Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Introduction

Despite the titles of the best-known works on the subject, in the period under discussion here, there never was such an event as “the Russian Civil War.”1 Rather, as the title of this volume indicates, a plethora of multifaceted wars swept across and beyond the Russian Empire as it collapsed at the end of the First World War and was then refashioned as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the subsequent years. Some of these wars involved battles—political and military—between various Russian political and social groups, but others were between Russians and the many non-Russian former subjects of the tsar (particularly in the Baltic region, Poland, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia), while still others involved few, if any, Russians, and were contested between the non-Russian minorities of the old empire (notably, the Ukrainian–Polish War and the struggle between Azerbaijan and Armenia). In the purely Russian wars, contending views of politics and economics were at the fore, but in the other “Russian” civil wars, elements of nationality, identity, and religion were added to the equation. Amplifying this was the fact that the former imperial Russian space (or at least its peripheries) became the object of foreign intervention on a tremendous scale: both the Central Powers in 1918 and the Allies from 1918 to 1922 dispatched tens of thousands of troops to theaters as far flung as Odessa and Vladivostok and Arkhangel’sk and Ashkhabad. At the same time, the conflicts in the former Russian Empire leached across its borders into Poland and Galicia, Turkey, Persia, China, and Mongolia.2 So to designate these events as a singular and discrete “Russian Civil War” is clearly misleading.

The time frame of the struggles discussed here also strays from the norm. Being focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the battles between the forces of the emergent Soviet state (the “Reds”) and their conservative opponents (the “Whites”), previous studies have tended to limit their coverage to the period in which that struggle reached its zenith (roughly 1917/1918–1921/1922). Herein, having recast the events as a matrix of overlapping and sometimes parallel wars that were as much about the collapse of the tsarist empire and the construction of its successor, the USSR, as they were about the rise of Soviet socialism and the demise of Russian tsarism, conservatism, and liberalism, the chronology of this historical dictionary is correspondingly broader. In this volume the opening salvos of the “Russian” Civil Wars are detected in the major uprising against tsarist rule that occurred in Central Asia in the summer of 1916. Likewise, the wars’ terminus is regarded as June 1926, when the last Red front (army group), the Turkestan Front, was placed on a peacetime footing as the Central Asian Military District.3

If the geographical and chronological scale of the “Russian” Civil Wars was unusual, their costs were unparalleled (except, perhaps, by the still uncounted “cost” of the vicious wars in China from 1927 to 1949): between 1917 and 1921 alone, at least 10,500,000 people lost their lives during the struggles with which we deal here; many millions more were maimed, orphaned, or widowed; and at least 2,000,000 former subjects of the tsar were pressed into foreign exile.4 As the most active fronts of the “Russian” Civil Wars began to die down, in 1921–1922, at least another 5,000,000 people then perished in a horrendous famine across the Volga–Urals region, the North Caucasus, and Ukraine that was in large part precipitated by the previous years of civil-war-induced chaos. And several tens of thousands, at least, of other people were then killed in battles and anti-Soviet uprisings—mostly in Transcaucasia and Central Asia—before the upheavals reached a temporary quietude around 1926. Consequently, the first complete (“All-Union”) Soviet-era census, which was conducted in that year, identified 147,027,915 citizens of the newfound USSR—where without world war, revolution, and civil wars (and taking into account the loss of the former imperial lands of Finland, the Baltic, Poland, Bessarabia, and other territories), it might have expected to have found at least 175,000,000 and perhaps more.5

In addition to the physical losses, the psychological scars all this inflicted on the participants in the “Russian” Civil Wars (and their descendants)—be they victors or vanquished—remain forever incalculable, for this was without a doubt the greatest cataclysm to engulf Russia since, in 1237–1240, the Mongols had surged through the Caspian Gate to overrun Kievan Rus′ and sack the cities of what had until then been one of the richest and most sophisticated societies in Christendom. It took Russia half a millennium to recover from that catastrophic event. It could be argued that, a century after the events with which we are here concerned, the Russian Republic and the other successor states to the USSR are also still coming to terms with them.

Such a complex historical phenomenon as the “Russian” Civil Wars is worthy of study on several levels. As should already be clear, even a century after the events, historians have yet to agree upon matters as basic as the geographical and chronological scope of the subject. In addition, it remains unclear what actually happened, as the struggles were played out across (and beyond) the huge (and often impenetrable) former empire, which on the eve of its collapse had covered no less than one-sixth of the land surface of the globe. In addition, of course, the chief outcome of the wars was the formation of the USSR, from which ensued the major ideological struggle of the twentieth century, generating a chiefly bipolar world in which the challenge of communism to capitalism was of paramount importance (and at the same time adding ideological tropes to contending histories of the period produced in the USSR and the West). This remained the case until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s. Even then, though, with communism gone, the echoes of the “Russian” Civil Wars did not altogether fade. Indeed, if anything—and much to the surprise of most Western politicians—they found new resonances, as the successor states around the periphery of the former Soviet Union began to question and challenge the post–civil wars settlement that had been imposed by Moscow back in the 1920s, opening old wounds and picking away at still painful scars. On a superficial—or at least symbolic—level, this often took the form of toppling Soviet-era statues and renaming cities, streets, buildings, and institutions after rehabilitated national heroes.6 More alarmingly, some of the armed conflicts that had been frozen by the creation of the USSR broke out anew: from Azeri–Armenian battles over Nagorno Karabakh in the late 1980s, through the Georgian–Ossetian War of 2008, to the Russian–Ukrainian contest over eastern Ukraine that erupted in 2014.

Other than to provide a new, comprehensive, and up-to-date reference tool, therefore, the intention of this book and the rationale for the selection of its contents are to collate a combination of heretofore insufficiently explored perspectives and insights from the vast array of newly available sources (many of them online) to complement more traditional repositories of information and to bring them to bear upon what remains, indubitably, a turning point in world history. To those ends, alongside this introduction (which can also be read as a historiographical guide to the subject),7 as well as its attendant apparatus of a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, a glossary, appendixes, and a bibliography, the volume is centered on an extensive dictionary. Across almost 2,000 discrete entries, featuring extensive cross-references, the dictionary covers the course of the civil wars among all the peoples and regions of the former Russian Empire (and beyond), presenting the biographies of leading military and political figures and detailing key military forces and their attributes (including such diverse matters as weaponry, uniforms, flags, anthems, art, language, propaganda, laws, treaties and agreements, etc.); the roles of political parties and social movements; military, governmental, and quasi-governmental organizations; creeds and concepts; and the major events of the “Russian” Civil Wars. Where appropriate, entries also include information on how events and individuals have been memorialized (or dememorialized) in the contemporary world.

1916–1917: The Origins of the “Russian” Civil Wars

A long-term view of the origins of the “Russian” Civil Wars would cite a combination of the unique nature of the growth of the Russian Empire and the pressures placed on it by the challenges of modernity in the half century or so prior to their outbreak. The Russian Empire was unusual in that it was a contiguous, land-based empire in which, although by far the largest ethnic group, Russians were in a minority, accounting for about 44 percent of the population by the time of the first census in 1897. Although efforts to cooperate with and co-opt non-Russian elites were almost as common as attempts to suppress them for much of the empire’s history, this was never going to be an equal partnership, and relations between Russians and non-Russians became increasingly strained in the late 19th century, as the last tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, reacted to the first stirrings of nationalism among the “minorities” with the promotion of Russian nationalism (and its broader ally, Pan-Slavism) and ill-considered attempts at forced Russification, imposing the Russian language, Russian laws, and Russian governmental structures on peoples from Finland through Poland, the Baltic, and Ukraine to Transcaucasia and thereby withdrawing from the compact whereby these peoples had enjoyed varying degrees of (albeit limited) autonomy in culture, religion, and government.

This period, particularly after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, also featured radical changes in Russian society, as industrialization was fostered so that Russia might compete on the world stage with its Great Power rivals. Indeed, from the 1890s onward, the Russian Empire was in the midst of the most dynamic and rapid industrial revolution the world had ever seen. Although there were Russian centers of industrial growth and the concomitant proletarization of the population (around St. Petersburg and Moscow, for example), it is of interest that most of the industrializing regions were to be found in the non-Russian periphery: the Baltic (especially Riga), Poland, eastern Ukraine, and Baku (the world’s leading oil-producing region by the turn of the century). As the population boomed (the empire’s populace more than doubled, from 60 million to over 120 million between 1861 and the outbreak of war in 1914), the pressures and stresses of urbanization placed great strains on the political structures of the state, which had been only partially modernized by Alexander II’s “Great Reforms” to local government, the courts, education, and the army in the 1860s. Moreover, many of those reforms had been undone by his Canute-like conservative successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II. Although in the last years of the autocracy social advancement by merit was more common than the patrimonial system of yore, many young men found their careers and ambitions blocked by the carapace of tradition and elitism in which the regime still enveloped itself. This applied as much to those liberals and conservatives who might have wished a reformed tsarism to endure as it did to those revolutionary socialists who fundamentally opposed it. The regime’s struggle to contain such ambitions, particularly those directed at the field of politics, was at the core of the narrative of late tsarism.8 In 1905, tensions reached their zenith with the failed revolution of that year, in which peasants (who felt themselves cheated by the settlement of 1861, which had granted them insufficient lands, who felt overtaxed by the government, and who were now increasingly subject to the whims of the world market into which Russia was integrated) combined with impoverished workers, the emergent educated and frustrated professional classes, and non-Russian nationalists to bring tsarism to its knees. Nicholas II rallied and saved the regime by dividing liberals from radicals through the foundation of an advisory State Duma (parliament), but then proceeded to re-exacerbate tensions by clawing back the limited powers he had granted it, ignoring it and frequently dispersing it, and driving some liberals back into the revolutionary camp.

A final key feature of late tsarism that fed into the civil wars was migration. One chief purpose of serfdom had been to maintain a static population that was easy to control, tax, and recruit to the armed forces. After the emancipation of 1861, barriers to movement withered. Indeed, pressure on land in Russia, combined with the need for labor in the booming industrial centers of the peripheries, witnessed a flood of Russians emigrating to towns in the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia. By the 1890s, the government itself was sponsoring migration through a Resettlement Administration attached to the Ministry of the Interior (subsequently it was taken over by the Ministry of Agriculture). Around five million peasants left European Russia for Siberia during the period (although only around two-thirds of them settled there permanently). Their story was largely a happy one, with prosperous centers of dairy farming springing up east of the Urals (although the life lessons these families learned—that socialism, in the form of the powerful Siberian cooperative movement, offered them greater protection and profit than had the tsarist system—would come back to haunt the Siberian Whites during the civil wars). Part of the Siberian farmers’ success can be attributed to the fact that they were moving into a nearly empty space, populated only by scattered and small native communities. Far less comfortable were Russian settlers who went to Russian Turkestan, where they came up against the nomadic traditions of much of the native population in the north of the region and the highly sophisticated Muslim culture of the populous valleys of the south. This, as we shall see, was the recipe for the conflict that sparked the “Russian” Civil Wars, even as the tsarist regime was fighting for its survival in the world war that broke out in 1914.

As one leading British historian of the post-1905 “constitutional” period of tsarism once explained, Russia’s experience of the First World War exacerbated a number of these preexisting tensions in Russian society.9 Bob McKean mentioned problems caused by the refugee crisis (which added to the migrations of previous decades), increased urbanization (to man arms factories), the mobilization of 15 million men into the army, the strains placed on transport and the economy, the decimation at the front of much of the officer corps who had provided a bulwark to tsarism, and—because of defeat and the scandals surrounding the royal family (notably the Rasputin episode)—the discrediting of Nicholas II in particular and autocracy in general. Added to this were the revived ambitions of political and social leaders of a liberal or even socialist bent who were drafted in to assist the regime by the government (notably Zemgor, the Union of Zemstvos and Town Councils).10 Together, McKean concluded, these tensions were sufficient to ensure that when the food riots that broke out in Petrograd in February 1917 inspired a mutiny of the city’s garrison and the instigation of a revolution, almost nobody came to the defense of Nicholas; even most of the high command advised him to abdicate. This he duly did, on behalf of himself and (illegally) on behalf of his sickly son, Alexis.11

If this serves as a useful and commendably concise analysis of the February Revolution of 1917, however, it fails to explain why that revolution, which seemed almost universally popular and was virtually bloodless, should descend into full-scale and incomparably sanguinary civil war before the end of that year. To understand that, it is necessary to appreciate that one of the key facets of the “Russian” Civil Wars—clashes between Muslim and either Orthodox or (later) secular forces in Central Asia—was already under way, long before Nicholas II signed the abdication document in a sidetracked train near Pskov on 2 March 1917 (and would continue long afterward). It too had been generated by the world war’s exacerbation of existing tensions.

The origins of the Central Asian revolt of 1916 can be traced to Russian colonial penetration of the region in the late 19th century. The empire had been pressing into what was to become the Turkestan Region (krai) since Peter the Great had sent a force toward Khiva in 1717, but it had only been fully integrated into the tsars’ realm following a series of annexations from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s that had incorporated lands as far south as Ferghana. The first motor of these expansions was the securing of cotton-rich valleys of the irrigated regions of southern Turkestan, in order to feed Russia’s booming textile industry. The second was that Petersburg’s military and economic presence in these regions placed pressure on the possessions and protectorates in southern Asia of its chief imperial rival, Great Britain. However, as Russian settlers followed the imperial flag into Turkestan, various complex economic and political problems ensued: clashes over land rights and water rights between the natives and incoming settlers, for example, and especially, conflicts between nomads and Russian farmers, as well as resentment of the semi-military, colonial rule imposed on the region by St. Petersburg. No other region of the Russian Empire had, over such a lengthy period of time, endured such discriminatory rule as that of the Turkestan governor-generalship, and for the historian Daniel Brower, the 1916 revolt was nothing less than “a judgement on the empire’s half century of colonial rule” in Central Asia.12 The region’s problems were compounded by the First World War, with cotton prices falling and the price of consumer goods spiraling, while the forced mobilization of horses by the military authorities was also greatly resented. The trigger for the revolt, however, was the decision of the Russian stavka, authorized by Nicholas II on 25 June 1916, that dire shortages of manpower in industry and military support services in European Russia necessitated the mobilization of 390,000 men of military age from the hitherto exempt inorodtsy (native peoples, literally “foreigners”) of Central Asia. They would formally be members of the armed forces but would be assigned work in “the construction of defensive fortifications and military communications in frontline areas and also for any other work necessary for national defence.”13 Publication of the order in June–July 1916, at the height of the cotton harvest, caused confusion and panic, with fears expressed that the men would be put into fighting units—possibly against Muslim Turkey. Within a few days much of the region had risen in protest and revolt; telegraph lines and railways were destroyed and government buildings were ransacked. In response, on 17 July 1916, the entire Turkestan region was declared to be under martial law. However, although the revolt of the Sarts (the settled native population) was quickly contained, disorder spread rapidly to the nomads of the Kazakh and Turkoman steppe; with 15,000-strong bands of rebels sweeping across the region, “to some extent, the insurrection acquired the character of a ‘Holy War’ against the Russian infidels, and of an anti-colonial struggle for independence,” especially in Semirech′e, where many Russian incomers had settled.14 Commander of all forces deployed in the suppression of the uprising (and governor-general of Vernyi) was Colonel P. P. Ivanov—later, in 1918, as General Ivanov-Rinov, the ataman of the Siberian Cossack Host and commander in chief of the anti-Bolshevik Siberian Army. It was in this campaign that he learned his craft (or, rather, lack of it) in the “pacification” of rebel forces. One survivor of Ivanov’s pacification of a rebel area recalled how

Ivanov gave the order to shoot, to set fires and to confiscate household goods and agricultural tools. The units entered the villages, burned goods and shot anyone they encountered. Women were raped and other bestial events took place. In the villages they burned the crops in the fields and harvested grain was confiscated. The people fled to the city and into the steppe, abandoning their homes. Famine ensued. Women fled, leaving their children behind. Refugees starved in the distant steppe lands and in the towns.15

The natives’ crops were ruined, and their possessions and animals confiscated, by rampaging government forces. Moreover, Soviet figures indicate that across the entire region 88,000 “rebels” were killed and a further 250,000 fled into China, together amounting to 20 percent of the native Central Asian population. In contrast, just over 3,000 Russian settlers and soldiers were killed.16 Thus, the scene was being set for the clashes between natives and Russian forces (White and Red) that would characterize the next decade of the civil wars in Central Asia.

Conflict would next be ignited by the Muslim intelligentsia’s establishment of an anti-Soviet government at Kokand (the “Kokand Autonomy”) on 29 November 1917 (crushed by Red Guards, with the slaughter of thousands of inorodtsy, on 18–22 February 1918). It would then develop into a region-wide guerrilla resistance, the Basmachi movement (basmachestvo), strongly influenced by the Muslim clergy, which the Red Army, as we shall see, would only be able (at great cost) to tame, but never entirely extinguish, by 1926. Prominent and numerous among the Basmachi, unsurprisingly, were those who had fought the Russians in 1916—Junaïd-khan, for example—and who had lost their livelihoods and their families to the “pacifications” of Ivanov-Rinov and his ilk. Whether this would have happened without the February Revolution is unknowable, but the breakdown of authority across the Russian Empire that accompanied the collapse of tsarism in early 1917 greatly facilitated the rise of the basmachestvo, and the 1916 uprising in Central Asia can therefore be considered the outbreak of the “Russian” Civil Wars.17

Further germs of the civil wars can be identified in the outcome of the February Revolution of 1917 and the period prior to the seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party in October of that year. The toppling of the tsar generated a honeymoon period, during which all but the most died-in-the-wool anarchists and monarchists pledged mutual support in building a democratic Russia. Liberal and nonparty progressive politicians from the State Duma formed a Provisional Government (to lead the country to a Constituent Assembly that would frame a new constitution), while workers’ organizations and parties (chiefly the peasant-based Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and the two wings of the social-democratic movement, the moderate Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks) re-created the Petrograd Soviet and promised the government its conditional support.18 This collaboration, however, had shallow roots and soon foundered over two key issues that would reverberate beyond 1917 into the depths of the civil wars: Russia’s role in the world war and the nationalities question. Regarding the war, the socialists were willing to continue fighting to prevent the Central Powers from stifling the revolution and winning the war (“revolutionary defensism”), but at the same time they insisted on an active peace policy to bring a negotiated and mutually acceptable end to the carnage (a peace “without annexations and indemnities”). This somewhat contradictory formula clashed fundamentally with the belief of the first Provisional Government’s foreign minister that only a postwar settlement in which Russia gained control of the Turkish Straits would prove viable or lasting.19 When Pavel Miliukov, leader of Russia’s main liberal party (the Kadets), hinted at this in a note to the Allies on 18 April 1917, he was forced to resign as foreign minister, and SR and Menshevik leaders then joined the first of a series of coalition provisional governments. They did so in order to police government policy, but as the regime failed to deliver on any of its promised steps toward political and social reform, they found themselves tarnished by association. Of the main socialist parties, only the Bolsheviks, newly radicalized by the return to Russia in early April of their uncompromising leader, V. I. Lenin, remained outside the coalition, incorrigibly opposed to the government and in favor of an immediate end to the war. Their support waxed correspondingly, as was witnessed in early July 1917, when tens of thousands of Bolshevik supporters took to the streets of the capital demanding the replacement of the Provisional Government by an all-socialist cabinet and clashed, with bloody outcome, with Cossacks, police, and other government forces. These “July Days” witnessed the boiling over of a pot of political strife that had been simmering since February and foreshadowed the coming clashes between Bolsheviks and other socialists during the civil wars. It is worth noting, however, that the immediate spark for the conflagration had been set on 2 July, when all the Kadet ministers of the Provisional Government had resigned in protest against the socialist ministers’ offer of broad autonomy to Ukraine; again, the “nationalities question” was at the heart of matters.20

Eventually, in mid-July, the new socialist prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, was able to tempt the Kadets back into office. The price he paid for this, however, planted another seed of the civil wars. On 8 July 1917, Kerensky named General Lavr Kornilov commander in chief of the Russian Army. Kornilov, one of Russia’s few heroes of the world war, had accepted the abdication of Nicholas II, but was a staunch opponent of socialism and a stern defender of order in the country, which he saw as a sine qua non of military victory. In an extraordinary statement, he accepted his elevated post only on the condition that he be charged with answering to his own conscience (rather than to the government). His conscience, it soon became clear, dictated that he should order the illegal execution of deserters and ignore the views of revolutionary soldiers’ committees. Encouraged by rightist political forces (among whose number could now be counted the Kadets, who had strayed from their radical roots in despair at the manner in which revolutionary disorder had undermined the war effort), he also began to press upon Kerensky plans for stemming the revolutionary tide through the imposition of martial law in factories and on the railroads, the reestablishment of the death penalty, and other such measures. Precisely how close Kerensky was to accepting the Kornilov plan and whether or not the general was deceiving Kerensky and intended to establish himself as a military dictator remain a matter of debate,21 but at the last moment, on 27 August 1917, the prime minister pulled out of any putative deal, denounced Kornilov as a traitor, and had him and many of his supporters arrested and imprisoned at Bykhov. These Bykhov generals—among them, in addition to Kornilov, Generals A. I. Denikin, A. S. Lukomskii, I. P. Romanovskii, and S. L. Markov—were later to form the leadership corps of the future White Volunteer Army in southern Russia. Meanwhile, much of the initial rank and file of that force (chiefly young officers and military students) was being alimented and encouraged to prepare for counterrevolution by none other than the man who had replaced Kornilov at the head of the Russian Army, General M. V. Alekseev.

In its last, post-Kornilov weeks, the Provisional Government in general, and Kerensky in particular, came under increasingly hostile attack from both the Left (who regarded the prime minister’s flirting with Kornilov as a betrayal of the revolution) and the Right (who regarded Kerensky’s arrest of the general as a betrayal of Russia). There were few shots fired in anger at this juncture, but the political battle lines of the civil wars were by then pretty clearly demarcated. National divisions also broadened, as, for example the Ukrainian government, the Rada, voiced its displeasure with the manner in which Kerensky (under pressure from the Kadets and other conservatives) had reneged upon the promises of broad autonomy for the region that had earlier been offered and began moving toward autonomy and independence.22 Seen in this light, the entire period from February to October 1917, in which all significant political, military, and social forces edged further away from compromise but had not yet taken up arms, might best be characterized as a period of phony civil war.

Whether or not the fractious Russian polity would have descended into outright civil war without a deliberate move toward it is unknowable. That move was made, however, and very deliberately, by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in two interrelated acts: the October Revolution of late 1917 and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

On the night of 24–25 October 1917, sensing that they had sufficient support in key cities and among the soldiery, the Bolshevik Party broke with other elements of Russia’s democracy; arrested the Provisional Government; and formed a revolutionary cabinet, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom).23 This body immediately passed a series of revolutionary laws (transferring all private land to the peasantry and declaring “workers’ control” of factories, for example) and called upon all belligerents to bring an immediate end to the world war. These provocative measures were echoed by Lenin’s refusal to countenance any notion of forming a coalition, all-socialist government, and he immediately set about sabotaging the negotiations toward such a compromise that had been initiated by the powerful railway workers’ union, Vikzhel, as well as by more moderate elements within the Bolshevik Party.24 The fact was that Lenin expected civil war and regarded it as part and parcel of the revolutionary process, not an unfortunate or avoidable addendum. From his point of view—and from ours—the October Revolution is best regarded, therefore, as the ratcheting up of a preexisting and probably unavoidable armed conflict, rather than the moment of its outbreak.25

That said, the Bolshevik seizure of power did not go unopposed. National councils in the three putative Baltic states soon declared their independence, as did the Rada in Ukraine, while in Finland a bloody civil war erupted between Whites under General C. G. E. Mannerheim and Red units close to the Bolsheviks. Officer cadets in Petrograd who were associated with the aforementioned Alekseev organization also mounted armed resistance to Bolshevik Red Guards around their schools and other centers in Petrograd, while like-minded cadets and students in Moscow seized the Kremlin and were only dislodged from it after a weeklong siege. Even more ominously, Don Cossack forces rallied by Kerensky from around Gatchina advanced into the southern suburbs of Petrograd before being repulsed by Red Guards and hastily assembled units of pro-Bolshevik sailors of the Baltic Fleet. Meanwhile, in the far south, other elements of the Don Cossack Host engaged with Red units around Rostov-on-Don (capturing the city on 2 December 1917), and in the southern Urals the Orenburg Cossack Host declared their opposition to Soviet rule and expelled Red units from their home territory (which was also the base of an anti-Bolshevik Kazakh government, Alash Orda, founded on 13 December 1917). In Central Asia, a Muslim government (the Kokand Autonomy) was proclaimed at Kokand on 26 November 1918 to oppose the Russian-based pro-Bolshevik forces of the Tashkent Soviet; farther east, in Irkutsk, forces of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks, led by the future ataman G. M. Semenov, also engaged with Red units. Portents of later clashes between the Soviet government and the Allies were also to be found in these months, as British and Japanese warships docked at Vladivostok in December, while the first stirrings of the later Soviet–Polish War might be detected in Red Guard actions to contain an anti-Soviet uprising organized in Belorussia among the 1st Polish Legion of the Russian Army by General Józef Dowbór-Muśnicki. Nor was the Soviet government inactive: within weeks of the revolution, in the first stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, Red Guard units surged from and through Kharkov toward Kiev, briefly capturing the Ukrainian capital from nationalist forces on 26–27 January 1918, as Red units also dislodged the Don Cossacks from Rostov (and moved on to capture the Host capital, Novocherkassk) and forcibly established Soviet rule in Odessa and Crimea.

It was on the political rather than the military front that the further descent into civil war was most indelibly marked, however. On 5–6 January 1918, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly gathered at the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. The PSR and its national allies in Ukraine and elsewhere had won a clear majority (almost 60 percent) of the vote in the elections (which had been held in mid-November). The new Soviet government argued (with some justification) that these results failed to take account of the new political configuration in the country—in particular the fact that in December 1917 the left wing of the PSR had declared itself to be a separate party and had joined the Bolsheviks in government—and demanded that the assembly endorse a Lenin-penned “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples,” according to which the assembly should recognize Soviet power and Sovnarkom’s post-October decrees. When the SR majority refused to sign its own suicide note, Bolshevik and Left-SR delegates walked out of the meeting. Subsequently, Bolshevik sailors who were policing the event ordered the delegates to leave the Tauride Palace. When they attempted to return on the following day, they found the building locked and sealed off by Red Guards. This may not have been the start of the civil wars—as we have seen, many earlier dates suggest themselves—but it was certainly the end of the February Revolution and the hopes for a democratic solution to Russia’s problems that it had engendered.26 It also sowed the seeds of the armed conflict between the Bolsheviks and their more moderate socialist opponents that was the primary feature of the civil wars in 1918.

1918: Intervention and the Democratic Counter-Revolution

With the Volunteer Army fleeing from the exposed Don region into the North Caucasus for refuge in early 1918 (the First Kuban “Ice” March) and not returning north until later in the year, and with other embryonic White armies operating only far to the east, the year following the October Revolution was dominated by two interrelated phenomena: the beginnings of extensive foreign intervention in the “Russian” Civil Wars and the rise and fall of democratic (mostly moderate socialist) opposition to the new Bolshevik dictatorship in areas closer to the Russian heartland. The latter would probably have ignited at some point without the former, but foreign intervention certainly accelerated opposition to the Soviet government by the Russian SRs and their allies in non-Russian regions of the former empire.

It is first important to note, however—although it is a story that has largely been forgotten in the West—that Austro-German intervention in the Baltic, and especially Ukraine (as well as Ottoman incursions into Transcaucasia) had a greater influence on the course of the civil wars than did the intervention of the Allies. Indeed, much of the Allied intervention (if not all) can be read as a response to Austro-German and Turkish moves to secure Russian territory and resources at a critical juncture of the world war.27 Their opportunity came when, in a series of debates that almost split the Bolshevik Party, Lenin was eventually successful in securing a majority in favor of signing a separate peace with the Central Powers at the fortress town of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).28 The treaty detached all Russia’s territorial gains in Eastern Europe dating back to the 17th century (including Finland, the Baltic provinces, Belorussia, Poland, and Ukraine), as well as more recent gains (in 1878 and since 1914) in eastern Anatolia—including Kars, Ardahan, and Batumi (known to the Turks as Elviye-i Selâse, the “three provinces”)—and forced demobilization on the Soviet government, as well as demanding that all Russian naval vessels be confined to port. More than one-third of the old empire’s population (56,000,000 people), one-third of its railway network, half its industry, three-quarters of its supplies of iron ore, and nine-tenths of its coal were thereby immediately transferred to the control of Germany and its allies, while all Russian claims to privileges within Persia and Afghanistan were also forfeited.29

This was the most draconian peace settlement that any European power had ever imposed upon another. Soon after it was signed, Austro-German forces moved into Ukraine and on to Crimea and the Don, while Turkish forces moved into Armenia and pushed on toward Baku. Although there were pockets of resistance (by the anarchist partisans led by Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, for example), the forces were able to advance with relative ease because some Russians and many non-Russian nationalists had opted for what became known as the “German orientation” in 1918: that is, seeking the assistance of the Central Powers to quarantine and eventually crush the Bolshevik contagion in Moscow (whence Sovnarkom had relocated in March 1918). This was true of forces as diverse as the Kadet leader Miliukov; initially, the mostly socialist leaders of the Ukrainian National Republic, who signed their own treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk on 27 January 1918; certainly the former tsarist general P. P. Skoropadsky, who with German aid and encouragement overthrew the UNR on 29 April 1918 and established a conservative, hyper-nationalist Hetmanate; and the Menshevik leaders of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (proclaimed on 28 May 1918).

So, with the connivance of nationalist leaderships, the Central Powers were able to seek to exploit the agricultural and industrial wealth of Ukraine and the oil of Baku. At the same time, putative nationalist leaderships found some protection from Soviet attacks on them (both from Soviet Russia and from enclaves of pro-Bolsheviks within their home territories). This was equally true in the Baltic, where German forces had fully occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia by January 1918. In the three putative Baltic States, nationalist leaders found the occupying Germans far less willing to offer them any meaningful autonomy. Indeed, many nationalist leaders were arrested there in 1918. Nevertheless, the German presence again meant that the Bolsheviks could not overrun the region, leaving Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian national governments to emerge in the aftermath of the Central Powers’ collapse in November 1918.

As the intervention of the Central Powers developed in 1918, it elicited a major reaction from those Russians who had adopted the opposite, “Allied orientation” with regard to how best to solve Russia’s problems. This might be defined as a belief that not only was it Russia’s duty to keep its promises to the Allies to fight the war until victory (entailing a complete rejection of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), but also that it was the duty of the Allies to help non-Bolshevik Russians rebuild the Russian Army (albeit on more democratic lines) and to reestablish the Eastern Front. However, this relationship was never going to be entirely harmonious. Many democratically minded Russians (and probably most socialists) were fearful of what price might have to be paid to induce the Allies to intervene, and even while inviting intervention they were demanding that there be no political interference in Russian affairs by London, Paris, or Washington.30 On the other hand, many Allied military and political leaders were not convinced that the socialists had the backbone for the fight; they had witnessed, often at firsthand, the shambles that the Russian Army had become in 1917 and feared a return to that. So some began to argue for supporting not the democrats, but forces of a more right-wing stamp.31 Others, somewhat surprisingly, placed their hopes on the new Red Army that was being organized by Leon Trotsky in the spring of 1918. British officers helped train Red soldiers, while the chief British representative in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, kept a line open to the Kremlin and in his dispatches home expressed the belief, for months after the treaty had been signed, that the Soviet government could be induced to abjure Brest-Litovsk and to rejoin the fray on the Allied side.32

Clearly the delivery of a democratic alternative to Bolshevism was going to be a problematic process. It initially found a very competent midwife, however, in the shape of the Czechoslovak Legion, in which, during the course of the world war, Czechs living within the Russian Empire had joined prisoners of war and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army to fight under Russian command for an independent homeland. Having secured the Soviet government’s agreement to leave Russia in February 1918—Lenin had no desire for what looked like an Allied fifth column to be stationed on his flank in Ukraine—some 35,000 of these men were stretched out along the Trans-Siberian Railway in May–June 1918, en route to Vladivostok (and thence the Western Front), when they clashed with local Soviet forces, revolted, and captured the railway from the Volga to the Pacific over the next few weeks.33

As the revolt flowed eastward, there emerged from the Volga–Urals–Siberian soils in which Bolshevism had never firmly taken root—the PSR, after all, had won huge majorities east of the Volga in the elections to the Constituent Assembly34—a string of challengers to Soviet authority. At Samara, on 8 June 1918, the rule was proclaimed of a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch); at Ekaterinburg, from 25 July 1918, there gathered a Provisional Oblast′ Government of the Urals; and at Omsk appeared a Western Siberian Commissariat (26 May 1918), which soon gave way to a rather more conservative (although it still initially contained socialists) Provisional Siberian Government (23 June 1918).35 Actually, both the WSC and the PSG were scions of a Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, the regional government long dreamed of by Siberian regionalists (oblastniki), which had been elected by delegates of the Siberian Regional Duma at Tomsk on 26–27 January 1918, before its dispersal by Red Guards. This “Democratic Counter-Revolution” in the east had significant local roots, symbolized by the presence in the PSG, in particular, of political and social activists of long standing who described themselves as adherents of the Siberian regionalist movement (oblastnichestvo), which dated back to the late 19th century. Equally important, however, was the part played in the organization of these regimes by delegates of underground anti-Bolshevik organizations dispatched to the peripheries in the spring of 1918—notably the Union for the Regeneration of Russia and the National Center.36

Over the course of the summer, however, the Democratic Counter-Revolution in the east crumbled and collapsed, to be replaced by forces more conservative and more militaristic in their outlook (the Whites). A number of reasons can be adduced to explain this. For one thing, the PSR had divided hopelessly in 1917. By 1918, as we have seen, its left wing had become a separate party and was in collaboration with the Bolsheviks (although the coalition would collapse during March–July 1918 over Brest-Litovsk and Bolshevik policies in the countryside); meanwhile, its right wing, led by N. D. Avksentev and V. M. Zenzinov, founded the URR and sought collaboration with the Kadets; in the center the nominal party leader, V. M. Chernov, castigated both its errant wings. Second, the PSR-dominated regimes found it difficult to organize effective military forces, partly because they lacked experience; partly because recruits failed to come forward in sufficient numbers (in the SR’s peasant heartlands the villagers had been granted the land by the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Land of October 1917 and wondered why they should now be asked to fight their benefactors for the sake of democratic institutions that remained abstract to them); partly because they were not trusted by most of the anti-Bolshevik Russian military establishment and the increasingly rightist PSG (who deliberately poached officers from Komuch, for example); and partly because they were not trusted by the Allies.37

Although, as a consequence of all this, Komuch’s People’s Army never mustered more than 30,000 men (even after mobilization had been resorted to in the absence of volunteers), it was energetically commanded (not least by the SR Colonel V. I. Lebedev) and enjoyed support from the Czechoslovaks. Consequently, following negotiations with Major Stanislav čeček, commander of the legion’s 1st Division, a joint Czech–Komuch Volga Front was soon established, centered on Samara, which in a series of lightning operations succeeded in driving Red forces from the important regional centers of Ufa (5 July 1918), Simbirsk (22 July 1918), and Kazan′ (7 August 1918). The last of these victories was of particular significance: on the one hand, at Kazan′ had been stored about half of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve, a treasure trove that now fell into the hands of the anti-Bolsheviks in the east;38 on the other, as Trotsky recognized from his vantage point at Sviiazsk (on the opposite bank of the Volga), with Kazan′ in their hands and with Red forces in such disarray—actually in “a state of psychological collapse,” as the war commissar put it, dodging bullets while threatening left and right to execute commissars and commanders who failed to rally their troops—the road to Moscow lay wide open before the People’s Army, and “the fate of the revolution was hanging by a thread.”39

The causes of Trotsky’s discomfort are not difficult to fathom. The collapse of Red efforts in the east since May–June 1918 had been hastened by the revolt at Simbirsk against Soviet power (in the name of continuing the war against Germany) that had been staged on 10–11 July 1918, by none other than the commander of the Reds’ recently organized Eastern Front, the Left-SR M. A. Murav′ev.40 This had been accompanied by a disastrous collapse in morale among key units, particularly the exhausted 4th Regiment of the Latvian Riflemen, hitherto among the most effective of Red forces, which in mid-July simply abandoned Syzran′ and refused to advance on Simbirsk.41 Troublingly for the Soviet command, all this coincided not only with the uprising against the creeping authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks, staged in Moscow on 6 July 1918 by their former partners in Sovnarkom, the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (who were also strongly opposed to the treaty with Germany), but also with a series of revolts organized at Iaroslavl′ and surrounding towns engineered by B. V. Savinkov—the enigmatic former SR terrorist and (in 1917) champion of Kornilov, who was now in command of an extensive network of (partly Allied-financed) anti-Bolshevik officer organizations across Russia, which he called the Union for Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom.42 Farther east again, the workers of the armory towns of Izhevsk and Votkinsk, in the Urals, turned on and expelled their Bolshevik overlords.43 That these widespread revolts were followed by Allied landings at ports as disparate as Vladivostok, Krasnovodsk, and Arkhangel′sk in early August and by the arrival of representatives of Norperforce at Ashkhabad (10 August 1918) and of Dunsterforce at Baku (14 August 1918), then by the assassination of Cheka boss Moisei Uritskii by SR terrorists at Petrograd on 30 August 1918 and the attempted assassination of Lenin that same day in Moscow, could hardly have calmed any Bolshevik’s nerves.

If the Bolsheviks looked weak and nervous, however, their democratic opponents were in a worse state. Having unwisely attacked on too many fronts, the People’s Army of Komuch began to fall back in September: on 10–12 September, Red forces, under the personal direction of Trotsky, recaptured Kazan′, Vol′sk, and Simbirsk. Meanwhile its political leaders were being strong-armed into a compromise with the more right-wing PSG in a so-called state conference held that same month in Ufa. A PSR–Kadet coalition, the Directory, emerged from this, but the Kadet party leadership felt that it strayed too far from the model proposed by the URR, and in any case, real power by now lay in the hands of the Siberian Army, which had long since set about abducting and assassinating socialists in the east (notably the author A. E. Novoselov). As the Red Army advanced toward the Urals, and seeing no alternative, the Ufa Directors quit Ufa for Omsk, the headquarters of the PSG and the Siberian Army, placing themselves in the lion’s mouth, as Avksentev acknowledged. They lasted only a few weeks there before being arrested by Siberian Cossacks in the coup of 18 November 1918, which brought to power, as the putative supreme ruler of Russia, Admiral A. V. Kolchak—a darling of the political Right in Russia and close friend of powerful British interventionist forces in the region.44

Meanwhile, a markedly similar course of events was being played out in anti-Bolshevik camps elsewhere, albeit at different tempos. In isolated Central Asia, for example, the process extended over the greater part of a year, as the SR–Menshevik Transcaspian Provisional Government that had been established following an anti-Bolshevik Ashkhabad uprising on 11–12 July 1918 (sponsored by British forces across the Persian border at Meshed) gave way to a far more conservative Committee of Social Salvation in January 1919, which in July 1919 then accepted its subordination to the White forces in South Russia’s orbit.45

In Northern Russia, meanwhile, the Democratic Counter-Revolution had adopted the countenance of a regime rather more Leftist than had been the case in Siberia—the Supreme Administration of North Russia, led by the veteran Populist N. D. Chaikovskii—but one that, oddly, was even more a creation of the Allies than the PSG: Chaikovskii’s cabinet had assumed power at Arkhangel′sk on 2 August 1918, on the basis of a program inspired by the URR, but unashamedly with the connivance and intervention of British forces that had landed at the port on that day to support a military coup against the local soviet. Within weeks, on 6 September 1918, tiring of the socialist ministers’ schemes, the local military, led by Colonel G. E. Chaplin, had toppled the Supreme Administration. Members of the Allied military missions seem to have initially encouraged this act, but then had second thoughts: Chaikovskii was freed from his incarceration in the island monastery of Solovetskii and was permitted to establish a new government, the Provisional Government of the Northern Region. Nevertheless, it was thereafter the Northern Army that had control of events in the Northern region, and Chaikovskii, one of the totemic individuals among Russian democrats for the past half century, was obliged to retire. Eventually, Chaikovskii took his leave of the anti-Bolshevik North and went instead to Paris (to join the Russian Political Conference there, in its forlorn and frustrating endeavors to gain admission for Russian representatives to the deliberations of the Allies). On the day of Chaikovskii’s departure, 1 January 1919, there duly arrived at Arkhangel′sk General E. K. Miller, who was to become military governor of the region for the remainder of the civil war in the North.46 They must have passed each other in the harbor; socialist democracy was departing Russia as White militarism disembarked from an Allied vessel.

Ironically, in those areas of the former empire that had been under the control of the Central Powers, in late 1918 and early 1919 forces of a far more moderate socialist, liberal, and nationalist hue were gaining a foothold as the occupying forces withdrew. In effect, as the Bolsheviks had promised under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk not to encroach upon the occupied territories in the Baltic, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, the presence of the Central Powers’ forces acted as a buffer, preventing the Red Army and Red Guards from crushing democratic and nationalist opposition to Soviet rule along the western and southern peripheries of the former empire in the same manner that they had crushed such forces along the Volga and (initially) the Don.47

In the Baltic region, for example, national parties of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, usually dominated by liberals, were able to secure the independence that had evaded them earlier in 1918. Their rule was not uncontested, however, by elements of the generally conservative Baltic German community and the allies they found among renegade Freikorps elements of the former Imperial German Army (who were seeking to establish a United Baltic Duchy allied to Berlin), rogue Russian commanders seeking plunder and adventure (notably Ataman S. N. Bułak-Bałachowicz), and White forces who were pressed back into the nascent Baltic States by the Red Army (notably the Pskov Volunteer Corps). Soon the confusion in the region resulted in a war between pro-German elements and the new armies of Latvia and Estonia (the Landeswehr War), in which the Allies had to intervene to disband the Germans.

In Ukraine, the withdrawal of Austro-German forces also soon resulted in the overthrow of their puppet Hetmanate and its replacement by a government of Ukrainian Social Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries (the Directory), which soon reestablished the Ukrainian National Republic, with the veteran socialist agitator Simon Petliura at its helm. The UNR, in January 1919, formally united with the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had been established by Ukrainian liberals on the former Austrian crown lands in Eastern Galicia. Ukraine, however, was to become a chaotic theater of the civil wars, in which the always mutative, vulnerable, and peripatetic Council of Ministers of the UNR could not attract the protection (and still less recognition) of the Allies, as a consequence of its earlier dealings with the Central Powers at the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This remained the case even after most of its radical socialist ministers resigned in February 1918, in an act of appeasement to Paris and London.

In Transcaucasia, meanwhile, Menshevik Georgia reasserted its formal independence, renouncing the protectorate that had been established over it by Germany under the Treaty of Poti of 28 May 1918, while radical nationalist forces (the Dashnaks and Musavat, respectively) came to the fore in the governments of the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, as the Ottoman Army of Islam withdrew. However, just as Allied postarmistice intervention in the Baltic might have subsequently become the key factor in sustaining the independence movements there in 1919, in 1918 British forces in Transcaucasia were also instrumental in helping the national movements in Azerbaijan and Armenia to expunge Bolshevik subversion (notably by carrying off the 26 Baku Commissars in September 1918).48 Georgia, however, received less succor; as in the case of Ukraine, this was a consequence of its subservience to Germany in 1918 (as well as because of its strained relations with White forces in the North Caucasus and South Russia, which the Allies were coming to favor).49

1918–1922: Reds versus Whites

In 1919, the main focus of the “Russian” Civil Wars actually was Russia—specifically the Bolshevik heartland in European Russia. As the Democratic Counter-Revolution waned and avowedly conservative and militaristic (but far from committedly monarchist) forces, the Whites, came to the fore, White armies sought to advance on Petrograd and Moscow from the north, south, east, and west. Consequently, the Red command accepted a tacit truce for most of the year with its nationalist enemies in the Baltic, Poland, and Transcaucasia (although the same could not be said for Ukraine, which was far too strategically and economically valuable for Moscow to allow it to pass into hostile hands) and concentrated instead on rebuffing these attacks and forcing the Whites back into the Black, White, and Baltic Seas and, eventually, the Pacific Ocean. Space here precludes a very detailed account of developments on the various Red versus White fronts of 1919 and the final obliteration of the remnants of the Whites by Red forces over the following years.50 However, a condensed narrative of these complex struggles will be assayed.

The genesis of the White movement can be found in the aforementioned Alekseev organization, formed in Petrograd and Moscow in September–October 1917. Over the following months, a stream of these young officers and officer cadets followed the Bykhov generals and other senior commanders of the Russian Army to the Don Cossack capital of Novocherkassk to form the Volunteer Army. More recruits were picked up along the way, and other volunteers were ferried toward the Don by a branch of the Volunteers that was established at Kiev, where the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian Army of the UNR (and later the Hetmanate Army) acted as a magnet and a (rather unsatisfactory) sanctuary to disaffected officers from Russia. The welcome such a professedly Great Russian nationalist force found among the Don Cossacks, who from February 1917 had been avidly rebuilding their ancient rights of self-government, was not as warm as the White leaders had hoped. Indeed, many young and poor Cossacks who had served at the front (frontoviki) espoused pro-Bolshevik sympathies. So when Red forces overran the Don in early 1918, the Volunteers (numbering fewer than 3,500 men, one in ten of whom was a general) retreated south into the Kuban steppe, facing a freezing ordeal (the aforementioned First Kuban March) and constant battles against pursuing Red forces from the north and Red Guard units assembling in the south from the returning dregs of the Russian Army on the Caucasus Front. Their aim was to unite with forces of the Kuban Cossack Host and to capture the Kuban capital, Ekaterinodar. They achieved the first of these but not the second, with their commander in chief, General Kornilov, killed during the unsuccessful siege in mid-April 1918. With their charismatic icon dead, the Volunteers’ leadership in political affairs passed to General Alekseev, while General Denikin took command of the army.

Denikin soon had the main Volunteer force regroup back on the Don, where Cossack forces under Ataman P. N. Krasnov were clearing the Reds from the Host territory and were about to launch an advance on the strategically vital Volga port of Tsaritsyn.51 Denikin then directed the capture of the important industrial centers of Rostov-on-Don and Taganrog before initiating a Second Kuban Campaign. It commenced on 23 June 1918 and aimed, again, to capture Ekaterinodar, while at the same time conveniently quarantining the pro-Allied Volunteers from encountering the Austro-German interventionists, who were by then investing regions adjacent to the Don region. (German forces had entered Rostov-on-Don itself during the first week of May 1918.) This time, the southward advance of the Volunteers went well, with combined cavalry and infantry attacks snaring a string of railway towns from Rostov to Belaia Glina before finally securing Ekaterinodar on 15 August 1918 and the port of Novorossiisk (26 August 1918). The latter victory allowed scattered White forces in Crimea and South Russia to move across the Black Sea to reinforce the Volunteers. Among them was General P. N. Wrangel, who then led a grinding cavalry campaign across the Kuban and Terek regions to cut the local Reds’ rail communications with the north through the capture of the important junction at Tikhoretskaia (15 July 1918) and subsequently to annihilate pro-Soviet forces and institutions in the North Caucasus by mid-November.52 The victories, however, cost the Volunteers more than 30,000 casualties—among them two more of their totemic figures, General Markov and General M. G. Drozdovskii—while General Alekseev succumbed to illness and died in October.53 The prestige, power, and potential it brought them, however, were among the reasons the Cossacks of the region decided to bury (albeit for later disinterment) their aspirations for autonomy and, on 8 January 1919, to subordinate themselves to Denikin in a united Armed Forces of South Russia. To symbolize this new, pro-Allies partnership, Ataman Kaledin (who had in 1918 exchanged letters with the Kaiser) was replaced as leader of the Don Host by General A. P. Bogaevskii.

Despite the successes of the second half of 1918, Denikin subsequently faced criticism for securing his own rear in the North Caucasus—mopping-up operations that would continue for much of the first half of 1919—rather than deploying all his available forces northward to invest European Russia in what might have been a joint White strategic offensive against the Red center with the forces of Admiral Kolchak, which were advancing from the east. Whether this would have been feasible—or whether (as was to become the case in Siberia) failure to secure the rear would have resulted for the AFSR in an advance that would have misfired as much as that of Kolchak, rather than one that was, for Denikin, very nearly successful—must remain a matter of speculation.54 Nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight we can at least say that the two major White offensives seem to have been remarkably uncoordinated.

The forces organized by Admiral Kolchak—or, to be more precise, by his advisors with greater experience of land warfare—had their origin in the Siberian Army that had been organized by the Provisional Siberian Government during the summer of 1918. This, in turn, to a significant degree echoed the structures and personnel of the West Siberian Military District of tsarist times—not least because far fewer officers of the Imperial Russian Army had fled to Siberia after the Bolshevik revolution than had fled to South Russia. On the other hand, Kolchak did enjoy the services of many members of the Academy of the General Staff (which had been relocated to Ekaterinburg by the Soviet government in March 1918) who deserted to the anti-Bolsheviks in the wake of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion. Anti-Bolshevik forces in the east also had the advantage of open (if very distant) access to the outside world through Vladivostok. Allied technical support could be supplied from an early stage, therefore—notably in the shape of the Russian Railway Service Corps—as could military supplies, advice, and advisors. Of the latter, the most notable were General Alfred Knox from Britain and General Maurice Janin from France. Indeed, the latter had been named as commander in chief of all Allied forces (including Russian forces) in the east as early as August 1918 (although jealousies among Kolchak’s staff eventually blocked that posting).

Following a morale-boosting victory by the Siberian Army at Perm, in the northern Urals, in December 1918 (overseen by another foreigner, the mercurial General Radola Gajda of the Czechoslovak Legion) and an extensive recruitment campaign among the Siberian peasantry over the autumn and winter of 1918–1919 (which was intended to raise more than a million men but actually netted considerably less than a 10th of that), Kolchak’s newly dubbed Russian Army stood poised to begin a general offensive. Despite recruiting problems and desertions (notably of Bashkir units, who went over to the Reds en masse in February 1919), it was a much larger force than that of Denikin, mustering close to 700,000 men at its height, although fewer than 150,000 ever saw service at the front.

The order of battle of Kolchak’s forces in early March 1919 consisted of, from north to south: Gajda’s Siberian Army of around 45,000 men (supported by the makeshift Siberian Flotilla on the upper Kama river), with its headquarters at Ekaterinburg; General M. V. Khanzhin’s 42,000-strong Western Army, based at Cheliabinsk and containing units inherited from the People’s Army of Komuch, which was to be reinforced by a new corps under Colonel V. O. Kappel′ as the offensive progressed; and the Southern Army Group of Ataman Dutov (from May 1919 the Southern Army) of some 25,000 men, under General G. A. Belov. South of the Dutov–Belov group were stretched troops of the Orenburg and Urals Cossacks, numbering another 20,000 fighters, who were held up before the Red occupation of Orenburg but whose extreme left flank bulged forward almost to the banks of the lower Volga. Facing them along the Reds’ Eastern Front (again from north to south) were around 120,000 men of the 3rd, 2nd, 5th, 1st, and 4th Red Armies, who were numerically weaker but had many more artillery pieces, reinforced by the powerful Volga–Kama Military Flotilla, who could summon many more reserves from the Soviet center and had an ally in the forces of the Turkestan ASSR that were pushing north along the Orenberg–Tashkent Railway on the Aktiubinsk Front.55

From 4 March 1919 onward, with skis and sledges employed to make progress through the deep snow still lying in the Urals passes, the offensive commenced along the entire front and was initially successful during its first month: the Western Army took Ufa from the 5th Red Army by 16 March, then Sterlitamak, Belebei, and Bugul′ma (6–10 April 1919), bringing Khanzhin within striking distance of the Volga crossings at Samara and Simbirsk. Meanwhile, to the south Dutov’s Cossacks captured Orsk (9 April 1919) and pushed on toward Orenburg; in the north the Siberian Army captured Sarapul (10 April 1919) and closed on Glazov. At this point, however, impetuosity and hot-headedness took hold: instead of digging in on the river Ik and sitting out the worst of the spring thaw, when snowmelt transformed roads into rivers, the Western Army pushed on (taking Buguruslan on 15 April 1919), as Kolchak, on 12 April 1919, ordered that all Red forces east of the Volga were to be eliminated. By this point 180,000 square miles of territory (populated by some 5–7 million souls) had been engulfed by the Siberian Whites, together with at least 20,000 prisoners and many guns and armored trains.56 This seemed impressive, but not everybody was fooled: “Don’t think that our successful advances are a result of military prowess,” an officer warned the Siberian Kadet Lev Krol′, “for it is all much simpler than that—when they run away we advance; when we run away they will advance.”57 Moreover, Khanzhin’s vanguard had lost touch with its supply trains and commissaries and—forced to live off the land like occupiers, not liberators—were the living, breathing, and all-consuming contradiction of the crudely reproduced leaflets they distributed among the villages promising the hungry Urals that “Bread is Coming!” from Siberia.

It would soon be time, as Krol′ had been warned, for the Siberian Whites to run away. The Red Eastern Front, erroneously set up by its commander Colonel S. S. Kamenev to absorb a strong push from the Siberian Army (and in general deprived of manpower and other resources, as the Red command prioritized the Western Front and Ukraine over the winter of 1918–1919), had been forced to fall back before Khanzhin’s initially rampant Western Army (which had a 4:1 local advantage in men and artillery over the opposing 5th Red Army around Ufa). But in April 1919, new reserves (many of them from central Russian Bolshevik and trade union organizations) were poured into that sector, swelling a maneuvering group under the hugely talented Red commander M. V. Frunze that, as the spring floods receded in May, would push northward from Buzuluk to bite into the side of the White salient formed by Khanzhin’s overextended advance. Belebei was duly recaptured on 15 May, and on 7 June charismatic Komdiv V. I. Chapaev led the 25th Rifle Division in an audacious storming of the Belaia river to break into Ufa on 9 June 1919, where they found huge supplies of oil and grain. To the north, Gajda’s Northern Army was still advancing at this point, capturing Glazov in early June, but with its left flank now exposed by the sudden disintegration of the Western Army, it was forced to turn and flee, abandoning Glazov on 13 June, reaching Perm′ (their point of departure in March) by the end of June and surrendering the key Urals city of Ekaterinburg on 15 July 1919 to the vanguard of the 2nd Red Army, which had advanced 200 miles in less than four weeks.58 At this point, Trotsky and Glavkom Vācietis argued for calling a halt, but they were overruled by Lenin and, at the instigation of Eastern Front commander S. S. Kamenev, the pursuit of the Whites beyond the Urals was continued.59 Soon thereafter, in July 1919, Kamenev replaced Vācietis as Glavkom, and the latter was given three months in prison to reconsider his strategy.60

Over the coming months, Kolchak made several attempts to staunch the wounds inflicted upon the Russian Army, but to no avail. First Kappel′’s Volga Corps was thrown into the fray, followed by skeletal reserve formations from the rear; but both forces, utterly unprepared, melted away overnight, as thousands of White conscripts deserted to the oncoming Reds, many of them sporting their newly issued British uniforms and holding their newly acquired Remington rifles from the United States.61 Others went over to the partisan forces, which by the summer of 1919 had made much of the Siberian rear a no-go area for the Kolchak authorities beyond the narrow and fragile ribbon of the Trans-Siberian Railway (which was still policed by Czech and other Allied troops, though they were more motivated to protect it as their own escape route to the east than by any will to maintain Kolchak’s lifeline from the Pacific coast).

Having on 23 May 1919 added the portfolio of minister of war to his resumé, Colonel Lebedev next oversaw a complete restructuring of the remaining forces of Kolchak’s Russian Army into a White Eastern Front (consisting chiefly of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies) in June–July. Then in July, at Cheliabinsk, he attempted to set a trap for the Reds, but the pincers of his uncoordinated counterattack failed to meet, and the helter-skelter retreat was resumed.62 After this debacle—which was doubly embarrassing as it coincided with the Omsk Diplomatic Conference, at which Allied representatives gathered at Kolchak’s capital to consider how their governments might best aid the admiral—Lebedev was sacked as chief of staff and war minister in August, but this could not alter the verdict of the Allied delegates that Kolchak was now a lost cause. (For several of them, it was their first venture from Vladivostok into darkest White Siberia.) To confirm that conclusion, another effort to check the Red advance between the rivers Ishim and Tobol′, masterminded by Kolchak’s new commander in chief, General M. K. Diterikhs, was similarly botched in early September 1919, as key army groups (notably the Siberian Cossacks Corps of Ataman P. P. Ivanov-Rinov) failed to move on the field of battle quite as smoothly as they did on paper.63 Diterikhs’s services were then also briskly dispensed with, but Kolchak’s capital, Omsk, could not be saved by his pugnacious successor, General K. V. Sakharov, despite the latter’s fashioning of the optimistically monikered “Moscow Army Group” from the remnants of the White Eastern Front. Depleted forces of the Reds’ 27th Rifle Division, who had advance 150 miles in two days, entered and captured the city early on 14 November 1918, before half the defending garrison was even awake—or, rather, half of those garrison units that remained in Omsk, for by that point “the devil take the hindmost” had replaced “all for the Army” as the Whites’ slogan of the hour. Fleeing officers were particularly anxious to remove telltale signs of their status, in case they were apprehended by the Reds, with the result that Omsk’s streets “were so thickly littered with epaulettes as to suggest the idea of fallen leaves in autumn,” according to a British witness.64 Sakharov was then arrested by the exasperated General A. N. Pepeliaev on 9 December 1919 and replaced as commander by General Kappel′, but by then the remains of Pepeliaev’s own 1st Army had mutinied around Tomsk, while their former commander, General Gajda—who had been sacked in early July 1919 for having criticized Lebedev’s direction of the spring offensive—had placed himself at the head of a mutiny against Kolchak at Vladivostok (the Gajda putsch). Meanwhile, the remnants of the Southern Army and its Urals and Orenburg Cossack auxiliaries were by now entirely cut off from the main White force; some fled south toward the Caspian (and ultimately Persia), while others followed Dutov toward Semirech′e (and, ultimately, Chinese Turkestan).65

Amid this chaos, Kolchak and his staff proceeded slowly toward Irkutsk by train. On 4 January 1920, the admiral abdicated, passed supreme authority to General Denikin in South Russia, and somewhat bizarrely, named as commander of forces in the Far East none other than Ataman Semenov—whose appetite for warlordism remained unrivaled in the civil wars and who had caused nothing but trouble for the Omsk regime.66 Perhaps the admiral believed that his own presence in the region might temper Semenov’s penchant for brutality, for Kolchak believed (rightly) that he had secured Allied guarantees for the safe passage of his trains into Transbaikalia. At Irkutsk, however, he was treacherously betrayed by the Czechs, who handed over the erstwhile supreme ruler (and the remainder of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve that was on board his echelon) to the SR-dominated Political Center that had seized control of the city. The admiral was imprisoned, interrogated, and eventually, on 7 February 1920, executed by the Cheka, local Bolsheviks having removed the Political Center from power.67 Those remaining White forces who had survived what amounted to the longest military retreat in military history then skirted Red Irkutsk and, beyond Baikal, were mostly incorporated into Semenov’s Far Eastern (White) Army.

As Kolchak’s forces retreated in May–June 1919, the AFSR was preparing its own advance, having been delayed by having to subdue the remnants of the 11th and 12th Red Armies in the North Caucasus while fending off an advance of the Reds’ Southern Front that had recaptured Rostov in January 1919. On the other hand, during the first half of 1919 Allied aid was flowing into South Russia; it would eventually amount to 200,000 rifles and 500,000,000 rounds of ammunition, over 1,000 heavy guns and 6,200 machine guns, as well as around 60 tanks and 168 aircraft (together with vital training crews and engineers and spare parts). Also, a ruthless Red campaign of “de-Cossackization” had inspired another Cossack uprising on the northern Don in March, destabilizing the Red front, while to the west any meaningful pressure on Denikin’s left flank was dissipated when forces commanded by the anarchist Nestor Makhno and by Ataman Nykyfor Hryhoriiv, who were nominally allies of the Reds, both turned against Moscow.68 So, having cleared the Reds from the Don region in May–June 1919 (in a series of cavalry raids mounted by General V. Z. Mai-Maevskii), having welcomed into his ranks one of the most prominent of deserters from the Reds (Colonel N. D. Vsevolodov, commander of the 9th Red Army), and having finally captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June 1919, on 3 July 1919 Denikin issued one of the most fateful orders of the civil wars: his “Moscow Directive.” According to that order, the AFSR was instructed to move on to a general advance, along the network of railway lines converging on the ancient capital—a strategic offensive aimed at “the occupation of the heart of Russia, Moscow.” To that end, the Volunteer Army was to progress on a line through Kursk, Orel, and Tula to Moscow; the Don Army was to pass through Voronezh and Riazan′ to Moscow; and the Caucasian Army (of Kuban Cossacks) was to move in a loop from Tsaritsyn through Saratov, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Vladimir to Moscow.69 To some, including General Wrangel (who had overseen the Kuban Army’s capture of Tsaritsyn), an advance on such a broad front smacked of recklessness, but Denikin was probably right to gamble on a repeat of the sort of impulsive victory the Volunteers had already pulled off—by sheer force of will, time and time again, and against numerically superior forces—before the Red Army’s rich and populous base territory could produce numbers of recruits and weapons that no number of appeals to the “White idea” could outgun.

Interestingly, Denikin’s order made no mention of operations west of the River Dnepr, which he clearly intended to act as a defensive barrier on the left flank of the AFSR (and perhaps as a cordon against the Ukrainian anarchy that seemed to infect all who came in contact with it), but it was in the nature of the civil wars’ chaos that it was beyond the Dnepr, in right-bank Ukraine, that many initial AFSR successes actually came. As the Red Ukrainian Front shattered and the 14th Red Army disintegrated, White forces captured Poltava (29 July 1919), Kherson, and Nikolaev (both 18 August 1919). On 23 August 1919, assisted by marines landed by the Black Sea Fleet, White forces also captured the key port of Odessa and a week later entered the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.70

A second impressive White operation launched in these weeks was also absent from the Moscow Directive (which might suggest that Denikin’s control of the AFSR was less complete than he might have wished). On 10 August 1919, taking advantage of a gap in the Reds’ Southern Front at Novokhopersk between the 8th and 9th Red Armies, General K. K. Mamontov launched an immensely damaging excursion of Cossack forces (the 4th Don Cavalry Corps) into the rear of the Red lines (the “Mamontov raid”), capturing Tambov (on 18 August 1919, and almost netting Trotsky himself in the process); wrecking lines of communication to the Red’s Southern Front; and forcing the Soviet authorities to declare a state of siege across a broad region encompassing Riazan′, Tula, Orel′, Voronezh, Tambov, and Penza provinces. For one day (11–12 September 1919), Mamontov even occupied the city of Voronezh, where his larcenous troops made merry and looted everything they could carry, as they had throughout the operation.71 Rather less successful was the push north from Tsaritsyn of Wrangel’s Caucasian Army, which suffered from a lack of supplies and from the absence of a north–south railway along the Volga and soon had to retreat. That sector was also being rapidly reinforced by the Reds with units switched from the Eastern Front (notably, most of the complement of the former 2nd Red Army). Perhaps key here, though, was the reluctance of the Kuban Cossacks to deploy their forces in regions so far removed from their home territory, despite several personal appeals from Wrangel to the Kuban ataman, General V. G. Naumenko.72 This strained relationship with the Cossacks, whose interests remained local (when they did not stretch to pillage and rapine) was the Achilles’ heel of the AFSR. Meanwhile, Wrangel’s force’s intermittent contacts on the left bank of the Volga with outliers of Kolchak’s Urals Army only sharpened a bitter sense of what might have been had the southern and Siberian White armies been able to combine effectively (albeit that, as mentioned above, Kolchak’s Urals Army was, by this stage, entirely isolated from his retreating Russian Army).

With its left flank fanning out across Ukraine and its right flank stalled on the Volga, the AFSR’s double-pronged spearhead was now formed by the Volunteer Army and the Don Army. Their departure north was delayed by a series of Red counterattacks in August–September. Nevertheless, in late September, the great Moscow offensive of the AFSR got properly under way, with its spine along the Khar′kov–Kursk–Orel–Tula–Moscow railway and its mailed fist consisting of the crack divisions of the Volunteer Army—notably its “colorful units” (the Drozdovtsy, Kornilovtsy, and Markovtsy), named for the fallen heroes of 1918.73 Kursk was captured on 20 September 1919, with Red units deserting en masse to Mai-Maevskii’s forces, and on 14 October 1919, the city of Orel fell to the Kornilovtsy, placing the White vanguard just over 200 miles from Moscow, primed to advance farther and anticipating the opportunity to rearm en route, as their forces passed through the city of Tula, home of the arsenal founded by Peter the Great 200 years earlier. On the Volunteers’ right flank, meanwhile, General Shkuro captured Voronezh on 30 September 1919 and welcomed the Don Army into the city a few days later.

Denikin’s now-converging thrusts toward Moscow seemed all the more inexorable because they coincided with another White advance, by the North-West Army on Petrograd—precisely the sort of combined and synchronous operations that had eluded the AFSR and Kolchak’s Russian Army six months earlier. The North-West Army was based around the Pskov Volunteer Corps, an officer-heavy detachment of perhaps 6,000 men that had, over the winter of 1918–1919, found itself in the rather embarrassing situation of fighting the Reds while being subordinated to the nationalist Estonian Army of General Johan Laidoner. Even more embarrassingly, it was largely armed and uniformed by the Germans. By May–June 1919, however, White forces in the Baltic theater had freed themselves from Estonian control and came under the command of General N. N. Iudenich, one of Russia’s most successful commanders of the world war, who had been confirmed as commander of the North-West Front on 5 June 1919 by Admiral Kolchak.74 An initial move against Petrograd, in May–June 1919, however, achieved little success, despite the arrival of Iudenich during its prosecution; this failure was caused chiefly by the grave distractions being created in the rear of the North-West Front by White units that were nominally subordinate to its command, notably the rogue Western Volunteer Army, which had been created by the unpredictable General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov, who preferred to ally with pro-German forces in attacking Riga (during the Landeswehr War) than risk his forces in an attack on Petrograd. Undeterred, however, Iudenich gathered a force of some 50,000 men (although only 18,500 were in the active army), one in ten of whom were officers (including 53 generals). Taking advantage of revolts in the rear of opposing Red forces (notably the uprising at the fortress of Krasnaia Gorka) and distractions provided by Royal Navy operations in the Baltic and even the Gulf of Finland,75 Iudenich was thus able to launch a strategic offensive on 12 October 1919, capturing Luga (16 October 1919), thereby cutting Red communications to Pskov (which Estonian forces, now commanded by the talented General Jānis Balodis, entered on 20 October), and even investing the Petrograd palace suburbs of Gatchina (16 October 1919) and Tsarskoe Selo (20 October 1919), which were only 25 and 12 miles respectively from Nevskii Prospekt and the beckoning Winter Palace itself. The commanders of the armies of both Kolchak and Denikin imagined at various points that they could hear the tolling of the Kremlin bells in Moscow, but Iudenich’s men really could see the autumn sun glinting off the great golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in central Petrograd, whose defenses had been depleted by the dispatch to other fronts of many of its Bolshevized workers and sailors.76

With the arrival of War Commissar Trotsky’s train in the revolutionary citadel of Petrograd on 17 October 1919, however, the Whites’ fortunes changed forever. In energetic collaboration with Colonel V. M. Gittis (commander of the Western Front) and komandarmy Colonel S. D. Kharlamov and General N. D. Nadezhnyi—all of them the sort of tough and experienced “military specialists” (voenspetsy) that Trotsky had long favored—a hurriedly reinforced 7th Red Army (with a strength of 40,000 men, 453 field guns, 708 machine guns, 6 armored trains, and 23 aircraft) was able to halt the advance of the North-West Army before it severed the vital artery of the Moscow–Petrograd railway. Soviet forces then initiated an immediate counteroffensive, on 21 October 1919, that rapidly overwhelmed their opponents, who were inferior in numbers and arms. As Iudenich’s shattered forces limped back across the Estonian border, they were disarmed and interned by their unwelcoming hosts.77 This final development coincided with the arrangement of a Soviet–Estonian cease-fire (5 December 1919) and formal armistice on 31 December 1919 (there had actually been no fighting to speak of between the two sides for six months), which led swiftly to the subsequent Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920), bringing an end to the civil-war hostilities between the two countries and sealing the independence of Estonia. That settlement was, in turn, succeeded by the equally quite uncontentious treaties of the RSFSR with Lithuania (Treaty of Moscow, 12 July 1920), Latvia (Treaty of Riga, 11 August 1920), and Finland (Treaty of Tartu, 14 October 1920), which brought to a close the civil wars and wars of independence in the northwest.78

Iudenich’s efforts might have borne richer fruit had Petrograd been seriously and simultaneously threatened from the north in 1919. But although Allied forces and their Russian and Karelian allies were advancing down the Murmansk–Petrograd railway to Medvezhia Gora (Medvezh′egorsk), on the northern shores of Lake Onega, and then on toward Petrozavodsk by late May 1919; although a Finnish unit had at the same time crossed the border and was closing on the same city by June; and although (also in May–June) British marines (with a small fleet of well-armed monitors and gunboats) undertook offensives up the rivers Vaga and Northern Dvina toward Kotlas, as other interventionist forces (including U.S. detachments) sortied down the railway from Arkhangel′sk toward Vologda, none of this seriously threatened Petrograd or offered succor to Iudenich.79 Indeed, it was not intended to do so. The Finns (in their so-called Aunus Expedition, one of several campaigns known collectively as the Kinship Wars) were seeking to detach southern (Olonets) Karelia from Soviet Russia and knew that such an outcome would hardly be countenanced by the Whites, while the British offensives and the 8,000-strong North Russian Relief force that arrived in May–June 1919 were intended only to push the Bolsheviks back, so as to facilitate the complete withdraw of Allied forces. That withdrawal had been agreed upon in April 1919, got under way in June of that year, and was completed with the evacuation of Arkhangel′sk (26–27 September 1919) and Murmansk (12 October 1919).80

The last chapter of the northern saga of the civil wars closed with the evacuations of Arkhangel′sk and Murmansk by their last, desperate White defenders in early 1920, but it had always been the strangest of the theaters of struggle. It boasted by far the greatest concentration of Allied troops of the intervention (if one discounts the self-serving Japanese presence in the Far East), and White forces in the north were blessed with a capable and experienced commander, General E. K. Miller; yet in this sparsely populated polar wilderness, where many potential peasant conscripts were Karelians and shied away from the Russian incomers (or even sought union with Finland), Miller was all too often the epitome of the general without troops. Although the Whites’ Northern Army would claim a complement of more than 50,000 in late 1919 (that is, after the Allies had departed and the situation was rendered entirely hopeless), Miller’s force rarely mustered more than 5,000–10,000 volunteers, as men were rounded up and pressed into service, received their rations and uniforms, and then routinely disappeared back into the taiga. This necessitated such local innovations as the Slavo-British Legion, which is now chiefly remembered for the wrong reason: as the only unit of the civil wars in which Russian conscripts mutinied against and then killed four of their British officers.81

Had Petrograd fallen to the North-West Army or (more unlikely) the Northern Army, the strategic and morale-boosting effect upon the AFSR would have been incalculable. As it was, however, Trotsky’s successful defense of the Red citadel crushed White dreams.

What proved to be the turning point for the Reds on the Southern Front against Denikin came when the new Red main commander, Glavkom S. S. Kamenev, and Trotsky put together a new striking group, featuring strong contingents of the Red veterans of the Latvian and Estonian Riflemen, which drove into the left flank of the Volunteer Army, almost cutting off the Kornilovtsy and facilitating the Reds’ reoccupation of Orel on 20 October 1919, thereby denying White forces the opportunity of re-equipping at Tula. At the same time, the Volunteers were hit on the opposite flank by an impressive raid launched by a new Red phenomenon: S. M. Budennyi’s 1st Cavalry Corps (from 19 November 1919, the 1st Cavalry Army, or Konarmiia), the result of Trotsky’s summons of six weeks earlier, “Proletarians, to Horse!”82 This unexpected transformation of “Communists into cavalrymen,” as Trotsky put it (although, in truth, the cavalrymen themselves were overwhelmingly of Cossack, not proletarian, origin), forced General Shkuro to surrender the key city of Voronezh to Budennyi on 24 October 1919, effectively severing the Volunteers’ communications with the Don Army to their east and with their main fortified rear on the Don. When the Konarmiia then pushed on to capture the railway junction at Kastornoe (on the Voronezh–Kursk line), disaster loomed for the Whites—and loomed larger when Khar′kov fell as early as 11 December 1919. Until this point, the Volunteers’ 150-mile withdrawal had been relatively orderly, but beyond Khar′kov, with the railway lines crammed with typhus-ridden civilian refugees and military casualties, and a huge swathe of rear territory and key towns and railway junctions occupied by Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine, a further, headlong, 300-mile flight began, which by the first week of 1920 saw the remains of the force that just two months earlier had been so close to capturing Moscow streaming across the frozen river Don and once more into the North Caucasus.83

In rapid pursuit was the Konarmiia, now boasting more than 15,000 horsemen, supported by eight armored trains and its own squadron of aircraft. It and other Red forces—by now vastly outnumbering and outgunning their opponents—captured Rostov-on-Don and Novocherkassk on the same day, 7 January 1920. Meanwhile, the left flank of the AFSR also recoiled from the 12th and 14th Red Armies, as Kiev fell on 16 December 1919 and Odessa on 7 February 1920. The attempted White evacuation of the latter—the third such awful hemorrhage the great port had suffered during the civil wars—was a shambles, with local commander General N. N. Shilling drawing universal criticism for abandoning tens of thousands of retreating AFSR forces and civilians to the Reds.84 The only saving grace for the AFSR was that General I. A. Slashchov’s 3rd Corps of the Volunteers had cut through Makhno’s insurgents in Northern Tauride to reach and then hold the Perekop isthmus, thereby safeguarding the Crimean peninsula as a haven for the fleeing Whites.

The sudden and disastrous White collapse sowed discord among the AFSR leadership and created a sense of disorientation, as participants in the retreat tried to keep track of kaleidoscopic changes in command—and even of where Denikin and his stavka were actually located, as headquarters shifted almost weekly (from Taganrog, to Rostov, to Tikhoretskaia, to Ekaterinodar, and finally to Novorossiisk in the first weeks of 1920). One of Denikin’s first reactions to the collapse was to replace General Mamontov at the head of the Don Army with General S. G. Ulagai, thus infuriating the Don Cossacks (who were already deserting en masse to the Reds, as the latter approached their home territories). In December 1919, Denikin then transferred General Wrangel to the command of the Volunteer Army (replacing the now permanently drunk Mai-Maevskii, who was retired). This was far too late for Wrangel to effect the sort of concentrated Cossack push against Moscow that he had long favored over Denikin’s multipronged Moscow Directive, and the baron was quick to remind Denikin of this—in a typically tactless letter that he sent to his commander in mid-February 1920. Although a recent biographer of Wrangel has highlighted that the baron subsequently censored the letter for publication in his memoirs, omitting passages that he deemed to have been too personal in their attacks on Denikin—expunging, for example, a description of Denikin as a man “poisoned by ambition and the taste of power, surrounded by dishonest flatterers” and one who was “no longer preoccupied with saving the country, but only with preserving power”85—Denikin would, of course, have seen the original version and was consequently enraged. Moreover, and most disloyally, the contents of the letter had been leaked by Wrangel to the press and were published widely. Rumours rapidly spread that Wrangel was about to stage a coup against Denikin, who dismissed Wrangel from his post on 2 January 1920. Such bickering, however, seriously undermined any attempt by the AFSR to hold a line along the River Manych.

There were feuds at this time within the Red ranks also: the burgeoning cult of Budyennyi sparked jealousies; Colenel V. I. Shorin was suddenly dismissed from the command of the South-East Front for having taken too long to recapture Tsaritsyn (which finally fell on 2 January 1920); and the charismatic cavalryman B. M. Dumenko, a rival to Budennyi as the “first saber of the republic” and chief inspirer of the liberation of the Don over the previous months, was arrested and shot for involvement in the mysterious death of his military commissar. Moreover, Red forces were now very far from their home territories, were occupying generally hostile Cossack lands (and were poised to attack more of the same), and were exhausted after their 450-mile counterthrust against the Whites. But the situation in the White camp was truly chaotic, with Cossack separatism once again raising its head in the form of the gathering of an All-Cossack Supreme Krug in January 1920 (with representatives of the Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, and other hosts).86 To make matters worse, just as Kolchak’s Siberia had sprouted a number of anti-White SR organizations as the Russian Army collapsed in late 1919, in early 1920 an unexpected second blossoming of the Democratic Counter-Revolution overran much of the rear of the AFSR, especially in the wooded hills of the coastal Black Sea region of the North Caucasus, where there lurked thousands of deserters and refugees from all sorts of civil-war armies that were being loosely organized by fugitive SRs. This self-styled “Green” movement was coordinated from November 1919 onward by a united Black Sea Liberation Committee.87

For the White movement in 1920, then, February may have been the cruelest month. On a single day, 7 February 1920, Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak was executed at Irkutsk while the last White toehold in Ukraine was lost with the botched evacuation of Odessa. Meanwhile, the internment of Iudenich’s forces in Estonia was completed. On 10 February 1920, Red forces captured Krasnovodsk (today’s Türkmenbaşy), on the shores of the eastern Caspian, consolidating Soviet power in Central Asia and forcing onward the withered remnants of the 15,000 Urals Cossacks who had departed from their base at Gur′ev on 5 January 1920. Finally, on 19–21 February 1920, a thousand White soldiers were evacuated from Arkhangel′sk, leaving tens of thousands more to their fate. Denikin did manage a brief resurgence, as Don Cossack forces recaptured Rostov on 20 February 1920, but it was a false dawn, and for the remainder of that bitterly cold and fateful month, his forces retreated toward the Kuban. Harried, however, by a newly reorganized, 160,000-strong Caucasian Front of the Red Army (commanded by the energetic M. N. Tukhachevskii), and with the 1st Cavalry Army pressing in along the Tsaritsyn–Ekaterinodar railway on their right flank, there was nothing Denikin’s forces could do when they got to the Kuban other than immediately abandon its capital, Ekaterinodar, without a fight, on 17 March and then make for the last remaining major port in anti-Bolshevik hands, Novorossiisk. Their fading hope was of evacuation by sea, before that city fell either to the Reds advancing on it along the Rostov railway from the north or to the SR-insurgent forces of the Black Sea Liberation Committee approaching it from the south (who had captured Tuapse, 75 miles south of Novorossiisk, on 17 February 1920). That dream was shattered by a shortage of shipping (although the Allies provided some vessels) and the all-pervading chaos. Novorossiisk in February 1920 was inundated by “a sea of wounded, sick and refugees,” according to one eyewitness: “Bodies lay in all sorts of corners, while the hospitals were besieged by sick, frozen and hungry people for whom nothing could be done, so that those stricken with typhus remained just where they happened to fall. . . . The whole foreshore was packed with people, carts and animals—whole families on their knees, praying for help, while the criminals of the underworld came out and in the confusion preyed on the elderly and defenceless.”88 About 35,000 White soldiers and casualties did eventually find berths on Russian and Allied vessels by the last days of March, but almost as many again (and untold numbers of civilians) were captured in the port when the Red Army arrived on 26–27 March 1920. This was only the beginning: 60,000 more Whites were surrounded and captured at Sochi in April 1920, by which time the SR–Green forces there had also been tamed by the Red Army, while a guerrilla war in the Kuban region—initiated by White fugitives, who adopted the grandiose title of the People’s Army for the Regeneration of Russia, commanded by General M. A. Fostikov—achieved little more than to provoke further Red retributions and massacres.89

The Red Army

The foregoing account of the 1919 campaigns concentrated on the White advances because the Reds tended not to make grand strategic decisions in that year.90 Rather, they reacted to the probings of their opponents and took advantage when the latter collapsed. That, however, is not to downplay the supreme achievement of the Soviet government in the civil-wars years: the creation of the Red Army. Much of the credit for this has, rightly, been apportioned to war commissar L. D. Trotsky.

The Red Army was born out of the disintegration of the Imperial Russian Army, which the Bolsheviks had done so much to foster (regarding the army as a nest of real and potential counterrevolutionaries). Prior to October 1917, the party’s propagandizing among troops fostered disorder and desertion; after October, Sovnarkom issued an avalanche of decrees canceling all ranks and titles, permitting the election of officers, expanding the competences of soldiers’ committees, and ordering the demobilization of successive classes of conscripts. All this culminated in the order for a general demobilization of the old army on 29 January 1918.91 However, the disintegration of the old army did not necessarily imply the creation of a new one.

Like most socialists, the Bolsheviks generally despised militarism and regarded the standing army as the chief instrument of state oppression of the working class. For them, especially those consolidating around N. I. Bukharin, A. S. Bubnov, and V. M. Smirnov as the nucleus of the Left Bolsheviks within the party, one of the essential purposes of the revolution was to destroy the army and to replace it with a democratic militia system. As advocates of the untapped potential for revolutionary creativity of the proletariat, the Left further considered that any subsequent conflict, either domestic or international, would be conducted according to quite different principles of organization and strategy—a concept they dubbed “revolutionary war”—in which what would count would not be military training or experience but the unstoppable and incorruptible élan of the workers-in-arms. However, the militia system failed at the first hurdle, during the German invasion of Soviet territory in February 1918 that was occasioned by Sovnarkom’s initial reluctance to accept the peace terms on offer at Brest-Litovsk. It had been expected that at least 300,000 recruits would come forward for this partisan army, but only around 20,000 were mustered (a third of them from Petrograd).92 Consequently, the German advance was virtually unopposed during the “Eleven-Days War,” and the Soviet government had to accept the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

All this had an immediate impact on Trotsky, who resigned as foreign commissar and became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs on 14 March 1918. A dedication to order, routine, hierarchy, and discipline was central to his character and style as a revolutionary, and he soon began to impose those characteristics on the Red military. Within a week of becoming war commissar, he was telling the Moscow Soviet, “Comrades! Our Soviet Socialist Republic needs a well-organized army,” and went on to assert:

While we were fighting with the Kaledinites we could successfully remain content with units which had been put together in haste. Now, however, in order to cope with the creative work of reviving the country . . . , in order to ensure the security of the Soviet Republic under conditions of international counter-revolutionary encirclement, such units are already inadequate. We need a properly and freshly organized army!93

But how was such an army to be organized and led? Certainly Trotsky knew such a task would be beyond his own capabilities and those of the other journalists and activists who led the Bolshevik party. So, in a leap of faith that must be regarded as one of the key moments in the civil wars, Trotsky grasped the nettle and, in address of 28 March 1918 to a Moscow city conference of the party, he focused on what he termed the “sore point” in party discussions, which for him had to be at the heart of the new army:

the question of drawing military specialists, that is, to speak plainly, former officers and generals, into the work of creating and administering the Army. All the fundamental, leading institutions of the Army are now so constructed that they consist of one military specialist and two political commissars. This is the basic pattern of the Army’s leading organs. . . . Given the present regime in the Army—I say this here quite openly—the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree.94

Within a few weeks, more than 8,000 former officers were serving in the Red ranks, and by the end of 1918, 30,000 of them were employed—not as “officers,” but to spare Bolshevik blushes, as “military specialists” (voenspetsy)—a disproportionate number of them being graduates of the imperial Academy of the General Staff.95 There were, of course, cases of treachery and desertion by voenspetsy (notably when virtually the entire faculty of the Academy of the General Staff itself went over to the enemy on the Volga during the summer of 1918), which fed the fires of opprobrium that leftist party radicals felt for this “treachery” to proletarian principles. Also, Trotsky’s wish—expressed in an article of 31 December 1918 eulogizing “The Military Specialists and the Red Army”—that he was returning to the topic “for the last time, I hope,” was not realized: residual Left Bolshevik resentment at such confounding of revolutionary purity remained widespread (and was voiced with great bitterness at a conference of Bolshevik army delegates in late March 1919).96 Critics of the employment of voenspetsy could point out that it had, after all, been stated, in the Sovnarkom decree of 3 January 1918, which first mentioned the creation of such a force, that “the Red Army of Workers and Peasants will be formed from the most conscious and organized elements of the working masses”—a definition that hardly encompassed the employment of the military elite of tsarist Russia.97 Debates on this issue would become particularly vitriolic and divisive at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1919, where concessions had to be made to Trotsky’s opponents in order to defuse a sizable “military opposition” within the RKP(b). This loosely organized group was demanding that military commissars be afforded a greater role in decision making within the army and that party institutions should assume a larger role in directing a Red Army that was increasingly manned by conscripted peasants.98 Although it was claimed at the time, by Trotsky, that only 5 out of 82 voenspetsy army commanders ever deserted,99 a more recent investigation of materials in the Russian archives has established that some 549 highly valued genshtabisty deserted from the Red Army in the period 1918–1921, and that in total, almost one in three voenspetsy managed to flee to the enemy.100 Yet despite this debilitating and dangerous hemorrhage, and despite the lingering qualms of the Leftists, at least the principle of utilizing officers and experts had been firmly established, and the majority of officers employed in the Red Army (including 613 genshtabisty) remained at their posts.

Left Bolshevik (and Left-SR) irritations were at least partly salved by a second, truly revolutionary aspect of the new army: the appointment of so-called military commissars to all units. Although this office was based on the far-distant precedent of a similarly named institution at the time of the French revolutionary wars, and while the Provisional Government of 1917 had also named its special plenipotentiaries at the front and in the regions “commissars,” the military (or political) commissar of the Red forces was an original phenomenon. It was, in fact, one of the key martial innovations of the Reds during the civil war. According to an order signed by Trotsky on 6 April 1918:

The military commissar is the direct political organ of Soviet power in the army. . . . Commissars are appointed from among irreproachable revolutionaries, capable of remaining under the most difficult circumstances, the embodiment of revolutionary duty. . . . [They] must see to it that the army does not become disassociated from the Soviet system as a whole and that particular military institutions do not become centers of conspiracy or instruments to be used against the workers and peasants. The commissar takes part in all the work of the military leaders, receives reports and dispatches along with them, and counter-signs orders. War Councils will give effect only to such orders as have been signed not only by military leaders but also by at least one military commissar.

He was equally insistent, though, that “the commissar is not responsible for the expediency of purely military, operational, combat orders.”101

In terms of army administration, the aforementioned Supreme Military Council was at the apex of a still nebulous command hierarchy of what was becoming, in the first half of 1918, the “Worker-Peasant Red Army.” This new, revolutionary armed force had been first mentioned by (a similar) name in a Sovnarkom decree of 3 January 1918 (“On the Formation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army”), but did not begin to become a living reality until its founding units were mustered from 23 February of that year (a date subsequently celebrated as “Red Army Day” in Soviet Russia). The Supreme Military Council itself replaced the improvised Revolutionary Field Staff and was given the tasks of providing strategic leadership to the armed forces of the Soviet Republic and overseeing the building of the Red Army.102 Following the setbacks on the Volga during the summer of 1918, however, it was abolished on 6 September 1918 and was replaced by the Revvoensovet (Revolutionary Military Soviet, or Council) of the Republic (RVSR), which restored some of the influence of senior commissars. In the midst of these events, on 2 September 1918, Vācietis was promoted to main commander in chief (Glavkom) of the Red Army (his predecessor, M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, who had failed to recognize the crucial importance of the Eastern Front, was quietly shunted aside).103 On 11 September 1918, the RVSR then devised a formal structure for the entire Red Army, which was divided (initially) into five armies, each with 11 divisions of between six and nine regiments (plus reserve units), grouped around three fronts (the Northern Front, the Eastern Front, and the Southern Front) and the Western Fortified Area.104 Revvoensovets were then established for each army (from 12 December 1918), military commissars were assigned to shadow commanders and to offer ideological guidance and motivation to Red forces, and regular units finally displaced almost all irregular (“partisan”) formations. The structure of the Red Army that would eventually emerge victorious from the wars was thus essentially in place before the end of the first year of serious struggle. Moreover, with control of the heartland of the old empire firmly established, the Soviet regime was able to draw upon the stocks of supplies meant for the old army—supplies that had had to be stretched to breaking point in 1916–1917 to maintain the Imperial Russian Army of some 10,000,000 men, but which would provide rich pickings for a Red Army that would never put in the field more than 5 percent of such a figure.

Thus, the new Red Army (unlike the Whites) had some central, strategic direction (greatly aided by the fact that the Soviet government had inherited, wholesale, the central administrative apparatus and personnel of the old army—from telegraphists to typewriters).105 The Whites were far less fortunate in this respect, having to rely on the meager resources of the outlying military districts of tsarist times to which they had been confined. The coordinating organs of the Red Army were then topped off, following a VTsIK decree of 30 November 1918, with the formation of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense (from April 1920, the Council of Labor and Defense, the STO).106 This body, which was chaired (ex officio) by Lenin and included Trotsky (as chair of the RVSR, although he was rarely available to attend its meetings), Stalin (as the representative of VTsIK), and several people’s commissars of the most interested commissariats, was created by Sovnarkom but was coequal to it, as STO directives were considered to be the equivalent of state laws.107 It played no part in the formation of military strategy, but STO sought instead to direct and coordinate the work of all economic commissariats with all institutions having a stake in the defense of Soviet Russia. In the circumstances of a confusion of civil wars, it managed that task with relative success. Again, the Whites had nothing to compare with it.

From May 1918, the nascent Red Army could also begin to draw on a steadier stream of recruits, as a general mobilization was instituted and the volunteer principle was abandoned, although the registration of those eligible was rudimentary and the nonappearance and desertion of mobilized men remained a problem. By late 1918, the Red Army was still a long way from resolving this issue, but it was much closer to doing so than were its rivals, and signs were apparent that a solution acceptable to both sides of this bargaining process—the citizens and the state—was achievable. Back in June 1918, the Bolsheviks had attempted to mobilize all workers and all “nonexploiting” peasants aged 21–25 years in 51 districts of the Volga and the Urals, but in the absence of a functioning central draft organization, impromptu and usually unsuccessful local levées had had to be attempted. Hardly more was achieved by a countrywide draft on 11 September 1918, while even by early 1919 drafts were widely evaded; for example, in May 1919, a month after a draft was initiated, Tambov had produced precisely 24 recruits of the 5,165 anticipated, and by the time this round of mobilizations was called off (in June 1919) just 24,364 of 140,000 expected recruits had been mustered.108 In his examination of this phenomenon, Erik Landis describes “hundreds of thousands” of deserters taking up arms in the Red rear and this “green army” severely compromising the stability of Red fronts from around April to September 1919 (just as Denikin was preparing his advance).109 According to one pioneering Western study of the phenomenon of desertion, the rate of flight was so great throughout the civil wars that ultimately the Reds were only able to triumph over their enemies by dint of the larger pool of men they could draw upon.110

This may well have been the case, but a more recent investigation concludes that retention rates were gradually improving in the Red Army. In the most insightful examination of this process to date, Joshua Sanborn dates the beginning of it to a decree passed at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 10 July 1918 that linked citizenship to military service and obliged all healthy men aged 18–40 years to come forward.111 Improvements thereafter he attributes to the Soviet state building an apparatus that could be seen to apportion the burden of mobilization at least reasonably fairly among its citizens—the crucial factor being that the system was one that was central, not local, and therefore perceived to be less open to abuses.112 In sum, Sanborn concluded, the Bolsheviks “created a state-sponsored discourse that finally incorporated the idea that soldiers acquired rights when they performed their national duty.” In particular, they were assured that their families would be cared for and that they, as soldiers, would be respected by the state and would acquire privileges above those granted to other citizens.113 Tied to this, though, was a degree of flexibility in the approach of the state. The Red Army could, of course, unleash terror against those who deserted, and by April 1919 the Anti-Desertion Commission had established numerous branches at local levels, which organized armed patrols to comb the countryside and snare runaways and had the power to confiscate property from the families of known deserters and those suspected of assisting or harboring them.114 But, as Sanborn notes, commanders actually used a “two-pronged” approach to desertion. This was reflected in an order by Lenin of December 1918 in which, while describing deserters as “heinous and shameful” and representative of “the depraved and ignorant,” he nevertheless offered a two-week amnesty for those absentees who returned to their units. This was accompanied by a nationwide propaganda campaign to convince shirkers and deserters that they could not hide and would be punished, while the Red Army Central Desertion Commission urged that repression be mixed with “proof of concern for the families of Red Army soldiers.”115 Finally, an intensive and extensive “verification” campaign seems to have been particularly effective throughout 1919, during which all those men of draft age in the Soviet zone were required to attend meetings at which their eligibility for military service would be checked. Of course, given the ongoing chaos, this was never applied universally, but in the second half of 1919, 2,239,604 men attended such meetings and 272,211 of them were then enrolled in the armed forces. By August 1920, a further 470,106 men were recruited by this means. Thus, noted Sanborn, “a military service consensus had been reached and conscription normalized.”116 Certainly the White forces never came close to emulating this—although their failure to do so had as much to do with a lack of administrative resources in the peripheral areas in which they operated as with ignorance of the importance of such systems of social control. On the Red side, the results were clear: a Red Army of 800,000 men in January 1919 would become one of 3,000,000 by January 1920.117

White Defeat

The Red versus White struggle was decided on the battlefield, but the outcome of civil wars also depends on the contenders’ ability, through politics and propaganda, to convince people to fight for them (or at least not to raise arms against them). In this field, governance, the Whites were a spectacular failure. Consequently, no matter how successful their main military thrusts were, when the tide turned and advances morphed into retreats, the Whites had nothing to fall back on. Hence the precipitous collapse of the AFSR, the North-West Army, and Kolchak’s Russian Army.

This is not to say that the Whites did not try to compete with the Bolsheviks on the political plane—however much their background in the Russian military tended to incline them to regard “politics” as a dirty word (a feeling amplified by the disasters of 1917). Both Kolchak and Denikin actually elaborated political programs in 1919 that might—despite the generally held perceptions of the Whites as “reactionaries”—broadly be described as “liberal.”118 They repeatedly committed themselves to resuscitating local governments, to respecting the right of the non-Russian peoples to self-determination, to respecting the rights of trade unions, and to radical land reform, and vowed that, upon victory in the civil war, they would summon a new national assembly to determine the future constitution of the Russian state. Kolchak, whose Omsk government was more stable, rooted, and fully developed than the rather nebulous and peripatetic Special Council that advised Denikin, tended to take the lead in such matters,119 but both the main White military camps had phalanxes of Kadet auxiliaries to add flesh to the bones of their declarations on politics and to staff their press agencies, advisory councils, and bureaus of propaganda.120 Moreover, there is little doubt that both Denikin and Kolchak held genuinely progressive views on a range of issues, including the necessity of radical land reform in Russia—the key issue of the previous century—and that both were entirely sincere in their protestations that they had no personal desire to hang on to political power for a moment longer than it would take to drive Lenin from the Kremlin. Also, although the document that established the Kolchak dictatorship (“The Statute on the Provisional Structure of State Power in Russia”) made no provision for its termination, the admiral put on public record, in a speech at Ekaterinburg in February 1919, for example, a solemn pledge that he would not retain power “for a single day longer than the interests of the country demand,” and asserted that “in the future the only admissible form of government in Russia will be a democratic one.”121 And these declarations reaped some rewards: in May 1919, for example, the Big Four at Paris were sufficiently impressed with Kolchak’s democratic credentials that they would consider recognizing his regime as the government of all Russia.122

However well-drafted or well-intentioned, though, there was always something flimsy, half-baked, and unconvincing about White politics; and a lingering sense prevailed that neither Denikin nor Kolchak was much interested in the details of the political concerns that had been agitating Russia since—and, indeed, long before—February 1917. Moreover, however egalitarian were the personal beliefs and intentions of the major White leaders, who were far from the clichéd caricatures of prince-nez-adorned, sadistic fops of Bolshevik propaganda,123 this could not disperse the stench of restorationism that suffused their camps, which were heavily populated with the former elite of the Russian Empire. British officers with the mission in South Russia, for example, who had been invited to a banquet held by the local branch of the Union of Landowners at Novocherkassk, soon sensed that they were among “a hot-bed of monarchists” and were deeply embarrassed when one of the guests (a cousin of Nicholas Romanov) ordered the orchestra to play “God Save the Tsar,” the old imperial anthem (which had been banned since the February Revolution).124

Consequently, although Denikin’s land laws and labor legislation might have promised fair treatment to peasants and workers, the populace of territory occupied by the AFSR invariably felt the whip and wrath of returning landlords and factory bosses, who had been driven out by the wide-scale seizures of private property that had accompanied the spread of Soviet power in 1917–1918 and now sought revenge and recompense.125 The same rule applied in the east, as Kolchak’s forces advanced from Siberia (where large, landed estates were almost unknown) across the Urals to the Volga region (beyond which they became general)—despite the fact that Kolchak himself was clearly committed to a progressive land reform resembling that assayed in Russia in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution and that Omsk’s Ministry of Agriculture was teeming with former associates of the reforming prime minister of those days, P. A. Stolypin.126 Most telling of all was that Kolchak’s “Decree on Land” was not issued until April 1919, when his army’s move toward European Russia necessitated such action.127 Similarly, on the second great issue of the day—national self-determination—Kolchak also remained silent until the spring of 1919, when the focus of Paris on the Whites’ intentions prompted action—or at least more promises.128

A variety of explanations might be adduced for such prevarication. A generous reading of White policy would emphasize that the movement was genuinely committed to a stance of non-predetermination—one that, disinterestedly, inhibited (even forbade) the introduction of significant reforms during the armed struggle; such acts, according to the doctrine, which was routinely espoused by the Whites, would have to await the decisions of a new constituent assembly, once the Bolsheviks had been defeated. A less generous exposition of the “White idea” could cite cynical distortions and maskings of their true aims by the Whites, in order to secure peasant recruits to man their armies and Allied weapons to equip them, while attempting to hoodwink any too-trusting members of the national minorities into accepting that promises of self-determination emanating from Omsk and Ekaterinodar were real.129

The Whites’ evasive and contradictory stance on the nationalities question was particularly damaging to their cause (given that, especially in South Russia and the northwest, they tended to be operating from bases in lands where Russians were in a minority and non-Russians were using the postimperial and post–world war hiatus to fashion their independence. Thus, Denikin would occasionally sing the praises of self-determination, yet more often espouse the cause of a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” while engaging in a prolonged border war (the “Sochi conflict”) with the Democratic Republic of Georgia,130 and also directly insulting the Ukrainians by referring to that land by the condescending tsarist-era term “Little Russia.”131 He would also offer up such alarming suggestions regarding the proper delineation of a new Polish–Russian border, in the wake of the establishment of the Second Polish Republic at the world war’s end, that Warsaw would call a halt to his army’s operations in the spring of 1919 and then enter into secret peace talks with Moscow that would facilitate the redeployment of 40,000 men from the Red Army’s Western Front to its “Southern Front, Against Denikin” in the autumn of that year.132 Another instructive example was the case of Daghestan and its neighbors in the Caucasus, who had united in an autonomous Mountain Republic. This regime had initially been dissolved by the Bolshevik-dominated Terek Soviet Republic at Vladikavkaz in the spring of 1918, but had reestablished itself as Soviet power crumbled in the North Caucasus later that year. It then had repulsed a new Soviet offensive in April 1919, only to find that, when Denikin’s forces subsequently occupied the North Caucasus and then Daghestan, it had to flee again—this time from the Whites.133

In Siberia, Kolchak had less immediate concerns with the non-Russian nationalities, who were not present in sufficient numbers within his realm to cause harm (although the desertion from his front line around Ufa, in February 1919, of 6,500 Bashkir forces, who had despaired of their treatment by the Whites, left a big hole in the front line).134 However, as supreme ruler his pronouncements on the issue had national and international consequences, and here it was revealing that Kolchak should choose the case of Finland, which was already independent and certainly unrecoverable, to dig in his heels: when General Mannerheim, in July 1919, offered a deal whereby his 100,000-strong army would capture Petrograd for the Whites in return for some not inconsiderable but hardly outrageous conditions (recognition of Finnish independence, the secession to Finland of Pechenga, self-determination for Karelia, free navigation through Lake Ladoga for Finnish merchant vessels, etc.), Kolchak refused to agree. His advisor, George Guins, would plead with him that “the prime aim must be the defeat of the Bolsheviks and only second the putting back together of Russia,”135 but the admiral would not recognize the logic of such an approach. For Kolchak, Russia could not be saved from the Bolsheviks if it was in pieces, because Russia in pieces was not Russia.

So, both generous and cynical approaches to White politics have elements of truth to them. Over and above such considerations, however, it has to be conceded that—for what they regarded as the purest of motives—the White leaders distained all politics; their contempt for what they, as officers, regarded as an unwholesome and ungentlemanly pursuit was at least honest, if misguided, and was certainly reinforced by the depressing experience of 1917, when all Russia seemed to have turned into a vast, endless, clamorous, and pointless political meeting.136

The Whites’ distaste for politics, and especially class-based politics, knitted perfectly with the claim of their Kadet allies to be, as a party, “above class” and “above politics” (although, again, a cynic might point out that the Kadets were calculating here that there was no strong bourgeois class in Russia that might support their liberal platform) and with that party’s historical tendency to place nation above all else. Moreover, the particular circumstances of post–world war Europe at the moment, over the winter of 1918–1919, that the White movement reached maturity, strongly reinforced this predilection. The White leaders were all too well aware that although there were ranks of irreconcilable anti-Bolsheviks in and around the governments in London, Paris, and Washington, there were many Allied politicians who did not fear the Soviet government, or who hoped to use Russia’s discomfort to their own countries’ advantage, or who were genuinely overwhelmed by war-weariness. In these circumstances, the end of the world war might not prove advantageous: consequently, a Kolchak supporter in the Russian Far East, for example, recorded his impressions of the sight of British Tommies celebrating the armistice as “not particularly joyous,” as civil wars waged on in Russia; the admiral’s secretary, the aforementioned Guins, would reflect that the collapse of Germany had been “fatal to the anti-Bolshevik struggle”; and one of his generals would bluntly assert that, from 11 November 1918 onward, “Kolchak had no Allies.”137 Consequently, if Kolchak and his supporters were to win what they desired above all else—the admittance of Russia to the family of Allied “victor nations,” a seat at the forthcoming peace conference, and the opportunity to ensure that their country was properly rewarded for the very considerable part it had played in the world war—the lesson was clear. A few days after having assumed the mantle of “supreme ruler” in November 1918, Kolchak spelled out that lesson:

The day is dawning when the inexorable course of events will demand victory of us; upon this victory or defeat will depend our life or death, our success or failure, our freedom or ignoble slavery. The hour of the great international peace conference is now near and if, by that hour, we are not victorious then we will lose our right to a vote at the conference of victor nations and our freedom will be decided upon without us.138

Kolchak’s calculations were correct. In November–December 1918, nothing was done by the Allies to dissuade Romania from snatching formerly Russian Bessarabia from its German occupiers. Then, at meetings on 12–19 January 1919 in Paris, the Council of Ten decided that no Russian representatives would be afforded a seat among them. Days later, in accordance with a scheme devised by Lloyd George and Robert Borden, the prime minister of Canada, an invitation was sent out by radio (from a transmitter atop the Eiffel Tower) suggesting that all warring parties in “Russia” should meet at a separate peace conference at Prinkipo, off Constantinople, in the Sea of Marmara. When informed of the latter, Kolchak was aghast and spluttered, “Good God! Can you believe it? An invitation to peace with the Bolsheviks!”139 Had he been told some weeks later, in early March 1919, that a senior American diplomat, William C. Bullitt, was at that moment being entertained in Moscow, was parlaying in a semi-official manner with Lenin, and was offering very generous terms to end the intervention, Kolchak’s language might have been less temperate.140 Then, in April, news broke of a scheme approved in Paris for supplying food relief and medicine to the peoples of Russia, including those in the Soviet zone. Kolchak’s precise response to news of this initiative of Fridtjof Nansen is unrecorded, but he probably found himself in unusual accord with Trotsky, who, surveying the scene on 13 April 1919, commented, “We have before us a case of betrayal of the minor brigands by the major ones.”141

In the light of all this, it seems sensible to conclude that analyses of the Whites’ defeat in the civil wars that focus on their tardy, half-hearted, and haphazard attempts to win political support are—however accurate such a portrayal—ultimately misguided. “All for the Army,” as the mantra went at Omsk, was probably a reasonable response to the circumstances of the time. The price to be paid, however, in terms of popular support and the concomitant ability to absorb and bounce back from military defeats, was revealed in the manner in which all four of the major White fronts disintegrated once their advances had been turned.

1918–1922: On the Internal Front

To say that the Whites were unpopular is not, however, to imply that the Reds were popular. Clearly they were not in nationalist-held territories stretching from Finland, through the Baltic, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia to Central Asia.142 And even in the Russian lands, what really counted was that the Soviet government was less—sometimes only marginally less—unpopular than its opponents. In fact, Lenin’s regime faced persistent internal challenges—armed and unarmed, martial and ideological, as well as economic—to its governance, in principle and in practice. However, these challenges remained largely isolated from one another; importantly, they were never so extensive as to replicate the no-go, partisan-infested regions that spread like a typhus rash across the White rear in Ukraine, South Russia, and especially Siberia. Moreover, attacks on the internal fronts only reached dangerous proportions for the Soviet government from late 1920 onward. By that time, the major external threats had been dealt with: the White forces were on their last legs; Allied forces (with a few exceptions in the Far East) had left the country; the Allied economic blockade of the RSFSR had been officially lifted (in January 1920); and pens across the globe were poised to sign a series of mutually profitable agreements between Moscow and its former interventionist enemies, of which the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 16 March 1921 was only the first.

Initially, it is important to note, the Bolsheviks had been popular: their promises of “peace, bread and land” and of workers’ control of industry in the wake of the October Revolution were in tune with the mood of the masses. This was vital, as it had facilitated the “Triumphal March of Soviet Power” over the winter and early spring of 1917–1918 and gave the Bolsheviks mastery of the populous and relatively well-stocked central Russian heartland, from which no enemy was able to dislodge them. But workers’ control proved a disaster for the industrial economy and the railways and was rapidly replaced by one-man management in 1918.143 Meanwhile, having granted all land to the peasants in October 1917, by May–June 1918, as the fighting on the Volga deepened the civil wars and important grain-producing regions were detached from the Soviet heartland (including Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Western Siberia), the Soviet government was proclaiming a “food dictatorship,” reserving the right to extract from the villages as much grain and other resources as it required (prodrazverstka), and was dispatching armed detachments (prodotriady) into the countryside to do just that. The truth was that although Lenin only came up with a collective term (“War Communism”) for these policies in 1921, implying that it was a policy forced on the party by emergency circumstances, such dirigisme and such distrust of the peasantry as petite-bourgeois class enemies chimed much more closely with the Bolsheviks’ ideological tenets from the beginning, and much of the party pursued them energetically.144

As unemployment rose in the spring of 1918, as a consequence of economic confusion and the demobilization of the old army, and food supplies dwindled as a consequence of the break-up of formerly market-oriented estates and chaos on the railroads, instances of strikes and protests soared in the Soviet zone—especially in the cold and hungry north and especially in Petrograd.145 This then had immediate knock-on effects politically, as the Mensheviks enjoyed a sudden electoral revival in elections for local soviets in the spring of 1918; in fact, they won the elections for city soviets in all the major cities of the Central Industrial Region and most of the smaller cities. This, in turn, induced widespread falsification of the results by the Bolshevik authorities, the effective exclusion of the Mensheviks from future elections, and no little violence on the part of the Soviet government against opposition parties and organizations deemed to be influenced by them.146 Meanwhile, in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the escalation of the blatantly anti-peasant policies of War Communism, the Bolsheviks’ former coalition partners, the Left-SRs, resigned from Sovnarkom in March 1918 and staged an uprising in Moscow in early July. The latter was all the more worrying for the Soviet government as it coincided with a major uprising organized by Boris Savinkov at Iaroslavl′ and the mutiny on the Volga staged by the commander of that front, Colonel Murav′ev. This was succeeded by a series of assassinations of leading Bolsheviks (including Petrograd Cheka boss Moisei Uritskii) and, on 30 August 1918, an attempted assassination of Lenin.

In response to all this and the uncovering of an alleged plot against the Soviet government organized by Allied agents in Moscow (the “Lockhart Plot”), the bourgeoisie and its representatives (in Soviet eyes)—including officers and officer cadets, Kadets, priests, teachers, and students, as well as several former tsarist ministers—were the primary target of the thousands of arrests and the 8,000–15,000 shootings that, within eight weeks, had followed Sovnarkom’s decree “On Red Terror” of 5 September 1918. The principle that guided actions such as these was established by the Chekist Mārtiņš Lācis, who infamously declared that he saw his organization’s task as “the extermination of the bourgeoisie as a class” and determined that a suspect’s social class, not the evidence against him or her, should be uppermost in the mind of an investigator.147

But many workers too had fallen victim for their alleged counterrevolutionary crimes, while many entirely innocent people were also executed. Moreover, workers understood that although the Terror had only intensified in the autumn of 1918, its executioner, the Cheka, had been one of the very first institutions founded (on 7 December 1917) by the Soviet state—that it was, in fact, an essential and entirely necessary element of the revolution in the eyes of many Bolsheviks. Moreover, sudden waves of arrests and executions would periodically engulf the big cities of the Soviet zone throughout the ensuing years. In the autumn of 1919, for example, as Denikin’s forces closed on Moscow, the Cheka uncovered the machinations of the Tactical Center—a sort of umbrella organization for the remnants of the various anti-Bolshevik underground organizations that had sprung up and been cut down in 1918—and executed dozens of its real and alleged members.148

Such tactics did not contain urban unrest, however, as strikes continued, culminating in a huge wave of anti-Bolshevik worker activism in Petrograd in early 1921 (in which Mensheviks and anarchists featured prominently), which in turn prompted the uprising of the sailors at the nearby naval base of Kronshadt in February of that year. In sympathy with the striking and locked-out workers in the nearby city, and in protest against their own intolerable conditions of service, the sailors seized the island of Kotlin and issued proclamations in favor of “Soviets without Communists” and an end to the “commissarocracy.” To reconquer the island, huge Red Army forces were concentrated against Kotlin in mid-March 1921, and thousands of sailors and their supporters were killed, executed, imprisoned, or deported. Ironically, the Baltic sailors had earlier, in 1918, been eulogized by Trotsky as “the pride and glory of the revolution.”149 Despite the war commissars’ later protestations that by 1921 the majority of Baltic Fleet sailors were recent recruits from the “petite-bourgeois” peasantry and therefore innately hostile to the Soviet regime, the historian Israel Getzler has established that at least 75 percent of them had been recruited prior to 1918 (and were therefore likely to have been from the proletarian stock that the navy tended to prefer).150

In several of their resolutions, though, the Kronshtadt rebels had voiced their support for peasant victims of the predations of War Communism, which had inspired a series of uprisings in the villages—particularly (but far from exclusively) those in the immediate rear of a Red front, which were the most likely to be subjected to impromptu and locally organized Red Army requisitions.151 These disturbances began in the spring of 1918 and were particularly virulent in the rear districts of the newly formed Eastern Front, where 50 districts of Saratov province alone were involved. Perm province, farther north, was also the scene of such events in 1918. These uprisings, which took the form of collective actions of entire villages, were forcibly repressed, but continued to trouble the Soviet government over the next few years.152 In the spring of 1919, for example, the so-called Chapan (or Kaftan) War spread across Simbirsk, Samara, and Kazan provinces (just as Kolchak’s forces were approaching these regions). Several major towns were captured by the rebels and Soviet forces from the 4th Red Army had to be diverted from the front to expel them.153 All told, from January to June 1919 peasant disturbances occurred in 124 districts of European Russia.154

These events might have been explained by the delay in news arriving of the Soviet government’s announcement of a softening of its attitude toward the peasants in March 1919, when local Bolsheviks were ordered to put an end to one aspect of the class war in the countryside by treating “middle peasants” (i.e., those who did not exploit the labor of others) more mercifully. However, matters did not improve; late the following year, first Ufa (the “Pitchfork Rebellion”) then Tambov provinces, in the western Urals and in southeast European Russia, respectively, erupted, and then, from January 1921 much of Western Siberia (including Tiumen′, Omsk, and Akmolinsk provinces and the eastern stretches of Cheliabinsk and Ekaterinburg provinces) was overrun by peasant rebellions. Both the Tambov Rebellion and the Western Siberian uprising were less easily quashed than those in the Volga–Urals region, as they rapidly assumed a mass character, in which political and military leaderships (sometimes dominated by SRs or former SRs, as in the case of the Tambov leader A. S. Antonov) emerged to organize the peasantry, and led to the construction of real and substantial internal fronts, on which the Red Army battled peasant forces that could be numbered in the tens of thousands and proved themselves capable of capturing and holding large towns. A feature of the Siberian uprising that was especially galling to the Soviet government was the prominence in the ranks of the rebels of former members of anti-Kolchak partisan forces that had merged with the Red Army as it advanced eastward in 1919–1920.155

In a very lengthy analysis of the Tambov experience, sent to Lenin on 20 July 1921, V. A. Anotonov-Ovseenko (since February 1921 chairman of the VTsIK Plenipotentiary Commission for Tambov), although deploying the usual Soviet terminology of “kulaks” and “bandit gangs” to describe the hardly gang-like, 21,000-strong rebel army that the Red Army had to confront across the province, was openly critical of Soviet policy:

In general the Soviet regime was, in the eyes of the majority of the peasants, identified with flying visits by commissars or plenipotentiaries who were valiant at giving orders to the volost′ (District) Executive Committees and village Soviets and went around imprisoning the representatives of these local organs of authority for the non-fulfillment of frequently quite absurd requirements. It was also identified with the food requisitioning units, which often acted directly to the detriment of the peasant economy, without in any way profiting the State. The peasantry, in their majority have become accustomed to regarding the Soviet regime as something extraneous in relation to themselves, something that issues only commands, that gives orders most zealously, but quite improvidently.156

Most common, Antonov-Ovseenko noted, were peasant complaints against the dictatorship of the proletariat: “What sort of worker-peasant regime is it that we have?” they would ponder—“The regime in fact is that of the workers at the expense of the peasants.”157

To remedy matters, in a region that had been particularly adversely affected by the shifting fronts of the civil wars (not least during the aforementioned Mamontov raid), Antonov-Ovseenko suggested the merciless expunging of the rebel leadership, combined with a no less thorough, root-and-branch overhaul of the local Soviet administration and a campaign of reeducation. Tellingly, though, as a first step, he had some months earlier suggested the dispatch of two divisions of seasoned Red troops to the province.158 Soon afterward, Tukhachevskii arrived and began a process of pacification of the region through assigning Red forces to the villages, to guard against renewed flare-ups of rebellion, as the major Antonovite groups were extinguished one by one.159 A recent account has it that Tambov province experienced a gross loss of 240,000 people in the course of the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion, most of them while under internment or during subsequent repressions rather than in the actual fighting (although this figure includes questionable estimates of the “unborn”).160

In the end, of course, there could only be one victor in these unequal struggles, which, although almost simultaneous, remained isolated from one another. That victor would be the force that could deploy tens of thousands of trained and battle-hardened soldiers, supported by armored trains, tanks, aircraft, and (in the case of Tambov, and apparently for the first time in the civil wars) poison-gas brigades.161 That victor was, of course, the Red Army, largely free by the spring of 1921 of other commitments and headed by experienced commanders with whom the rebels could not compete.

Although in recent scholarship the severity of the peasant rebellions, especially in Tambov and Western Siberia, has received more emphasis than before, by far the best known of all the anti-Bolshevik insurgencies of the civil wars era remains that centered on southeastern Ukraine, which was named after its leader, the enigmatic and posthumously iconic anarchist Nestor Makhno.162 Batko (“Little Father”) Makhno was born in 1888 of poor peasant stock in Huliai-Pole, Ekaterinoslav province, and was converted to anarchism during the 1905 Revolution. Having been freed from a Moscow prison following the February Revolution of 1917, he returned to Huliai-Pole to chair its soviet and to organize numerous revolutionary communes. In 1918, in opposition to the Ukrainian Hetmanate and the forces of the Austro-German intervention, he developed a substantial peasant army, the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. The high tide of the Makhnovshchina lasted from November 1918 (when the Central Powers withdrew from Ukraine) to June 1919, in which period Makhno’s “Free Territory” extended from Berdiansk through Donetsk, Aleksandrovsk, and Ekaterinoslav. In areas where the Makhnovists were dominant, the population was urged to abolish capitalism, to expropriate private land and factories, to organize itself through popular assemblies, and to implement the free exchange of goods between town and countryside. Peasants were advised to establish producer communes and to work collectively; workers were informed of the advantages of self-management. The involvement of political parties, including the Bolsheviks, in local administration was expressly forbidden in favor of “free soviets”—a tenet of the anarchist group Nabat, who sent many emissaries to advise Makhno.163

In 1919–1920, Makhno’s army battled the Whites, the Ukrainian Army, and the Red Army—although periodically it entered into tactical alliances with the Reds. When their White opponents looked weak, the Reds, who also feared the spread of libertarian ideas into their own ranks, would break these alliances and turn against Makhno. They found it difficult, however, to extinguish fully an army whose soldiers had an uncanny knack of simply melting back into the villages when under threat and a hydra-like ability to throw up new offshoots and tentacles in other parts of Ukraine, as well as the Don and the North Caucasus. Yet despite occasional large-scale desertions from the Red Army to the Makhnovists (e.g., the Maslakov mutiny), as the White threat abated, the Free Territory was gradually absorbed into the Soviet state and the Makhnovshchina was crushed, although embers of anarchist rebellion would occasionally flare up in southern Ukraine throughout the early Soviet period. In August 1921, badly injured, Makhno himself escaped into Romania and a life of unhappy exile.164

1920–1926: Battles in the Marchlands

Having dealt with the major White forces in South Russia, Siberia, the Baltic, and Siberia; having installed a new Soviet regime in Ukraine (the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), as the Soviet–Ukrainian War was at last won; and having come to terms with independent Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, the Red Army was at liberty from around March1920 to begin dealing with its remaining opponents around the periphery of the old empire. There were many of these, but the most puissant of them was Poland.

Although there had been no formal declaration of war, the Soviet–Polish War had been a fact since the establishment of the new Polish Republic at the end of the world war and particularly since the Red Army’s capture of Minsk in January 1919. Mutual convenience dictated that no serious battles ensued in 1919, as the Poles dealt with their own conflicts against Germany and the Western Ukraine People’s Republic (the Polish–Ukrainian War) and the Bolsheviks tackled the Whites (who, Warsaw was aware, were hostile to Polish independence), but given the extensive nature of Poland’s territorial claims beyond its established eastern border and the Bolsheviks’ determination to spread their revolution into Eastern and Central Europe, this unspoken truce was bound to break.165 Accordingly, even as the AFSR was being crushed in the North Caucasus, the Red high command began preparing for active operations on the Western and South-West Fronts, to which, Trotsky ordered, should be assigned all the best commanders and commissars available, as well as the most seasoned Red forces (including the 1st Cavalry Army). Meanwhile, negotiations got under way for a Soviet–Lithuanian alliance, including provision for joint military action against Poland that would culminate in the Treaty of Moscow (12 July 1920).166

Initially, however, Red commanders were taken by surprise when a combined Polish and Ukrainian force launched an offensive toward Kiev, capturing it on 7 May 1920. A huge Red counteroffensive soon obliged them to retire, though, and Soviet forces were at the gates of Warsaw by mid-August. Then this seesaw conflict tilted again, as, reinforced by tens of thousands of volunteers eager to oppose “the Russians” and resupplied from Allied stocks, Polish forces thrust eastward, breaching and dividing the Red fronts and marching on into Ukraine and Belorussia as the Soviet forces fled. At this point, with the Soviet armies scattered, exhausted, and seemingly more intent on pogroms than fighting the Poles (and with recriminations flying back and forth over Stalin and Budennyi’s failure to move troops from the South-West Front against Warsaw), plans in Moscow to export the revolution, which seemed to have been realized in August, were shelved. An armistice with the Poles was duly arranged in September–October 1920, and the following year the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) formally brought the war to an end. Under the terms of that agreement, Poland shifted its eastern border about 100 miles east of that accorded to Warsaw by the Allies in 1919, but recovered, in effect, only those eastern borderlands lost to Russia in the third partition of Poland of 1795. Other territories and populations in the east, however, including those around Kiev and Minsk, had to be recognized by Warsaw as now lying within the new Ukrainian SSR and Belorussian SSR, respectively. Warsaw was also obliged to cut off its links with the UNR (sealed at the Treaty of Warsaw in April 1920), thereby scuppering the cause of Ukrainian nationalism for generations. To some extent, therefore, Lenin was justified in writing of the Riga settlement “We have won. Anyone who examines the map will see that we have won, that we have emerged from this war with more territory than we had before we started it.”167 Nevertheless, he must have written that through gritted teeth: Warsaw, Berlin—even Prague, Budapest, and Vienna—had been, conceivably, within the grasp of the Red Army in August 1920. They would not again be so until April 1945, and then in very different circumstances. Peace with Poland was a necessity, though. Lenin was always a pragmatist more than an idealist and was aware that civil-war struggles had brought the Soviet economy to its knees by mid-1920. He, and war commissar Trotsky, also knew that internal security was under threat from the peasant revolts discussed above, and that there was still a lot of fighting to be done in Transcaucasia, in Central Asia, in Siberia and the Far East, and most immediately, once again in White-held regions of South Russia.

Unfortunately for Moscow, the 35,000 Whites evacuated from Novorossiisk in late March 1920 had not sailed away into the sunset, but had merely made the short hop to the Crimean peninsula, to regroup under a new commander, General Wrangel, who was selected to succeed Denikin by a conference of AFSR commanders at Yalta on 4 April 1920. Wrangel vowed that his regime would privilege order, obedience, and justice and would expunge all memories of Denikin’s ochlocratic “Grabarmiia.” To this end, he ordered the shooting of all looters; retired a number of miscreant generals (including, eventually, the now unhinged General Slashchev); formed a cabinet (the Government of South Russia) that included some notably moderate elements (including the liberal, former Marxist, P. B. Struve, as minister of foreign affairs); and summoned back from Paris, to be his prime minister, the joint architect of the prewar Stolypin peasant reforms, former tsarist minister of agriculture A. V. Krivoshein. The latter helped draft laws for a radical land reform in Russia, come the dreamt-of White victory.168 That outcome would remain a dream, however. Despite a landing of Cossack forces in the Kuban and a surge out of Crimea by his redubbed Russian Army in June–July 1920 that took White forces briefly beyond the Dnepr, Wrangel’s offensive was nothing more than a noble gesture of defiance: his active army never numbered more than perhaps 25,000 men, and against him were ranged forces of the Reds’ Southern Front under the brilliant commander M. V. Frunze, who was able to deploy 188,000 infantry, cavalry, and other front-line troops (with 3,000 machine guns, 600 artillery pieces, and 23 armored trains, as well as several hundred tachanki), and who could syphon reinforcements from the Western and South-West Fronts following the armistice with Poland.169 The Allies, meanwhile, having concluded that the White cause was lost and that rather than fight the Bolsheviks it was better to hem them in behind a cordon sanitaire of the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, offered scant support to Wrangel and even threatened to cut off all aid should he continue offensive operations against the Soviet regime.

By October 1920, consequently, the Whites had been forced back into Crimea, only to find the elements turning against them, as freak weather conditions dried out the Sivash marshes that abutted the narrow and easily defensible pathway onto Crimea, the Perekop isthmus. This permitted Soviet forces (at this point including many Makhnovists) to invade the peninsula and cause a huge evacuation of White forces from its southern ports in November. This was far better organized than Denikin’s effort at Novorossisk nine months earlier, but nevertheless many White soldiers remained trapped in Red territory and became the subject of a campaign of retribution and terror by the Cheka in which at least 12,000 people were executed.170

Until 1920, the three small and mutually disputatious republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan that had emerged from the disintegration of a short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic in May 1918 remained quarantined from Soviet invasion by the presence in their region of first German and Turkish and then Allied interventionists and the screen provided by Denikin’s forces in the North Caucasus. But now the Allies had withdrawn (with the exception of the British garrison at Batumi, which would leave in mid-July 1920), and the Whites had been shoved aside, leaving the three republics fatally exposed. This was most unfortunate for the Azeris and their port capital of Baku, which found itself first in line for the Red Army’s attentions in Transcaucasia. Unlucky too was the fact that a Red advance into Azerbaijan could utilize the Rostov–Baku railway, which, having pressed along the steppe north of the main Caucasus range, then ran south along the Caspian coastline and snaked through Daghestan to Derbent, then into Azerbaijan itself. But this amorphous—and often despised—Muslim population of the old empire was always going to be a prime target for the Reds, as the Azeris (or “Tatars,” as the Russians called them) were not well organized but possessed precious stocks of oil. Thus, on 22 March 1920, it is not surprising that Red Army Glavkom Kamenev issued the order that “the entirety of the former Baku guberniia” should immediately be occupied by the 11th Red Army.171 The small Azeri army could never have mounted effective resistance to this Red thrust—not least because it lacked experienced generals, Muslims generally having been distained by the imperial Russian forces. In addition, the many Turkish advisors to the Azeri army, who were anxious (in order to disturb the postwar settlement as it pertained to Anatolia) to forge closer links between the new Kemelist regime in Ankara and Moscow, were duplicitously advising the Azeris that they had nothing much to fear from the Bolsheviks. Thus, resistance was always likely to have been minimal, even had not 22 March 1920 also been a day marked by a renewed and unfortunately diversionary outbreak of hostilities in the Azeri–Armenian War that had been rumbling on since 1918. Soon afterward, an uprising of local Bolsheviks, who had been joined by the left wing of the Hummet party (now renamed the Azeri Communist Party), seized parts of Baku; on 28 April 1920, advance units of the 11th Red Army arrived there to oversee the immediate proclamation of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Azeri uprisings, especially that at Ganja in May 1920, still troubled the Soviet government, but were eventually contained. A subsequent Red push into the disputed Karabakh region in June–July 1920 then presaged a full-blown invasion of neighboring Armenia in November of that year; the establishment of the Armenian SSR; and a subsequent agreement with Kemalist Turkey (the Treaty of Moscow, 16 March 1921), in which the Soviet government, seeking to encourage Turkey’s hostility to the Allies, ceded to Ankara lands in Eastern Anatolia previously claimed by Yerevan (including Mount Ararat). The treaty was also, as Armenian nationalists claim to this day, a punishment inflicted on Armenia as a consequence of the widespread uprising against Soviet power that gripped the country in February 1921 and temporarily drove the Red Army out of Yerevan—an uprising that continued to tie down Soviet forces in the southern region of Zangezur, where the independent Mountainous Republic of Armenia was proclaimed, until July 1921.

The four-month pause between the Soviet offensives in Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhchivan, in June–July 1920, and that against Yerevan in November of that same year, can be explained by the outbreak of general Soviet–Polish hostilities in April–May of that year, as well as by the White threat reemerging from Crimea in June–July 1920. Also pertinent here, though, were Soviet concerns not to discomfit their partners in the ongoing, and very delicate, negotiations that would lead to the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement (in March 1921) by acting too precipitously in an area in which London—especially that bit of Westminster closed off by a door marked “Curzon”—had a special interest.172

These factors also, for a while, reprieved the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The Menshevik regime in that country, which had been established in May 1918, endured, despite a number of Soviet probings (in April–May 1920), through the Darial Gorge, into South Ossetia (Tskhinvali) and along the Black Sea littoral toward the chiefly Muslim region of Abkhazia (both of which regions had ambitions to secede from Georgia and both of which alleged cruel treatment in the civil-war years at the hands of the Georgian republic’s security police, the People’s Guard). It also survived a planned Bolshevik coup in Tiflis that was forestalled by Georgian forces. But local Bolsheviks were soon ordered by Moscow to refrain from such activities, as Sovnarkom went so far as to sign a full treaty, the Treaty of Moscow (7 May 1920), with their erstwhile Menshevik rivals. Under the terms of this agreement, Georgian independence was recognized by the RSFSR. However, as the Moscow treaty also demanded that Georgia sever all links with undefined “counterrevolutionary forces,” expel foreign missions, and legalize the Bolshevik Party on its territory, as well as declaring the strategic mountain passes through the Caucasus (which had to that point been garrisoned by the Georgians) to be neutral and demilitarized, the signing of this treaty was the equivalent of the Georgian Mensheviks sawing through the already creaking branch on which they were sitting. With the Poles and Wrangel dealt with, and with assurances from Soviet representatives in London that the projected Anglo–Soviet trade agreement would be signed no matter what verbal protests the British government might feel constrained to make against further Soviet advances in Transcaucasia, a workers’ uprising broke out—exactly on cue, having been prearranged by Moscow’s plenipotentiary to the region, Sergo Ordzhonikidze173—in the Borchalinsk and Akhalkaksk districts of Georgia on 11 February 1921. Within two weeks, the Georgian capital was under the control of local Bolsheviks and units of the 11th Red Army.

However, partly as a consequence of its international support;174 partly because of the long-lingering, internecine social-democratic bitterness that soured relations between Moscow and Tiflis; partly because of the Georgian clans’ warrior traditions; and partly because its mountainous terrain made the country almost uniquely difficult to conquer, the civil war in Georgia was a long way from being won by the Reds in February 1921. Extensive guerrilla resistance to Soviet rule, eventually coordinated by agents of the Paris-based Committee for the Liberation of Georgia, ebbed and flowed continuously and very violently across the region—notably in the Svanetian uprising (September 1921) and the Kakhet–Kevsureti rebellion (of 1921–1922)—culminating in the extensive August Uprising of 1924. Subsequently, between 7,000 and 10,000 Georgian prisoners were executed by the Cheka and perhaps as many as a further 20,000 were deported.175 Meanwhile, a softening of Moscow’s economic policies (the New Economic Policy) served to undermine resistance in Georgia and Transcaucasia in general, as well as peasant resistance across what in December 1922 was declared the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

By the time that the forces of Wrangel were being pressed back into Crimea in October–November 1920, the Red Army commanded sufficient men and resources to begin to deal simultaneously with remaining White ulcers at the other end of the Red body politic, in the Far East. Having defeated and executed Kolchak earlier in the year, in February 1920, with the AFSR not yet eliminated and the Poles clearly girding themselves to advance, “Not a Step Further East” had been adopted as the Red Army’s order of the day in Siberia when it reached Irkutsk, as all available forces were required in the west. Thus, on 2 February 1920, the Politbiuro had announced itself to be “unconditionally opposed to committing military and other forces beyond Irkutsk” and pulled many forces and arms of the 5th Red Army back to European Russia.176 Moreover, the Soviet government feared clashing with the still sizable Japanese presence along the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railways. To act as a buffer between the new Soviet border east of Irkutsk and the interventionists, there was therefore proclaimed, at a “Congress of Toilers” at Blagoveshchensk on 6 April 1920, a nominally independent Far Eastern Republic. This had a coalition government, included SRs and Mensheviks in its administration, and had its own armed forces, the People’s-Revolutionary Army, but its self-government was a chimera: the FER was always and entirely controlled by Moscow through the Bolsheviks’ Far Eastern Bureau (Dal′biuro), as was its army, into which were incorporated forces from the Red Army’s formally disestablished Eastern Front, and which was initially commanded by G. Kh. Eikhe, former commander of the 5th Red Army. Still, the “independence” of the FER was a useful fiction that suited the climate of the times, as the Allies also sought to wash their hands of their former—but now embarrassing (for they had failed)—White protégés, and were coming, albeit uneasily, to normalize relations with this strange new regime in Moscow. Even the Japanese, albeit after lengthy negotiations, signed a peace treaty with the FER (the Gongota Agreement, 15 July 1920), although at that point Tokyo refused to acknowledge the FER’s claim to sovereignty over the Maritime Province and its chief city, Vladivostok. These would remain outside the FER’s control until October 1922, when the Japanese were prevailed upon to withdraw from the Russian mainland and the FER’s forces entered Vladivostok. The FER immediately petitioned for union with the USSR and was accepted into the Soviet fold.177 Meanwhile, on 6 July 1921, White forces under the rogue ataman Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg were driven from the Mongolian capital, Urga (Ulan Bator). However, although most White forces in the region were able to flee abroad, chiefly into Manchuria, some remained cut off in the taiga and, having regrouped, were able to stage offensives against Soviet forces, such as that in Iakutsk, which lasted until well into 1923.178

The missing piece of the jigsaw that was becoming the USSR remained Central Asia (or Transcaspia and Russian Turkestan in the parlance of the times), where the final campaigns of the “Russian” Civil Wars were fought. This was a very particular struggle (or, rather, series of struggles), in which the Red Army faced opponents that usually had little in common with any other of their previous adversaries—least of all the Whites.179

At Tashkent, the Turkestan Soviet Republic, despite its isolation from Bolshevik Russia until September 1919, had for two years prior to that constituted a remarkably resilient citadel of Soviet power. Based on the concentrated Russian populations of the Central Asian towns and railway centers, but also drawing support from modernizing elements among the broader Muslim population (the Young Bukharan Party, the Young Khivan Party, etc.), the local soviet had immediately declared in favor of the October Revolution in 1917; had pronounced the existence of the first manifestation of the Turkestan ASSR on 30 April 1918; and had thereafter, amid the sparsely populated and starkly contrasting reaches of steppe and mountains that surrounded it, gathered a small and irregular army (the Turkestan Red Army) to defend itself against a variety of anti-Bolshevik forces that were only marginally weaker than it was itself.180 (No single force in the region numbered more than a few thousand fighters at any point during the civil wars.) Cut off from Moscow by the uprising of the Orenburg Cossacks in late 1917, the Tashkent regime first sought to build a Soviet alternative to the Moslem-led Kokand Autonomy (headed by Mustafa Chokaev) to its east and to the Kazakh’s Alash Orda regime at Semey (Semipalatinsk), both of which had been founded in November–December 1917. It had also, from the summer of 1918, sought to maintain a Semirech′e Front in the northeast, against Ataman B. V. Annenkov’s Semirech′e Cossacks, although the latter seem to have been too preoccupied with relentless rapine in their home territory to pose a serious threat to Red Tashkent.

The Tashkent Soviet also faced internal subversion, notably from the nebulous Turkestan Military Organization, which counted among its membership Colonel P. G. Kornilov (brother of the now deceased White icon General L. G. Kornilov) and its own treacherous commissar for military affairs, K. P. Osipov, and which staged a series of uprisings. The most serious of these (the “Osipov Rebellion”) was launched on 19 January 1919, by Osipov and other members of the Turkestan Military Organization, with the support of a sizable portion of the local garrison (2,000 men, by some counts, of that 5,000-strong force) and Allied agents in the region, such as Colonel F. M. Bailey.181 By 20 January 1919, the rebels had control of most of the city and had captured and executed a number of Bolshevik members of the government of the Turkestan ASSR (the “Fourteen Turkestan Commissars”), but had failed to gain control of several key strategic points (notably the railway station) or any of the local arsenals, allowing Red forces to regroup and drive the Osipovites from Tashkent on 21 January 1919. The anti-Bolshevik Kokand regime, meanwhile, was effectively dispersed by Red Guards in February 1918, but thereafter resistance in the Ferghana valley experienced a renaissance under the rebel leader Igrash-bey, whose forces mushroomed from around 4,000 in 1918 to 20,000 (or, by some estimates, 30,000) by the summer of 1919, while pro-Soviet forces of the Young Bukharan Party were expelled from Bukhara by the khan, and their fellow Young Khivans were denied control of their own putative capital by the support offered to the khan of Khiva (Sayid Abdullah) by the powerful Muslim warlord Junaïd-khan.

Yet apart from the front against the Orenburg Cossacks, Tashkent faced its most serious and active civil-war opposition from Ashkhabad (Aşgabat), to the west, which sat astride the second chief route out of the region—the railway line to Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea—and against which the Tashkent Bolsheviks directed their Transcaspian Front. Following the successful anti-Bolshevik Ashkhabad uprising of 11–12 July 1918, a Menshevik–SR Transcaspian Provisional Government had been established at Ashkhabad and had spread its authority all across the former Transcaspian oblast′ by the end of that month. The regime enjoyed moral, financial, and (limited) military support and guidance from a British military mission (Norperforce), commanded by General Wilfred Malleson at Meshed, across the border in Northern Persia.182 Nevertheless, the Transcaspian government was far from being the counterrevolutionary puppet of the Allies it was painted as in Soviet propaganda and seems to have been initially popular with Russian and Ukrainian railways workers along the Ashkhabad–Krasnovodsk line. It became distinctly less popular, however, as it was forced to accept the authority of emissaries of Denikin’s AFSR, claiming command over the region and its existing and future military formations (loosely reconfigured as a White Turkestan Army) in early 1919. Consequently, with local partisan assistance, on 9 July 1919 Tashkent’s Red troops reentered Ashkhabad. With the rail route to Tashkent from Orenburg opened in September 1919, following the final defeat of Dutov’s Cossacks, Red reinforcements then flooded the region and soon pushed the AFSR’s makeshift defenses back along the line to Krasnovodsk and thence across the Caspian in February 1920—just in time for them to unite with White forces retreating into the North Caucasus and to compete for a berth on the ships gathering for the chaotic evacuation at Novorossiisk.

With the forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution and the Whites dealt with in turn, and with stocks of arms, men, and food flowing in along the Orenburg railway from Soviet Russia in 1920, Tashkent was then able to concentrate its fire on two other centers of anti-Soviet power in western Turkestan: the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara. The respective heads of these former Russian protectorates (Khan Said-Abdulla and Emir Said-mir Mohammed Alim-Khan, respectively) were ejected in February and September 1920, in turn, to be replaced by the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic (26 April 1920) and the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (8 October 1920). In nurturing these experimental administrations, however, Moscow had constantly to struggle against the anti-Moslem and centralizing proclivities of local Russians, who had allied themselves with the Soviet cause for ethnic as much as political reasons, as well as the pronounced chauvinism of local Bolsheviks. To ensure that non-Russians—specifically, progressive Muslim proponents of Jadidism—were both represented and heard, a Turkestan Commission of VTsIK was established on 8 October 1919, as well as, subsequently, a Turkestan Bureau (Turkbiuro) of the RKP(b). However, from 1921 onward, Moscow came to regard the Jadids with suspicion, and they were removed from the local administrations.

Reinforcing the recentralizing tendencies that came to the fore within and around Josef Stalin’s Commissariat of Nationalities at this point was the fact that although Soviet power now seemed to have been firmly established in the cities of Khiva, Bukhara, and Tashkent, across the vast subcontinental expanse of Central Asia—from the mountainous east, around Ferghana, to the Turkmen steppes of the west—it was very far from secure. Hiding out across the region (and sometimes over the borders in Persia and Afghanistan) were relatively small but seemingly inexterminable groups of guerrilla fighters, whom the Soviet government termed Basmachi. The Reds’ battle with these Muslim rebels, although hitherto much neglected, came under renewed scholarly attention in the West after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provoked new generations of anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas into action, but it awaits its definitive history. What is clear, however, is that although they evolved through a series of relatively distinct chronological phases, although they played out in one of the most remote of all reaches of the former imperial space, and although the Muslim rebels were rarely united in purpose and were prone to murderous internecine vendettas, the Reds’ struggles against the Basmachi were an integral part of the “Russian” Civil Wars.183 As one pioneering study of the phenomenon concluded, “In the history of the Turkestan’s war of liberation, the Basmachi must be seen not only as a mere uprising but as an armed civil war against Soviet supremacy.”184 Indeed, just as we have seen that the 1916 revolt in Central Asia can be regarded as the opening stage of the “Russian” Civil Wars, the Red Army’s battles against the Basmachi can be regarded as their conclusion. It is thought that during these final battles of the “Russian” Civil Wars, which ranged long after the usual dates suggested as an endpoint in 1921 or 1922, 574,000 Red soldiers were killed, compared to around 50,000 among the rebels, while famine and disease accounted for several hundred thousand further deaths.185 The struggle only came to an unquiet end in June 1931, with the Reds’ capture and execution of the Basmachi leader Ibrahim-bek, although further small pockets of resistance held out until at least 1934, and possibly, according to unconfirmed reports, until 1938. However, from the mid-1920s, Soviet forces had been engaged in only relatively minor security operations. These were skirmishes, police actions, and border-control events, not warfare. Significantly, the last active front of the Red Army to be closed in the wars that are the focus of this work was the Turkestan Front: on 4 June 1926 it was replaced by the peacetime operation and administration of the Central Asian Military District. This can best serve as the terminal date of the “Russian” Civil Wars—albeit in a region that (belying once again the traditional nomenclature) is considerably closer to Mumbai than it is to Moscow.

Conclusion: Who Won the “Russian” Civil Wars?

On the face of things, the Bolsheviks were the clear victors of the “Russian” Civil Wars. Utilizing their relatively prosperous, well-stocked, populous, and ethnically homogeneous stronghold in the heartland of European Russia, which was well-served by railways, rivers, and canals for transportation purposes, they had been able to see off, one by one, their White enemies in Siberia and South, North-West, and North Russia (who had, in part, done the Bolsheviks’ job for them by stifling the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918); they had been able to convince the Allies that armed intervention in Soviet Russia was a lost cause; they had successfully quelled the series of uprisings against Soviet power that were a feature of the years 1920–1922 and, through the introduction of the NEP had brought—or bought—an end to peasant resistance; and they had—piecemeal, and when the time was ripe—reconquered Ukraine, Transcaucasia, the Far East, and Central Asia. The USSR had become an established state, which from 1924 was recognized by other world powers and which would have a profound influence on international affairs for decades to come, not least during the Second World War.

Nevertheless, several qualifications have to be made to a description of the Bolsheviks as “victors” in the civil wars. For one thing, obviously some important territories of the former Russian Empire remained outside the Soviet imperium at the close of the wars, notably the strategically and economically important lands of independent Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland, while Bessarabia had been incorporated into Romania. Second, although peasant resistance to Soviet power had been broken and its recrudescence in armed form contained by the NEP, it had not been extinguished altogether and would resurface in what amounted to an economic war between the hungry cities and relatively prosperous villages of the USSR in the late 1920s. Lenin was therefore right to have termed NEP a “peasant Brest”: just as the treaty of 1918 had not brought (and was never intended to bring) a permanent peace between Soviet Russia and imperial Germany, NEP was regarded by most Bolsheviks as a temporary breathing space. Once the civil wars were over in 1926, the Soviet state, increasingly under the sway of Stalin, would again turn on the peasants, in the collectivization campaign that was intended to finally extend Soviet rule into the countryside and to break peasant resistance forever. Indeed, a case can be made for regarding the collectivization campaign as a second round of the civil wars.186 Third, although the Allies had withdrawn from Soviet Russia, although they would welcome their former enemy into the League of Nations in 1934, and although they were grateful for the Soviet contribution to the subsequent struggle against Hitler, the enmity between East and West that would characterize the post-1945 period was demonstrably born in the period immediately following the October Revolution of 1917. In that sense, the “Russian” Civil Wars can be described as the first round of the Cold War that continues to shape the modern world.

Moreover, it is obvious that even the imperfect Bolshevik victory did not endure. In 1991, the USSR collapsed, partly as a consequence of the long-standing enmity toward it of the United States and its allies, which had forced the Soviet state to sacrifice the economic well-being of its population to the demands of the arms race; partly, also, as a consequence of the hostility toward Moscow of non-Russian territories that had been incorporated into the Soviet sphere during the civil wars and during and after the Second World War. Worth recalling here is that those territories on the edge of and immediately abutting the borders of the former Russian Empire were precisely those in which the Bolsheviks had perceived the greatest hope for the tide of world revolution that they predicted would flow from the Russian source. That hope had been dashed at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920, however, and by 1926, the only pro-Soviet government on the face of the globe was, perversely, housed at Ulan Bator in Mongolia.187 What sort of victory was that for a party whose very essence was proletarian internationalism?

Finally, it is worth asking whether the party that emerged from the civil wars truly deserves the title “Bolshevik.” The bitter and exhausting struggles against counterrevolution, nationalism, peasant conservatism, and intervention, it could be argued, had cost Lenin’s party its soul. Consequently, the Russian Revolution of 1917 largely failed in its objective of remaking the world. It begat an apparently powerful state, the USSR, but the much-vaunted “new Soviet man,” fashioned from the DNA of socialism and immune to militarism and colonialism, was stillborn. Rather, the new Soviet man of the post–civil war years was a party apparatchik who helped corral and police an increasingly disgruntled population of Russians and an always alienated population of non-Russians, while assisting in the governance of the most militarized state in the world as it strove to forestall economic collapse and renewed invasions. Moreover, guided by Stalin, he would very soon turn on the idealists of the old party and the military leaders of the civil wars, who were the central targets of the murderous purges of the 1930s. From exile, in 1937, Leon Trotsky, the organizer of the Red Army and the chief architect of the “Bolshevik victory” in the “Russian” Civil Wars, would ruefully observe this betrayal of the revolution.188 Four years later he would be murdered in Mexico by an agent of Stalin’s secret police.

Notes

1. The most prominent English-language works include David Bullock, The Russian Civil War, 1918–22 (Oxford: Osprey, 2008); W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Berlinn, 2008); and Geoffrey Swain, Russia’s Civil War (Stroud: Tempus, 2000).

2. It is worth noting here that one of the most contested cities of the period was L′vov (Lviv in Ukrainian, Lemberg to the Austrians), which had never been part of the Russian Empire, apart from a brief period of occupation in 1914–1915.

3. For a fuller explanation of the need for a broader geographical focus and a lengthier chronology of the subject, see Jonathan D. Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London/New York: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2015). The trend toward dealing with the subject in this manner was chiefly initiated by Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002). This is to a degree echoed and built upon in Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines events on the Eastern Front in the context of decolonization. Despite its title, another recent addition to the genre—Douglas Boyd, The Other First World War: The Blood-Soaked Russian Fronts, 1914–1922 (Stroud: The History Press, 2014)—is disappointing, being a rather shallow popular history of Russia’s part in the First World War and the Allies’ role in Russia, with a single final chapter devoted to some aspects of “The Wars after the War.”

4. V. V. Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: Spravochnik (Moscow: Russkaia panorama, 2004), 18; and Iu. A. Poliakov, Sovetskaia strana posle okonchania grazhdanskoi voiny: Territoriia i naselenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 104. These sources cite fatalities in action of 950,000 in the Red Army, 650,000 among White and nationalist forces, and 900,000 among various independent partisan forces, with a further 2,000,000 deaths due to terror (1,200,000 killed by the Reds, 300,000 by the Whites, and 500,000 by partisan forces) and 6,000,000 due to hunger and disease. To put the figure of a total of 10,500,000 deaths in perspective, the Russian deaths in the First World War were approximately 3,700,000 by recent estimates (2,000,000 military deaths and 1,700,000 civilian): Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke, 18. For comparison, it is worth noting that in Europe’s other great internecine conflict of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War, it is likely that losses amounted to around 530,000, with perhaps 50,000 more fatalities in Franco’s postwar prison camps. Given that Spain’s population in 1936 was approximately 25,000,000, while the population of the Russian Empire in 1917 was approximately 160,000,000, it seems that mortality was around three times greater in the Russian Civil War than in the Spanish Civil War.

5. Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946), 29. Unsurprisingly, the gathering of data for the 1926 census was not unproblematic, but the greatly esteemed Lorimer insisted that its findings, published in 56 volumes, was “one of the most complete accounts ever presented of the population of any country.” Ibid., xiii. A recent, sober Russian analysis, while detailing the problems associated with statistics from this period (and decrying exaggerated and unscientific estimates of 40,000,000 deaths found in the popular press of the late glasnost′ period, when sensationalism was rife), nevertheless concludes that in 1926 there was a population deficit “in the amplitude of 20–25 million” people in the USSR. Iu. A. Poliakov, ed., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke, Tom 1: 1900–1939 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 95–96.

6. To take but one example, the street in Kyiv on which the Ukrainian parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) stands is now named for the historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of the founding fathers of the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian National Republic of the civil-wars era, who was persecuted and (in 1934) quite possibly murdered by the Soviet security services.

7. For a fuller discussion of the historiography, see Jonathan D. Smele, “Russia: Civil War, 1917–1920,” in Reader’s Guide to Military History, ed. Charles Messenger (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 510–15; and Jonathan D. Smele, ed., The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Continuum, 2003).

8. A glance at the biographies of the chief participants in the “Russian” Civil Wars will reveal a preponderance of men born in the 1880s, as the era of counterreform began to bite.

9. Robert B. McKean, Between the Revolutions: Russia, 1905–1917 (London: The Historical Association, 1998). It is worth recording here that the circumstances of the war also contained the germs of the various interventions in Russia of the civil-wars years, as invading Austro-German forces established control over former Russian territories in the Baltic, Belorussia, and Ukraine and various Allied military and technical missions were dispatched to the Eastern Front to shore up Russia’s war effort. Conversely, Russia’s own victories on the Caucasus Front gave momentum to expansionist ambitions there that took hold of Russian imperialists and Armenian nationalists alike. Equally, national military forces that would play key roles in the civil wars can date their foundation to the world war: the Czechoslovak Legion, the Latvian Riflemen, and Armenian volunteer detachments, for example. On the war, see Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–17 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975). On internal migration and refugees, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). On economic and social problems in general, see Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow: Longman, 2005).

10. The zemstvos were the elected rural councils, at district and provincial levels, established by Alexander II in 1864. By 1914 they existed across most of European Russia and, by their nature, tended to attract progressive elements among the gentry and the peasant electors, as well as offering employment to professionals such as doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, agronomists, engineers, etc.

11. The best source on the February Revolution remains Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). But see also Michael Melancon, Rethinking Russia’s February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency? (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2000); and Semion Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917 Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

12. Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 152.

13. For the order, see A. R. Sadykov and A. Bermakhanov, eds., Groznyi 1916-i god: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Almaty: Qazaqstan, 1998), 1:13; “Vosstanie v 1916 g. v Srednei Azii,” Krasnyi arkhiv 3 (1929): 48.

14. Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 352.

15. “Dzhizakskoe vosstanie v 1916 g.,” Krasnyi arkhiv 5 (1933): 63.

16. Kh. T. Tursunov, Vosstanie 1916 goda v Srednei Azii i Kazakhstane (Tashkent: Gos. izd-vo Uzbekskoi SSR, 1962), 320–21; Edward D. Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954), 159.

17. For a study of Central Asian affairs that cuts across the 1917 divide, see Marco Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot: Srednaiaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR (Moscow: Zvenia, 2007).

18. Conditional upon the government not attempting to undo any of the gains socialists perceived in the victory over tsarism.

19. On foreign policy issues in 1917, see Rex A. Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February–October 1917 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969).

20. On the Ukraine issue in 1917, see D. Ia. Bondarenko, “Vremennoe pravitelʹstvo i problema Ukraina (iiul–oktiabr 1917 g.),” Otechestennaia istoriia, no. 1 (2006): 54–64.

21. On the Kornilov affair, see Jorgen L. Munck, The Kornilov Revolt: A Critical Examination of the Sources (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1987).

22. The Rada declared Ukraine to be autonomous on 3 November 1917 and then independent on 9 January 1918.

23. On the October events, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004).

24. On the Vikzhel negotiations, see Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1996), 53–62.

25. The established view, challenged here, has it that “the Russian Civil War . . . began in the autumn of 1917. To be precise, it began on 25 October[,] during the evening,” with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. See Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 4.

26. Rex A. Wade, “The October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly, and the End of the Russian Revolution,” in Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White, ed. Ian D. Thatcher (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 72–85.

27. The Allied powers were not altogether lacking in imperialistic designs on Russia, as it collapsed, but these pale in comparison to the expansionist plans and actions of the Central Powers. That Allied intervention has a huge historiography in comparison to that of the Austro-German incursion is apparent from the comparative size of the chapters covering these subjects in Smele, Russian Revolution and Civil War. The best work on Allied intervention remains Richard H. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961–1972). On Austro-German intervention, see Winifried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 1918: Von Brest-Litovsk bis zum Ende der Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1966). On Turkey, see Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

28. Lenin’s majority in the party may well, in fact, have been a gerrymandered one, and in its Central Committee a majority either abstained or voted against Lenin in the key vote of 23 February 1918. On the Bolshevik opposition to Lenin, see Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict: The Left Communist Opposition of 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1991). On the negotiations and the peace treaty, see John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace: Brest-Litovsk, March 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1938).

29. The fullest version of the treaty (and its variants and supplements) is available online at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bl34.asp#treatytext.

30. See Jonathan D. Smele, “Mania Grandiosa and ‘The Turning Point in World History’: Kerensky in London in 1918,” Revolutionary Russia 20, no. 1 (2007): 1–34.

31. See, for example, Clifford Kinvig, Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia, 1918–1920 (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007); and Brock Millman, “The Problem with Generals: Military Observers and the Origins of the Intervention in Russia and Persia, 1917–1918,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 2 (1998): 291–320. Offering support to this argument, not all socialists favored armed resistance to the Bolsheviks. Following an Extraordinary Party Conference in November 1917, the Mensheviks offered limited support to the Soviet government and attempted to work from within Soviet institutions to temper the Bolshevik dictatorship. The best summary of the Mensheviks’ experience of the civil wars is provided, despite its title, in André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 70–88.

32. See Smele, “Russian” Civil Wars, ch. 1.

33. The cause of the revolt remains contentious. Soviet historians always blamed Allied provocation, as did some (generally left-wing) Western historians; others blamed the Bolsheviks for unwisely attempting to disarm the powerful legion, perhaps as a consequence of instructions from Berlin and Vienna. See Victor M. Fic, The Bolsheviks and the Czechoslovak Legion: The Origin of Their Armed Conflict, March–May 1918 (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1978).

34. Oliver Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 148–50.