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

One hundred miles south of Moscow, Tula was the arsenal of the revolution. After the evacuation of Petrograd it became the hub of the Soviet Republic's munitions industry. At the height of the First World War its factories employed over 60,000 workers, although by the time of Os'kin's arrival, with the general flight to the countryside, only 15,000 were left. The new military commissar took up his office in the Soviet building, housed in the former Peasant Bank, which, as if to symbolize the new social order, was surrounded by metal factories.¹

The local Red Guards, which Os'kin had come to reorganize, had been mostly set up by the workers during 1917 to defend their factories against the threat of a 'counter-revolution'. After the Bolshevik seizure of power there had been a great deal of talk about using them to form a new type of 'proletarian army' rather than retaining the remnants of the old (and mainly peasant) one.

The Bolsheviks did not like the idea of a standing army. They thought of the army as a tool of oppression wielded by the old regime against the revolution. A workers' militia would be more egalitarian, and the Red Guards were to be the basis of such a force. They made up the units of the new Red Army, whose establishment was decreed on 15 January. Apart from their ideological objections to the idea of a standing army, the Bolsheviks also had practical reasons for favouring the volunteer principle at this stage: the disintegration of the old army and the complete absence of any apparatus to carry out conscription left them no choice. The only real troops they could rely on were the three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, which stood alone between them and disaster during the first months of their regime.

At this time, when the workers were fleeing the cities, the new Red recruits were largely made up of unemployed former soldiers, and all those 'vagabond, unstable elements that', in Trotsky's words, 'were so numerous at the time'. Some of them had no doubt come to like the army way of life, or at least preferred it to post-war civilian hardships. But most of them had nowhere else to go — the war left them without home or family. They were stranded in towns like Tula, half-way between the Front and their long-abandoned homes. Many of these migrants signed up with the Red Guards simply to receive a standard-issue coat, or a pair of boots, before running off to sell them and start the whole process over again in some other town. The new Proletarian Militia was a rag-and-bone trade for the down and out.²

Naturally, such an army was virtually useless on the battlefield. The image of the Red Guards as disciplined crack troops is the stuff of Soviet mythology. The Red Guards were irregular detachments, motley-clothed and armed, poorly disciplined and very heavy-drinking. The 'committee spirit' of 1917 lived on in their ranks. Officers were elected and their primitive operational plans were usually voted on by a show of soldiers' hands. The military consequences were disastrous. Attacks were launched without proper scouting, often using no more than a school atlas. The soldiers fought in a wild and undisciplined manner, all too frequently breaking up in panic at the first sight of the enemy. Crushing defeats by the Germans in February and March, followed by the Czechs in May and June, made it clear to Trotsky that such methods would not do. With the Soviet regime on the brink of defeat, the Red Army would have to be reformed on the model of the old imperial army, with regular units replacing the detachments, proper discipline in the ranks, professional officers and a centralized hierarchy of command. That reformation was to be Os'kin's task in Tula.

One of Trotsky's first measures was to call on the services of ex-tsarist officers. They were called 'military specialists' rather than officers to dissociate them from the old regime (for the same reason soldiers were now called 'Red

Army servicemen'). Some 8,000 ex-tsarist officers had volunteered to fight for the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power. The soldiers and their committees, for whom the revolution meant above all the ending of officers' authority, greeted them with much hostility. But the shortage of NCOs, as well as the so-called Red Commanders, whose training had only just begun, ensured that brute military needs won the day over revolutionary zeal. Now Trotsky sought to extend the principle with the mass conscription of the ex-tsarist officers, brushing aside the soldiers' objections by simply abolishing their committees. On 29 July he issued his famous Order Number 228, calling up all officers. By the end of the year, 22,000 ex-tsarist officers had been recruited; and in the course of the civil war the number rose to 75,000, not including doctors, vets and other officials. By the end, three-quarters of the senior commanders in the Red Army were drawn from the tsarist officer corps.³

What motivated these officers? Some, like Brusilov, who was to join the Red Army in 1920, were moved by a sense of patriotic duty: the country, for better or worse, had chosen the Reds, or so it seemed to them, and their duty was to serve it. Many were also driven by an inbred sense of military duty: these were 'army men' who would serve that institution regardless of its politics. Perhaps some junior officers were also attracted by the prospect of a more senior command in the new army than they might have expected in the old one. But the most common motivation was the simple need to find a job: it was survival, not self-advancement, which drew the officers to the Soviet cause. Most of them had lost their military pension, often their only means of livelihood, and were thus much worse off than the other ruined classes of Old Russia. Amidst the terror of 1918, moreover, they were well advised to make themselves useful to the regime. For as Trotsky was to put it in a memo to Lenin, by employing the ex-tsarist officers 'we shall lighten the load on the prisons'.* The officers who joined were closely supervised by the commissars, like Os'kin, and warned that any acts of betrayal of the Red Army would lead to the arrest of their families. 'Let the turncoats realize', read Trotsky's special order of 30 September, 'that they are at the same time betraying their own families — their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.'⁴

There was a storm of opposition to the recruitment of these officers. Many soldiers saw it as a return to the old military order, and as a betrayal of Order Number One. They particularly resented the reintroduction of pay differentials based on rank, of compulsory saluting, and of special badges and uniforms, not to speak of rations and privileges, for the officers. The party workers in the army saw it as a challenge to their power, while the NCOs and the Red

* At that time (October 1918) there were 8,000 officers sitting as 'hostages' in the Cheka prisons (Revvoensovet Respubliki, 36).

Commanders were jealous of the 'men with golden epaulettes' and feared that they might block their own promotion. Os'kin himself was in two minds about the tsarist officers. As a military man, he could see the desperate need for competent commanders. Military efficiency had to be placed before revolutionary equality. The antics of the Left SRs and the Anarchists in Tula — teenage fanatics of the militia principle — had caused enough chaos to convince him of the need for Bolshevik discipline and organization (he joined the party in July 1918). And yet, at the same time, as a peasant-NCO and a man of some ambition, he also resented the privileges of the ex-tsarists. Where he had earned his rank through courage under fire, most of them had gained theirs through birth and education. He felt that their attitudes were unchanged — 'their facial muscles winced whenever they were addressed by the soldiers as "comrade commander" ' — and feared this might lead them to revolt.'"'

The military setbacks of the summer were quickly blamed by Trotsky's critics on the ex-tsarist officers. The loss of Simbirsk to the Komuch in July had indeed been partly brought about by the mutiny of M. A. Murav'ev, a lieutenant-colonel in the tsarist army and the Left SR Commander of the Eastern Front. During the following months a concerted campaign was launched within the party against Trotsky's policies. Two articles in Pravda were the catalysts of this conflict. Sorin, a member of the Moscow Party Committee, accused Trotsky of vesting 'too much power' in the ex-tsarist officers, while unfairly making the commissars 'answer with their lives' when the soldiers refused to obey their orders. A commissar named Panteleev had indeed been shot on Trotsky's orders after his detachment had fled from the battle for Kazan. The case became a cause celebre for those determined to defend the independence of the party and its commissars against the commanders. Kamensky, a commissar in Voroshilov's army on the Southern Front, claimed in the other Pravda article that the ex-tsarist commanders acted like virtual 'autocrats', while the commissars were merely there to 'append a decorative signature' to their orders.⁶

Kliment Voroshilov, an Old Bolshevik and Red Guard commander, was the leading figure of this Military Opposition, as it soon came to be known. Based in Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov refused to carry out the orders of Trotsky's central command organ, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (RVSR) and its Commander on the Southern Front, the ex-tsarist General Sytin based at Kozlov. Stalin backed Voroshilov, although he always denied belonging to the-Military Opposition. This direct challenge to Trotsky's authority from such a senior party comrade was the origin of much of the personal animosity between Trotsky and Stalin in the years to come.

Trotsky turned the criticisms of his policies into a question of the party's general confidence in himself as Commissar for War. He demanded that the editors of Pravda be censured for publishing the articles by Sorin and

Kamensky. He also demanded Stalin's recall from the Southern Front, where the Georgian was shooting dozens of officials and creating havoc as a special commissar for food supply. This was a dangerous game for Trotsky to play. The sentiments of the Military Opposition, like those of the Left Communists, from which it had in part originated, were widely shared among the rank and file who had joined the party since 1917. As they saw it, the whole purpose of the revolution was to replace the old 'bourgeois specialists' with proletarians loyal to the party. Theirs was a communism of careerists — one that combined an egalitarian rejection of the old authorities with the demand that they, as Communists, should enjoy a similar position of power and privilege within the new regime. In their eyes, comradeship and class were the only necessary qualifications for military advancement. Battles would be won by the 'revolutionary spirit' of the comrades and their men, not by the outmoded science of the tsarist Military Academy.

Underlying this mistrust of the officers was an instinctive lower-class resentment of all privilege and a deep anti-intellectualism. These same attitudes were also displayed towards the other so-called 'bourgeois specialists' employed by the Soviet regime in the bureaucracy and industry (i.e. Civil Servants, managers and technicians who had held their posts before 1917). Many intellectuals in the party leadership were themselves targets of this demagogic hostility from the rank and file. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin's three great rivals in the 1920s,* suffered particularly on this score. Their Jewish looks no doubt had much to do with it. Most of the Military Opposition came from lower-class families and had had no more than a basic education. Voroshilov was the son of a casual labourer on the railways, and had spent only two years at school. These 'sons of the proletariat' were resentful at having to give way to officers who had enjoyed all the privileges of noble birth and education in the Military Academy. Much of their resentment, as junior commanders, was provoked by what they saw as Trotsky's arrogance and his Bonapartist manners as the head of the Red Army. He always arrived at the Front in his richly furnished train (Trotsky was well known as a gourmet and his train was equipped with its own high-class restaurant). His commissars were always dressed in immaculate uniforms, with expensive leather boots and shiny golden buttons. Perhaps with a little more sensitivity Trotsky might have neutralized the Military Opposition. But he had never been noted for his tact — Trotsky himself once admitted that he was disliked within the party for his 'aristocratism' — and his pride had

* Stalin's rise to power was partly dependent on the mobilization of this anti-intellectualism against the Old Bolsheviks (those who had joined the party before 1917) among the rank-and-file Communists. Many of his most important allies in the 1920s were former members of the Military Opposition. Voroshilov, for example, joined the Politburo in 1925.

been wounded by the Oppositions challenge to his position and authority. Trotsky chose to strike back where it would hurt most, ridiculing his critics as 'party ignoramuses'. The odd betrayal by the military specialists, he claimed, was not as bad as the loss of 'whole regiments' through the incompetence of 'semi-educated' Communist commanders who 'could not even read a map'.⁷

The conflict rumbled on through the winter, until March 1919, when, with Kolchak on the Volga, Lenin made an appeal for party unity, and a compromise of sorts was struck at the Eighth Party Congress. Trotsky's employment of the ex-tsarist officers was to be supported on the grounds of military exigency, but the supervisory role of the commissars and the general power of the party in the army were both to be increased, along with the training of Red Commanders for future leadership of the army. This, however, was just to throw a blanket over the dispute. The chain of command in the army became even more confused, with the commanders, the commissars and the local party cells all engaged in a three-cornered struggle for authority.⁸ Moreover, the conflict between Trotsky and the Military Opposition was to emerge the following summer, when Stalin relaunched a general attack on the leadership of the army.

* * * In the summer of 1918, with the Reds facing defeat on all sides, the Soviet Republic was declared a 'single military camp'. Martial law was imposed throughout the country. The RVSR under Trotsky's leadership became the supreme organ of the state; the whole economy was geared towards the needs of the army; and the country was divided into three main Fronts (Eastern, Southern and Northern), five Army Groups and a Fortified Area in the west. The Bolshevik leaders made fist-banging speeches and the press came out with bold headlines calling on the people to do their duty and defend the Fatherland.

In this desperate situation, Trotsky had no choice but to call for mass conscription. The Red volunteers were many too few and poorly disciplined to counteract the Germans in the Ukraine, the British in the north, the Czechs on the Volga, the Japanese in the Far East and the Whites aided by the Allies on the Don. Mass conscription was Trotsky's second major reform, after the recruitment of the ex-tsarist officers, and it was just as controversial as the first.

Whereas the Red Guards were seen as an army of the working class, mass conscription was bound to produce an army of peasants. Most Bolsheviks saw the peasants as an alien and hostile social force. Conscription on this scale was in their eyes tantamount to arming the enemy. It would 'peasantize' the Red Army and end the domination of the working class within it, an important retreat from the party's principles. But then the revolution was itself in retreat, with the Reds on the brink of defeat. If they were to survive, they had no choice but to mobilize the peasantry.

To begin with, though, most of the conscripts continued to be drawn

from the cities. Of the fifteen compulsory mobilizations declared between June and August, eleven applied only to urban workers. With hundreds of factories closing every month, there was no great problem in getting workers to enrol for the army: 200,000 did so from Moscow and Petrograd alone. The local party organs also threw in 40,000 of their own members. Semen Kanatchikov, the Bolshevik worker now turned roving commissar, arrived in Tula to oversee the despatch of Communists to the Eastern Front. Os'kin thought him a 'severe task-master' and expressed his fears that if the best comrades were called up, there would not be enough left in Tula to defend the revolution there. This was a major problem for the provincial party organizations. Many of their most committed members were lost in battle, so that the worst elements, the self-seekers and the corrupt, took control of local party cells.⁹

During these first campaigns, when the Red Army was desperate for recruits, ultimate proof of devotion to the party was shown by fighting for it at the Front. The Bolsheviks had always distinguished themselves with a macho and military self-image. They dressed in leather jackets — a military fashion of the First World War — and all carried guns.* Half a million party members joined the Red Army during the civil war. Trotsky, who compared these Communist fighters to the Japanese Samurai, ensured that they were distributed evenly throughout all the army units. Party members, if not appointed commissars, were certainly expected to lead from the front. Many of them fought with a desperate courage, if only for fear of their own capture (and almost certain torture) by the Whites. The bravery of the Communist soldiers became part of the Reds' civil war mythology. It was what the Bolshevik historian L. N. Kritsman would later call the 'heroic period' of the revolution. And from that romantic image — the image of the party as a comradeship in arms unafraid to advance or conquer any fortress — came many of its basic ruling attitudes.

Mass conscription of the peasantry was one fortress still to be conquered. In 1918 the Soviet regime had no real military apparatus in the countryside. Few volost Soviets had a military committee (voenkom), the main organ responsible for carrying out Red Army conscription. Even where there was a military committee its work was usually hampered by the village commune, which alone had a register of peasants eligible for conscription. The first remotely comprehensive military census of the population was not completed until 1919 — which of course meant that until then any conscription was bound in effect to be no more than a voluntary call-up. It was hardly surprising, then, that of the 275,000 peasant recruits anticipated from the first call-up in June, only 40,000 actually appeared.¹⁰

* All party members had the right to carry guns. It was seen as a sign of comradely equality. They were not disarmed until 1935 — after the murder of Kirov.

There were several reasons why the peasants would resist mobilization into the Red Army. The first harvest of the revolution, which coincided with the call-up, was the most compelling. Peasant recruitments and desertions in all the civil war armies fluctuated in accordance with the farming seasons. Peasants joined up in the winter, only to desert the following summer. In the central agricultural regions the weekly rate of desertion was up to ten times higher in summer than in winter. As the Red Army grew on a national scale, such desertions became more common, topping two million during 1919, because the recruits were more fearful of being sent to units a long way from their farms.¹¹

During the autumn of 1918 many village communes called on both sides to end the civil war through negotiation. Many even declared themselves 'neutral republics' and formed brigades to keep the armies out of their 'independent territory'. There was a general feeling among the peasants that they had been at war for far too long, that in 1917 they had been promised peace, and that now they were being forced to go to war again. Whole provinces — Tambov, Riazan', Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, Vitebsk, Pskov, Novgorod, Mogilev and even parts of Moscow itself — were engulfed by peasant uprisings against the Red Army's conscriptions and its all too often coercive requisitioning of peasant food and horses. Os'kin, in Tula, had to deal with one of the largest revolts in November. Bands of peasants armed with harrows, spades and axes marched on the towns, where they ransacked and burned the Soviet's military offices. Many of the rebels had been called up. Others had lost their only horse to the army draft (a catastrophe for any peasant farm). Peasant recruits in the local barracks, disgruntled by the harsh conditions there, often joined the uprisings. Tula was surrounded by a band of 500 peasants. Os'kin and Kanatchikov mobilized the party and 2,000 factory workers, threatening shirkers with instant execution, and, with the help of a Red Army brigade from Moscow, pushed the rebels back to their villages, where they then carried out a series of brutal repressions. Os'kin calmly recalled that 'we shot several hundred peasants'. He sat as judge and jury on the ring-leaders of the uprisings, sentencing dozens of them to public hangings. Such were the powers and the responsibilities of a Bolshevik commissar.¹²

During the first months of 1919 the rate of peasant conscription improved markedly. The slack period of the farming season and the growing threat of a White advance from the Volga and the Don, leading to the loss of the land which the peasants had gained in the revolution, were crucial factors. But the general strengthening of Soviet power in the countryside also played its part. From 800,000 soldiers in January, the Red Army doubled in size by the end of April, the height of Kolchak's offensive in the east. Most of the new

recruits came from the Volga region, the Red frontier against Kolchak, where the peasants had most to fear from a White victory.¹³

'We had decided to have an army of one million men by the spring,' declared Lenin in October 1918, 'now we need an army of three million. We can have it. And we shall have it!' And have it they did. The Red Army grew to three million men in 1919, and to five million by the end of the following year. But ironically, the possession of an army on such a scale was a serious handicap to the regime's military potential. For the army grew much faster than the devastated Soviet economy was able to keep it supplied with the instruments of war: guns, clothing, transport, fuel, food and medicine. The soldiers' morale and discipline fell in step with the decline in supplies. They deserted in their thousands, taking with them their weapons and uniforms, so that new recruits had to be thrown into battle without proper training, so that they in turn were even more likely to desert. The Red Army was drawn into a vicious circle of mass conscription, blockages of supply and mass desertion. And this locked the whole economy into the draconian system of War Communism, whose main purpose was to channel all production towards the demands of the army (see pages 612-15, 721-32).

With hindsight, the Bolsheviks might have done better to opt for a smaller army, better disciplined, better trained and better supplied, and not such a burden on the economy. As one Red commander put it to Lenin in December 1918: 'It is a thousand times more expedient to have no more than a million Red Army men, but well-fed, clothed and shod ones, rather than three million half-starved, half-naked and half-shod ones.' Such an army, made up largely of workers, would have been more battle-worthy than the peasant conscripts who barely knew how to handle a gun and ran home at the start of the harvest. The Reds, in practice, had no real fighting chance against the Whites, whose troops were much better trained and disciplined, unless they outnumbered them by four and sometimes even ten to one. For every active Red on the battlefield there were eight others who for lack of training, clothing, health or ammunition could not be deployed.¹⁴ A smaller army, moreover, by placing less pressure on the economy, would not have led to the same excesses — the violent requisitionings, the imposition of labour duty, the militarization of the factories — which did so much to alienate the peasants and workers from the Soviet regime. Yet arguments from hindsight are the luxury of historians: when Lenin made his panic call for a mass army, the regime seemed on the brink of defeat; and it is easy to understand why he opted for safety in numbers.

Watching the parade on Red Square to mark the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin was shocked by the ragtag appearance of the troops. 'Look at them,' he exclaimed, 'they march like bags of sand.' In most of the units there were no standard uniforms, and the soldiers dressed in whatever

came to hand. Many wore the uniforms they took from the captured Whites (who in turn wore British Army surplus kit). As for leather boots, they were worn only by the Red Army commanders, the commissars and the cavalrymen. The peasant infantry marched in the crude bast shoes, or lapti, manufactured in the villages. But even these were in short supply and there were times when, for lack of adequate footwear, whole regiments had to be confined to barracks. The supply of weapons was not much better. It was largely a question of shells: whereas the army was firing between seventy and ninety million rounds a month, the main arsenal at Tula was producing only twenty million. 'There were times', as Trotsky put it, 'when every one of a soldiers stock of cartridges counted, and when delay in the arrival of a special train bringing ammunitions resulted in whole divisions retreating.'¹⁵

'Comrades!', a bad-tempered Trotsky warned an army conference in 1919, 'although we have not been brought down by Denikin or Kolchak, we may yet be brought down by overcoats or boots.' In fact, if anything, the Red Army was brought down — quite literally — by illness and disease. More soldiers died from disease than from fighting in the civil war. Typhus, influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and venereal diseases were the main killers, but many more men suffered from lice, stomach bugs, dysentery and toothache. On an average day in an average unit, 10 to 15 per cent of the men would be too ill to fight and had to be abandoned to fortune in the rear. But some units were taken out of action by rates of illness of up to 80 per cent. This was particularly true in 1920, when 30 per cent of the Red Army — that is, over a million men — contracted typhus. The unhygienic conditions of army life, where soap and bath water were not seen for weeks, were the root cause of the problem. But the situation was made much worse by the chronic shortages of doctors and nurses, surgical spirits, bandages and drugs. The rapid to-and-fro movements of the Fronts, so characteristic of the civil war, also made it difficult to set up proper field hospitals or to organize transport to the rear. The sick and wounded could thus be neither properly cared for at the Front, nor easily evacuated to the rear. The agony they must have gone through can only be imagined. Trotsky himself, touring the Southern Front in June 1919, was shocked to see the way the wounded men were treated:

Transports arrived by rail at Lisky station containing wounded men who were in a frightful condition. The trucks were without bedding. Many of the men lay, wounded and sick, without clothes, dressed only in their underwear, which had long remained unchanged: many of them were infectious. There were no medical personnel, no nurses and nobody in charge of the trains. One of the trains, containing over 400 wounded and sick Red Army men, stood in the station from early morning until evening,

without the men being given anything to eat. It is hard to imagine anything more criminal and shameful!¹⁶

Given such hellish conditions, no one could expect the soldiers to behave like saints. Heavy drinking, brawls and looting were the most common — and least serious — problems of indiscipline. But there were also daily reports of soldiers disobeying orders; refusing to take in new recruits because of the extra burden on supplies; demanding leave and better conditions; and threatening to or actually lynching their commanders. Full-scale mutinies were not uncommon, culminating in the occupation of the Front headquarters, the arrest or murder of the staff and the election of new officers. It was back to the chaos of 1917. Much of the violence was reserved for the well-dressed officers and commissars, especially if they were suspected of corruption in the distribution of supplies. This violence was given a revolutionary edge by the fact that the officers were often seen as burzhoois — and an ethnic one by the fact that many of the commissars were Jews. Although anti-Semitism was generally much less widespread than among the Whites or Ukrainian nationalists, it was a definite problem in the ranks of the Red Army. One can only wonder what Trotsky must have felt as he read the reports of his own soldiers' pogroms in the Jewish settlements of the Ukraine, where he himself had grown up as a boy and where some of his relatives still lived.¹⁷

Desertion was the simplest solution to the soldier's woes. Over a million men deserted from the Red Army in 1918, and nearly four million by 1921. Trotsky said the Red defeats of 1919 — in the east in the spring and in the south in the summer — were a 'crisis of reinforcements', and that is precisely what they were. The Red Army was losing deserters faster than it could replace them with men trained and equipped for battle; and as the quality of the reinforcements fell, so the rate of desertion increased.

The commissars stopped at nothing in their desperate effort to stem the flood of peasant desertions. They sent detachments into the villages behind the Front and punished peasant households suspected of harbouring deserters. Punitive fines were imposed, livestock and property were confiscated, hostages were taken, village leaders were shot, whole villages were burned in an effort to persuade the deserters to return. Os'kin, not to be outdone in this zealotry, even formed a special brigade of Chinese Communists to help him combat the Tula deserters. He assumed that the Chinese would be 'more merciless' than the 'soft-hearted Russians' in taking reprisals against the villagers. Such measures were rarely effective, often merely strengthening the opposition of not only the deserters, but also the entire local peasantry, already embittered by the requisitioning and conscriptions of the Reds. Some deserters formed themselves into guerrilla bands. These were called the Greens partly because

they hid out in the woods and were supplied by the local peasants; sometimes these peasant armies called themselves Greens to distinguish themselves from both Reds and Whites. They even had their own Green propaganda and ideology based on the defence of the local peasant revolution. During the spring of 1919 virtually the whole of the Red Army rear, both on the Eastern and the Southern Fronts, was engulfed by these Green armies. In Tambov, Voronezh, Saratov, Penza, Tula, Orel, Nizhnyi Novgorod, Kaluga, Tver and Riazan' provinces peasant bands, sometimes several thousand strong, destroyed the railways, the telegraphs and bridges, ransacked the Soviet military depots and ambushed passing Red Army units. The destruction and chaos which the Greens brought about was to be a crucial factor in weakening the Red Front at a vital moment in the civil war and would lead to the breakthrough of the Whites.¹⁸

* * * It may seem odd that a peasant boy like Os'kin should have been so ruthless in putting down the peasants of his native province. But in fact it was not unusual. The Red Army was full of peasant NCOs and commissars like him. It was their School of Communism — transforming them from peasants into comrades — and it was a vital part of their education to learn how to use violence against 'their own'. There was nothing new in this. Military service has always been a form of upward mobility and psychological transformation for the peasantry. The army broadens the peasant's horizons, acquaints him with new technologies and methods of organization, and often teaches him how to read and write. The Russian experience of the First World War was a revolutionizing one in this respect. Most of the peasants called up by the army had, like Os'kin, been educated during the boom in rural schooling between 1900 and 1914. Three out of four peasant recruits into the army in 1914 were registered as literate. They formed a huge pool from which a new class of officers and military technicians would come, replacing the old elite as it was destroyed by the war with the Central Powers. Six out of ten of the military students educated in the officer schools between 1914 and 1917 came from peasant families.¹⁹ These were the radical ensigns, the Os'kins of 1917, who led the revolution in the army and were elected to the soldiers' committees. By educating them, the old regime had sown the seeds of its own destruction.

It also created the foot soldiers of the new regime. Having risen so far through the ranks, it was hard for these peasant sons to return from the war to the dull routines of village life. Their new skills and prestige, not to speak of their own self-esteem, gave them the ambition to aim for something better. For Os'kin, as for so many peasants of that war generation, this could only mean serving the new regime. Joining the party offered them a welcome escape from the narrow village world of their peasant fathers and grandfathers, the old Russia of icons and cockroaches. It gave them entry into the new and urban-centred

world of the ruling elite. Most of the Soviet bureaucracy, the provincial commissars and comrades of the 1920s, was drawn from these sons of the peasantry; and for most of them, as for Os'kin, the Red Army was the route to glory.

The Bolsheviks were quick to realize the potential of the Red Army as a school for their future bureaucrats. Compulsory lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic were introduced for all ranks from as early as April 1918. More people learned to read in the barracks and bivouacs of the Red Army than the rest of the country put together during the first years of the Soviet regime. By the end of 1920, there were 3,000 Red Army schools, with over two million books. The first emblem of the Red Army showed a hammer and a sickle with a rifle and a book.²⁰

Much of the teaching was inevitably the crudest sort of political indoctrination. It was a marriage between the old socialist and intelligentsia ideals of mass enlightenment and the doctrinal demands of the Bolshevik regime. Primers and textbooks were filled with scenes from everyday life, familiar to the peasants, from which moral and political lessons would then be drawn. These were ABCs of Communism. Dora Elkina recalls how she came to write the first Soviet primer. In 1919 she was sent to the Southern Front to teach the soldiers how to read and write. Having got hold of some old school textbooks, she wrote out the first sentence on the blackboard: 'Masha ate the kasha'. But the soldiers only laughed and heckled. Close to tears, she hit upon the idea of turning the lesson into a political discussion and explained to the soldiers why they could not go home to their Mashas, and why the country was short of kasha. Then she turned to the blackboard and wrote: 'We are not slaves, slaves we are not!' It was a great success among the soldiers, for whom the idea of not being slaves had always been a vital aspect of the revolution. This simple expression of human dignity later became famous as the opening line of her reading book. It was used in primary schools throughout the 1920s and 1930s. For millions of Russians, many of them still alive, it was the first sentence they ever learned to read.²¹

The poet Mayakovsky also wrote and illustrated one of several primers put out by the Commissariat of Enlightenment in the civil war. Clearly rooted in the Lubok tradition — simple picture tales which had sold in their millions in the nineteenth century — it was a brilliant piece of popular satire, with offbeat couplets in the style of a peasant chastushka, or rhyming song, and a rude iconoclastic humour that would appeal to the soldiers in the trenches:

B

The Bolsheviks hunt the burzboois

The burzhoois run a mile

K

It's hard for cows (korovy) to run fast Kerensky was Prime Minister

M

The Mensheviks are people

Who run off to their mothers

Ts

Flowers (tsvety) smell sweet in the evening

Tsar Nicholas loved them very much²²

The Red Army was the principal arena of Bolshevik propaganda in the civil war. It aimed to school its soldiers in the principles of Bolshevism — to transform them from peasants into proletarians. 'The main aim of our propaganda in the Red Army', declared one of its pioneers, 'is to fight against the petty-bourgeois, proprietorial psychology of the peasant, and to turn him into a conscious revolutionary fighter.'²³ There were army reading clubs and discussion groups, where the latest newspapers were reviewed; evening concerts and lecture meetings, where various Bolshevik dignitaries appeared; propaganda trains furnished with libraries, printing presses and even cinemas, which toured the Fronts; and Red Army drama groups which entertained the troops with cabarets and plays to drive home the meaning of Soviet power and highlight the evil of its foes.

Half a million Red Army soldiers joined the Bolshevik Party during the civil war. These were the missionaries of the revolution. They carried Bolshevism, its ideas and its methods, back to their towns and villages, where they flooded into the Soviet institutions during the early 1920s. The whole of the Soviet apparatus was thus militarized. Certain Fronts and armies would colonize certain commissariats. Party factions were formed on the basis of the links between veterans of the civil war. The Red Army as a whole, with its centralized command, was seen as a model for the Soviet apparatus. Trotsky often compared the two, likening the need for discipline in industry and society at large to the need for discipline in the ranks. The success of the Red Army increasingly led to the application of military methods throughout the Soviet system. Nothing did more to shape the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks than the experience of the civil war. The image and the self-identity of the Soviet regime was based on the mythology of a new order born out of armed struggle against the old; and, rather as in Franco's Spain, this foundation cult of the civil war became a vital mythological propaganda weapon of the Stalinist regime, with its constant demands on the Soviet people to display the same heroic spirit,

the same discipline and self-sacrifice, as they had shown in the civil war. Even the language of the Bolshevik regime, with its constant talk of 'campaigns', 'battles' and 'Fronts', of its 'vanguards' and 'fighters' for Socialism, bore the traces of this militarism. The Bolshevism that emerged from the civil war viewed itself as a crusading brotherhood of comrades in arms, conquering Russia and the world with a red pencil in one hand and a gun in the other.

ii 'Kulaks', Bagmen and Cigarette Lighters

In January 1920 Emma Goldman returned to the Petrograd she had known as a teenager in the 1880s. For over thirty years, while the Anarchist had lived in the United States, the 'gaiety of the city, its vivacity and brilliancy' had remained fresh in her memory. But the Petrograd she found in 1920 was a very different place:

It was almost in ruins, as if a hurricane had swept over it. The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries. The streets were dirty and deserted; all life had gone from them. The population of Petrograd before the war was almost two million; in 1920 it had dwindled to five hundred thousand. The people walked about like living corpses; the shortage of food and fuel was slowly sapping the city; grim death was clutching at its heart. Emaciated and frost-bitten men, women, and children were being whipped by the common lash, the search for a piece of bread or a stick of wood. It was a heart-rending sight by day, an oppressive weight by night. The utter stillness of the large city was paralysing. It fairly haunted me, this awful oppressive silence broken only by occasional shots.²⁴

The great cities of the north were the major casualties of the revolution and civil war. They suffered most from its physical destruction, becoming little more than ghost towns. Petrograd was one of the principal victims: the evacuation of the capital to Moscow seemed to deprive it of all life. Gorky, a Peterburzhets to the end, saw its decay as a sign of Russia's fall from civilization, its descent from Europe into Asia. 'Petrograd is dying as a city,' he wrote to Ekaterina in 1918. 'Everyone is leaving it — by foot, by horse, by train. Dead horses lie in the streets. The dogs eat them. The city is unbelievably dirty. The Moika and Fontanka are full of rubbish. This is the death of Russia.'²⁵ Zamyatin, in his story The Cave (1922), depicted civil-war Petrograd as an ice-age settlement, peopled by troglodytes who worshipped their 'cave-god', the primus stove, and burned their books to keep themselves alive. The hero of the story, Martin

Martinych, a lover of Scriabin's Opus 74, is reduced to stealing logs from his neighbour.

To the city survivors of these years, it must indeed have seemed as if the urban life of Russia was returning to the prehistoric age. The once bustling city centres were now pervaded by an eerie silence. Shops and restaurants were boarded up; factories were closed. There was so little traffic that weeds began to grow in the deserted streets. 'Petrograd is becoming a cemetery,' Vasilii Vodovozov, an aged professor and liberal activist, noted in his diary during the spring of 1919. 'But the air is as clean as in a village cemetery.' Horses vanished from the city streets, as their owners could no longer feed them, only to reappear as stinking meat in soups and goulashes. 'Civil war sausage' was a euphemism for horsemeat — or even worse (for it was not just horses that disappeared: hunger also wiped out the urban populations of dogs, cats and birds, along with the animals in the zoos). One of the sights of the cities in these years was the emaciated figures of children pulling carts and taxis as human draught animals. Even the Kremlin could not feed its horses — twenty of them died from hunger — so its officials had to travel around in private taxis.²⁶

Rats and cockroaches were the only species to thrive. The decay of the housing stock and the sanitation system produced a breeding ground for vermin. Wooden fences disappeared as people ripped them up for firewood. A three-storey house that had been abandoned would be stripped down to its brick foundations within a couple of nights. Three thousand wooden houses were stripped apart in Petrograd alone during 1919—20. People walked away with window-frames, floorboards, doors and wall panels. Whole urban tree populations disappeared as people chopped them down for firewood. In the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev the central boulevards lost all their trees during the two days of January 1920 between the departure of the Whites and the arrival of the Reds. In the freezing winters of the civil war the most valuable gift one could give a friend was a piece of firewood. People were literally prepared to kill for it. They burned their own furniture, their books and letters, just in order to keep the cold away.²⁷

As for the sanitary conditions of the cities, they were almost indescribable. Water pipes cracked in the arctic winter frosts. People had to collect water from pumps in the street, and to use the courtyards for toilets. The staircases of apartment blocks always smelled of urine. Without electric light, which was only turned on for two or three hours in the evening, people made their own sort of wick-and-oil lamp out of a bottle filled with fat. It was called a nedyshalka (a 'don't breathe'), since it filled the room with a smelly smoke that irritated throats and lungs and blackened all the walls. According to one contemporary, this primitive lamp 'made darkness visible but did not permit reading or writing or even much movement' because it 'went out at the slightest breath'. There was

no real system for collecting rubbish because of the shortage of horses. People dumped their rubbish in the streets and squares — which soon attracted vermin. Diseases spread at epidemic rates: cholera, typhus, dysentery and influenza killed people in their thousands every year. The death rate in Petrograd reached an estimated eighty per thousand in 1919. Morgues and cemeteries could not cope, and corpses lay around for months waiting to be buried.²⁸

Food, or the lack of it, lay at the heart of the urban crisis. 'Famine in Petrograd has begun,' Gorky wrote in June 1918. Almost daily they pick up people who have dropped from exhaustion right in the streets.' Food deliveries to the cities plummeted. Bakeries closed. Even in the Volga city of Saratov, right in the middle of the country's richest grain-producing region, long bread queues would form before 5 a.m., two hours before the bakeries opened. The average worker was consuming fewer than 2,000 calories a day — less than half the recommended intake. Compared with the pre-war years, hardly themselves a golden age, he was eating half the amount of bread and one-third the amount of meat. Food prices rocketed, and workers' wages could not keep up. In 1918 the real value of the average worker's wage was 24 per cent of its value in 1913; and by the end of 1919 its value was as low as 2 per cent. Studies showed that the average worker was spending three-quarters of his income on food, as opposed to less than half in 1913. They also showed that wages accounted for only half the workers' income. In other words, the mass of the workers were forced to feed themselves through the informal or black economy. Ethel Snowden, who came to Moscow in 1920 as a member of the British TUC and Labour Party delegation, asked her guide during a factory tour how much the average worker earned. When she was told what this was, and that it was enough to feed his family for no more than three days, she exclaimed naively: 'Oh! how clever and frugal of the workers to live without any food for the other twenty-seven days of the month. How do they do it?' The answer, of course, was that they traded on the side. They sold their belongings in the flea-markets; travelled to the countryside to barter with the peasants; put their children on the streets to beg; and their wives and daughters on the streets to sell themselves. There were at least 30,000 prostitutes on the streets of Petrograd in 1918, most of whom were teenage girls. Many of them were from 'respectable families'. One study in the early 1920s found that 42 per cent of the prostitutes in Moscow were from the gentry or bourgeois families who had been ruined by the revolution. Emma Goldman found the Nevsky Prospekt lined with nice young girls 'selling themselves for a loaf of bread or a piece of soap or chocolate'.²⁹

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 pages 648—9). 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 maitre de requites 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 governments 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'.^J9

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 pages 624-6).

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 revolutions 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 left-wing 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 right-wing 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 post-war 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 right-wing 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 spiders* 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

* No doubt a reference to Spiders ani Flies, the best-selling pamphlet of 1917 which had done so much to shape the popular myth of the burzhooi (see pages 523-4).

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 pages 753—5) — 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.³³

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.* 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

* One exception was onions — no doubt the result of a bureaucratic slip. A boom in onion production soon followed, as the peasants sought to exploit this last remaining legal area of free trade.

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 th 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 shop-floor, 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.* 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'etat 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,

" Another consideration was that many of the joint-stock companies affected by the decree were German-owned and that under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty any of these companies which were nationalized after I July would have to be fully indemnified (Malle, Economic, 59—61).

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.'*⁶⁷

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

* The first official portrait of Lenin only appeared in January 1918.

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,* 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 I 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,

* According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin disapproved of the cult (Marxist ideology negated the significance of any individual in history) and put a brake on it when he recovered (Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine, 337—40).

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.L 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.* 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

* It later emerged at the SR Trial in 1922 that Kaplan had been recruited by the SR Combat Organization, an underground terrorist outfit not officially connected with the SR Central Committee (most of whom had moved to Samara by August 1918) but supported by some of its members (e.g. Gots) who remained in Moscow. The Combat Organization assassinated the Bolshevik Commissar Volodarsky on 20 June. It also tried to murder Trotsky on his way to the Eastern Front; but he foiled the plan by changing trains at the last moment.

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 I 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 II, 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. ³

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 BimBom 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 naivete 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'etat 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 kombeay. 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,* 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

* Soviet Russia set up its first foreign embassy in Berlin at this time.

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.* 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,

* The refusal of the British royal family to visit Russia for the next seventy-five years because of the murder of the Romanovs may thus seem to many readers to contain a large dose of typical British hypocrisy.

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.* 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,+ 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

* Until recently the role of Yakovlev was something of a mystery. It was argued both that he was working for the Bolsheviks and that he was a White secret agent planning to rescue the imperial family. New evidence now puts his role as an agent of Moscow beyond dispute, although it is true that in July, whilst in command of the Second Red Army on the Eastern Front, he defected to the Whites (see Radzinsky, Last Tsar, ch. II).

+ The imperial couple were afraid that he would be taken to Moscow and forced to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The fact that they believed that the Bolsheviks should either need or want his signature for this is a telling sign of how far removed they had become from political reality (see Wilton, Last Days of the Romanovs, 206).

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 Seze — 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.* 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,

* The only certain survivor was the spaniel Joy.

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.* 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'.+ 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,++ 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.⁹³

* The Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas's brother, had been killed in June.

+ Boris Savinkov, Kerensky's Deputy War Minister during the Kornilov episode, led an uprising of army officers in the town of Yaroslavl', to the north of Moscow, on 6 July. It gained the support of the local workers and peasants and spread briefly to the neighbouring towns of Murom and Rybinsk. Soviet troops regained Yaroslavl' on 21 July. They shot 350 officers and civilians in reprisal for the revolt, which was said to be the joint work of the SRs, the White Guards, the Czechs and the Allies. Savinkov's underground organization, the Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom, was linked with the National Centre in Moscow, which supported the Volunteer Army. It also received money from the Czechs and the Allies — who were both under the illusion that Savinkov's sole purpose was to raise a new Russian army to resume the war against the Central Powers. There is no evidence linking the Allies with Savinkov's plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

++ A government inspection of Moscow jails in March 1920 found that children under the age of seventeen comprised 5 per cent of the prison population (Izvestiia gosuiarstvenmnogo kontrolia, 4, 1920: 7-10).

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.'* 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

* Brusilov's brother, Boris, was also arrested at this time, along with three other members of his family. They were 'hostages' and were ordered to be executed if Brusilov joined the anti-Bolsheviks. Boris was ill with influenza and had been literally taken from his sick-bed. He died in prison a few days after his arrest. Whilst in jail he received no medical treatment.

Okhrana's book.* 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.

* During the 1980s the KGB still trained its recruits with Okhrana manuals (see Kalugin, Vid 5 Lubitwki, 35).

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 gangsterlike 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,* 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

* She had been on her way to England, where she had good contacts with the Trade Union movement, in order to campaign for food aid to the hungry children of Russia, when she was arrested in Yamburg (GARF, f. 4390, op. 14, d. 57, 1. 7).

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 {Cadets', 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 Vendee 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 Conference* — 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

* The other delegates were V A. Maklakov (Kerensky's Ambassador in Paris), Sazonov (Kolchak's — and Nicholas II's — Foreign Minister) and the veteran Populist N. V Chaikovsky (head of the Northern Region government based in Arkhangelsk). The Russian Political Conference was a government in exile made up of former diplomats and other public men in Paris. Savinkov, Nabokov, Struve and Konovalov were among its members.

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 Chelia-binsk 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 cafes 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. Cafes, 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