selo (the Tsarina insisted on calling him Kedrinsky), later wrote that ‘all those who watched him in his captivity were unanimous in saying that Nicholas II seemed generally to be very good-tempered and appeared to enjoy his new manner of life. It seemed as if a heavy burden had fallen from his shoulders and that he was greatly relieved.’ Nicholas filled these quiet days with his family in games of dominoes, reading aloud The Count of Monte Cristo, gardening, rowing, tennis and prayers. Never before had he slept so well.80

This first stage of their captivity came to an end in the middle of August, when the imperial family was evacuated to the Siberian town of Tobolsk. Kerensky was concerned for their personal safety. There had always been the very real danger that an angry crowd might break into the palace and wreak a savage vengeance on the former Tsar: there had been one such attempt back in March by a group of soldiers from Petrograd. This danger seemed to be on the increase after the July Days. It had originally been intended to send the Tsar and his family to England, where George V, Nicholas’s cousin, had invited him in March. But the Petrograd Soviet was adamantly opposed to the idea, insisting that the former Tsar should be imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Moreover, George V withdrew his invitation for fear of alienating the Labour Party, although this was for a long time covered up by the shamefaced Windsors.fn11 So it was resolved to send them to Tobolsk instead, a provincial backwater far from the influence of the revolution, where they took up a relatively comfortable residence in the house of the former governor. In addition to the numerous ladies and gentlemen of their suite, the imperial family were accompanied by two valets, six chambermaids, ten footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a butler, a wine steward, a nurse, a clerk, a barber and two pet spaniels.81

The situation of the former royals took a turn for the worse in the early months of 1918. They noticed it in the growing rudeness of their guards, increased restrictions on their movements and the disappearance of luxuries, such as butter and coffee, which up until now they had taken for granted. The changes were connected with developments in the nearby industrial city of Ekaterinburg. A Soviet Congress of the Urals Region held there in February had elected a Bolshevik presidium led by Fillip Goloshchekin, a veteran Bolshevik and friend of Sverdlov. The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks were well known for their militancy. They were hostile to the relative comfort in which the Tsar had so far been held and were determined to get him transferred to their own control — some with a view to his imprisonment, others with a view to his execution.

Goloshchekin pleaded with Sverdlov to let him have the Tsar, claiming that in Tobolsk the danger was greater that he might escape. There were rumours of various monarchist plots — some of them real, some imagined, and some invented — to liberate the imperial family. Sverdlov did not say no – the Urals’ Bolsheviks were not the sort to mess around – but in fact there was a secret plan, ordered by the Central Committee, to bring the Tsar back to Moscow, where Trotsky was planning a great show trial for him, in the manner of Louis XVI, with himself in the role of chief prosecutor. Trotsky proposed:

an open court that would unfold a picture of the entire reign (peasant policy, labour, nationalities, culture, the two wars, etc.). The proceedings would be broadcast to the nation by radio; in the villages accounts of the proceedings would be read and commented upon daily.82

With this aim in mind, in early April Sverdlov ordered the commissar, Vasilii Yakovlev, to bring Nicholas and, if possible, the rest of his family back to Moscow alive.fn12 Yakovlev was told to travel via Ekaterinburg so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Bolsheviks there who, if they found out his real mission, would have kidnapped and executed the former Tsar. Indeed, in April the Soviet of the Urals Region passed a resolution to that effect; and Zaslavsky, one of the Ekaterinburg commissars, prepared an ambush to kidnap the Tsar. ‘We should not be wasting our time on the Romanovs,’ Zaslavsky said to Yakovlev on his arrival in Tobolsk, ‘we should be finishing them off.’83

The journey from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg was to be full of risks. The spring thaw was just beginning, flooding the roads; and the Tsarevich, whose haemophilia had recently returned, was too sick to be moved. Yakovlev was told by Moscow to leave the rest of the family behind and set off with the ex-Tsar alone. But Alexandra would not be parted from Nicholas,fn13 and in the end the two of them set off together, minus four of the children (who would follow later), in open carts towards Tiumen, the nearest railway junction, 170 miles away. On the way they passed through Pokrovskoe, Rasputin’s native village. Alexandra noted in her diary: ‘stood long before our friend’s house, saw his family & friends looking out of the windows at us’.84

Once they had boarded the train at Tiumen, Yakovlev became suspicious of the local Bolsheviks. He had heard that a cavalry detachment was planning to attack the train on its way to Ekaterinburg and kidnap his royal charges — the ‘cargo’, as he referred to them in his coded messages to Moscow. So he went on a roundabout route via Omsk to the east. This strengthened the suspicions of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks that he was planning to save the Tsar, perhaps taking him to Japan. A battle of telegrams followed, with both Yakovlev and Goloshchekin urging Sverdlov in Moscow to give them sole control of the ex-Tsar. Sverdlov this time gave in to Goloshchekin, ordering Yakovlev to turn back and proceed to Ekaterinburg. It seems that Goloshchekin’s assurance that the imperial couple would not be harmed was enough to persuade Sverdlov to let this powerful party leader finally have his way. ‘Have come to an agreement with the Uralites,’ Sverdlov cabled Yakovlev. ‘They have taken measures and given guarantees.’ Yakovlev agreed but warned prophetically that, if the ex-Tsar was taken to Ekaterinburg, he would probably never leave alive. Sverdlov made no reply.85

The imperial couple arrived in Ekaterinburg on 30 April (the rest of the family followed on 23 May). They were met at the station by an angry mob and imprisoned in a large white house commandeered the day before from Nikolai Ipatev, a retired businessman. The Bolsheviks called it the House of Special Designation — and it was there that the Romanovs would die. The regime in the house was strict and humiliating. A large fence was built around it to prevent communication with the outside world. Later the windows were painted over. The guards were hostile. They accompanied the Empress and her daughters to the lavatory; scrawled obscenities on the walls; and helped themselves to the prisoners’ belongings, stored in the garden shed. Except for meals, the prisoners were confined to their rooms. To while away the hours, Nicholas, for the first time in his life, read War and Peace.

It was in the first week of July that the decision was taken to execute all the captive Romanovs. Right up until its final collapse, the Soviet regime always insisted that the murder was carried out on the sole initiative of the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg. But the evidence that has since emerged from the archives shows conclusively that the order came from the party leadership in Moscow. This in fact had been known in the West from an entry in Trotsky’s diary of 1935 in which he recalled a conversation with Sverdlov shortly after the murder:

Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing, ‘Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?’ ‘Finished,’ he replied. ‘He has been shot.’ ‘And where is the family?’ ‘The family along with him.’ ‘All?’ I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise. ‘All,’ Sverdlov replied. ‘Why?’ He awaited my reaction. I made no reply. ‘And who decided the matter?’ I enquired. ‘We decided it here. Ilich [Lenin] thought that we should not leave the Whites a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances …’ I asked no more questions and considered the matter closed.86

The new archival evidence merely fills in the details. Goloshchekin arrived in Moscow at the end of June for the Fifth Soviet Congress. His view that the Romanovs should be killed was well known. Consultations with Lenin took place and this idea was accepted in principle without a firm date being set. On 16 July Goloshchekin, having returned to Ekaterinburg, sent a coded telegram to Sverdlov and Lenin via Zinoviev informing them that the execution had to be carried out without further delay ‘due to military circumstances’.87 The Czech Legion had surrounded the city and, with only a few hundred Red Guards at their disposal, the local Bolsheviks saw little chance of safely evacuating the imperial family. Later the same day, Moscow confirmed via Perm that the execution was to go ahead immediately. The confirmation may well have come directly from Lenin himself.88

Why did the Bolsheviks change their mind and go ahead with the murder, reversing their earlier decision to put Nicholas on trial in Moscow? The military considerations were certainly real enough, contrary to what many historians have said. The Czechs captured Ekaterinburg on 25 July, eight days after the murder; but they might easily have done so several days before, since the city was surrounded and they had many more troops than the Reds. But it is doubtful that either they, or any of the Whites, would have wanted to make such a sad and discredited figure as Nicholas their ‘live banner’. A martyred Tsar was more useful to them than a live one who was politically dead. Both Denikin and Kolchak were intelligent enough to realize that a monarchist restoration was out of the question after 1917, although both had monarchists among their advisers. Perhaps the Bolsheviks did not understand this. Perhaps they were victims of their own propaganda that the Whites were monarchists to a man.

But even so, there is no doubt that the murder was also carried out for other reasons. The party leaders were by this stage having second thoughts about the wisdom of a trial. Not that there was any real prospect of finding the ex-Tsar innocent. Trotsky was a master of the political trial, as his own in 1906 had shown, and he would no doubt show with brilliant logic how, as an autocrat who claimed the right to rule in person, Nicholas was himself to blame for the crimes of his regime. Nor was there any prospect of the ex-Tsar being allowed the legal nicety of able lawyers to defend him: the Russian equivalents of Malesherbes and de Sèze — Louis XVI’s lawyers at his trial — were all in prison or exile by this stage. It was rather the more fundamental problem — one raised by Saint-Just against Louis’s trial — that putting the deposed monarch in the dock at all was to presuppose the possibility of his innocence. And in that case the moral legitimacy of the revolution would itself be open to question. To put Nicholas on trial would also be to put the Bolsheviks on trial. The recognition of this was the point where they passed from the realm of law into the realm of terror. In the end it was not a question of proving the ex-Tsar’s guilt — after all, as Saint-Just had put it, ‘one cannot reign innocently’ — but a question of eliminating him as a rival source of legitimacy. Nicholas had to die so that Soviet power could live.

On 4 July the local Cheka had taken over the responsibility of guarding the Romanovs at the Ipatev House. Yakov Yurovsky, the local Cheka boss who led the execution squad, was one of Lenin’s most trusted lieutenants — ruthless, honest, intelligent and cruel. His brother said he ‘enjoyed oppressing people’.89 The Tsar’s murderer was also a Jew — a fact for which the Jews would pay in future. On the night of the murder, 16–17 July, at about 1.30 a.m., Yurovsky awoke the Tsar’s physician and ordered him to rouse the rest of the prisoners. At 2 a.m. all eleven of them were led down the stairs to the basement. Nicholas carried the Tsarevich, followed by the Empress and her daughters, the Tsar’s physician and the rest of the retinue. Anastasia carried the King Charles spaniel Joy. On their request, two chairs were brought in for the Empress and Alexis, who was still recovering from his recent attack of bleeding. None of them seemed aware of what was about to happen: they had been told that there had been shooting in the town and it was safer for them in the basement. After a few minutes, Yurovsky entered the room with the execution squad — six Hungarians, usually described as ‘Latvians’, and five Russians. Each had been assigned to shoot a particular victim, but when they entered the room it turned out that they were not facing the right person and the room was too small, with murderers and victims practically standing on each other’s toes, for the necessary changes to be made: it was this that partly caused the confusion that followed. Yurovsky read out the order to shoot the Romanovs. Nicholas asked him to repeat it: his last words were ‘What? What?’ Then the firing began. Yurovsky shot Nicholas point blank with a Colt. The Empress also died instantly. Bullets ricocheted around the room, which filled up with smoke. When the firing finished, after several minutes, Alexis lay alive in a pool of blood: Yurovsky finished him off with two shots in the head. Anastasia, who also showed signs of life, was stabbed several times with a bayonet.90

Given all the evidence that has come to light, it is inconceivable that any of the Romanovs survived this ordeal.fn14 After the murder the bodies were driven off in a lorry and dumped in a series of nearby mineshafts. These turned out to be too shallow to conceal the bodies and the next day they were removed. But on the way to some deeper mines the lorry got stuck in the mud and it was decided to bury the corpses in the ground. Sulphuric acid was poured on their faces to hide the identity of the corpses should they be discovered. This proved unnecessary — and ineffective. The graves were not discovered until after the collapse of the Soviet regime. But by this time, DNA analysis of the bones, brought back to Britain in 1992, was enough to establish beyond doubt that they belonged to the Romanovs.91

News of the execution reached Lenin the next day during a session of Sovnarkom. The people’s commissars were engaged in a detailed discussion of a draft decree for health protection when Sverdlov came in with the news. The brief announcement of the Tsar’s death was met with general silence. Then Lenin said: ‘We shall now proceed to read the draft decree article by article.’92

The official announcement appeared in Izvestiia on 19 July. It mentioned only the death of the ex-Tsar, claiming that the ‘wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place’. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were afraid to acknowledge that they had murdered the children and servants — all of them, after all, innocent people — lest it should lose them public sympathy. But in fact public reaction was remarkably subdued. ‘The population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference,’ noted Lockhart. Rumours that the rest of the family had been killed elicited few emotions. Only the monarchists were moved. Brusilov, a monarchist of the heart and a Republican only of the mind, refused to believe that the rumours were true and prayed every night for the ‘missing Romanovs’. The lie was kept going until 1926, when the publication of Sokolov’s book in Paris, The Murder of the Imperial Family, based on the findings of a commission set up by Kolchak, made this no longer tenable. But in the meantime the legend had been born that perhaps not all the Romanovs had died. It is a legend that still lives today, despite the huge weight of evidence against it. All of which merely goes to show that there is more currency — and more profit — in fiction than in history.93

Why has the murder of the Romanovs assumed such significance in the history of the revolution? It could be said that they were only a few individuals, whereas revolutions are about the millions. This is the argument of Marxist historians, who have tended to treat this episode as a minor side-show to the main event. E. H. Carr, for example, gave it no more than a single sentence in his three-volume history of the revolution. But this is to miss the deeper significance of the murder. It was a declaration of the Terror. It was a statement that from now on individuals would count for nothing in the civil war. Trotsky had once said: ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ And that is what the Cheka did. Shortly after the murder Dzerzhinsky told the press:

The Cheka is the defence of the revolution as the Red Army is; as in the civil war the Red Army cannot stop to ask whether it may harm particular individuals, but must take into account only one thing, the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the Cheka must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent.94

The Bolsheviks murdered other Romanovs after the execution of the former Tsar.fn15 Six members of the old dynasty were murdered on the following night at Alapaevsk in the northern Urals. But in a sense their deaths were now just one small part of the Red Terror.

*

One of the most terrifying aspects of the Terror was its random nature. The knock on the door at midnight could come to almost anyone. The Bolsheviks justified the Terror as a civil war against the counter-revolution. But they never made clear who those ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were. Indeed, in so far as the Terror was driven by the regime’s own paranoiac fear that it was surrounded by hostile enemies working together to overthrow it — in this view the Kaplan plot was all part and parcel of the SR and Menshevik opposition, the White Guard reaction, the Allied intervention, Savinkov’s uprising in Yaroslavl’,fn16 the peasant uprisings and workers’ strikes — virtually anyone could qualify as a ‘counter-revolutionary’. In this sense the Terror was a war by the regime against the whole of society — a means of terrorizing it into submission. ‘Terror’, Engels wrote, ‘is needless cruelties perpetrated by terrified men.’

A tour of the Cheka jails would reveal a vast array of different people. One former inmate of the Butyrka jail in Moscow recalls seeing politicians, ex-judges, merchants, traders, officers, prostitutes, children,fn17 priests, professors, students, poets, dissident workers and peasants — in short a cross-section of society. The Petrograd poetess Gippius wrote that ‘there was literally not a single family that had not had someone seized, taken away, or disappear completely’ as a result of the Red Terror, and for the circles in which she moved this is almost certainly true.95

Many of the Cheka’s victims were ‘bourgeois hostages’ rounded up without charge and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for some alleged counter-revolutionary act. Of course most of them were not ‘bourgeois’ at all. The round-ups were much too crude for that, sometimes consisting of no more than the random arrest of people on a stretch of street blocked off at each end by Cheka guards. People were arrested merely for being near the scene of a ‘bourgeois provocation’ (e.g. a shooting or a crime); or as the relatives and known acquaintances of ‘bourgeois’ suspects. One old man was arrested because during a general raid the Cheka found on his person a photograph of a man in court uniform: it was the picture of a deceased relative taken in the 1870s. Many people were arrested because someone (and one was enough) had denounced them as ‘bourgeois counter-revolutionaries’. Such denunciations often arose from petty squabbles and vendettas. Yakov Khoelson, a military inspector, was arrested in November, for example, when two people jumped ahead of him in the queue for the Moscow Opera. They shouted ‘provocation!’ and complained to the doorman that Khoelson and two others had jumped the queue. The Cheka was called and Khoelson was arrested. Nikolai Kochargin, a petty official, was arrested in the same month after a dispute with a friend at work who had repaid him a loan in forged coupons. Kochargin went to the Cheka to complain — only to find himself arrested the next day when his debtor denounced him as a trader in forged coupons.96

Arbitrary arrests were particularly common in the provinces, where the local Cheka bosses were very much their ‘own men’ pursuing their own civil wars of terror. But the principle urged by Lenin — that it was better to arrest a hundred innocent people than to run the risk of letting one enemy of the regime go free — ensured that wholesale and indiscriminate arrests became a general part of the system. Peshekhonov, Kerensky’s Minister of Food, who was imprisoned in the Lubianka jail, recalls a conversation with a fellow prisoner, a trade unionist from Vladimir, who could not work out why he had been arrested. All he had done was to come to Moscow and check into a hotel. ‘What is your name?’ another prisoner asked. ‘Smirnov’, he replied, one of the most common Russian names:

‘The name, then, was the cause of your arrest,’ said a man coming towards us. ‘Let me introduce myself. My name too is Smirnov, and I am from Kaluga. At the Taganka there were seven of us Smirnovs, and they say there are many more at the Butyrka … At the Taganka they somehow managed to find out that a certain Smirnov, a Bolshevik from Kazan, had disappeared with a large sum of money. Moscow was notified and orders were issued to the militia to arrest all Smirnovs arriving in Moscow and send them to the Cheka. They are trying to catch the Smirnov from Kazan.’

‘But I have never been to Kazan,’ protested the Vladimir Smirnov. ‘Neither have I,’ replied the one from Kaluga. ‘I am not even a Bolshevik, nor do I intend to become one. But here I am.’97

Reading the letters of the victims’ families to Dzerzhinsky, one gets a better sense of the human tragedy that lay behind each arrest. Elena Moshkina wrote on 5 November. Her husband, Volodya, aged twenty-seven, an engineer in the Moscow Soviet, had been imprisoned as a ‘bourgeois hostage’ in the Butyrka because it was alleged he belonged to the Union of Houseowners. Moshkin had joined the union on behalf of his mother; but her house had been sold in 1911 and he had since resigned. Elena pleaded to take his place in jail, since they had two small children to support and only Volodya’s salary to live on. They could not pay the 5,000 roubles demanded as a ransom by the local Cheka boss, who had admitted that they had no evidence against her husband and that he was merely ‘a hostage of the rich’. Moshkina’s letter came to nothing: it was marked in red pencil ‘into the archive’.98

Liubov Kuropatkina wrote to Dzerzhinsky on 18 November. Her husband, Pavel, had been imprisoned ‘as a bourgeois hostage’ in Pskov. The soldiers of his regiment had twice elected him as their officer, once after February and once after October, despite his tsarist rank as a corporal and his senior age (sixty-eight). He had led the regiment on the Pulkovo Heights against Kerensky’s troops after the Bolshevik seizure of power. For this, the soldiers had allowed him to keep his savings, 50,000 roubles, which he then donated to the Soviet at Krasnoe Selo. In April 1918 Kuropatkin fell ill with malaria and the couple retired to a village near Pskov to farm a small allotment. He had been arrested before the first harvest, and his wife was now left on her own to feed seven small children and her very old father. She had two grown-up sons in the Red Army, and another who had disappeared as a prisoner of war in Hungary. ‘My own health has always been poor, I cannot do physical work, and the constant worry for the safety of my husband has broken me. I cannot travel the sixty versty to the jail in Kholm to visit him.’ Her letter was also marked ‘into the archive’.99

Nadezhda Brusilova was another letter writer to Dzerzhinsky. Brusilov had been arrested shortly after midnight on 13 August and imprisoned in the Lubianka. His apartment must have been under surveillance because earlier that evening he had been approached by two agents of the Komuch who had offered him a large sum of money to go with them to Samara and help to lead the fledgling People’s Army. Brusilov had refused; but this did not prevent him from being arrested (nor the Komuch agents from being shot). During the raid the Chekists confiscated all Brusilov’s medals: it must have been a torment for him to lose these final fragments of his broken past. Brusilov was never charged. Nadezhda was told that he had not even been arrested, but had merely been ‘taken prisoner’ to prevent him falling into the hands of the regime’s opponents. ‘His name is too popular,’ one Chekist told her. Dzerzhinsky himself explained to Brusilov that he had been detained because they had ‘evidence’ that Lockhart was planning to stage a coup in Moscow and pronounce the general a ‘dictator’. Brusilov replied that he had never met the British agent, whereupon Dzerzhinsky candidly acknowledged: ‘All the same, we cannot take the risk, people would rally behind your name.’fn18 When Brusilov asked what he could do to speed up his release, the Cheka leader was just as frank again: ‘Write your memoirs on the former army and abuse the old regime.’ The old general was finally released in October and placed under house arrest. It is a measure of the suffering he must have gone through, without any medicine for his injured leg, that even this great patriot should beg his captors to let him and his family emigrate from Russia and settle in ‘some neutral country’.100

Conditions in the Cheka prisons were generally much worse than in any tsarist jail. A government inspection of the Moscow Taganka jail in October 1918, for example, found overcrowded cells, no water, grossly inadequate rations and heating, and sewage dumped in the courtyard. Nearly half the 1,500 inmates were chronically sick, 10 per cent of them with typhus. Corpses were found in the cells. The Peter and Paul Fortress, that great symbol of the tsarist prison state, was now an even more forbidding place. The Menshevik Dan, who had been imprisoned there in 1896, found himself once again behind its bars in the spring of 1921. Whereas before there had been one man to a cell, there were now two or three; and women were imprisoned there for the first time. Dan was held with hundreds of other prisoners in the basement, where the food stores had been previously kept. Four men shared each tiny cell. The walls ‘dripped with damp’, there was no light and the prisoners, fed only once a day, were never allowed out for exercise.101 Compared to this the old prison regime in the fortress had been like a holiday camp. Most of its inmates before 1917 had been allowed to receive food and cigarettes, clothing, books and letters from their relatives.

Many of the Cheka’s most notorious techniques had been borrowed from the tsarist police. The use of provocateurs, stool-pigeons and methods of torture to extract confessions and denunciations came straight out of the Okhrana’s book.fn19 This was hardly surprising — and not just because, in Flaubert’s words, ‘in every revolutionary there is hidden a gendarme’. The Bolsheviks had sat in tsarist jails for years. Literally they had learned the system from the inside. And they now applied it with a vengeance. Dzerzhinsky had spent half his adult life in tsarist prisons and labour camps before he became head of the Cheka. It was not surprising if he set out to inflict on his victims the same cruelty he had suffered in those years. Hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders — and this was no doubt in part a legacy of their prison years.

The ingenuity of the Cheka’s torture methods was matched only by the Spanish Inquisition. Each local Cheka had its own speciality. In Kharkov they went in for the ‘glove trick’ — burning the victim’s hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with ‘human gloves’. The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims’ bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victim’s torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim’s guts in an effort to escape. In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues. Many Chekas preferred psychological forms of torture. One had the victims led off to what they thought was their execution, only to find that a blank was fired at them. Another had the victims buried alive, or kept in a coffin with a corpse. Some Chekas forced their victims to watch their loved ones being tortured, raped or killed.

Needless to say, there were many sadists in the Chekas. They treated the tortures as sport, vying with each other to perform the most extreme violence. Some victims recall the Chekists standing about and laughing at their torture. There were even ‘human hunts’. Most of the sadists were young men in their teens brutalized by war and revolution. Many were out to prove their ‘hardness’. There is also evidence to suggest that many of them may have been non-Russians — Poles, Latvians, Armenians and Jews — in so far as they made up a high proportion of the Cheka. Lenin certainly favoured their employment in the Cheka, claiming that the Russians were ‘too soft’ to carry out the ‘harsh measures’ of the Terror. Yet many of the Cheka’s torture methods were reminiscent of the brutal forms of killing employed by the Russian peasantry. Women were also not exempt from the perpetration of sadistic violence. Vera Grebennikova, for example, was alleged to have killed over 700 people, many of them with her bare hands, during two months in Odessa. Rebecca Platinina-Maisel in Arkhangelsk killed over a hundred, including the whole family of her ex-husband whom she crucified in an act of savage revenge.

Such was the brutalizing effect of this relentless violence that not a few Chekists ended up insane. Bukharin said that psychopathic disorders were an occupational hazard of the Chekist profession. Many Chekists hardened themselves to the killings by heavy drinking or drug abuse. For example, the notorious sadist Saenko, the Kharkov master of the ‘glove trick’, was a cocaine addict. To distance themselves from the violence the Chekists also developed a gangster-like slang for the verb to kill: they talked of ‘shooting partridges’, of ‘sealing’ a victim, or giving him the natsokal (an onomatopoeia of the trigger action).102

Executions were the final product of this machinery of terror. Tens of thousands of summary executions were carried out in courtyards and cellars, or in deserted fields on the edge of towns, during the years of the civil war. Whole prisons would be ‘emptied’ by the Cheka before a town was abandoned to the Whites. At night the cities tried to sleep to the sound of people being shot. The Bolsheviks themselves, however, did not lose much sleep. In 1919, during a session of Sovnarkom, Lenin wrote a note and passed it to Dzerzhinsky: ‘How many dangerous counter-revolutionaries do we have in prison?’ Dzerzhinsky scribbled, ‘About 1,500’ and returned the note. Lenin looked at it, placed the sign of a cross by the figure, and gave it back to the Cheka boss. That night, 1,500 Moscow prisoners were shot on Dzerzhinsky’s orders. This turned out to be a dreadful mistake. Lenin had not ordered the execution at all: he always placed a cross by anything he had read to signify that he had done so and taken it into account. As a result of Dzerzhinsky’s simple error 1,500 people lost their lives.103

*

The Red Terror evoked protests from all quarters of society. Patriarch Tikhon condemned the violence and climate of fear created by the Bolsheviks, citing the prophecy of St Matthew: ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’ The opposition parties denounced the Terror in their underground newspapers. The famous Anarchist philosopher, Prince Kropotkin, whose daughter had been arrested in August 1918,fn20 denounced the Terror in a long and bitter letter to the Bolshevik leader, who was still recovering from Kaplan’s bullets, on 17 September: ‘To throw the country into a red terror, even more so to arrest hostages, in order to protect the lives of its leaders is not worthy of a Party calling itself socialist and disgraceful for its leaders.’ Workers also condemned the bloody terror perpetrated in their name. ‘Enough blood! Down with Terror!’ proclaimed the All-Ukrainian Trade Union Council in September. ‘Red is the colour of truth and justice,’ declared the railway workers of Kozlov. ‘But under the Bolsheviks it has become the colour of blood.’104

As the ‘conscience of the Revolution’, Gorky was by far the most outspoken critic of the Terror. Hundreds of people, from poets to peasants, wrote to him pleading for his help to save their loved ones. Gorky felt a strong moral obligation to do what he could for all of them. ‘I am their only hope,’ he told Ekaterina. This was the point when the humanist in him got the better of the revolutionary: he was more concerned for the individual than any abstract cause. He bombarded the Bolshevik leaders with countless letters demanding the release of innocent individuals from the Cheka jails. Their tone became increasingly irate. ‘In my view,’ he wrote to Zinoviev in March 1919 protesting against the arrest of an academic, ‘such arrests cannot be justified by any political means … The disgusting crimes you have perpetrated in Petersburg during the past few weeks have brought shame to the regime and aroused universal hatred and contempt for its cowardice.’ The following October he wrote to Dzerzhinsky appealing for the release of Professor Tonkov, President of the Military-Medical Academy: ‘All these arrests I see as an act of barbarism, as the deliberate destruction of the best brains of the country and I declare that by such actions the Soviet regime has made an enemy out of me.’105

Some of Gorky’s protests went straight to Lenin. The Bolshevik leader took an indulgent view of his favourite writer’s efforts to save human souls from the furnace of the revolution. He even intervened on some of their behalfs. The writer Ivan Volnyi, for example, gained his release from the Cheka jail in Orel through the combined efforts of Gorky and Lenin.106 But Lenin would have none of Gorky’s general criticisms of the Terror. Responding to the question of Tonkov’s arrest, for example, Lenin confessed in a letter to Gorky ‘that there have been mistakes’. But he went on to justify the general policy of arresting people like Tonkov, who were suspected of ‘being close to the Kadets’, in a preventive way. In his letter Lenin spelled out the difference between himself and Gorky. It was also the basic difference — one of means and ends — between the Bolsheviks and the democratic socialists:

Reading your frank opinion on this matter, I recall a remark of yours [from the past]: ‘We artists are irresponsible people.’ Exactly! You utter incredibly angry words — about what? About a few dozen (or perhaps even a few hundred) Kadet and near-Kadet gentry spending a few days in jail in order to prevent plots … which threaten the lives of tens of thousands of workers and peasants. A calamity indeed! What injustice. A few days, or even weeks, in jail for intellectuals in order to prevent the massacre of tens of thousands of workers and peasants! ‘Artists are irresponsible people.’107

Within the party there were also critics — not so much of the Terror itself but of its excesses. Kamenev, Bukharin and Olminsky led the attack on the abuse of Cheka power. Essentially, they were carrying on where the Left SRs in the Commissariat of Justice had left off in July in trying to subordinate the Cheka to the state. Their campaign culminated in November with the demand for the Cheka’s abolition and its replacement by a new terror organ directly under the control of the Soviet Executive. But the ‘hard men’ in the party — Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky — stood firmly behind the Cheka. Later efforts to moderate the Cheka, such as the Statute of February 1919, came to little. Although it was subordinated to the Commissariat of Justice, the Cheka continued to function as before — as a state within a state — circumventing its control. The Bolshevik Central Committee, and from 1919 the Politburo, exercised the only real control over the Cheka. Lenin himself took an intimate interest in its activities and protected it from criticism and reform.

Under Lenin’s regime — not Stalin’s — the Cheka was to become a vast police state. It had its own leviathan infrastructure, from the house committees to the concentration camps, employing more than a quarter of a million people. These were the Bolshevik oprichniki, the detested police of Ivan the Terrible. During the civil war it was they who would secure the regime’s survival on the so-called ‘internal front’. Terror became an integral element of the Bolshevik system in the civil war. Nobody will ever know the exact number of people repressed and killed by the Cheka in these years. But it was certainly several hundred thousand, if one includes all those in its camps and prisons as well as those who were executed or killed by the Cheka’s troops in the suppression of strikes and revolts. Although no one knew the precise figures, it is possible that more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in the battles of the civil war.

14 The New Regime Triumphant

*

i Three Decisive Battles

Prince Lvov wrote to the American businessman Charles Crane on 12 October 1918:

Bolshevism has found a fertile soil in the base and anarchistic instincts of the people. It is in this sense a Russian sickness, and can only thus be cured by foreign intervention. The re-establishment of order and of the healthy forces in Russia can only be achieved under the protection of an organized army.

The Prince had long pinned his hopes for Russia’s liberation on the United States. Unlike other counter-revolutionaries, he had no illusions of a popular uprising against the Bolsheviks. Four chaotic months at the head of the Provisional Government had made him sceptical about the potential of the Russian people as a constructive democratic force. ‘Georgii is very down in the mouth,’ Lvov’s aunt had noted in her diary after a visit to him in his Cheka jail in Ekaterinburg on 13 March. ‘He is convinced that Russia lacks the strength to organize its own salvation, since it has been destroyed and its salvation can only come from the outside.’ Lvov did not believe in the Cossack Vendée in the south. He looked instead to Siberia, where there was more hope of an Allied intervention in that spring.1

For three months Lvov sat in prison. His Bolshevik jailer, a former piano-maker from Petrograd, took an immediate liking to the Prince and allowed him to put his agricultural knowledge to the benefit of the other inmates by reorganizing the prison farm so that they had meat and fresh vegetables to eat. Even behind bars Lvov carried on with the practical zemstvo-type reforms with which he had always occupied himself. Goloshchekin, the militant Bolshevik leader in Ekaterinburg, wanted Lvov shot for his alleged involvement in a counter-revolutionary plot. But Poliakov, the Left SR Commissar for Justice in the city, had his doubts about the merits of the case, and the judges, who had no evidence, were eventually forced to set Lvov free. There is a story — though it has never been proved — that Lenin had pleaded with the Ekaterinburg leaders to let the former Prime Minister go. After his release Lvov fled to Omsk and attached himself to the Siberian government. It was on its behalf that he left in September for the United States, travelling via Vladivostok, to plead the case for Allied intervention in the White campaign against the Bolsheviks.2

So far the story of Allied intervention had been something of a farce. None of the Western powers knew what their aims were in Siberia; but neither did any of them want to be left out. Under the pretext of guarding Allied stores and keeping the Trans-Siberian Railway open, Western troops were landed in Vladivostok. The British were the first to arrive in early July with the Middlesex Battalion led by Colonel Ward, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent. It was a real Dad’s Army. Made up of men declared unfit for battle, it was known as the ‘Hernia Battalion’. In their smart new khaki uniforms, patently unsuitable for the harsh conditions of Siberia, they soon became an object of ridicule. They were fodder not for cannons but for cartoons. French and US troops arrived soon after, followed by the Japanese, but their purpose remained unclear. The Western powers wanted a stable government in Siberia in order to resurrect the Russian army and reconstitute the Eastern Front against the Central Powers. But the Japanese, who had ambitions to annex Russia’s Far East, wanted, on the contrary, instability. Both sought to serve their separate purposes by financing the Cossack warlord, Grigorii Semenov, whose regime in Chita claimed to control the mountainous terrain east of Lake Baikal. In fact Semenov served no one but himself. Like the other warlords of the Far East, Kalmykov and Ungern-Sternberg, Semenov was less a politician than a bandit. His mercenary troops robbed and murdered the local population with quite unspeakable barbarism. Never have the taxes of the Western democracies been so criminally wasted.3

With the advent of Kolchak, the Allies at last had a Russian national hero whom they could back with confidence against the Bolsheviks. Thanks to the support of General Knox, the head of the British military mission, Kolchak received more aid from London than any other leader of the Whites. A second British battalion was sent to Omsk in January 1919, along with a small naval detachment which fought the Reds on the Kama River, while Knox himself took over the training of Kolchak’s officers in Vladivostok. But it was US support that really mattered, since the other Western powers would undoubtedly follow its lead. ‘Everything depends on America,’ Lvov wrote to Crane from Tokyo.4

On 15 November the Prince finally arrived in Washington. All his hopes for Russia were now focused on a meeting with the President. As the leader of the free world, Woodrow Wilson would surely recognize his moral obligation to promote the cause of freedom in Russia. This of course was a naive dream: with the ending of the world war, the Americans had no intention of sending more troops to Siberia. But, like many of the Russian liberals, Lvov idealized the land of the free. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote to Crane, ‘that the World War is giving birth to a new world order led by the United States.’ Lvov was also convinced that President Wilson would share his liberal ideals: theirs would be a meeting of hearts as well as minds. On 21 November the two finally met. The meeting lasted only fifteen minutes. Wilson was friendly but not prepared to discuss the commitment of further troops. According to one of his aides, all he had to say when the meeting was over was: ‘Did you notice what a wonderful beard the Prince has?’5

Had Lvov been a normal person, this disappointment would have been enough to shatter his optimism. After three months of travelling around the world, all his hopes had come to naught. But the Prince was not normal. He was as persevering as Pangloss himself, and travelled on to Paris in his moral quest. There Kolchak and Denikin placed him at the head of their delegation — formed from the Russian Political Conferencefn1 — to plead their case for Allied aid and diplomatic recognition at the Versailles Peace Conference in January. Recognition did not come: the Allies were determined to maintain the hypocrisy of neutrality in the Russian civil war. But thanks to the Prince and his delegation, they did send large amounts of aid to Kolchak. In the first six months of 1919 his White army received from them: one million rifles; 15,000 machine-guns; 700 field guns; 800 million rounds of ammunition; and clothing and equipment for half a million men. This was roughly equivalent to the Soviet production of munitions for the whole of 1919, and was certainly enough to launch a major campaign against the Reds. Thirty thousand Allied troops (Czechs, Americans, British, Italians and French) defended Kolchak’s rear and maintained the 4,000-mile supply route along the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok to Omsk.6

Under their protection, Kolchak built up his forces in preparation for an early spring offensive against the Reds. Some people have suggested that he struck too early, before his armies were really ready, and that he should have waited for the summer, by which time Denikin might have joined him in a combined offensive on the Volga. But at the time there were decisive reasons for an early offensive. Some success was needed to ensure further Allied aid and recognition for the Kolchak regime. The Reds appeared on the brink of collapse. On Christmas Eve Kolchak’s troops had captured the vital industrial city of Perm, routing the Third Red Army in the process. This opened up the possibility of pushing on towards Arkhangelsk, where the Allies had installed a White government under the Russian General K. E. Miller. The ‘Perm Catastrophe’ was obviously the outcome of a chronic breakdown in the Red rear. Soldiers had been hastily thrown into battle without proper training. Lacking enough food or winter clothing to withstand the arctic conditions, they surrendered en masse to the Whites. There they told them of the critical situation behind the Red Front. Military conscriptions and requisitionings had sparked a violent wave of peasant uprisings. The Red Terror had murdered thousands of innocent civilians in the cities of the Urals, turning virtually the whole population, including the workers, against the Bolsheviks. Relations were particularly strained with the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga-Ural region. The Reds were seen, in the words of one of their commissars, ‘as a hostile army of occupation depriving the Muslims of their autonomy and trampling on their customs’.7

Kolchak’s offensive pushed west on three Fronts. The main attacking force was the Western Army under General Khanzhin, which advanced towards Ufa at the start of March. It was made up from the remains of the Komuch’s People’s Army and supplemented by peasant conscripts. There were also 10,000 worker-volunteers from the munitions factories of Izhevsk and Votkinsk who had fled to Kolchak on the suppression of their uprising against the Bolsheviks in November. On their right flank was Gajda’s Siberian Army, made up mainly of peasant conscripts, which attacked towards Viatka; and on their left the Orenburg and Siberian Cossacks, who fought alongside the Bashkir units under General Dutov. Their aim was to capture Orenburg and to link up with the Whites on the south-eastern steppe. This would cut off the Reds in Central Asia. The total front-line strength of Kolchak’s forces was around 100,000 men.

By mid-April Kolchak’s forces had advanced more than 200 miles and had captured an area larger than Britain. Their destination, the Volga River, was within a few days’ march. Behind their own lines the Reds were meanwhile struggling to cope with the largest peasant uprising until that time — the so-called ‘War of the Chapany’ (named after the local peasant term for a tunic) which engulfed whole districts of Simbirsk and Samara under the slogan of ‘Long live the Soviets! Down with the Communists!’8 The Whites talked confidently of the ‘race to Moscow’. In Paris Lvov saw Kolchak’s prestige soar among the Allies. Further huge credits were advanced to Omsk. It seemed that Western diplomatic recognition for the Whites was just around the corner.

But on 28 April the Reds launched a counter-offensive. It was led by Mikhail Frunze, who was later to become a Soviet hero but who at this time was still a relatively unknown Bolshevik. An ex-worker in his early thirties, Frunze’s only real experience of war had been at the head of a Red brigade during the struggle for power in Moscow. Thousands of party members were mobilized and despatched to the Eastern Front. The newly organized Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, sent 3,000 of its members. The Soviets were also ordered to recruit ten to twenty conscripts from each volost. Due to the resistance of the peasants, only 13,000 recruits actually appeared — slightly more than two per volost — but it still helped to tip the balance against the Whites. The Reds were also joined by the majority of the Bashkir units which defected from Kolchak’s side in May. By mid-June, Frunze’s forces had pushed Kolchak’s armies back to where they had started from, east of Ufa. After that the cities of the Urals fell to the Reds like dominoes as the Whites fell apart and retreated in panic. Orenburg, Ekaterinburg and the vital railhead at Cheliabinsk had all been lost by the middle of August. There was little to stop the Reds from marching on to Omsk. Kolchak now had fewer than 15,000 soldiers in the field, barely an eighth of his active forces at the height of his advance.9

There were a number of military reasons for the collapse of the Kolchak offensive. But behind all of them lay politics. It was a case of military overstretch, where the regime in the rear lacked the political means to sustain the army at the Front.

Take the problem of command. There were very few commanders of any calibre to be found in Kolchak’s army. Only 5 per cent of the 17,000 officers had been trained before the war and most were young wartime ensigns. General Lebedev, the de facto head of the army, was only thirty-six. He had been a colonel in the tsarist General Staff. Like most of Kolchak’s senior commanders, he was more expert in political intrigue than in the science of war. The army leaders, in the words of Baron Budberg, ‘thought of themselves not just as a military but also as a political corps’. This, after all, was a military dictatorship. Political factions soon developed among the commanders’ supporters, with the result that the army broke up into little more than a disunited collection of separate detachments, each pursuing its own little war. The more the army became politicized, the more its bureaucracy ballooned out of all proportion to the soldiers in the field. At the height of the offensive there were 2,000 officers in the staff at Omsk alone to administer 100,000 soldiers. Even in Semipalatinsk, 1,500 miles from the fighting, there was a staff of over 1,000. Instead of serving at the Front too many commanders sat around in offices and cafés in the rear.10

Then there was the problem of supplies. Kolchak’s army, even more than Lenin’s, suffered from shortages at the Front. It had to resort to feeding itself from the villages near the Front, which often meant violent requisitioning, leading to the alienation of the very population the Whites were supposed to be liberating. Part of the problem was Kolchak’s short-sighted economic policies. He would not use the tsarist gold reserves to counteract runaway inflation. Peasants withdrew their foodstuffs from the market as the Omsk banknotes lost their value. Nothing was done to resurrect the chronic state of Siberia’s industries: they were simply written off as a bastion of Bolshevik influence. Consumer goods and military supplies had to be brought in by rail from the Pacific, 4,000 miles away. Much of them were held up by bandits east of Lake Baikal, or by peasant partisans. Whole trainloads were also diverted by the railway workers, many of whom were sympathetic to the Reds and all of whom were badly paid.

In Omsk itself valuable supplies were often squandered by corrupt officials. The venality of Kolchak’s regime was notorious. The staff of Gajda’s army was drawing rations for 275,000 men, when there were only 30,000 in his combat units. The Embassy cigarettes imported from England for the soldiers were smoked by civilians in Omsk. English army uniforms and nurses’ outfits were worn by civilians, while many soldiers dressed in rags. Even Allied munitions were sold on the black market. Knox was dubbed the Quartermaster General of the Red Army: Trotsky even sent him a joke letter thanking him for his help in equipping the Red troops.11

The atmosphere of the Omsk regime was filled with moral decadence and seedy corruption. Cocaine and vodka were consumed in prodigious quantities. Cafés, casinos and brothels worked around the clock. Kolchak himself led by example, living with his mistress in luxury in Omsk while his poor wife and son were packed off to Paris. The Admiral had no talent for choosing subordinates and filled his ministries with third-rate hangers-on from the old regime. ‘The company is awful,’ he complained to his wife. ‘I am surrounded by moral decay, cowardice, greed and treachery.’ But Kolchak largely had himself to blame. If he had managed not to alienate the zemstvos, the one local source of administrative talent, things would not have been so bad. Budberg was appalled by the situation he found as Minister of War:

In the army, decay; in the Staff, ignorance and incompetence; in the Government, moral rot, divisions and the intrigues of ambitious egotists; in the country, uprising and anarchy; in public life, panic, selfishness, bribes and scoundrelism of every sort.

In such a climate little was achieved. The offices responsible for supply were full of corrupt and indolent bureaucrats, who took months to draw up meaningless statistics, legislative projects and official reports that were then filed away and forgotten. ‘The whole regime’, Budberg concluded, ‘is only form without content; the ministries can be compared to huge and imposing windmills, busily turning their sails, but without millstones and most of their internal working parts broken or missing.’12

By far the biggest weakness of Kolchak’s army was its failure to mobilize the local population. Its offensive came to a halt for want of adequate reinforcements, while far too many conscripts deserted. This was mainly a question of the peasants. True, the White advance was critically weakened by the desertion of the Bashkirs and the Cossacks on the southern flank, which allowed Frunze’s army to break through. But the vast majority of the population in Western Siberia and the Volga-Kama region, where the offensive would be made or broken, were either Russian or Ukrainian peasants. On the face of it, there was no reason why the Siberian peasants should be hostile to the Whites. There was no real landownership by the gentry to the east of the Urals, so the major factor binding the peasants to the revolution in central Russia did not come into play here. Most of the older settlers were relatively wealthy mixed and dairy farmers, who, one would have thought, should have had a stake in the Whites’ post bellum status quo based on private property. Yet the peasants to the east of the Urals proved just as reluctant to join Kolchak’s army as those to the west.

It was partly a question of image. Kolchak’s regime, rightly or wrongly, was associated with a restoration of the tsarist system. This was communicated by the epaulettes of his officers; and by the tsarist and feudal methods employed by his local officials, who often whipped the peasants when they disobeyed their orders. This was bound to bring them into head-on conflict with the Siberian peasantry, whose ancestors had run away from serfdom in Russia and the Ukraine and whose love of freedom and independence was thus very strong. The whole ethos of the Kolchak regime was alien to the peasants — a feeling expressed in the peasant chastushka, or rhyming song:

English tunics, Russian epaulettes;

Japanese tobacco, Omsk despots.

The closer the Whites moved towards central Russia the harder it became for them to mobilize the local peasantry. In the crucial Volga region, the furthest point of Kolchak’s advance, the peasants had gained more of the gentry’s land than anywhere else in Russia and so had most to fear from a counter-revolution. Here Kolchak dug his own grave by failing to sanction the peasant revolution on the land. Like Denikin’s regime in the south, where the landowners were equally dominant, Kolchak’s government was quite incapable of anything more than a carefully guarded bureaucratic response to what was the vital issue of the civil war. It was a classic example of the outdated methods of the Whites. ‘Any future land law’, Kolchak’s land commission declared on 8 April, would ‘have to be based on the rights of private property’. Only the ‘unused land of the gentry’ would be ‘transferred to the toiling peasantry’, which in the meantime could do no more than rent it from the government. As one critic put it, such a declaration was ‘a marvellous propaganda tool for the Bolsheviks. All they have to do is to print it up and distribute it to the peasantry.’13

To mobilize the peasants Kolchak’s army resorted increasingly to terror. There was no effective local administration to enforce the conscription in any other way, and in any case the Whites’ world-view ruled out the need to persuade the peasants. It was taken for granted that it was the peasant’s place to serve in the White army, just as he had served in the ranks of the Tsar’s, and that if he refused it was the army’s right to punish him, even executing him if necessary as a warning to the others. Peasants were flogged and tortured, hostages were taken and shot, and whole villages were burned to the ground to force the conscripts into the army. Kolchak’s cavalry would ride into towns on market day, round up the young men at gunpoint and take them off to the Front. Much of this terror was concealed from the Allies so as not to jeopardize their aid. But General Graves, the commander of the US troops, was well informed and was horrified by it. As he realized, the mass conscription of the peasantry ‘was a long step towards the end of Kolchak’s regime’. It soon destroyed the discipline and fighting morale of his army. Of every five peasants forcibly conscripted, four would desert: many of them ran off to the Reds, taking with them their supplies. Knox was livid when he first saw the Red troops on the Eastern Front: they were wearing British uniforms.14

From the start of its campaign, Kolchak’s army was forced to deal with numerous peasant revolts in the rear, notably in Slavgorod, south-east of Omsk, and in Minusinsk on the Yenisei. The White requisitioning and mobilizations were their principal cause. Without its own structures of local government in the rural areas, Kolchak’s regime could do very little, other than send in the Cossacks with their whips, to stop the peasants from reforming their Soviets to defend the local village revolution. By the height of the Kolchak offensive, whole areas of the Siberian rear were engulfed by peasant revolts. This partisan movement could not really be described as Bolshevik, as it was later by Soviet historians, although Bolshevik activists, usually in a united front with the Anarchists and Left SRs, often played a major role in it. It was rather a vast peasant war against the Omsk regime. Sometimes the local peasant chieftains were somewhat confused as to what they were fighting for. Shchetinkin, for example, a partisan leader in Minusinsk, issued this comic proclamation:

It is time to finish with the destroyers of Russia, Kolchak and Denikin, who are continuing the work of the traitor Kerensky … The Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich has arrived in Vladivostok and taken power over Russia. He has commanded me to raise the people against Kolchak. Lenin and Trotsky in Moscow have subordinated themselves to the Grand Duke and have been appointed as his ministers. I call on the Orthodox people to take up arms for the Tsar and Soviet Power.

Generally, however, the partisan movement expressed the ideas of the peasant revolution in hostile opposition to the towns. A good example of its ideology is to be found at the First Peasant Congress of Insurgents from the districts of Kansk, Krasnoyarsk and Achinsk which convened in April 1919. It proposed a whole ‘constitution of peasant power’, with a ‘peasant government’, communal taxes in accordance with norms set by Congress, and the ‘distribution of the riches of the land among the toiling peasantry’. It even passed a ‘peasant code’ which set sentences of community service for those found guilty of drunken brawls, gambling, catching spawning fish and — an act evidently seen by the peasant delegates on a par with these — rape.15

The partisan movement was strongest in those regions — Tomsk and Yenisei provinces in central Siberia, the Altai and Semipalatinsk in the south, and the Amur valley in the east — where the most recent Russian immigrants were concentrated. These were generally the poorer peasants, many of whom had to supplement their income by working on the railways and down the mines. But the movement also spread to the richer farming regions as the repressions of the Omsk regime increased. Peasant deserters from Kolchak’s army played a leading role in the partisan bands. They had that little extra knowledge of the outside world which can be enough in a peasant community to catapult a young man into power. The peasant bands fought by guerrilla methods, to which the wild and remote forest regions of the taiga were so well adapted. Sometimes they joined forces with the Red Army units which had been hiding out in the taiga since the Bolsheviks had been forced out of Siberia during the summer of 1918. The partisans’ destruction of miles of track and their constant ambushes of trains virtually halted the transportation of vital supplies along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Kolchak’s armies for much of the offensive. Thousands of his soldiers had to be withdrawn from the Front against the Reds to deal with the partisans. They waged a ruthless war of terror, shooting hundreds of hostages and setting fire to dozens of villages in the partisan strongholds of Kansk and Achinsk, where the wooded and hilly terrain was perfect for holding up trains. This partly succeeded in pushing the insurgents away from the railway. But since the terror was also unleashed on villages unconnected with the partisans, it merely fanned the flames of peasant war. As Kolchak’s army retreated eastwards, it found itself increasingly surrounded by hostile peasant partisans. Mutinies began to spread as the Whites came under fire from all sides: even the Cossacks joined them. Whole units of Kolchak’s peasant conscripts deserted as the retreat brought them closer to their native regions. By November 1919, Kolchak’s army was falling apart. Once again the Whites had been defeated by the gulf between themselves and the peasantry.16

On 14 November Omsk was abandoned by Kolchak’s forces as the Reds, who now outnumbered them by two to one, advanced eastwards. It was a classic case of White incompetence, with the leading generals caught in two minds as to whether to defend the town or evacuate it — and in the end doing neither properly. The Reds took the city without a fight, capturing vast stores of munitions that the Whites had not had time to destroy, along with 30,000 troops. Thousands of officers and their families, clerks and officials, merchants, café owners, bankers and prostitutes fled the White capital and headed east. The lucky ones travelled by train, the unlucky ones by horse or on foot. The bourgeoisie was on the run. The wounded and the sick — whose numbers were swollen by a typhus epidemic — had to be abandoned on the way. This was not just a military collapse; it was also a moral one. The retreating Cossacks carried with them huge supplies of vodka and, as all authority disappeared, indulged themselves in mass rape and pillage of the villages along their way. One of the characters in Doctor Zhivago, much of which was based on Pasternak’s experiences in Siberia, summed up the atmosphere: ‘Before there had been obligations of all kinds — sacred duties to the country, the army, and society. But now the war was lost, everything seemed to have been deposed, nothing was any longer sacred.’17

Kolchak headed towards his new intended capital in Irkutsk, 1,500 miles east of Omsk. The longest of his six trains, with twenty-nine cars, was taken up by the tsarist gold reserve, which had been captured from the Reds at Kazan and handed over to Kolchak. Three hundred miles from his destination, Kolchak’s train was held up by the Czechs, and for most of December it remained stranded in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, in Irkutsk, the Political Centre, a coalition of the trade unions, the zemstvos and the leftwing parties took over the city and proclaimed itself the government of Siberia. Kolchak was declared an ‘enemy of the people’ and ordered to be brought to trial. On 4 January 1920 Kolchak resigned, transferred the command of his army to Semenov and travelled with the Czechs to Irkutsk, where he expected to be handed over to the Allied missions. But somehow he was betrayed and delivered to the Irkutsk Bolsheviks. From what we know, it seems most likely that he and his gold were handed over by the Czechs in exchange for a guaranteed passage to Vladivostok, where at last they could set sail for the United States on their journey round the world to return home. Neither the Political Centre nor the Allied missions did anything to save the Admiral. On 21 January a five-man commission (two Bolsheviks, two SRs and one Menshevik) interrogated him. There were plans to bring him back to Moscow and place him on public trial. But, as with the trial of Nicholas, these plans were aborted and, on 6 February, he was sentenced to execution. Perhaps the Reds feared Kolchak’s capture by the remnants of his army, which were assembling just outside the city. Or perhaps the Bolsheviks simply preferred to have him dead.fn2 Early the next morning Kolchak was shot. His body was buried beneath the ice of the Ushakovka River.

If Kolchak’s final defeat had taken so long, it was largely because the Reds had been forced to divert a large proportion of their troops from Siberia to the Southern Front, where Denikin was threatening to break through during the summer of 1919.fn3

During March and April, at the height of the Kolchak offensive, Denikin’s forces broke out from Rostov to occupy the crucial Donbass coal region and the south-east Ukraine. Some historians have seen this as a critical strategic mistake. Denikin’s original plan had been to strike towards Tsaritsyn in order to link up with Kolchak’s forces. But this plan was abandoned in late March, when the Reds, who were desperate for coal, invaded the Donbass and the northern Don. Faced with the choice between saving the Don or linking up with Kolchak on the Volga, Denikin opted for the former. He had always given top priority to the defence of his Cossack strongholds. That had been the reasoning behind his preference the previous summer to launch a Second Kuban Campaign rather than attack towards Tsaritsyn; and now those same priorities came into play. Denikin’s decision was bitterly opposed by several leading generals, notably Baron Wrangel, the lofty six-foot-six leader of the Caucasian Army, who constantly intrigued against Denikin. Wrangel denounced the decision not to advance towards Tsaritsyn as a ‘betrayal of Kolchak’s troops’, allowing the Reds ‘to defeat us one by one’. Given that Kolchak’s troops in March were barely 200 miles from Tsaritsyn, perhaps Denikin was wrong not to run the risk of losing the Don to link up with them. The Reds were certain that they would be defeated if the two White armies combined. However, it must be said in Denikin’s defence that he was responding to what can only be called a war of genocide against the Cossacks. The Bolsheviks had made it clear that their aim in the northern Don was to unleash ‘mass terror against the rich Cossacks by exterminating them to the last man’ and transferring their land to the Russian peasants. During this campaign of ‘decossackization’, in the early months of 1919, some 12,000 Cossacks, many of them old men, were executed as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ by the tribunals of the invading Red Army.18

It was the spontaneous Cossack uprising against this terror which enabled Denikin to break through. Thousands of Cossacks joined his troops as they advanced northwards in the spring. The main White force in the Donbass was led by General Mai-Maevsky. A chubby pear-shaped man with small piggy eyes and a pince-nez, he was the most unlikely military hero. ‘If he had not worn a uniform,’ Baron Wrangel wrote, ‘you would have taken him for a comedian from a little provincial theatre.’ Mai-Maevsky was notorious for his drunken orgies: by the end of the civil war there were few brothels in southern Russia where he was not known. Yet he was also one of the Whites’ most able generals — a brilliant tactician, physically courageous and idolized by his 12,000 ‘coloured troops’ (so-called because of their multi-coloured caps). Under his command the Volunteer Army advanced from the Donbass into the south-east Ukraine, easily defeating Makhno’s Red partisans on the way. Kharkov was captured on 13 June, Ekaterinoslav on the 22nd, as the Red peasant conscripts ran away at the first sight of these crack White forces. Meanwhile, in one of the most remarkable campaigns of the civil war, Wrangel’s Caucasian Army marched for forty days across the sun-baked south-eastern steppe — and at the end of it captured Tsaritsyn against superior forces on 19 June. The Red defenders of the Volga city fled in panic as soon as they saw Wrangel’s British tanks approach. Forty thousand Reds were captured by the Whites along with a huge store of munitions.19

Denikin’s breakthrough had been facilitated by a number of factors. The Whites had the advantage of superior cavalry and supplies, thanks in large part to the Allies. Despite his own physical immobility, the rotund Mai-Maevsky was a master improviser of the war of movement. He used his British aeroplanes for reconnaissance of enemy terrain and despatched his cavalry by railway to those points where they could inflict the most damage. One unit could fight at three different places in a single day. The Reds, meanwhile, were clearly overstretched by the climax of the fighting on the two main Fronts — the Southern and the Eastern. They were also suffering from a crisis in supplies. According to Trotsky, this was the main reason for the collapse of the Southern Front. ‘Nowhere do the soldiers suffer so much from hunger as in the Ukraine,’ he told the Central Committee on 11 August. ‘Between a third and a half of the men are without boots or undergarments and go about in rags. Everyone in the Ukraine except our soldiers has a rifle and ammunition.’ The supply crisis led to indiscipline and mass desertion. In the seven months of Denikin’s advance, from March to October 1919, the Reds registered more than one million deserters on the Southern Front. The rear was engulfed in peasant uprisings, as the Reds resorted to the violent requisitioning of horses and supplies, forcible conscription of reinforcements and repressions against villages suspected of hiding deserters.20

The south-eastern Ukraine, where Makhno’s partisans were in control, became a major region of peasant revolt just at the height of the Denikin offensive. Nestor Makhno was the Pancho Villa of the Russian Revolution. He was born in 1889 in Hulyai Pole, the centre of his peasant insurrection. During 1905 he had joined the Anarchists and, after seven years in the Butyrka jail, returned to Hulyai Pole in 1917, where he formed the Peasant Union — later reformed as the Soviet — and organized a brigade, which carried out the seizure of the local gentry’s estates. During the civil war Makhno’s partisans fought almost everyone: the Rada forces; Kaledin’s Cossacks; the Germans and the Hetmanates; Petliura’s Ukrainian Nationalists; the rival bands of Grigoriev and countless other warlords; the Whites; and the Reds. The strength of his guerrilla army lay in the quality and the speed of its cavalry, in the support it received from the peasantry, in its intimate knowledge of the local terrain and in the fierce loyalty of its men. Makhno’s alleged exploits, which included drinking bouts of superhuman length, gave him a legendary status among the local peasants (they called him ‘Batko’, meaning ‘father’). It was not unlike the myth of Stenka Razin as a peasant champion of truth and justice who was blessed with supernatural powers. Under the black flag of the Anarchists, Makhno stood for a stateless peasant revolution based on the local self-rule of the free and autonomous Soviets that had emerged in the countryside during 1917. When the Whites advanced into the Ukraine Makhno put his 15,000 men at the disposal of the Reds. In exchange for arms from Moscow, his troops became part of the Third Division under Dybenko, although they retained their own internal partisan organization. Trotsky made a point of blaming their lack of discipline for the Red defeats.fn4 In June he ordered the arrest of Makhno as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ — his anarchist conception of a local peasant revolution was inimical to the Proletarian Dictatorship — and had several of his followers shot. Makhno’s partisans fled to the forests and turned their guns against the Reds. Most of the peasants in the south-east Ukraine supported his revolt.

From Tsaritsyn, on 3 July, Denikin issued his Moscow Directive. The three main White forces were to converge on the capital in a gigantic pincer movement along the main railways, thus cutting off its main lines of supply. Wrangel’s Caucasian Army was to march up the Volga from Tsaritsyn to Saratov, and turn in from there to Penza, Nizhnyi Novgorod and on to Moscow; General Sidorin and the Don Army were to advance north via Voronezh; while Mai-Maevsky’s Volunteer Army was to march from Kharkov via Kursk, Orel and Tula. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, counting on the speed of the White cavalry to exploit the temporary weakness of the Reds. Wrangel bitterly opposed the Directive. He called it the ‘death sentence’ of the White Army. In his view it ran the risk of advancing too far and broadly without adequate protection in the rear in the form of trained reserves, sound administration and lines of supply to maintain the offensive. Wrangel preferred to concentrate the troops and advance more slowly in one sector — namely his own on the Volga. But when he put this to Denikin, the latter exclaimed: ‘I see you want to be the first man to set foot in Moscow!’21

With hindsight it is clear that the Directive was a disastrous mistake: it cost the Whites the civil war. Denikin himself later admitted that the Front became much too broad, mainly because the cavalry commanders, whom he could not control, took it upon themselves to expand the territory under their occupation. It was a case of too many generals and not enough authority. As the Front grew, so too did the need for fresh troops and supplies. Yet the front-line units were by this stage several hundred miles from their bases in the rear. They resorted to violent requisitioning and conscription from the local population, thereby alienating the very people they were supposed to liberate. Denikin had always said that the advance on Moscow would depend on a ‘national uprising of the people against the Soviet regime’; but the effect of his armies’ actions was to rally them behind it.22

The offensive started well enough. On 31 July Denikin’s forces captured Poltava, followed by Odessa and Kiev in August, as Soviet power in the Ukraine crumbled. Meanwhile, in August, Mamontov’s Cossacks, 8,000 strong, broke deep into the Red rear towards Tambov, blowing up munition stores and railway lines and dispersing newly drafted Red recruits. Tambov and Voronezh were both briefly occupied and looted as part of Mamontov’s plan to disrupt the rear. During September Mai-Maevsky’s advance continued into central Russia. Kursk was taken on the 20th and Voronezh, once again, ten days later. On 14 October the Whites took Orel. Only 250 miles from Moscow, this was the closest they would come to victory. The Bolsheviks were thrown into panic. Precisely at this moment, just as Denikin was threatening to capture Moscow from the south, another White army under General Yudenich was being amassed on the outskirts of Petrograd. For once the Whites had managed to co-ordinate the attacks of their two main armies, and for a few crucial days in mid-October it seemed that this would be enough to defeat the Reds.

Bunkered in the Kremlin, Lenin received hourly telephone reports from his commanders at the two Fronts. Desperate measures were put into action for a last-ditch defence of Moscow: 120,000 workers and peasants were forcibly conscripted into labour teams to dig trenches on the southern approach roads. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks prepared for the worst. Many of them tore up their party tickets and tried to ingratiate themselves with the Moscow bourgeoisie in the hope of saving themselves when the Whites arrived. Others got ready to go underground. Secret plans were laid for the evacuation of the government to the Urals. Some of the senior party leaders even prepared to flee abroad. Elena Stasova, the Party Secretary, was ordered to procure a false passport and a wad of tsarist banknotes for each member of the Central Committee.23

But the signs that the Whites had overstretched themselves soon became apparent. While their armies had more than doubled in size since the spring, they still lacked enough troops to sustain their advance towards Moscow. Denikin’s 150,000 soldiers were very thinly spread along the thousand miles of the Southern Front, making them vulnerable to a counter-offensive. In the rear the Whites had left themselves without enough troops to defend their bases against Makhno’s partisans, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Chechens in the Caucasus, and at the height of the Moscow offensive they were forced to withdraw vital troops to deal with them. They were also hampered in part by the lack of reinforcements. The Kuban Cossacks, whom Wrangel was counting on to reinforce his campaign against Saratov on the Volga, refused to leave their homelands. It was the old problem of Cossack localism: without guarantees of autonomy for the Kuban — which the Whites were not prepared to give — they would not take part in the fighting in Russia. But the real problem for the Whites — and the single biggest reason why their offensive ran out of steam — was their inability to mobilize enough troops within the newly occupied regions of the Ukraine and Russia. And here the Whites were defeated by their own political failures.

In the Ukraine the Whites were crippled from the start by their Great Russian chauvinism. This guaranteed the opposition of the richer peasants, much of the rural intelligentsia and the petty-bourgeoisie, all of whom were sympathetic to the Ukrainian nationalist cause. Of all the contenders for power in the Ukraine — the Greens, the Blacks, the Reds and the Whites — Denikin was the only one who made no concessions to the nationalists. This was not a mistaken calculation: the need to defend the Great Russian Empire was the essential belief of the White regime. Even if they had been told that without such concessions they could not succeed, the Whites would still have refused to make them. Dragomirov, Lukomsky and Shulgin, the three Kievan Russians who dominated the White movement in the south, were more Russian than the Russians in Russia. Denikin satisfied their nationalist demands. He appointed Russians to all official posts; suppressed the agrarian co-operatives, strongholds of the nationalist movement; and forbade the use of the Ukrainian language in all state institutions including schools. He even denied the existence of a Ukraine — which he called ‘Little Russia’ in all his pronouncements. His clumsy ‘Proclamation to the Little Russian People’, in which he pledged to reunite Russia with its ‘little Russian branch’, merely helped to drive the Ukrainian peasants into Petliura’s nationalist army, which did so much to weaken the White rear. During the decisive battles of the autumn the Whites were forced to withdraw 10,000 troops from the Front against the Reds to fight Petliura’s and other nationalist bands.

An even more crucial weakness was the failure of the Whites to build up an effective system of local administration in the newly conquered territories. It meant they lacked the means to mobilize the peasantry and its resources without the use of terror. This became critical as they advanced into Soviet Russia and were cut off from their bases of supply. At the height of the offensive it became very difficult to get food and equipment to the soldiers. Makhno had occupied the key supply bases in the rear — Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdiansk — and, along with Petliura’s nationalists, was holding up the military trains from the south. Then there was the problem of the railway workers, who by and large were against the Whites and could often only be made to work for them at the point of a gun. Within the Whites’ own industrial bases there were similar tensions with the workers, as Denikin rolled back the rights of the trade unions and returned plants to their former owners. Coal production in the Donbass fell dramatically, bringing much of industry and transport to a halt. The Whites responded with a reign of terror, shooting workers in reprisal for the ‘Bolshevik’ decline in production. In Yuzovka one in ten workers was routinely shot whenever mines and factories failed to meet the output targets for coal and iron. Some workers were shot for simply being workers under the slogan ‘Death to Callused Hands!’ It was a sort of class revenge for the Red Terror with its own slogan ‘Death to the Burzhoois!’ But even such repression was unable to reverse the decline in production. The White economy was thrown into chaos as factories closed down, inflation spiralled and workers went on strike. Vital supplies for the army were either not produced or not transported to the Front.24

Meanwhile, in August, Allied shipments of aid were reduced as the Western powers, chastened by Kolchak’s retreat, became sceptical of a White victory. Much of the aid had been lost through corruption: weapons, uniforms, linen, blankets, even hospital equipment, would somehow find their way on to the black market. During the fighting at Kharkov several soldiers from Denikin’s tank corps were caught selling their radiator anti-freeze as vodka in the Hotel Metropole. Henceforth, the Allies resolved, military aid should be given in the form of ‘non-marketable’ goods (although in Russia there were no such things) and should be paid for by Denikin in cash or exported goods. This was a death blow to the White campaign. The front-line soldiers were left without supplies, notably warm kit for the coming winter. Without an effective system of local administration to organize this, the soldiers soon broke down into chaotic looting. As Denikin himself acknowledged, more than anything else this alienated the local population and guaranteed a White defeat.25

The worst looting was carried out by the Cossack cavalry. They held the Russian peasants in contempt and viewed it as their right to plunder them at will, as if invaders of a foreign country. Their commanders were a law unto themselves and, on the whole, allowed the looting as a means of winning the Cossacks’ loyalty. It was precisely the same combination that produced the atrocious pogroms against the Jews (of which more here). Mamontov and Shkuro were only the most notorious examples, urging on their soldiers with the promise of loot. But there were dozens of junior commanders who made themselves into ‘Cossack heroes’ in this way: one of them was called the Prince of Thieves. Denikin disapproved of these adventurers but he lacked the firmness to bring them to book — a fact he would later bitterly regret. Some of the Cossack units were so weighed down with booty that they were quite unable to fight. Their cavalry was followed by long tails of wagons — some stretching up to thirty miles — laden down with stolen property. Trains were filled with looted goods and diverted to the rear instead of being used to transport equipment to the Front. Mamontov’s Cossacks, having rejoined the Whites after their August raid on Tambov, were so concerned to get back with their spoils to the Don that all but 1,500 out of 8,000 deserted. Wrangel claimed that by the autumn the Whites had only 3,000–4,000 committed fighters left at the Front: ‘all the rest were a colossal tail of looters and speculators … The war for them was a means of getting rich.’ With such an army, he concluded, it was ‘impossible to win over Russia. The population has come to hate us.’26

*

With Denikin’s capture of Orel, the crucial arsenal of Tula, 100 miles away, was imminently threatened. Its loss, claimed Trotsky, ‘would have been more dangerous than that of Moscow’.27 Without Moscow the Reds would have lacked a prestigious capital; but without Tula they would have lacked an army. The entire fate of the Soviet regime hinged on the defence of Tula — and at the centre of that defence stood Dmitry Os’kin. As the Military Commissar of Tula, Os’kin was placed at the head of the two key bodies — the Military Council and the Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) — which between them ruled the so-called ‘Tula Fortified Region’ by martial law.

Os’kin had no doubts about the need for martial law. He had long ago left behind his Left SR libertarianism and accepted the need for ruthless discipline in a civil war. The necessity was underlined by the fact that the Tula workers were threatening to strike in protest against shortages of food. There had been a general strike in Tula in the spring. Os’kin and his comrades had been denounced by hungry workers at every factory meeting: ‘Down with the Commissars!’ became the slogan of the strike. To suppress the strike the Bolsheviks had waged civil war against the workers. Dzerzhinsky himself had been sent by Lenin on 3 April. Special Communist detachments had occupied the factories and up to 1,000 workers had been arrested. Since then relations with the workers had been less embattled — Os’kin had made sure that better food supplies were brought in — but this was now threatened by a renewed strike as food stocks once again became depleted. Given the vital need to keep munitions production going, there was no choice in Os’kin’s view but ‘to militarize the factories and repress the workers if they went on strike’. None of the Bolsheviks had any illusions about the possibility of negotiating a settlement with the workers: there was not enough time. And, in any case, as Lenin admitted to the Politburo on 15 October, ‘the masses in Tula are a very long way from being with us’. In fact, if anything, they were with the Mensheviks, who had led the general strike in the previous spring and who, before that, had held majorities in the city Soviets. Some of the Mensheviks now chose to agitate for the Reds in Tula in order to repel Denikin. It was a measure of the Bolsheviks’ desperation, and of the low esteem in which the workers held them, that they had to rely on their deadliest rivals to come to their aid. Os’kin and his comrades were reluctant to do so, fearful as they had been of any other party since the general strike, but Lenin intervened to open up the factory doors to the Mensheviks. Dan told the Tula workers that the victory of the Whites would mean the defeat of the revolution; but the hungry workers seemed only bored by this. The Mensheviks were forced to conclude that the workers were ‘extremely hostile to the Communists and no appeal to defend the revolution against Denikin could pacify their mood’.28

The need for urgent results also lay behind Os’kin’s extraordinary measures for Tula’s military defence. Thousands of peasants and ‘bourgeois’ citizens were forcibly conscripted into labour teams. They worked day and night felling timber to fuel the factories and digging trenches around the city. Hundreds of their relatives were held as ‘hostages’ — to be shot if the work was not done properly. Os’kin had no qualms about using such measures: they were ‘necessary for the defence of the revolution’. Thousands of Red Army reinforcements were despatched to Tula, including the famous Latvian Rifle Division, stalwart supporters of the Bolshevik regime. Os’kin organized the conscription of 20,000 local troops in addition to this. ‘The whole of Tula’, as he put it, ‘was turned into one huge barracks.’ Soldiers were billeted in every spare building. The town squares and parks were taken over by tanks and units of soldiers going through their drill. Machine-gun posts were mounted on the tallest buildings along the major roads and mined barricades were erected at the entrance to the town. Throughout the southern districts of the province there were lookout posts, linked by telephone with Tula, to warn of the approach of Denikin’s troops. The gentry’s abandoned manors were turned into barracks. One regiment made its home on Tolstoy’s former estate at Yasnaya Polyana; while another camped nearby on Prince Lvov’s at Popovka.29

At this crucial moment, with the outcome of the struggle very finely balanced, hundreds of thousands of peasant deserters were returning to the Red Army. This return was a decisive factor, tipping the balance in favour of the Reds, and it says a great deal about why the Bolsheviks won the civil war. Rightwing accounts of the civil war have tended to present the victory of the Reds as something that was achieved without mass support. The Bolsheviks, so the argument goes, simply had a larger territorial base upon which to draw. They were more systematic than the Whites in their use of terror and coercion to extract the necessary military resources from a civilian population which was essentially hostile to both sides and indifferent to the outcome of their struggle. This is two-thirds right. But the fact that the Bolsheviks could at least claim to stand for ‘the revolution’ — and they had captured its most important symbols such as the Red Flag — also surely enabled them to mobilize a certain level of support, albeit only a conditional support and as the less bad of two options, from the peasantry, and indeed as we shall see from certain workers too, who feared that a victory of the Whites would reverse their own gains from the revolution.

This is clearly shown by the story of the return of the peasant deserters to the Red Army. Until June, the Reds’ campaign against desertion had relied on violent repressive measures against the villages suspected of harbouring them. This had been largely counter-productive, resulting in a wave of peasant revolts behind the Red Front which had facilitated the White advance. But in June the Bolsheviks switched to the more conciliatory tactic of ‘amnesty weeks’. During these weeks, which were much propagandized and often extended indefinitely, the deserters were invited to return to the ranks without punishment. In a sense, it was a sign of the Bolshevik belief in the need to reform the nature of the peasant and to make him conscious of his revolutionary duty — thus the Reds punished ‘malicious’ deserters but tried to reform the ‘weak-willed’ ones — as opposed to the practice of the Whites of executing all deserters equally. Between July and September, as the threat of a White victory grew, nearly a quarter of a million deserters returned to the Red Army from the two military districts of Orel and Moscow alone. Many of them called themselves ‘volunteers’, and said they were ready to fight against the Whites, whom they associated with the restoration of the gentry on the land. These were regions where the local peasantry had made substantial land gains in 1917. In Orel the amount of land in peasant use had increased by 28 per cent; while in the Moscow military district the increase was as much as 35 per cent. The threat of a White victory made the peasants fear for the loss of their new land — a fear that the Reds encouraged through their propaganda — and they were prepared to send their sons back to the army to defend this land. However much the peasants might have disliked the Bolshevik regime, with its violent requisitionings and bossy commissars, they would continue to defend it as long — and only as long — as it stood between the Whites and their own revolution on the land.30

By October, the Reds had nearly 200,000 troops ready for battle on the Southern Front. This gave them twice as many forces as the Whites. In preparation for a counter-offensive against the Whites, Alexander Egorov was given command of the Southern Front on 11 October. His career pattern was very similar to Os’kin’s and indeed typical of the new Red military élite. He had risen to the rank of colonel during the First World War, had joined the Left SRs in 1917, and had defected to the Bolsheviks during the summer of 1918. Egorov was the principal architect of the Red Army victory in the south — although in fact there was very little planning, since the strategy had been changed at the final moment and was largely improvised as it went along.fn5 Os’kin found nothing but panic and chaos at the headquarters of the Southern Front. Nobody even knew for sure ‘where our troops were located’.31

Despite this confusion, which was characteristic of the whole of the civil war, these large-scale battles of October were very different from the sort of fighting that had typified the earlier stages of the civil war. The battles of 1918 had really been no more than small-scale skirmishes and artillery duels. The small and motley forces had been mostly concerned with self-preservation, there had been no fixed positions or Fronts, and towns and territories had frequently changed hands. It had been like a minor nineteenth-century war. But the battles of October were much heavier and resembled more the fighting of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved, millions of cartridges were fired every day, there were tanks and aeroplanes, and armoured cars, and the battles went on through the night. With better command structures in both armies, and their officers under stricter orders not to retreat, thousands of soldiers’ lives were expended over insignificant bits of land. Neither side took prisoners.

The Red counter-offensive on the Southern Front had two key strategic elements. The first was a surprise attack by the Striking Group of Latvian Rifles, some 12,000 crack troops situated to the west of Orel, on the left flank of the Volunteer Army as it pushed north towards Tula. After a fierce and bloody battle, in which nearly half the Latvians were slaughtered, the Whites were pushed back beyond Orel. At this point the second key element of the counter-offensive was deployed. On 19 October the Red Cavalry suddenly attacked the Cossacks on the left flank of the Whites, eventually chasing them back towards Voronezh. The Cossacks must have been astonished by the Red horsemen, since they had hardly ever been deployed before. Trotsky had always underestimated the strategic advantages of the cavalry in a war of movement like the civil war. It was only the Mamontov Raid that had taught him the slogan ‘Proletarians to Horse!’32

To build up their cavalry the Reds had turned in 1918 to Semen Budenny. This tall and imposing cavalry officer, complete with a handlebar moustache, was the son of a non-Cossack peasant from the Don region. He had been drafted into the tsarist army in 1903, and after the war against Japan, when his horsemanship had first been spotted, had been enrolled in the Imperial Cavalry Riding School in St Petersburg. By 1914, Budenny had risen to become a sergeant-major in the élite Imperial Dragoons. He was one of the many NCOs to join the Bolsheviks in 1917; and like many of them soon fell in with Stalin and the Military Opposition. In 1918 Voroshilov placed him at the head of a small cavalry force fighting against Krasnov’s Cossacks near Tsaritsyn. This First Red Cavalry Corps was largely made up of poor Cossacks and non-Cossack peasants from the northern Don. It was reinforced from these same elements in preparation for the counter-offensive against Denikin. This was the nucleus of Budenny’s celebrated Cavalry Army, the one immortalized through Babel’s stories, which recounted its adventures in the war against Poland during 1920. Many of Stalin’s most honoured commanders, if not the most talented, won their spurs in the ‘Konarmiia’. Apart from Marshal Budenny, who was buried in Red Square in 1970, there were Marshal Timoshenko (who led the Red Army into the Second World War) and Marshal Zhukov (who led it to victory in 1945).

Pursued by the Red Cavalry, the White Cossacks fled south to the Don, abandoning Voronezh to the Bolsheviks on 24 October. From this strategic city, Budenny’s horsemen advanced towards Kastornoe, a crucial railway junction between Moscow and the Don. They finally captured it on 15 November after several days of bloody fighting against Shkuro’s Cossacks. This effectively sealed the fate of Denikin’s offensive. The Whites were now threatened with the prospect of complete encirclement by the Reds, and they were forced to beat a hasty retreat south. Never again did they threaten to break through into central Russia.

*

October was a double opportunity missed by the Whites. At the height of the fighting at Orel a second major White force, the North-Western Army, advanced to the outskirts of Petrograd.

Given its shortcomings, it is amazing that the North-Western Army ever got so far. It had been formed in Pskov with the help of the German army during 1918. After the defeat of Germany, as the Red Army had advanced westwards, it had retreated into Estonia, then a newly independent state in the grips of its own civil war. There it had been able to build up its forces behind the natural barrier of Lake Peipus. By May 1919, when it re-entered Russia and launched its attack on Petrograd, the army had some 16,000 men, most of them Russian prisoners of war handed over by the Germans and deserters from the Reds.

The army was led by General Yudenich, a small-time hero of the First World War whom Kolchak had recognized as his commander in the Baltic. Aged fifty-seven and weighing eighteen stone, Nikolai Yudenich was both too old and fat to inspire anyone as a leader. With his flabby cheeks, his bald head and his twirling moustache, he looked every bit the unreconstructed Russian aristocrat that he was. Yudenich had never really reconciled himself to the downfall of the Tsarist Empire — and this was to be the cause of his own downfall.

Like all the White generals, Yudenich’s instinct was to bury politics in the interests of his military campaign. ‘Against the Bolsheviks without Politics’ was his slogan. The North-Western Government was a piece of democratic window-dressing to appease the Allies. It had no real intention of governing Russia. Yudenich dismissed the need for a reform programme, and did not count on a popular uprising to pave his army’s way to Petrograd: this was to be a military conquest not a winning of the people’s hearts and minds. In fact quite the contrary occurred. As soon as his army entered Soviet soil, it met the opposition of the population and its mainly Russian conscripts began to desert. This lack of support within Russia meant that Yudenich was obliged to call on foreign troops. The Allies were luke-warm towards his mission — they were looking to withdraw from the civil war — and only sent him minimal supplies. True, British warships blockaded Petrograd and even attacked Kronstadt; but no Allied land troops were sent to Yudenich. Even if they had been willing to support the Whites in an offensive against Petrograd, Yudenich’s connections with the Germans would have been enough to prevent the Allies from supporting him.

Without the support of the Allies the success of Yudenich’s offensive against Petrograd would rest on the willingness of Finland to act as a springboard and supply base for his army. The Finnish border was only twenty miles from Petrograd — nearly ten times shorter than the march through Russia via Pskov. Yet even here — with the prize of Petrograd so close to their grasp — the White generals allowed their obstinate commitment to the Russian Empire to get in the way of an accord with the Finns.

The Finnish Defence Corps under General Mannerheim had grown into a major national army since its defeat of the Reds at Helsingfors during the spring of 1918. It was the Finns rather than the Whites whom the Bolsheviks feared most in Petrograd. By June 1919, it was reckoned that there were up to 100,000 Finnish troops around Lake Lagoda. One quarter of them were facing Petrograd. The price of Finland’s support for Yudenich was simple: a guarantee of its independence. This should have been a formality: Finland was already, to all intents and purposes, an independent state and was recognized as such by most of the Western powers. Yet the Whites thought that even this small price was still too much to pay. Their simple-minded nostalgia for the Russian Empire, which they were committed to restore, prevented them from making deals with nationalists. ‘History will never forgive me if I surrender what Peter the Great won,’ Kolchak had declared with typical bombast when urged, as the supreme leader of the Whites, to yield to the Finnish demand. Prince Lvov and the Political Conference in Paris were adamantly opposed to the idea of granting Finland recognition until its status had been finally resolved by the Constituent Assembly in Russia. This was also typical of the Whites’ fixation with the legal framework of the past — a fixation which prevented them from engaging with the political realities of the present. Mannerheim was well disposed to the antiBolshevik cause. But not even he could persuade the war-weary Finns to support the Whites without a guarantee of recognition. The Reds, on the other hand, had granted Finland recognition eighteen months before. They were now offering a peace accord with the Finns if they remained neutral in the civil war, while threatening them with ‘merciless extermination’ if they joined the Whites. The Allies urged Yudenich to recognize Finland, realizing that without its support his offensive was doomed to fail. But the White general refused to budge. This gave Mannerheim, facing an election in July, no choice but to wash his hands of the Whites. He refused to give Yudenich troops or to let his army operate from Finnish soil. It was a crucial setback for the Whites, forcing them to advance on Petrograd by the longer and more hostile route through Yamburg and Gatchina.

Yudenich made a last desperate effort to enlist the support of the Estonians. But they were a small nation, and a young and fragile one, and they were unwilling to give the Whites many troops, especially when the latter would not even recognize Estonian independence in return. The Reds were quick to exploit the situation — just as they had been in the Finnish case — offering Estonia a peace accord if it remained neutral in the civil war. The natural inclination of the Estonians to avoid involvement in the civil war thus coincided with their best interests as an independent state forced to live next door to the Soviets.

Left to his own devices, Yudenich ordered a dash for Petrograd on 10 October. He was banking on the Reds being caught short by the fighting on the Southern Front. To begin with, the gamble paid off. The Bolsheviks had indeed transferred units to the south. The 25,000 troops of the Seventh Red Army, left to defend Petrograd, were utterly demoralized and beginning to desert. Aided by Colonel Liundkvist, the Chief of Staff of the Seventh Army who defected to the Whites and supplied them with details of the Red positions, Yudenich’s 18,000 troops advanced rapidly. By the 20th they had reached the Pulkovo Heights, overlooking the Petrograd suburbs. ‘There was the dome of St Isaac’s and the gilt spire of the Admiralty,’ one his officers recalled, ‘one could even see trains pulling out of the Nikolai Station.’ So confident were they of victory on that day that one of their generals even refused the offer of field-glasses to survey the city because, as he put it, they would in any case be walking down the Nevsky Prospekt the next day.33

News of the White advance created panic among the Reds. Lenin wanted to abandon Petrograd and concentrate on the Southern Front. But Trotsky was adamant that the birthplace of the revolution should be defended at all costs, even if that meant fighting in the streets, and he persuaded Lenin to change his mind. On 16 October Trotsky was despatched to the old capital to take charge of its defence. Zinoviev, the Petrograd party boss, had completely lost his nerve and could do nothing but lie down on a sofa in the Smolny. This was one of the few occasions in the civil war — much fewer than claimed by his acolytes — when Trotsky’s presence at the Front helped to decide the outcome of the battle. At one point he even mounted a horse, rounded up the retreating troops and led them back into battle.

Trotsky’s first task was to boost morale — and this he did with his brilliant talent for mass oratory. He urged the soldiers not to give up and made fun of the enemy’s British tanks, from which the Reds had run away, describing them as nothing more than boxes ‘made of painted wood’. He even ordered the Putilov plant to knock up a few vehicles resembling tanks to give the troops reassurance that they too had these machines on their side. Trotsky’s next task was to transform Petrograd into a fortress and prepare its population for a battle in the streets. Martial law was declared in the city and a night-time curfew was imposed. Thousands of workers and bourgeois residents were mobilized to erect barricades on the streets and squares. Lenin urged Trotsky to raise 30,000 people, to ‘set up machine-guns behind them and to shoot several hundred of them in order to assure a real mass assault on Yudenich’. The city’s sewage system was pulled up and used to build the barricades. Trenches were dug in the southern suburbs and machine-guns were posted on top of all the buildings along the main roads into the centre. Military trucks and motorcycles hurtled around Petrograd by day and night; Bolsheviks in leather jackets stood around at road blocks with guns around their shoulders; and all the major buildings were guarded by teams of worker volunteers.34

Although Petrograd, like every other city, had been troubled by frequent strikes, the threat of a White breakthrough seemed to galvanize many workers into defending the Soviet regime. As one of the Whites’ spies in Petrograd put it:

The worker elements, at least a large section of them, are still Bolshevik inclined. Like some other democratic elements, they see the regime, although bad, as their own. Propaganda about the cruelty of the Whites has a strong effect on them … Psychologically, they identify the present with equality and Soviet power and the Whites with the old regime and its scorn for the masses.