Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

1

The Civil War: The First Battles (1918)

In the midst of World War I, in February–March 1917, the tsarist regime which had ruled Russia since the fourteenth century collapsed with startling speed and finality. The causes of its breakdown were many and reached deep into history, but the most immediate of them was public dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. Russian armies did not acquit themselves well in the campaigns of 1914–16, being repeatedly beaten by the Germans and forced to abandon to them vast and rich territories, including Poland. There were widespread rumors of treason in high places which alienated conservative elements. The inhabitants of cities were angered by inflation and shortages of food and fuel. The spark that ignited the revolutionary conflagration was a mutiny of the Petrograd military garrison, manned by superannuated peasant conscripts. Once the mutiny erupted, public order broke down in no time, the process being encouraged by liberal and radical politicians eager to take over power. With the abdication of Nicholas II on March 2, the entire bureaucratic machinery of the state dissolved.

Into the vacuum stepped intellectuals whose ambitions far outstripped their administrative experience. The liberals, later joined by moderate socialists, staffed the Provisional Government, while the radicals joined the soviets, councils composed of worker and soldier deputies, but run by intellectuals from the socialist parties. The resultant dyarchy proved unworkable. By the summer of 1917, Russia was torn apart by growing social and ethnic conflicts, as communal peasants seized private land, workers took over factories, and the ethnic minorities claimed the right to self-government. Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky attempted to assert dictatorial powers but he was not temperamentally suited for the role, and in any event lacked an effective power base. In the fall, public opinion was severely polarized, with Kerensky trying to steer a middle course between liberals and radicals. The final blow to his authority was a quarrel toward the end of August with the Commander in Chief, General Lavr Kornilov, whom he accused of seeking to usurp his authority. The result was that the army, the only force capable of defending the Government, turned against it, leaving the field open to the Bolsheviks.

The Bolshevik Party was a unique institution. Organized as a conspiratorial group for the specific purpose of seizing power and making a revolution from above, first in Russia and then in the rest of the world, it was profoundly undemocratic in its philosophy and its methods of operation. The prototype for all subsequent totalitarian organizations, it resembled more a secret order than a party in the normally accepted sense. Its founder and undisputed leader, Vladimir Lenin, determined on the very day he learned of the outbreak of the February Revolution that the Bolsheviks would topple the Provisional Government by armed force. His strategy consisted of promising every disaffected group what it wanted: to the peasants, the land; to the soldiers, peace; to the workers, the factories; to the ethnic minorities, independence. None of these slogans were part of the Bolshevik program and all would be thrown overboard once the Bolsheviks were in power, but they served the purpose of alienating large groups of the population from the Government.

In the spring and summer the Bolsheviks made three attempts at taking power, but failed each time: the last, in July, was frustrated by Petrograd soldiers whom the government informed of Lenin’s dealings with the German enemy. Following the third unsuccessful putsch, Lenin went into hiding in Finland, and operational command passed to Leon Trotsky. Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders decided to camouflage the next attempt at a power seizure as the passing of all power to the soviets, to which end they convened an illegal and unrepresentative Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25. The coup succeeded because this time the army, angered by Kerensky’s treatment of Kornilov, refused to come to his assistance. From Petrograd, the Bolshevik coup spread to the other cities of Russia.

Although power was taken in the name of the soviets, in which all the socialist parties were represented, Lenin refused to admit other socialist parties into his government, staffing it exclusively with Bolsheviks. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which was to give Russia a new constitution and administration, the Bolsheviks were severely mauled, receiving less than one-quarter of the votes. Their dispersal of the Assembly in January 1918, after it had met but once, marked the onset of a one-party regime in Russia. Using politicized courts and the Cheka, the newly created secret police, the Bolsheviks unleashed a terror which in the first year of their power effectively silenced opposition on their territory. All organized activity was placed under the control of the Bolshevik Party, which itself was subject to no external controls.

But the Bolsheviks were masters only of central Russia, and even there they ruled only the cities and industrial centers. The borderlands of what had been the Russian Empire, inhabited by peoples of other nationalities and religions, as well as Siberia, had separated themselves and proclaimed independence, either because they wished to assert their national rights or (as in the case of Siberia and the Cossack regions) because they did not want to live under Bolshevik rule. The Bolsheviks, therefore, had literally to conquer by force of arms the separated borderlands as well as the villages in which lived four-fifths of Russia’s population. Their own power base was not very secure, resting on at most 200,000 party members and an army then in the process of dissolution; but power is a relative concept and in a country in which no other organization disposed of comparable numbers, this was a formidable force.

The Bolsheviks took power for the express purpose of beginning widespread armed conflict, first in Russia and then in Europe and the rest of the world. Beyond the borders of what had been the Russian Empire, they failed. But inside them, they succeeded well enough.

The Civil War, which tore Russia apart for nearly three years, was the most devastating event in that country’s history since the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. Unspeakable atrocities were committed from resentment and fear: millions lost their lives in combat as well as from cold, hunger, and disease. As soon as the fighting stopped, Russia was struck by a famine such as no European people had ever experienced, a famine Asian in magnitude, in which millions more perished.

As is true of many terms applied to the Russian Revolution, “Civil War” has more than one meaning. In customary usage it refers to the military conflict between the Red Army and various anti-Communist or “White” armies lasting from December 1917 to November 1920, when the remnant of White forces evacuated Russian territory. Originally, however, “civil war” had a broader meaning. To Lenin it meant the global class conflict between his party, the vanguard of the “proletariat,” and the international “bourgeoisie”: “class war” in the most comprehensive sense of the term, of which the military conflict was only one dimension. He not only expected civil war to break out immediately after his taking power, but took power in order to unleash it. For him, the October coup d’état would have been a futile adventure if it did not lead to a global class conflict. Ten years before the revolution, analyzing the lessons of the Paris Commune, Lenin agreed with Marx that its collapse was caused by the failure to launch a civil war.^* From the moment the World War broke out, Lenin denounced pacifistic socialists who called for an end to the fighting. True revolutionaries did not want peace: “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The proletarian slogan must be: civil war.”¹ “Civil War is the expression of revolution.… To think that a revolution is possible without civil war is the same as to think it possible to have ‘peaceful’ revolution,” wrote Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii in a widely read manual of Communism.² Trotsky put it even more bluntly: “Soviet authority is organized civil war.”³ From such pronouncements it should be evident that the Civil War was not forced on the Communist leaders by the foreign and domestic “bourgeoisie”: it lay at the heart of their political program.

For the inhabitants of the former Russian Empire (except for those living under German occupation), the Civil War began in October 1917, when the Bolsheviks, having toppled the Provisional Government, moved to suppress rival political parties: at that time, before there were any “Red” or “White” armies, Russian newspapers already carried columns titled “Grazhdanskaia voina” (civil war), under which headings they reported on the clashes between the Bolsheviks and those who refused to acknowledge their authority. The “war on two fronts” of which the Bolsheviks liked to speak was a reality, and even seventy years later it is difficult to decide which cost them more effort: the struggle against civilian opponents, in which military force was frequently invoked, or the military conflict with the White armies. When on April 23, 1918, Lenin made what on its face sounds like an astonishingly foolish claim—“One can say with certainty that the Civil War, in the main, is over”⁴—he clearly meant the war against his civilian adversaries, not the one against the White armies, which had hardly begun.

This chapter and the next will deal mainly with the Civil War in the conventional, that is, military, meaning of the word. The subject is exceptionally confusing, because it involves many contestants dispersed over an immense territory: in addition to the principal armies, there were ephemeral partisan forces that frequently changed sides, and contingents of foreign troops. When an empire as vast and diverse as Russia disintegrates and its segments fly in all directions, no coherent structure remains; and where no coherence exists, the historian can pretend to provide it only at the risk of distorting reality.

The Russian Civil War was fought on three main fronts: the southern, eastern, and northwestern. It went through three major phases.

The first lasted one year, from the Bolshevik coup until the signing of the Armistice in France. It began in the winter of 1917–18 with the formation, in the Don Cossack region by generals Alekseev and Kornilov, of the Volunteer Army. Half a year later it was followed by the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion on the mid-Volga and in Siberia, which resulted in the creation in that area of an Eastern front involving two anti-Bolshevik governments, each with its own armed force, one located in Samara (Komuch), the other in Omsk (the Siberian Government). This initial phase was distinguished by rapidly shifting front lines and sporadic engagements by small units. In Communist literature it is commonly referred to as the period of “partisan warfare” (partizanshchina). During this phase foreign troops—the Czechoslovaks on the anti-Bolshevik side, and the Latvians on the Bolshevik one—played a greater role than indigenous Russian forces. The Red Army was formed only at the end of this phase, in the fall of 1918.

The second and decisive stage of the Civil War extended over seven months, from March to November 1919. Initially, the armies of Admiral Kolchak in the east and those of General Denikin in the south advanced resolutely toward Moscow, mauling the Red Army and forcing it to retreat. In the northwest, General Iudenich penetrated the suburbs of Petrograd. But then the Red Army turned the tide of battle, defeating first Kolchak (June–November 1919) and then Denikin and Iudenich (October–November 1919). The fighting capacity of both the Kolchak and Denikin armies was broken concurrently, almost to the day, on November 14–15, 1919.

The concluding phase of the Civil War was the anticlimactic Wrangel episode of 1920, when the remnant of the Denikin army managed for a while to fortify itself on the Crimean peninsula. These forces would have been quickly routed by the vastly superior Red Army had it not been for the outbreak of a war with Poland (April 1920), which distracted its attention.^* As soon as it was over, the Reds turned their full attention to Wrangel. In November 1920, the British and French navies evacuated what was left of the White army to Constantinople. This marked the close of the Russian Civil War in the military sense of the term; in the political and social senses, it would never really end.

Soviet historiography, especially under Stalin, went to great lengths to depict the Civil War as foreign intervention in which the anti-Bolshevik Russians played the part of mercenaries. While it is incontestable that there were foreign troops on Russian soil, the Civil War was throughout a fratricidal conflict. In late 1918 there was talk in Allied circles of a “crusade” against Bolshevism,⁵ but such plans never came anywhere near realization. The casualty figures of the three-year war indicate that, except for a few thousand Czech volunteers (on the anti-Communist side) and several times that number of Latvians (on the Communist side), as well as up to 400 Britons, the combat fatalities were overwhelmingly Russian and Cossack. The French and their allies fought one skirmish with a pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian partisan detachment in April 1919, following which they withdrew. The Americans and the Japanese never engaged the Red Army. The Allied (essentially British) contribution consisted mainly of supplying the Whites with war matériel.

The anti-Bolshevik armies are commonly known as “White” (Belye), or even “White Guard” (Belogvardeitsy), adjectives coined by the Communists to discredit their opponents, who, in time, came to accept it. White, of course, was the standard of the Bourbons and nineteenth-century French monarchists. The Bolsheviks used it to create the impression that, as with the émigrés of the 1790s, their opponents’ aim was to restore the monarchy. In reality, not one of the so-called White armies had the restoration of tsarism as its stated objective. All promised to give the people of Russia an opportunity to decide freely on their form of government. The most powerful force, the Volunteer Army, chose as its emblem not the Romanov black, orange, and white standard, but the national white, blue, and red,⁶ and as its anthem the march of the Preobrazhenskii Guard Regiment, rather than “God Save the Tsar.” Its founders and leaders—generals Alekseev, Kornilov, and Denikin, all of them descended from peasants—had never shown any partiality for Nicholas II: Alekseev had played a decisive role in persuading him to abdicate.⁷ The White generals rejected the restoration of the monarchy not only as a matter of principle but for practical reasons: a restoration was not feasible given that every potential candidate for the throne either had been murdered or had withdrawn from politics.^* In the somewhat romantic view of General Golovin, the movement was “White” only in the sense that white is the sum of all the colors of the spectrum: the spirit animating the Russian White armies, according to him, was not that of the counterrevolutionary force that invaded France in 1792, but of the revolutionary army from which emerged Napoleon.^†

Fought on a terrain that, except for the modest heights of the Urals, was a boundless plain, the Russian Civil War had little in common with the campaigns waged in the West in 1914–18. Here there were no fixed fronts. Troops moved mainly along railroad lines, leaving large unoccupied spaces in between. Everything was in flux, to the extent that armies were often formed not in the rear but in the vicinity of the battlefield and thrown with little or no training into combat.⁸ They emerged suddenly, and just as suddenly disintegrated and vanished. Units advancing with seemingly irresistible momentum would crumble and dissolve into a rabble upon encountering determined resistance. Front lines were thinly held: it was not uncommon for divisions manned by several thousand troops to defend a front of 200 kilometers, and for “brigades” to number a few hundred men.⁹ Irregular units would desert to the enemy, fight for him for a while, and then change sides once again. Tens of thousands of Red soldiers on being captured would be inducted into the White forces and sent to fight yesterday’s comrades. White prisoners captured after Wrangel’s evacuation were fitted into Red Army uniforms and deployed against the Poles. Except for dedicated volunteers—a small minority—the troops on both sides usually had no idea what they were fighting for and frequently deserted at the first opportunity. The fluidity of the environment makes it next to impossible to depict the progress of the war in graphic terms, the more so that between and behind the principal combatant forces there operated independent bands of “Anarchists,” “Greens,” “Grigorevites,” “Makhnovites,” “Semënovites,” and other partisans pursuing their own objectives. Some maps of the Civil War fronts resemble a Jackson Pollock painting, with white, red, green, and black lines running in all directions and intersecting at random.

Since the Red Army emerged victorious from the Civil War, it is tempting to ascribe its victory to better leadership and superior motivation. While subjective factors undeniably played a role in the outcome, scrutiny of the military balance indicates that the decisive factors were of an objective nature.^* The situation was not unlike that in the American Civil War, in which the North enjoyed such overwhelming preponderance in population, industrial resources, and transport that it was certain of victory as long as it had the will to fight. From the strategic point of view, nearly all the advantages lay on the side of the Red Army. The ability of the Whites to carry on against such overwhelming odds and at one point even to seem near victory suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is they who had the superior generalship and morale. In the final analysis, they appear to have lost not because they represented a less popular cause or committed fatal political and military errors, but because they faced insuperable handicaps.

One critical advantage enjoyed by the Bolsheviks was that they were one whereas their enemies were many. The Red Army had a single, unified command taking orders from a tightly knit political oligarchy. Even if the Red leadership often disagreed, it could formulate and implement strategic plans. The White armies were fragmented and separated by large distances. They not only had no common strategy, but much of the time could not even communicate with each other to coordinate operations. Liaison between Kolchak and Denikin depended on brave officers willing to risk their lives to cross Red lines: messages could take as long as a month to reach the destination.^* As a consequence, the southern, eastern, and northwestern armies operated independently, with minimal coordination. To make matters worse, the White armies were made up of an agglomeration of diverse components, each with its own command and interests: this held true of the most numerous contingent of the Southern Army, the Cossacks, who obeyed the commands of the White generals only if and when it suited them. Under these conditions, mistakes committed by the Red High Command could be corrected, whereas sound decisions by the Whites failed because they were not implemented.

The Reds enjoyed an immense, possibly decisive, advantage in the fact that they controlled the center of Russia, whereas their opponents operated on the country’s circumference. This would be an overwhelming asset under any circumstances. “It seems to me,” writes the historian Sergei Melgunov,

that the movement from the periphery toward the center is almost always doomed to disaster.… It is the center that determines the success or failure of a revolution. (Civil War is Revolution.) Here one must take into account not only the important psychological factor. The center controls all the technical advantages, first and foremost in the form of an established administrative apparatus, which the periphery has to create virtually from scratch.¹⁰

Operating from the center, the Reds could shift forces from one front to another to defend endangered positions as well as to exploit enemy weaknesses. When forced to retreat, they gained the advantage of shortened lines of communication.

Kolchak first and then Denikin advanced in what were called offensives over enormous territories. As they advanced they spread their lines ever wider and ever thinner. It seemed that they would go on till they had scarcely one man to the mile. When the moment came the Bolsheviks lying in the center, equally feeble but at any rate tending willy-nilly constantly towards compression, gave a prick or a punch at this point or that. Thereupon the balloon burst and all the flags moved back and the cities changed hands and found it convenient to change opinions, and horrible vengeances were wreaked on helpless people, vengeances perseveringly paid over months of fine-spun inquisition.¹¹

Their geographic position gave the Reds not only strategic advantages but also incalculable material benefits.

To begin with, they had at their disposal far greater human resources. In the winter of 1918–19, when the Civil War got underway in earnest, the Bolsheviks ruled all of Great Russia, with a population of some 70 million. The territories controlled by Kolchak and Denikin had only 8 or 9 million inhabitants each.^* This immense preponderance in population—4:1 and even 5:1 in the Bolsheviks’ favor—gave the Red Army a much larger mobilization base. The Communists had within their borders all the manpower they needed: when in the critical engagements of 1919 they suffered heavy losses from casualties and desertions, they had only to call up more peasants, put them in uniforms, hand them rifles, and ship them to the front. By contrast Denikin and Kolchak, to increase their forces, had to conquer more and more territory, and, in the process, overextend themselves. In the fall of 1919, when the decisive battles of the Civil War took place, the Red Army had nearly 3 million men under arms: the combined effectives of the White armies never exceeded 250,000.^† In every major engagement, the Reds enjoyed a substantial numerical advantage: I. I. Vatsetis, the Commander in Chief of the Red Army, advised Lenin in early January 1919 that the victories the Red Army had recently won were due to its numerical superiority.¹² In the Orel-Kursk battle of October 1919 that broke the back of the Southern (White) Army, the Red force was nearly twice as large.¹³ The same was true of the battle for Petrograd.

Nor was a more-than-tenfold preponderance in numbers the Red Army’s only manpower advantage. By controlling Great Russia, the Communists ruled an ethnically homogeneous population.^‡ The Whites, by contrast, operated from territories inhabited largely by non-Russians who either took little interest in the outcome of the Civil War, or else, for their own national reasons, preferred a Red victory. A high proportion of White forces consisted of Cossacks more eager to gain independence for their homelands than to rebuild the Russian Empire. In the spring and summer of 1919, in his advance on Moscow, Denikin traversed territory inhabited by Ukrainians whose loyalty to Russia was even more questionable.

The Red Army enjoyed a great edge in weapons and munitions, and this for two reasons. Before the Revolution, most of the defense industries were located in Great Russia. In September 1916, Russia had over 5,200 enterprises engaged in war production, employing 1.94 million workers. They were geographically distributed as follows:¹⁴

Although in 1918 Russian defense industries had virtually stopped functioning, once they resumed production in the winter of 1918–19, their output went almost entirely to the Red Army.¹⁵ The Whites had access only to secondary defense industries in the Urals and the Donbass region.

No less consequential was the fact that the Red Army inherited vast stores of war matériel. Communist historians agree that in the Civil War the Red Army “was almost fully and in all respects based on the stores left by the tsarist army. They were, on the whole, of incalculable quantity. Many items sufficed not only for the whole of the Civil War but until [1928].”¹⁶ An inventory taken by the Communists in December 1917, said to be incomplete, showed that the warehouses of the old army held 2.5 million rifles, 1.2 billion rounds of small arms ammunition, nearly 12,000 field guns, and 28 million artillery shells.¹⁷ Nearly all of this equipment fell into Communist hands. The Whites inherited from the old regime only the arsenals left behind in Romania, which they received from the Allies. Otherwise, they had to rely on weapons captured from the enemy and on deliveries from abroad. Without the latter, the White armies, operating in areas with few defense industries or tsarist arsenals, would not have been able to carry on. By contrast the Red Army, combining what it had inherited with what Soviet war industries were turning out, toward the end of the Civil War attained a higher ratio of artillery and machine guns to manpower than had obtained in the tsarist army.¹⁸

The Reds benefited also from superior railway transport. The Russian rail network was designed on a radial pattern, the hub of which was Moscow. Lateral lines were poorly developed. Control of the center made it easier for the Communists to shift troops and supplies than for the Whites.

The only material advantage the Whites enjoyed over the Reds was an abundance of foodstuffs and coal. Shortages of food and fuel caused immense hardships to the Soviet government, but these bore more heavily on the civilian population than on the regime or its armed forces, for the authorities made certain that the bureaucracy and Red Army were provided for. Already in 1918, at least one-third and possibly as much as two-thirds of Soviet government outlays went for the military.¹⁹ In 1919, the Red Army claimed 40 percent of the bread and 69 percent of the shoes produced in Soviet Russia. In 1920, it was a heavy consumer of the national product, absorbing, among other goods, 60 percent of the country’s meat.²⁰

The Red and White forces differed in a fundamental respect that redounded to the Communists’ advantage as well. The Red Army was the military arm of a civilian government; the White armies were a military force that had also to act as a government. This double responsibility caused a multitude of problems with which the White generals were ill-prepared to cope.^* They not only lacked administrative experience and personnel—and here subjective elements begin to blend with objective ones—they also had been conditioned by their whole upbringing to mistrust politics and politicians. Ex-tsarist officers found it more natural to obey than to command, and easier to serve the Bolshevik Government, much as most of them despised it, simply because it was vlast’ (authority), than to assume the burdens of statehood. Politicians, even those eager to help them, spelled trouble, because they injected the spirit of partisanship and contentiousness into what should have been a united front. “Both [Alekseev] and I,” writes Denikin,

tried with all the power at our command to fence off ourselves and the army from the raging, struggling political passions and to base [the White movemerit’s] ideology on simple, incontestable national symbols. This proved extraordinarily difficult. “Politics” burst into our work. It burst spontaneously also into the life of the army.²¹

This confession by the commander of the most important White army, which Kolchak would have seconded, exemplifies a fundamental flaw in the mentality of the anti-Bolshevik leaders, who liked to think in purely military terms while struggling to restore the Russian state, which was by its very nature a political task. The commanders of the Volunteer Army required all who enlisted in its ranks to sign a pledge that while on active service they would refrain from political activity.^* The Red Army, by contrast, was politicized from top to bottom: politicized not in the sense of allowing free discussion, but in that it inculcated in the troops through every propagandistic means the awareness that the Civil War was over politics.

And, finally, while the Red Army was a revolutionary force, the White armies remained tradition-bound. The difference was symbolized by their appearance. Red troops in 1917–18 had no formal uniforms and wore whatever they could lay their hands on: bits and pieces of tsarist uniforms, leather jackets, civilian clothes. In 1919 they began to be outfitted with uniforms of a new and original design. The Whites either wore tsarist uniforms—if officers, with the traditional epaulets—or British ones. Their mentalities were as different as their uniforms. Peter Struve was struck by the “old regime” mentality of the generals of the Volunteer Army:

Psychologically, the Whites conducted themselves as if nothing had happened, whereas in reality the whole world around them had collapsed, and in order to vanquish the enemy they themselves had to undergo, in a certain sense, a rebirth.… Nothing so harmed the “White” movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances which had ceased to exist—not its programmatic but its psychological “ancien-régimeness.” … Men with this “old regime” psychology were immersed in the raging sea of revolutionary anarchy, and psychologically could not find their bearings in it. I deliberately stress that in this instance I mean “ancien-régimeness” not at all in the programmatic but in the psychological sense. In the revolutionary storm that struck Russia in 1917, even out-and-out restorationists had to turn revolutionaries in the psychological sense: because in a revolution, only revolutionaries can find their way.²²

When one considers the enormous advantages of the Bolsheviks, mostly the result of their early conquest of central Russia, the surprising thing is not that they won the Civil War, but that it took them three years to do it.

2. Alekseev.

The Civil War in the military sense of the term began when a small band of patriotic officers, humiliated by the destruction of the Russian army and the Bolshevik government’s betrayal of commitments to the Allies, decided to continue the war against the Central Powers. Initially, their undertaking was not so much anti-Bolshevik as anti-German, because to them Lenin was nothing but an agent of the Kaiser. In the Southern Army, the anti-Bolshevik objectives emerged only later, after the Germans and Austrians had evacuated Russia and the Bolshevik regime, to everyone’s surprise, remained in power. But the patriotic generals also pursued a domestic agenda. They hoped to stop the fratricidal class war that the Bolsheviks had let loose, by rallying the country on an anti-German platform: to reverse, as it were, Lenin’s success in transforming a war between nations into a war between classes.²³

On the Eastern front initially the situation was different. Here the early anti-Bolsheviks were either Socialists-Revolutionaries who raised the banner of the Constituent Assembly, or else Siberian separatists. By the end of 1918, however, when Admiral Kolchak assumed supreme command, nationalist slogans prevailed here as well.

The founder of the most effective White force, the Volunteer Army, was General M. V. Alekseev. Sixty years old when the Revolution broke out, he had had a distinguished military career that went back to the Turkish war of 1877–78. In 1915, after assuming personal command of the army, Nicholas II named him Chief of Staff: from then until the February Revolution, he was the de facto commander in chief of Russia’s armed forces. Alekseev was deeply devoted to the army, which he viewed as the bearer of Russian statehood: in late 1916, to keep it intact in the face of serious reverses, he joined plots against the tsar. In February 1917, hoping to prevent the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison from spreading to the front, he helped persuade Nicholas to abdicate. During the Provisional Government he joined patriotic organizations committed to averting anarchy. Admired for his strategic ability and patriotism even by those who did not share his political views, Alekseev was a staff officer rather than a leader of men or a battlefield commander.

The Bolshevik coup found him in Moscow. Concluding that the new regime would neither honor Russia’s wartime pledges nor arrest the deterioration of the armed forces, he made his way south, to the region of the Don Cossacks, with the intention of rallying what was left of the viable forces in the army and resuming the war against Germany. He was promised support by the Council of Civic Activists (Sovet Obschestvennykh Deiatelei), an informal association of prominent personalities dominated by the liberal Constitutional-Democrats (Kadets).^* On arriving in the Don region, he succeeded in enlisting 400 or 500 officers in what was informally known as the “Alekseev Organization”—a disappointing number, given the hordes of demobilized officers in the area leading a life of idleness as they waited for something to happen.

At his headquarters in Novocherkassk, Alekseev was joined before long by other generals who had fled Bolshevik Russia. The most outstanding of them was Lavr Kornilov, who had escaped the prison at Bykhov to which Kerensky had confined him in August 1917, and in disguise had made his way across hostile territory. Impetuous, daring, adored by the troops, he was a perfect complement to the studious and reserved Alekseev. The latter, who admired Kornilov’s generalship but mistrusted his political judgment, proposed an arrangement under which Kornilov would take charge of the troops and he, Alekseev, would assume responsibility for the army’s politics and finances. Kornilov rejected this proposal, demanding undivided command; he threatened to leave for Siberia unless his condition was met.

The dispute between the two generals was resolved in January 1918 with the help of political figures who had come from Russia to Novocherkassk to advise the military leaders, among them Peter Struve and Paul Miliukov, the most powerful intellects, respectively, of Russia’s conservative and liberal movements. They and their associates sided with Alekseev and warned Kornilov that unless he agreed to a dual command structure, no financial assistance would be forthcoming. Kornilov yielded and on January 7 an agreement was concluded by virtue of which Alekseev took over the new army’s finances and its “external relations” (by which were meant mainly relations with the Don Cossacks on whose territory the new army was to be formed), and Kornilov became Commander in Chief. A “Political Council,” made up partly of generals and partly of politicians, was created to guide the political affairs of the army and maintain contact with supporters living in Bolshevik Russia. Following this accord, the “Alekseev Organization” was renamed “Volunteer Army” (Dobrovol’cheskaia Armiia).

3. Kornilov with young volunteers.

At the suggestion of Boris Savinkov, an old revolutionary turned patriot, the Volunteer Army released a vague programmatic statement that defined its mission as fighting “the German-Bolshevik yoke” and reconvening the Constituent Assembly.²⁴ The British and the French assigned liaison missions to the Army; the latter promised large sums of money (which never materialized).²⁵ This, for the time being, was the extent of Allied involvement. The Allies did not wish to side more openly with the Volunteer forces, out of fear of jeopardizing diplomatic efforts to dissuade the Bolsheviks from signing a separate peace with the Central Powers.

Eager to put the largest possible distance between himself and the politicians, Kornilov removed his headquarters to Rostov. As Chief of Staff he appointed General A. S. Lukomskii, an associate from the turbulent days of his conflict with Kerensky.²⁶ With volunteers signing up at a rate of 75 to 80 a day, toward the end of January 1918 the Army numbered 2,000 men, a high proportion of them junior officers, cadets, and secondary school students fired by patriotism and willing to serve in the ranks; hardly any ordinary soldiers enlisted.²⁷

From the outset, the destiny of the Volunteer Army, and its successor, the Southern Army, was linked with that of the Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossacks, whose territories the generals chose as their base of operations and from whose ranks they drew most of their troops. And in this fact lay a source of serious weakness, for the Cossacks proved halfhearted and undependable allies.

The Don Cossack Host (Donskoe Kazach’e Voisko) had been the largest Cossack contingent in the Imperial army, providing it with the bulk of its cavalry; smaller contingents were supplied by the Kuban and Terek Cossacks. Formed in the early sixteenth century by runaway serfs in the no-man’s-land between Muscovy, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire, the Don Cossacks at first made a living by hunting, fishing, and raiding Muslim settlements. In time, the Russian government restricted their independence and enrolled them, along with the other Cossack hosts, in its service. In return for bearing universal military duty, the Don Cossacks received generous allotments of land: on the eve of the Revolution, they held 13 of the 17 million hectares of arable land in the Don area, with an average household disposing of 12 hectares²⁸—double the average allotment of peasant households in central Russia. They were one of the mainstays of the tsarist regime, frequently called upon to quell urban disturbances. During World War I they contributed 60 regiments of cavalry. When the Russian army dissolved in the second half of 1917, these units made their way back home in reasonably good order. In July, they elected as their ataman, or chief, General Alexis Kaledin, a Russian patriot who offered his services to the Volunteer Army.

The 2 million Don Cossacks, however, were an asset of uncertain value: Kaledin warned his friends that he could not guarantee their loyalty. While they refused to recognize the Soviet government, they did so less from objections to the Bolsheviks’ legitimacy than from concern for their properties, which were threatened by the Soviet Land Decree nationalizing private land. They were much more interested in the affairs of the Don than in the fate of Russia—in Denikin’s opinion, their attitude could be summed up as: “Russia is none of our business” (“Do Rossii nam dela net”).²⁹ As the Russian state dissolved, their attention turned to their own security, which essentially meant protecting their rich landholdings from external and internal enemies. To this end and only to this end were they prepared to cooperate with the anti-Bolshevik generals. Their main objective, at any rate until the Germans lost the war and evacuated Russia, was to establish an independent Don republic under German patronage. They joined the Whites only after losing their German mentors. Leon Trotsky correctly argued that if the Red Army respected their territories, the Don Cossacks would not stir.³⁰ When they did move out of their region, they invariably coupled fighting with looting, of which Jews were the principal victims. The situation was similar among the Kuban and Terek Cossacks, who throughout the Civil War considered themselves sovereign peoples, even if they had no control over the White armies operating on their territory: when they fought alongside the Volunteers, it was mainly to rob civilians.

The conflict between the Cossacks, who thought in local, regional terms, and the White generals, who had a national perspective, was by its very nature insoluble.³¹ Denikin’s frequent appeals not only to the (nonexistent) patriotism of the Don Cossacks but to their enlightened self-interest fell on deaf ears. Their behavior infuriated Kornilov:

He was in the habit of assembling Cossacks in every Don settlement he was about to evacuate, in order to exhort them—always unsuccessfully—with a patriotic speech to follow him. These speeches invariably ended with the words: “You are scum (svoloch).”³²

The Cossacks felt threatened by the Bolshevik Land Decree because in their midst lived peasants, not members of Cossack communities, much poorer than they, who could use it as a pretext for seizing their properties. These peasants were mostly immigrants, known as inogorodnye, or “outlanders,” who had resettled to the Cossack regions from the overpopulated provinces of Great Russia. Here they either tilled marginal land or hired themselves out to the Cossacks as farm workers. In the Don area in 1917 they numbered 1.8 million: an estimated half a million had no land.³³ They constituted a very radical element: most of the Bolshevik supporters in the Don region came from their ranks. The outlanders were reinforced by deserters from the crumbling Caucasian and Black Sea fronts, as well as by some Cossack youths, whom the war had radicalized and who now turned against their elders.

By mid-February 1918 the Volunteer Army had 4,000 men—a highly motivated body, the nucleus of what in time would develop into the finest fighting force of the Civil War. Shortage of money seriously impeded the Army’s growth. Alekseev’s friends in Moscow failed to make good on their pledges, claiming that the nationalization of banks and the seizure of bank safes had left them destitute.³⁴ According to Denikin, their total contribution to his army amounted to 800,000 rubles.³⁵ The Allies had promised 100 million rubles, but for the time being delivered only 500,000.^* The Volunteer Army would have been stillborn had Alekseev not succeeded in withdrawing, with Kaledin’s help, 9 million rubles from the Rostov branch of the State Bank.³⁶

The news of the creation of a Volunteer Army on the Don in alliance with Kaledin’s Cossacks set off alarm bells in Bolshevik headquarters at Smolnyi: well versed in the history of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks immediately saw a parallel with the counterrevolutionary Vendée. The prospect was frightening not only for political and military reasons but also for economic ones, in that during the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, then in progress, the Germans made it known that they intended to detach the Ukraine and make it a puppet state. The Bolsheviks thus faced the prospect of losing yet another major grain-producing area. To forestall the loss, Lenin instructed V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko to assemble such troops as he could and, together with Bolshevik sympathizers among the peasants and deserters on the Don, liquidate the incipient counterrevolution. His other mission was to occupy the Ukraine before the Germans could turn it into a protectorate. Antonov’s army of 6,000–7,000 men advancing on the Don in December 1917 and January 1918 made good progress although undisciplined and plagued by desertions, because there was nothing to stand in its way. In the Don area, pro-Red peasants, workers, and deserters rose in its support.

Under assault from without and within, the Don Cossacks wavered in their loyalty to Kaledin and condemned him for siding with Alekseev and Kornilov. A Cossack elder expressed widespread sentiments: “Russia? Sure, it was a mighty power, but now it is gone.… Well, let it be.… We’ve got enough problems of our own.”³⁷ Challenged in his authority, observing the spread of anarchy to his homeland without being able to arrest it, despairing of Russia’s future, Kaledin committed suicide (January 29/February 11, 1918). For the next three months, until the election in May 1918 of General P. N. Krasnov as his successor, the Don Cossacks had no chief.

With the Don region in rebellion and a superior Red force drawing near, Kornilov faced the prospect of encirclement.³⁸ Before committing suicide, Kaledin had urged the White generals to move their small army into the region of the Kuban Cossacks, who he thought would be friendlier to them since there were fewer inogorodnye in their midst. Kornilov now followed this advice. On the night of February 21–22 (NS)^* the Volunteer Army evacuated Novocherkassk and Rostov and headed south: in Denikin’s words, “chasing a will-o’-the-wisp.”³⁹ The exact number of those who participated in the Volunteer Army’s legendary “Ice March” cannot be determined: the most likely figure is 6,000, of whom between 2,500 and 3,500 were combat troops and the rest civilian followers.^† Following on its heels, the Red forces of Antonov-Ovseenko entered Novocherkassk and Rostov.

The small band of Volunteers traversed hostile territory, harassed by inogorodnye and pro-Bolshevik deserters, braving savage cold and freezing rain, short of food, clothing, and weapons. The men had to fight every step of the way. No facilities existed to care for the wounded; losses were made good by enrolling Kuban Cossacks. The army was cut off from the world at large: its friends in Moscow had no idea where it was or whether it still existed.

The most tragic episode of the Ice March occurred during the siege of the Kuban Cossack capital, Ekaterinodar. On April 13, Kornilov was directing operations from an isolated farmhouse: some 3,000 Volunteers, reinforced by 4,000 Cossack cavalry, with 8 field guns and 700 shells, assaulted a city held by 17,000 Bolsheviks armed with 30 guns and abundant ammunition.⁴⁰ Red artillery had targeted the farmhouse and Kornilov was urged to move, but was too preoccupied to heed the warning. He was bending over a map when a shell struck: the explosion threw him against a stove, cracking his skull and burying him under the collapsed ceiling.⁴¹ He expired within a few minutes. His death dealt a severe blow to the army’s morale, for General Anton Denikin, who instantly took over as Commander in Chief (he had narrowly escaped being killed by the same shell), had none of his magnetism and flair. Kornilov was interred in an unmarked grave, following which Denikin ordered the siege lifted and the Army to resume its march. After the Volunteers had departed, the Bolsheviks exhumed Kornilov’s remains, bore them in triumph through the city, then tore them to shreds and burned what was left.⁴²

Like any general who loses a war, Denikin has been severely judged by historians. Under the circumstances, however, he was not a bad choice, for although neither a forceful person nor an effective administrator, he had reasonably good strategic sense and combined personal integrity with utter devotion to the cause.⁴³ His intellectual quality is attested to by his memoirs in five volumes, which display rare objectivity and an equally rare absence of rancor. One of his civilian associates, K. N. Sokolov, otherwise quite critical of Denikin, speaks of him personally in the highest terms, describing him as a “typical Russian intelligent.”⁴⁴ The main impression he made was one of “irresistible charm.” His external appearance

4. Denikin.

was most ordinary. Nothing grand; nothing demonic. Simply a Russian army general with a tendency to stoutness, a large bald head bordered by trimmed graying hair, a pointed beard, and a twirled mustache. But he had a simply captivating, shy severity in his awkward, as it were, halting manners, and in the direct, stubborn glance, which dissolved in a good-natured smile and infectious laughter.… In General Denikin I saw no Napoleon, no hero, no leader, but simply an honest, steadfast, and valiant man, one of those “good” Russians who, if one is to believe Kliuchevskii, had led Russia out of the Time of Troubles.^*

Although opponents on the left like to depict him as a reactionary monarchist, his politics are more aptly defined by a Communist historian as those of a “right Octobrist,” that is, a liberal conservative:⁴⁵ from his recollections, we learn that he sympathized with the Liberation Movement which had ignited the 1905 Revolution. On the whole, however, he was true to the tradition of the Russian military, regarding political involvement as unbecoming a professional officer.⁴⁶

The Ice March ended late in April when the Volunteer Army, having covered 1,100 kilometers in 80 days, half of them fighting, finally captured Ekaterinodar. The survivors were issued medals depicting a crown of thorns pierced by a sword.

Good news lay in store. Colonel M. G. Drozdovskii, commanding a brigade of 2,000 infantry and cavalry, had traversed the Ukraine from the Romanian front and reached the Don, where he placed himself and his troops at Denikin’s disposal. It was the only instance of an entire unit of what had been the Russian army joining the Volunteers. Even such small numbers made a difference because in the Civil War one volunteer was worth a dozen conscripts. More encouraging still was the fact that after three months of life under Communist rule during which they had been subjected to food requisitions, the inogorodnye lost enthusiasm for Lenin’s regime. Throughout April anti-Bolshevik risings broke out in the Don region which resulted in the expulsion of the Bolshevik forces from the area by the joint efforts of Drozdovskii, the Cossacks, and the Germans. In early May, the Volunteers recaptured Rostov and Novocherkassk.

While the Volunteer Army was forming in the northern Caucasus, other anti-Bolshevik groups were organizing along the mid-Volga and in Siberia. These movements were more political than military in character, their object being either to reconstitute a democratic all-Russian government or else to assert the region’s independence from Moscow. The military forces here were an adjunct, at any rate until November 1918 when Admiral Alexander Kolchak took command of the Eastern front. The White forces in the east were in every respect inferior to the Volunteer Army, whether judged by the quality of leadership, organization, or morale. The only competent unit operating in the east—from May 1918 when they took to arms, until October when they withdrew from combat—was the Czechoslovak Legion.⁴⁷

Socioeconomic conditions in Siberia differed in important respects from those prevailing in Great Russia. Siberia had not known peasant serfdom. The Russians here consisted of free peasants and traders, individualistic and enterprising, animated by a frontier spirit alien to the leveling ethos of the ex-serf. Living in their midst, however, were the same “outlanders” whom we have noted in the Cossack regions, peasant immigrants from central Russia, craving for the land of the old settlers (starozhil’tsy). They either cultivated marginal land or led a seminomadic existence employing the primitive slash-burn technique. In Siberia, as in the Northern Caucasus, social conflicts during the Revolution and Civil War pitted these newcomers against the prosperous old settlers and Cossacks. Bolshevik support in Siberia came either from this group or from the industrial workers of the Urals, both descended from serfs: as in Russia proper, there was a striking coincidence here between the heritage of serfdom and Bolshevism.^*

Siberia had since the middle of the nineteenth century a vigorous regional movement that aspired to autonomy for the area on the grounds that its unique historical and social characteristics required special methods of administration. The movement gained momentum under the Provisional Government, when the Siberians created their own regional authority. After the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, they became still more assertive: autonomy now served not only to give expression to Siberia’s spirit but also to enable it to escape the looming civil war. In December 1917, the Socialists-Revolutionaries and Constitutional-Democrats joined forces to form in Tomsk a Siberian Regional Council (Sibirskaia Oblastnaia Duma), which assumed quasi-governmental functions.^† The following month (January 27/February 9, 1918), the Council declared Siberia independent and announced a cabinet.⁴⁸ In early July, the new government, having moved to Omsk, issued a declaration in which it reconfirmed that it was the sole legitimate authority in Siberia.⁴⁹ The declaration left in abeyance the question of the region’s ultimate relationship with Russia. Siberia, it stated, considered itself separated from Russia only temporarily and would do all in its power to restore national unity: its future relations with European Russia would be determined by the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. The Siberian government annulled Soviet laws, dissolved the soviets, and restored sequestered land to its owners. It adopted a white and green flag symbolic of Siberia’s snows and forests.

While the Tomsk-Omsk government confined its claims to Siberia, the Committee of the Constituent Assembly formed in Samara on June 8, 1918, viewed itself as the only legitimate government in Russia. Its claim rested on the argument that the Constituent Assembly, elected in November 1917 by 44 million voters and then dispersed by the Bolsheviks, was the exclusive source of political legitimacy.

After the Bolsheviks had closed the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist-Revolutionary deputies from the mid-Volga area, a bastion of SR strength, returned home.⁵⁰ They attempted to reconvene the Assembly, but the effort collapsed.⁵¹ Their opportunity came in June 1918 with the rebellion of the Czechoslovak Legion. These Czechs were prisoners of war of the tsarist army captured during World War I. After the Bolsheviks had made peace with the Central Powers, they arranged for their evacuation from Russia to France by way of Vladivostok. In May 1918 Trotsky ordered them to surrender their arms, whereupon they rebelled.⁵² On June 8, the Czechs expelled the Bolsheviks from Samara. On the same day, five SR deputies to the Constituent Assembly, headed by V. K. Volskii, formed the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch). The Committee grew to 92 members, all Socialists-Revolutionaries, most of them from the party’s radical wing, headed by Victor Chernov.⁵³ Over its headquarters flew a red banner. On the day of its formation, Komuch declared Bolshevik authority in the province of Samara deposed, and all civil rights and freedoms restored. Existing soviets, handpicked by the Bolsheviks, were ordered dissolved and replaced by new ones, chosen in democratic elections with the participation of all the political parties.⁵⁴

Nothing demonstrates better the irrelevance of political and social programs during the Civil War than the fate of Komuch. On July 24, Komuch issued a platform of unexceptional socialist and democratic credentials—the kind that the Western governments were forever urging on the White generals. It acknowledged as law the Bolshevik Land Decree and assured the peasants that they could enjoy in perpetuity the soil they had seized since February 1917. Soviet labor legislation also remained in force.⁵⁵ These pledges did nothing to gain the Komuch support among the population, which by now paid no attention to programs and promises. Since the elections to the Constituent Assembly the preceding November, the electorate had grown disenchanted with politics and to the extent that it cared to express political opinions, showed a trend toward the right. Thus, in the municipal elections held in Samara when Komuch was still riding high (August 1918), only one-third of the 120,000 eligible voters bothered to vote, and of that number, less than half cast ballots for the SR-Menshevik bloc. In Ufa and Simbirsk the socialists elected fewer than one-third of the municipal officials, and only in Orenburg did they win as much as one-half. In 1919, absenteeism in the municipal elections in some cities under non-Bolshevik control reached as high as 83 percent.⁵⁶

Komuch formed a government composed of 14 SRs and a single Menshevik; under it served a military force called the People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia). It was initially hoped to man this army exclusively with volunteers, but as no more than 6,000 of these turned up, resort was had to conscription. Designed to bring in 50,000 soldiers, it actually realized fewer than 15,000. Commissioned officers were in very short supply because most of them disliked the left-wing orientation of Komuch, and if they enlisted, preferred to join the Siberian army or the Volunteers. The only effective anti-Bolshevik military force here were the 10,000 Czechs, the rear-guard of the Czechoslovak army still to the west of the Urals: in 1918 they made up 80 percent of the combat troops in the area and did most of the fighting.⁵⁷ In recognition of this fact, Komuch placed the People’s Army under the command of a Czech officer. The only Russian fighting force in the area was a detachment of anti-Bolshevik workers from the Izhevsk and Votkino weapons factories.

During the summer of 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion was designated by the Supreme Allied Council in Paris an integral part of the Allied armed forces: its mission was to serve as the vanguard of an international contingent intended to reactivate the Eastern front against Germany. In pursuit of this objective, the Czechs expanded the area under their control. On August 7, they captured Kazan from its Latvian defenders: in this engagement, Russian troops, Red and White alike, fought without enthusiasm.⁵⁸ In Kazan the Czechs seized a hoard of bullion and securities that the Communist government had secretly evacuated the previous May when it feared the imminent fall of Petrograd and Moscow to the Germans. It consisted of nearly 500 tons of gold—half of the country’s gold reserve—worth 650 million old rubles (the equivalent of $325 million), silver, foreign currency, and securities.⁵⁹ Representatives of Komuch followed on the heels of the Czechs.

Thanks to Czechoslovak intervention, in August 1918 Komuch exercised authority over the provinces of Samara, Simbirsk, Kazan, and Ufa as well as several districts of Saratov province. In administering this territory, the SRs, who routinely condemned the repressive policies of the Bolsheviks, proved themselves distinctly authoritarian, censoring critical newspapers, persecuting persons suspected of Bolshevik sympathies, and installing officials who quickly acquired the characteristics of tsarist bureaucrats, including a fondness for privileges and luxuries.⁶⁰ Although it depicted itself as a model democracy, Komuch has been called one of the most reactionary of the anti-Bolshevik regimes to emerge in the course of the Civil War.⁶¹ Its personnel intrigued day and night against the Omsk government, hoping to subvert it and extend Komuch’s authority over its territory.

The Siberian government in Omsk was also dominated by SRs, but of a more moderate and pragmatic orientation, willing to work together with non-socialist “bourgeois elements.” To this end they established friendly relations with the liberals (Constitutional-Democrats or Kadets) and the powerful Siberian cooperatives. Owing to this spirit of compromise, the Siberian government succeeded in establishing a relatively efficient administrative apparatus.

The Omsk government also disposed of a superior military force. Officers preferred the Siberian army to the People’s Army, since it was organized on traditional lines, retaining old titles and epaulets. Commanded by a young and energetic officer, Lieutenant Colonel A. N. Grishin (Almazov), it numbered 40,000 men, half of them Ural and Orenburg Cossacks.^*

5.z A Latvian rifleman.

The Red Army was slow to form.⁶² Delays were due not only to a shortage of volunteers and the near-universal disinclination of Russians to serve, but also to the Bolshevik aversion to a standing army. Revolutionary history taught them that a regular force commanded by professional officers was a breeding ground of the “counterrevolution.” In Russia, this danger was enhanced by the fact that, given the country’s demographic structure, a conscript army was bound to be an army of peasants, a class the Bolsheviks saw as hostile.

In the first few months in power the only military force on which the Bolsheviks could rely were three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, the one contingent of the old army that they kept intact because of its Social-Democratic sympathies. The Latvians rendered the Bolsheviks invaluable services: dispersing the Constituent Assembly, putting down the Left SR uprising, defending the Volga from the Czechs, and guarding their persons from potential assassins.

But since this force was hardly adequate for the Civil War they intended to unleash, the Bolsheviks reluctantly reconciled themselves to the necessity of forming a regular force. In March 1918, they created a Supreme Military Council (Vysshyi Voennyi Sovet) staffed by career officers of the old army, to serve as a skeletal general staff. Its head, Major General N. I. Rattel, had directed military communications in the Imperial army; its other members likewise were onetime imperial officers. This body was to coordinate and direct the Soviet war effort, but it accomplished little, since it had no troops to command.

Although formally the Red Army came into being in February 1918, for the next six months it led a merely paper existence. Apart from the Latvians, who were rushed from one endangered front to another, the forces fighting on the Bolshevik side consisted of scattered detachments of 700 to 1,000 men led by elected commanders; they had no formal military structure or chain of command, and therefore no coordinated strategy. By their very nature they had to conduct partisan warfare.⁶³ The Red Army became reality only in the fall of 1918, in the midst of concurrent campaigns against the Czechoslovaks and the Russian villages, when Moscow finally gambled on drafting masses of peasants and as many ex-tsarist officers as required to command them.

Although the White movements were military efforts par excellence, whose leaders scorned politics, they could not altogether dispense with political advice and support. This was supplied by two clandestine organizations with branches inside and outside Bolshevik Russia: the National Center (Natsional’nyi Tsentr) and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia (Soiuz Vozrozhdeniia Rossii). The former was liberal and dominated by Kadets; the latter was socialist and led by the SRs. Both, however, sought to transcend party loyalties and win a following on broad democratic platforms. The National Center, by far the more effective of the two, supplied the White leaders with political as well as military intelligence on conditions inside Soviet Russia. To some extent, it also influenced their conduct.

The origins of the National Center went back to the summer of 1917, when influential liberal and conservative politicians decided the time had come to set aside party rivalries and unite to stop the slide into anarchy. The Constitutional-Democratic Party, the driving force behind this effort, was, next to the Bolsheviks, the best organized political group in Russia: its centrist position enabled it to attract moderate socialists as well as moderate conservatives. The left-wing opposition, which gave rise to the Union for Regeneration, began to organize only in the spring of 1918. Because its socialist leadership could not quite make up its mind whom it disliked more, the Whites or the Reds, it never attained either the cohesion or the effectiveness of its rival.

The immediate forerunner of the National Center was the Council of Civic Activists, formed in August 1917 by a number of outstanding parliamentary figures, generals, businessmen, Kadet politicians, and conservative intellectuals.^* The Council’s platform called for firm authority and the restoration of discipline in the armed forces. Kerensky suspected that the Council’s hidden agenda was toppling him from power: his erratic behavior in August-September 1917, notably his provocative behavior toward Kornilov, was in good measure influenced by this perception.

In the winter of 1917–18, the Council backed Alekseev’s efforts to create a new army on the Don and through a delegation sent to him in January, helped smooth his relations with Kornilov. In the spring of 1918, liberal and conservative groups in Moscow combined to form a “Right Center.” The activities of this Center are shrouded in secrecy, for it left few documents, but it appears that its principal mission was organizing underground anti-Bolshevik military cells. It enrolled officers, some of whom it sent to Denikin, and others of whom it kept in readiness for a coup.⁶⁴

The Right Center broke up in the spring of 1918 over foreign policy disagreements. Its more conservative members, having concluded that the principal threat to Russia came not from the Germans but from the Bolsheviks, requested the Germans to help them overthrow Lenin’s regime. Negotiations to this end got underway after the arrival in Moscow of the German embassy, but they were terminated without issue on orders of Berlin, which decided to continue its pro-Bolshevik course.⁶⁵ The majority of the members of the Right Center, loyal to the Allies, broke away to form the National Center.

The socialist opposition coalesced after the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 3, 1918), which it repudiated on the grounds that it opened the door to German political and economic domination of Russia. In April, after unsuccessful attempts to come to terms with the National Center, socialists and left liberals formed the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, whose program called for the restoration, with Allied help, of the territories surrendered at Brest-Litovsk, the formation of an effective national government, and the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly.⁶⁶ The Union functioned separately from the National Center but maintained personal links with it through several left Kadets who belonged to both organizations.

The Union and the Center carried on intermittent negotiations to determine whether they could formulate a common platform. Convinced that the Bolshevik dictatorship could be defeated only by another dictatorship, the Center advocated a combined anti-Bolshevik military and political force under a leader invested with broad discretionary powers. The Union preferred to fight the Bolsheviks without resort to a dictatorship. In May 1918 the two groups reached a compromise calling for a three-man Directory made up of one socialist, one non-socialist, and one military man without party affiliation. Conveyed to the Komuch and the Siberian government, the decision would bear fruit in August 1918.

The Allied leaders believed as late as September 1918 that the war would last at least another year: for this reason, the reconstitution of the Eastern front to divert German forces from the West remained for them a matter of high priority. They had sent token forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok; they had placed the Czechoslovak Legion under their command; and they had authorized Japanese landings in the Far East. But having hardly any troops of their own to spare, their main hope was to raise in Siberia a large Russian army.

Responsibility for organizing the new Eastern front was entrusted to the Allied missions in Siberia.^* To fulfill this responsibility, they pressured the various governments that had sprung up east of the Volga—there may have been as many as thirteen—to unite into a single government and merge their armies. Allied officers were disgusted by the enmity between Omsk and Samara, which resulted in their refusing to supply each other with food, and each insisting that the other party’s troops disarm before setting foot on their territory.⁶⁷ They urged the Siberian government and Komuch, as well as the Cossacks and the organizations representing the ethnic minorities of the Urals and Siberia (the Bashkirs, Kirgiz-Kazakhs, and so forth) to bury their differences and consolidate in one government that the Allies would recognize and supply. The Czechs, who were bearing the brunt of the fighting, were especially insistent on this.

In the summer of 1918, responding to the pressures, Russian politicians convened three conferences. The third and most productive of these meetings gathered from September 8 to 23 in Ufa. On hand were some 170 delegates representing most organizations and national groupings opposed to the Bolsheviks (but neither the Volunteer Army nor the Don or Kuban Cossacks).⁶⁸ Half were Socialists-Revolutionaries; the rest ranged from Mensheviks to monarchists. It was a mélange of politicians who had little in common except dislike of the Bolsheviks: noting the red carnations the SRs sported in their lapels, a Cossack general said that the mere sight of these flowers gave him a headache.⁶⁹ Badgered by the Czechs and sobered by bad news from the front—while the meeting was in progress Kazan fell to the Reds and Ufa itself was threatened—the delegates proved more conciliatory. A settlement was reached which resulted in the creation of an All-Russian Provisional Government. Its structure bore the earmarks of the resolution agreed upon in Moscow by the National Center and the Union for Regeneration. The executive, called the Directory, was a compromise between those who wanted a personal military dictatorship (the Siberians and the Cossacks) and the SRs, who preferred a government subject to the authority of the Constituent Assembly. The new Provisional Government was to function until January 1, 1919, when the Constituent Assembly would reconvene, provided there was a quorum of 201 deputies; if such was lacking, it would open in any event on February 1. This government was declared the only legitimate authority in all Russia. Komuch and the Siberian government, as well as the other regional governments present, agreed to subordinate themselves to it. Denikin, however, who was neither represented nor consulted, refused to follow suit.⁷⁰

As ultimately constituted, the Directory, headquartered in Omsk, was composed of five men, under the chairmanship of the right SR, N. D. Avksentev.^* Inordinately vain, according to one contemporary, Avksentev “immediately surrounded himself with adjutants, restored titles … [and] created buffoon pomp behind which lay nothing of substance.”⁷¹ General Boldyrev, who took command of the armed forces, although nominally partyless, had strong ties to the SRs. He had a distinguished war record but was not widely known and lacked Alekseev’s prestige. Formally a coalition, it was for all practical purposes an SR government.

After much bickering, on November 4 the Directory formed a fourteen-man cabinet, chaired by Vologodskii. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the onetime commander of the Black Sea Fleet, who happened to be passing through Omsk en route to the Volunteer Army, was pressed by Boldyrev into service as Minister of War. It was largely a ceremonial appointment. Kolchak was well known to the British and had in General Knox, the head of the British military mission, a warm admirer. Boldyrev is reported to have told him that he had been appointed for the express purpose of securing Allied support and was not to interfere with military matters.⁷² The Directory’s program called for the restoration of Russia’s territorial integrity and the struggle against the Soviet government and Germany. Other questions were left for the Constituent Assembly.⁷³

In October 1918, when the Directory assumed office, the international situation was rapidly changing. The German government had requested U.S. mediation and World War I was drawing to an end. This prospect immediately affected the status of the Czech troops in Russia. On October 18, the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris proclaimed the independence of its country. As soon as the news reached them, the Czech troops resolved no longer to fight on Russian soil, since the cause for which they had been enlisted had triumphed: “The Allied victory had liberated Bohemia. The Czech troops were no longer mutineers nor traitors to the Hapsburg Empire. They were victorious soldiers and pioneers of Czechoslovakia. Home, which might have been forever barred and banned to them, now shone in the lights of freedom and of honor.”⁷⁴ Soon soldiers’ committees sprouted and politics took over. The combat capabilities of the Legion deteriorated to the point where the Russians were happy to see them go.⁷⁵ In the spring of 1919, yielding to French pleas, the Czechs agreed to delay evacuation home to guard the Transsiberian Railroad between Omsk and Irkutsk from pro-Communist partisans and bandits. But they did no more fighting. These were no longer the idealistic Czechs and Slovaks who had once placed themselves at the disposal of the Allied command: it was a remnant infected with the general corruption of the Civil War. While guarding the Transsiberian, they amassed much wealth in the form of industrial equipment and household goods, which they stored in 600 freight cars.⁷⁶

6. Posters announcing the Red Army’s capture of Kazan.

After the Czechoslovaks had withdrawn from combat, the only military forces left to the Directory were the People’s Army and the Siberian Cossacks. The People’s Army was in pitiful shape. Having inspected his frontline troops, Boldyrev reported: “the men [are] barefoot, in rags, they sleep on bare planks, some go even without hot food since, lacking shoes, they cannot make it to the kitchen, and there is no one to bring it to them or to carry it.”⁷⁷ There was no unified command: the most powerful entity, the Siberian Cossacks under Ataman Alexander Dutov, operated mostly on their own. Allied material help at this point was insignificant, consisting mainly of clothing. France and the United States held back; Japan minded her own business. Britain dispatched to Omsk the 25th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, commanded by Colonel John Ward, whose contingent of 800 soldiers had been declared unfit for duty on the Western front. Its mission was to maintain order in Omsk and give the Directory moral support. It did no fighting.^* Omsk also had a contingent of 3,000 Czechs who sympathized with the SRs.⁷⁸

The Directory, even more than the 1917 Provisional Government of which it viewed itself as the successor, was a paper government without administrative apparatus, financial resources, or even an official organ.⁷⁹ Such bureaucracy as it had consisted of functionaries of the Siberian government who continued to administer their area as they had done since 1917. Russian and foreign observers agree that the Directory never exercised effective authority, a fact that merits stressing in view of the legends circulated by Socialists-Revolutionaries after its fall. It was fatally hampered by irreconcilable differences between the SRs who headed both the government and the army, and the nonsocialists who ran the administration, controlled the money, and enjoyed the sympathy of the officers and Cossacks. Members of the Directory, according to Boldyrev, “were representatives and advocates of the groups that had sent them, groups which were deeply in conflict and even hostile in their political and social endeavors.”⁸⁰ In the pithy phrase of Colonel Ward, it was “a combination that refused to mix.”⁸¹

Unable to govern, the Directory and its cabinet spent much of their energy and most of their time on squabbles and intrigues. The socialists quarreled with the liberals, while the politicians who thought in all-Russian terms bickered with the Siberian separatists. The leaders of Komuch could not reconcile themselves to their loss of identity: although they had surrendered authority to the Directory, psychologically they still thought of themselves as a government within a government.

Chernov, the leading Socialist-Revolutionary, who had not been invited to join the Directory because he was considered too radical to work with the Siberians and Cossacks, was busy conspiring. In early August, the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party moved from Moscow to the Volga, leaving behind only a skeletal bureau.⁸² Chernov arrived in Samara on September 19, as the Ufa meeting was concluding its deliberations. In his view, the Ufa accord was an act of surrender to the reaction, and he set about trying to subvert it. At his urging, the SRs adopted a resolution making the SRs serving in the government accountable to the Party’s Central Committee. The result was to compromise Avksentev and Zenzinov in the eyes of the military and liberals.⁸³

As putative successor to the Provisional Government of 1917, the Directory fully expected to receive Allied diplomatic recognition. This the British were prepared to grant, at any rate on a de facto basis, and the British cabinet made a decision to this effect on November 14, 1918. But because of the time required to draft an appropriate telegram, the decision had not been made public or even conveyed to Omsk by the time the Directory fell. Neither the French nor the Americans were willing to follow suit.

Throughout the Directory’s eight-week existence rumors circulated that the SRs were plotting a coup.⁸⁴ It was not only ineffective but unpopular. Siberian peasants regarded it as “Bolshevik,” and so did the officers in its service and local businessmen. The gulf between the right and the left was too great to bridge even in face of the common danger. The Directory lived in an unreal world and its demise was only a question of time.

By May 1918, the situation of the Volunteer Army had improved appreciably. The tide of pro-Bolshevism in the northern Caucasus had receded, partly from the reflux of deserters, partly from peasant anger over Communist food requisitions. In western Siberia, the Czechs had risen in revolt. The Allied troops that landed in Archangel and Murmansk were thought in Denikin’s headquarters to be the advance party of a huge expeditionary force.

With the advent of spring, Denikin had to decide what to do next: on this decision, in his words, depended the fate of the Volunteer Army and even the entire White movement.⁸⁵ Alekseev wanted the Volunteer Army along with the Don Cossacks to be thrown against Tsaritsyn, the capture of which would make it possible to link up with the Czechs and the People’s Army. Once joined, the anti-Bolshevik armies of the east and the south could forge a single front from the Urals to the Black Sea. Capture of Tsaritsyn had the added attraction of disrupting Moscow’s traffic on the Volga and cutting off access to Baku, its main source of petroleum. Alekseev feared that if the Volunteer Army remained much longer in the backwater of the northern Caucasus it would not only miss a unique strategic opportunity but lose its very raison d’être: unless it transformed itself into an all-Russian national army, he argued, it would disintegrate. But Denikin had other ideas.

In mid-May, the Don Cossacks elected, as successor to Kaledin, General P. N. Krasnov, an opportunist and adventurer to whom Russia meant little and the Don everything.^{* 86} On assuming office he entered into close relations with the German command in the Ukraine with a view to securing subsidies and weapons. Some of the weapons, drawn from the arsenals of the old Russian army, he bartered with the Volunteer Army for food,⁸⁷ but on the whole his relations with it were strained, for he looked on the Volunteers not as allies but as guests. His objective was a sovereign Don Cossack republic. To the extent that he was even willing to contemplate sending his Cossacks on Moscow it was as Commander in Chief of all the anti-Bolshevik forces, the Volunteer Army included. This was totally unacceptable to the White generals, for whom the Don was an inalienable part of Russia. Krasnov’s ambitions and intrigues caused relations between the Volunteer Army and the Don Cossacks to sour in no time.^† Throughout the Civil War, the Don Cossacks kept their units separate and on occasion ignored and frustrated plans drawn up by the Volunteer Army’s command. In assessing the actions of what is loosely called the Volunteer Army it must never be left out of sight that it consisted of two discrete entities, the Volunteer Army proper and the Cossacks, whose interests coincided only in part. Until the summer of 1919, when Denikin entered the Ukraine and began to conscript the local population, the Cossacks considerably outnumbered the Volunteers.

Like Alekseev but for different reasons, Krasnov also wanted Denikin to concentrate on Tsaritsyn, so as to lift the threat to the Don region from Red forces operating in the northeast. So eager was he to capture the Volga city that he offered to place his Cossacks under Denikin’s command if he would agree to assault it with the Volunteer Army. Identical advice came from the Army’s friends in Moscow.⁸⁸

Denikin, who had a considerable streak of stubbornness, rejected these counsels, resolving instead to march his Army south, into the Kuban steppe. He reasoned that before venturing outside the northern Caucasus, he had to solidify his rear by liquidating the Red North Caucasian Army of 70,000 men, mostly made up of inogorodnye, which controlled the Kuban region. The Kuban Cossacks, who were both excellent soldiers and strongly anti-Communist, seemed likely to provide the kind of reliable support denied him by the Don host.⁸⁹ Denikin’s strategic decision was subsequently much criticized: for by failing to unite with the armies forming in the east when it was still feasible, he made it possible for the Red Army to deal with him and the other Whites one by one. Denied Volunteer support, Krasnov attacked Tsaritsyn on his own. His Don Cossacks stormed it repeatedly during November and December 1918, but the city held.^* It would fall to Denikin only in the summer of the following year, by which time the White armies in the east were in full retreat and the opportunity to create a unified anti-Bolshevik front had disappeared forever.

On June 23, the Volunteer Army set off on its second Kuban campaign. Taking part were 9,000 regular troops and 3,500 Cossacks. The artillery consisted of 29 field guns.⁹⁰ The months of July and August saw pitched battles that brought the Volunteer Army, outnumbered ten to one, many victories, culminating in the capture on August 15 of Ekaterinodar. On August 26 Denikin’s men entered Novorossiisk, which would serve as the port of entry for English supplies. Thousands of Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner and immediately pressed into service; their commanders, considered Bolsheviks, were usually shot. Kuban Cossacks enlisted in large numbers. The Army’s treasury was enriched by “contributions” exacted from villages known to have supported the Reds: these brought in 3 million rubles.⁹¹ The second Kuban campaign was a great tactical success and the Volunteer Army emerged from it larger and stronger than ever: at its conclusion, in September 1918, it had 35,000–40,000 men (up to 60 percent of them Kuban Cossacks) and 86 field guns.⁹² It was these victories that frightened the Bolshevik high command in August 1918 into requesting German military intervention against the Volunteer Army.⁹³

The Volunteer Army’s rear was secure. To Rostov and Novocherkassk streamed public figures escaping the Red Terror, including many Kadets and members of the National Center. But serious problems remained: perversely, their nature was such that they grew worse as the military situation improved. Although it by now controlled sizable territory, the Army had no effective administrative apparatus. Civil service personnel was in very short supply: when approached, persons with the requisite experience responded evasively, either from an unwillingness to assume responsibility, or from fear for their lives.⁹⁴ The administration, therefore, had to be improvised: Denikin placed military governors in charge of provinces and restored laws issued before October 25, 1917. By and large, the population was left to its own devices, which spelled not so much democracy as anarchy. Denikin later conceded that in territories ruled by his Army, justice served as a pretext for personal vendettas, the field-marshal courts which he had introduced being used by the Cossacks to settle scores with pro-Bolshevik “outlanders,” and thus turning into “instruments of organized lynch law.”⁹⁵ The more territory the Volunteer Army conquered, the more conspicuous was its inability to ensure elementary order and security for the population.

Alekseev died in October 1918. Shortly before, he had created a body to advise the high command, called the Special Conference of the Supreme Leader of the Volunteer Army (Osoboe Soveshchanie pri Verkhovnom Rukovoditele Dobrovol’cheskoi Armii). It was initially envisaged as a consultative body, but on the urging of the National Center, which argued that the Army could not function properly without a political arm, Denikin agreed in January 1919 to transform it into a shadow cabinet, under the chairmanship of General A. M. Dragomirov. Of the body’s eighteen members, five were generals and the remainder civilians, ten of them representatives of the National Center. The resolutions of the conference were not binding on Denikin, who reserved for himself the right to legislate on his own authority.⁹⁶ According to the recollections of one of its members, the conference lacked a clear political coloration, but the generals who dominated the proceedings were of a rather liberal persuasion.⁹⁷ The discussions produced few disagreements, not so much from consensus as from lack of concern, from a sense that the conference’s decisions made little difference:

Our unity was distinguished by a certain passivity; our deliberations showed little vitality and our decisions had no willpower. Subsequently, the Special Conference was compared to a machine without belt drives. Such it always was. In theory, everything was based on the principle of unity of authority. In practice, there was the shapeless unity of passivity.⁹⁸

There was a pervasive feeling, among the civilians as much as among the generals, that the only thing that mattered was military victory: hence, a certain sense of unreality hung over such deliberations. There was no sense of urgency about filling executive posts: months after the conference’s formation, some of the most important posts remained vacant, among them, the directorship of the Department of the Interior.

The National Center was responsible for the political programs which Denikin and his generals reluctantly agreed to endorse in early 1919, largely under British pressure. The Center’s agenda called for a combination of “firm authority,” that is, military dictatorship, with liberal political and social pledges centered on the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, agrarian reform involving compulsory expropriation of large estates (the traditional Kadet platform), encouragement of small and medium-sized farms, and social security for industrial workers.⁹⁹ The generals doubted whether such promises mattered much one way or the other; but they yielded when told that the Allied governments, on whose assistance they depended, would not be able to offer it unless they could persuade their constituencies that the Whites were fighting for the same ideals of democracy and social justice for which the Allies had waged World War I.

The ultimate defeat of the Volunteer Army is often blamed on political ineptitude, but a more likely cause, apart from the objective factors mentioned earlier, was the inability of the command to control its military and civilian personnel. This failure manifested itself equally in the Southern and the Eastern White armies. All observers agree that the indiscipline among the Whites was extraordinary. Denikin conceded that much, and more, when he said in response to the complaints of General H. C. Holman, the head of the British mission, that pervasive corruption made it impossible properly to supply frontline troops: “I can do nothing with my army. I am glad when it carries out my combat orders.”¹⁰⁰ Denikin either could not or would not enforce obedience or prevent marauding and looting. The problem was not so much with the original Volunteer Army as with the Cossacks and conscripts. The anti-Jewish pogroms by Cossacks serving under Denikin in the summer and fall of 1919 were only the most vicious manifestation of this indiscipline. Pilfering was all-pervasive except among the elite volunteer units. It not only alienated the population at large and demoralized the troops, but slowed the Army’s movements, for the loot which it carried was bulky.

On January 8, 1919, Denikin assumed supreme command of all the anti-Bolshevik forces in the south: the Volunteer Army now became a part of the Armed Forces in the South of Russia and Denikin its Commander in Chief (Glavnokomanduiushchii Vooruzhënnymi Silami na luge Rossii). (He had refused the title “Supreme Leader”—Verkhovnyi Rukovoditel—held by Alekseev.)¹⁰¹ The status of the Don Cossacks was partially resolved with Allied help. After the defeated Germans had withdrawn from the Ukraine and he had lost their patronage, Krasnov had no choice but to accommodate the Allies. They told him he would receive aid only through Denikin, and that to obtain it he had to subordinate himself to him.¹⁰² Krasnov had difficulty with this arrangement and in February 1919 made way for a Don Cossack of greater pro-Russian sympathies.^* The Don Cossack army, however, was never fully integrated: it retained its distinct identity and was promised that it would be deployed only on the Don front.¹⁰³

On the Eastern front—the Volga, Urals, and Siberia—where the politicians led and the military followed, there was growing dissatisfaction with the bickering and intrigues that marked the Directory’s rule: to many it seemed a “repetition of Kerensky.”¹⁰⁴ The Directory’s impotence was indeed striking: it is said to have had “as much voice in affairs as a cuckoo-clock on the wall of a rowdy saloon.”¹⁰⁵ Calls resounded for a “firm hand.” How else, it was asked, could the most oppressive dictatorial regime in history be overcome, except by another dictatorship? A messenger dispatched from Moscow by the National Center brought to Omsk a recommendation to this effect; similar demands were made by Siberian politicians and even some Social-Democrats. “The idea of dictatorship hung in the air.”¹⁰⁶

The events that precipitated the November 17, 1918, Omsk coup that brought to power a dictator in the person of Admiral Alexander Kolchak were the subversive activities of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. As noted, Chernov, the party’s titular head and unchallenged leader of its left wing, had all along opposed the concessions his colleagues had made to the Right SRs and the liberals as a price of forming the Directory. On October 24 the Central Committee of the SR Party in Ufa passed on his motion a resolution that in effect repudiated the Ufa accords.¹⁰⁷ The “Chernov Manifesto,” as it came to be known, stated that in the struggle between Bolshevism and democracy, “the latter is dangerously imperiled by counterrevolutionary elements that have allied themselves [with democracy] for the purpose of ruining it.” While supporting the Directory in its struggle against “commissar autocracy,”

in anticipation of possible political crises resulting from counter-revolutionary schemes, all the forces of the party must be immediately mobilized, given military training and armed, so as to be able to repel at any moment the attacks of the counter-revolutionaries who organize a civil war in the rear of the anti-Bolshevik front.

The document leaked, infuriating the military, whom it reminded of what the Petrograd Soviet had done to them in 1917. More sensible SRs were appalled. General Boldyrev wrote in his diary that this “Manifesto” showed that the SR Central Committee was resuming its “treacherous work” by declaring the intention to form a new government and secretly gathering an armed force to put it in power: it was nothing less than a coup d’état directed from the left.¹⁰⁸ In the opinion of General Knox, had such a document been written in England, its authors would have been shot.¹⁰⁹ Avksentev and Zenzinov, members of the Central Committee as well as dominant figures in the Directory, were upset by the Manifesto, but out of party loyalty did not disown it, thereby reinforcing the prevalent impression that the SR members of the Directory were conniving in a looming putsch.

This belief provided the rationale for removing the SRs from the government—an act tantamount to liquidating the Directory. When Chernov’s Manifesto became known in Omsk, Vologodskii, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and General Boldyrev called for the arrest of the SR Central Committee.¹¹⁰ At the same time, judiciary proceedings were initiated against the document’s authors.

While these events were taking place, Kolchak was on an inspection tour of the front; he returned to Omsk on November 16. The following day several officers and Cossacks approached him with the request that he take power. Among them was General D. A. Lebedev, Denikin’s liaison officer in Omsk and once a close associate of Kornilov’s, who hated the SRs for their role in the Kornilov affair. Kolchak refused for three reasons: he had no armed force at his disposal (this was in Boldyrev’s charge); he did not know the attitude of the Siberian government; and he did not wish to act disloyally toward the Directory, which he served.¹¹¹ Rather than assume dictatorial powers, he said he was considering resigning his ministerial post, which was to him a source of endless frustration.

Rebuffed, the supporters of a dictatorship apparently decided to force his hand. At midnight of November 17–18, in a raging storm, a detachment of Siberian Cossacks, led by Ataman I. N. Krasilnikov, broke into a private meeting held at the residence of the Deputy Minister of the Interior. Present were several SRs, including Avksentev and Zenzinov. The latter two were arrested along with their host; Argunov, Avksentev’s deputy, was taken in later that night. The coup, directed against the Socialists-Revolutionaries in the government and apparently masterminded by Lebedev, was a total surprise to everyone, including Kolchak.

Because of the myths spread about the circumstances that brought Kolchak to power—myths that had a very harmful effect on his relations with democratic circles in Russia and abroad—it is important to establish certain facts. For one, Kolchak did not engineer the coup: no evidence has been produced to show that he instigated it or even knew of it beforehand. There is no reason, therefore, to doubt his version of events, namely that he first learned of what had happened when he received a phone call in the middle of the night.¹¹² According to his biographer, Kolchak was “perhaps the only member of the Council of Ministers of whom it can be said with certainty that he was not privy to Krasilnikov’s coup.”¹¹³ Nor is there any basis for the claim, originating with French generals, that the Omsk coup had been masterminded by the English mission.¹¹⁴ The evidence, some of it made available only after World War II, corroborates General Knox’s assertion that the coup “was carried out by the Siberian government without the previous knowledge, and without in any sense the connivance of Great Britain.”¹¹⁵ Archival materials indicate that ten days before the coup, when rumors of it were rife, Knox had warned Kolchak that such a step would be “fatal.”¹¹⁶

The news of the arrests spread during the night and at six a.m. the cabinet of ministers held an emergency session. The demise of the Directory being accepted as a fait accompli, the cabinet temporarily assumed full authority.¹¹⁷ The majority of the ministers felt that power should be entrusted to a military dictator. Kolchak suggested Boldyrev for the post, but the candidacy was rejected on the grounds that the general could not be spared from his responsibilities as Commander in Chief. The cabinet then chose Kolchak, with one dissenting vote. When he learned of this decision (he was at the front at the time) Boldyrev was so outraged that he advised Kolchak to resign, threatening that the army would not obey his orders.¹¹⁸ Since Kolchak did not heed his advice, Boldyrev gave up his command and left for Japan.^* Allied representatives in Omsk promptly gave Kolchak their support, as did the two members of the Directory not under arrest.¹¹⁹ The Directory enjoyed so little popular support that no one rose to its defense: this much is conceded even by Argunov.¹²⁰ Maiskii, a Menshevik who later turned Bolshevik and ended up as Soviet ambassador to England, admits that the population of Omsk sympathized with Kolchak, from whom it expected the restoration of order: the people he encountered immediately after the coup wore the expression “if not of happiness then of something like relief.” Local workers took the imposition of a military dictatorship in stride.¹²¹

Scrutiny of these events leads to the inescapable conclusion that what occurred was a coup by Cossacks and officers of the Siberian government, followed by a transfer of authority. After the arrest of the Directory’s members, the Council of Ministers, which the Directory had appointed, took no steps to have them released and restored to power; instead, it claimed authority on its own behalf and immediately consigned it to Admiral Kolchak. There are thus no grounds whatever of speaking of “Kolchak’s coup” or “Kolchak’s seizure of power,” as is commonly done in histories of these events. Kolchak did not take power: it was thrust on him.

Against his express wishes, he was given the title “Supreme Ruler” (Verkhovnyi Pravitel’) rather than “Commander in Chief” (Verkhnovnyi Glavnokomanduiushchii), which he would have preferred. It was the intention of those who had appointed him to create a “steadfast supreme power, freed of executive functions, independent of any party influence, and endowed with equal authority over the civil and military personnel.”¹²² In a much more explicit sense than Denikin, Kolchak was not only a military but also a civilian commander in chief like Pilsudski in Poland. Serving under him was a Council of Ministers. But events soon forced Kolchak to assume full executive powers, and the cabinet—composed of the same ministers as under the Directory—was reduced to drafting legislative bills. Kolchak normally did not attend its meetings.

Kolchak was generous to his Socialist-Revolutionary opponents. The arrested SRs—who would probably have been murdered if Colonel Ward had not interceded for them¹²³—were ordered released. Kolchak gave them a liberal allowance (between 50,000 and 75,000 rubles each), put them on a train, and had them escorted to the Chinese border, whence they made their way to Western Europe. There they immediately launched a bitter campaign of vilification against him, which was not without effect on Western attitudes toward intervention. The bitterness of the Socialists-Revolutionaries stemmed from the realization that the demise of the Directory marked the end of any hopes they might still have had of gaining power in Russia—power to which they felt entitled by their victory in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. They no longer could hope to play the role of a third force, but had to choose between the Reds and the Whites.

It did not take them long to make the choice. The SR Central Committee, pronouncing Kolchak an “enemy of the people” and a counterrevolutionary, appealed to the population to rise against him. To avoid inevitable retribution, it decided to go underground and revert to terror: with the approval of the Central Committee it pronounced a death sentence on Kolchak.¹²⁴ On November 30, Kolchak demanded of the members of the defunct Komuch that they cease inciting uprisings in the rear of the White armies and interfering with military communications, under threat of severe punishment.¹²⁵ To no avail. The SRs considered themselves in a state of war with the Omsk government, and given the size of their following in Siberia, it was not an idle threat.

On December 22, 1918, the SRs went from words to deeds and jointly with the Bolsheviks tried to stage a coup d’état in Omsk. It was quickly suppressed by the Czech garrison and the Cossacks: over 100 of the rebels—according to some accounts, as many as 400—were summarily executed. Kolchak was later personally blamed for this atrocity. But in fact when it was perpetrated he was seriously ill and had no knowledge of it.¹²⁶

During the first year of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the Mensheviks and SRs living in Soviet Russia bided their time, convinced that the Bolsheviks would not be able to rule for long without their help. This conviction helped them patiently bear Bolshevik harassment. Their slogan was “Neither Lenin nor Denikin (or Kolchak).” The Mensheviks were the more sanguine of the two. Although disenfranchised, throughout 1918 they refused to join any anti-Bolshevik organizations: their members were strictly forbidden to take part in activities directed against the Soviet regime. They felt confident that the people’s democratic instincts would eventually triumph and force the Bolsheviks to share power: they saw their role as that of a loyal and legal opposition.¹²⁷ The SRs were divided. The Left SRs, after their abortive July 1918 coup, gradually melted away. The SR Party proper split into two factions, a more radical one under Chernov, which wanted to follow the Menshevik strategy, and a right one, which preferred to challenge the regime in the name of the Constituent Assembly. It was the latter that had organized Komuch and in September 1918 joined the Directory.

The establishment of a military dictatorship in Omsk frightened the Mensheviks and the Right Socialists-Revolutionaries alike and drove them into Bolshevik arms. They ignored the Red Terror, which was then in full swing, claiming thousands of lives, because, by and large, it did not affect them: for although the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, fulminated against the socialist “traitors,” its victims were mainly officials of the old regime and well-to-do citizens. The terror the Mensheviks and SRs feared was the White one. They viewed Bolshevik policies with genuine distaste and missed no opportunity to make their opinions known, often at considerable risk to themselves. But in their view the Bolsheviks were definitely the lesser evil because they had only “half liquidated” the Revolution;¹²⁸ the Whites, if triumphant, would liquidate it completely. Faced with this prospect, in late 1918 the Mensheviks, followed by the SRs, moved toward reconciliation with Lenin’s regime.

The Mensheviks, who had taken part neither in Komuch nor in the Directory, had been gravitating in this direction even before the Omsk coup. L. Martov, the leader of the Internationalist wing of the party, called for neutrality in the Civil War as early as July 1918 on the grounds that the defeat of the Whites would produce a democratic government in Russia.¹²⁹ Toward the end of October, excited by the prospect of a revolution in Germany, the Menshevik Central Committee declared the Bolshevik “revolution” to have been “historically inevitable.”¹³⁰ On November 14—three days after the armistice on the Western front—the same Central Committee appealed to all the revolutionary elements to rise against “Anglo-American imperialism.”¹³¹ Prominent Mensheviks, among them Theodore Dan, called on workers and peasants to “form a single revolutionary front against the attacks of the counterrevolution and predatory international imperialism,” warning “all enemies of the Russian Revolution … that when it is a question of defending the Revolution, our party, with all its power, stands shoulder to shoulder with [the Soviet] government.”¹³² In December 1919, the Social-Democrats Internationalists voted to join the Communist Party.¹³³

As a reward for this about-face, the Bolshevik leadership reversed its decision of the previous June to expel the Mensheviks from the soviets.¹³⁴ In January 1919 the party received permission to bring out its organ, the newspaper Vsegda vpered. The paper published such scathing criticism of the government, especially of the Red Terror, however, that it was closed after several issues. It never reappeared.

The SRs were somewhat more reluctant to turn pro-Bolshevik, because, unlike the Mensheviks, who were a small remnant of the Social-Democratic Party without any political prospects, they, as the party with the greatest popular following, felt they had history’s mandate to govern Russia. In December 1918, after the Directory had been overthrown, the Ufa Committee of the SR Party, the mainstay of Komuch, opened negotiations with Moscow. The talks were consummated in January with an accord calling on

all soldiers of the People’s Army to cease the civil war against Soviet authority, which, at the present historical moment, is the only revolutionary authority of the exploited classes for the suppression of exploiters, and to turn all their weapons against the dictatorship of Kolchak.¹³⁵

Troops of the People’s Army who obeyed this call were promised amnesty. Following this accord, nearly all units of the People’s Army went over to the Reds.¹³⁶ In the course of these negotiations, the Bolsheviks compelled the Ufa delegation to renounce the idea of a Constituent Assembly.¹³⁷

The main body of the SR Party felt it had no choice but to adopt the policy of accommodation as well. On February 6–9, 1919, its Central Committee Party and branch organizations on Soviet territory held a conference in Moscow to formulate a policy on the current situation. After voicing routine laments over the absence of democracy in Soviet Russia, the gathering accused the “bourgeoisie” and the “landlords” of seeking to reestablish the monarchy, and called on its members to “bend their efforts to overturn [reactionary] governments” created under Allied sponsorship. The conference placed itself on record as rejecting in

an unequivocal manner attempts to overthrow the Soviet regime by means of an armed struggle, which, given the weakness and dispersion of labor democracy and the ever growing power of the counterrevolution, will only benefit the latter, enabling reactionary groups to exploit it for the purposes of a [monarchist] restoration.¹³⁸

SRs were instructed to work for the overthrow of the governments of Denikin and Kolchak but to refrain from actively resisting the Communist regime. The policy was justified as a “tactical” concession that did not imply even a conditional recognition of Bolshevik authority.¹³⁹ This stipulation did not alter the fact that at the decisive phase of the Civil War, the Socialists-Revolutionaries placed themselves squarely on the side of the Bolsheviks. As reward, in February 1919 they were also allowed to rejoin the soviets.¹⁴⁰ On March 20, the SR Party was legalized and given permission to bring out its daily, Delo naroda. The paper, the first copy of which appeared on the same day, was suspended after six issues. Nevertheless, the SRs adhered to the new course, formalizing their pro-Communist orientation at the Ninth Council, held in Moscow in June 1919. The resolutions of this Council appealed to the party’s members to discontinue the struggle against the Bolshevik regime. The SR Party should henceforth

shift the center of its struggle against Kolchak, Denikin, and the others to their territories, subverting their work from within and fighting in the front ranks of the people who have risen against the political and social restoration, employing all the methods the Party had used against [tsarist] autocracy.¹⁴¹

Denikin could ignore such belligerent appeals, which called for a renewal of terrorism, because in the area where his troops operated in the first half of 1919 neither the SRs nor the Mensheviks had a significant following. But it was different in Siberia, where the SR appeals for subversion threatened the army’s rear. Kolchak’s officials now began to treat SRs as traitors and to arrest them along with Bolsheviks. Several members of Komuch were executed. The most savage persecutions were carried out by General S. N. Rozanov, who was appointed in March 1919 to suppress disorders in Enisei province. Emulating Bolshevik practices (according to a Soviet source, he had once served in the Red Army), he ordered imprisoned Bolsheviks and bandits to be treated as hostages and executed in reprisal for acts of violence committed against the regime.¹⁴² Kolchak insisted that he had forbidden such practices;¹⁴³ no document bearing his signature ordering such executions has been found. But since they occurred under his rule, he shared the odium.

Mainly as a result of General Knox’s sympathy, Kolchak received strong British support. Until his reverses in the summer of 1919, Britain pinned her hopes on Kolchak and made him, rather than Denikin, the main beneficiary of military aid. A second British battalion arrived in Omsk in January 1919, to bolster the impression of Allied backing, along with a small naval detachment that fought the Red Army on the Kama River—apart from Czechs, the only Allied unit to see combat in Siberia.¹⁴⁴ Knox assumed responsibility for the rear, that is, the lines of communication, and for the training in Vladivostok of 3,000 Russian officers.¹⁴⁵ The other powers were distinctly cool to the Supreme Ruler. General Maurice Janin, who arrived in Omsk in December in the double capacity of head of the French military mission and Commander of the Czechoslovak Legion (to which post he was appointed by the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris), regarded Kolchak as a creature of the British. He demanded to be placed at the head of all the Allied forces in Siberia, including Russian units. Kolchak rejected this request out of hand. Eventually, a compromise formula was devised by virtue of which Kolchak commanded Russian troops but coordinated military operations with Janin. The Czech National Council, which maintained close relations with the SRs and had taken a direct hand in creating the Directory, was from the outset inimical to Kolchak: after the overthrow of the Directory, it issued a statement denouncing the coup as a regrettable violation of the “principle of legality.”¹⁴⁶

The greatest trouble came from the Japanese, who opposed Kolchak from fear that he would prevent their annexing Russia’s Far Eastern provinces. By late 1918, they had 70,000 troops in Eastern Siberia. Although these had been dispatched to help open a new front, Tokyo ignored British pleas in the summer to move them west and help the hard-pressed Czechs. Instead, they used them to establish a regular occupation regime of a very brutal nature, in which they were assisted by two Cossack warlords, G. M. Semenov and Ivan Kalmykov (the ataman of the Ussuri Cossacks), whom they gave military and financial assistance. The two thugs terrorized Siberia east of Lake Baikal, forming a buffer between Kolchak and the Japanese. As a consequence, Kolchak’s authority never extended to the east of Baikal. Semenov, based in Chita, with bands controlling the territory between Khabarovsk and Baikal, refused even to recognize Kolchak. He was an ordinary brigand who hijacked trains and looted the civilian population, disposing of the proceeds in Japan and China. The commander of American troops in Siberia says that the bands of Semenov and Kalmykov, “under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people.… If questions were asked about these brutal murders, the answer was that the people murdered were Bolsheviks.”¹⁴⁷

In August 1918 the United States dispatched from the Philippines to Siberia an expeditionary force that ultimately numbered 7,000 men, under the command of Major General William S. Graves. Graves’s instructions were to help rebuild the anti-German front, but to refrain from any intervention in internal Russian affairs:

It is the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States … that military intervention there would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her, and that it would be of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design, to win the war against Germany. It cannot, therefore, take part in such intervention or sanction it in principle. Military intervention would, in its judgment, even supposing it to be efficacious in its immediate avowed object of delivering an attack upon Germany from the east, be merely a method of making use of Russia, not a method of serving her. Her people could not profit by it, if they profited by it at all, in time to save them from their present distresses, and their substance would be to maintain foreign armies, not to reconstitute their own. Military action is admissible in Russia … only to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces … and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.¹⁴⁸

These instructions suffered from an obvious contradiction inasmuch as the mere presence of U.S. troops in areas controlled by anti-Communist forces involved them in the Russian Civil War. Nevertheless, Graves would persevere in the effort to maintain the strictest neutrality and to function purely as a technical expert in a region where the contending parties were fighting for their very lives. He and his government received little gratitude for this behavior, the Bolsheviks treating the Americans as hostile interventionists and the Whites regarding them as Bolshevik sympathizers. Graves by his own admission knew nothing of Russia or Siberia, into which he writes he had been “pitch-forked,” and he had scant idea what the Civil War was about: he felt “no prejudice against any Russian faction.” After landing in Vladivostok, he was appalled to learn that the British and French actually sought to destroy the Bolsheviks, whom he understood to be Russians opposed to the restoration of autocracy.¹⁴⁹

Until the spring of 1919, American troops in Siberia carried out ordinary garrison duties: subsequently, they assumed responsibility for the operations of the Transsiberian Railroad between Lake Baikal and the sea. U.S. transportation experts, originally invited by the Provisional Government, undertook, by the terms of an agreement concluded in March 1919, to maintain Siberia’s railroads “for the Russians” regardless of whether they were Bolsheviks or anti-Bolsheviks. Graves announced publicly that no distinction would be drawn among the passengers (they would be carried “irrespective of persons … or politics”) or the destinations of freight.¹⁵⁰ This sounded as if the Americans were prepared to transport Bolshevik partisans and their equipment, which astounded the British and infuriated the Whites. Whatever his professions of impartiality, Graves intensely disliked Kolchak’s government, believing it to be made up of incorrigible reactionaries and monarchists. On the Bolsheviks, whom he had never encountered, he kept an open mind (“I was never able to determine who was a Bolshevik or why he was a Bolshevik”¹⁵¹).

Kolchak conceived his role in strictly military terms. He believed that Russia had been brought to her sorry state by the collapse of her army and would rise again only by the army’s intercession: the army for him was the heart of Russia.¹⁵² As he told the Bolshevik commission of inquiry after his arrest:

I did not intend to make any sweeping, complicated reforms, because I regarded my power as temporary.… The country needed victory at any cost, and every effort had to be exerted to secure it. I had absolutely no definite political objectives; I should not side with any parties, should not aim at restoring anything old, but should try only to create an army of the regular type, since I believed that only such an army could gain victories.¹⁵³

On assuming power, Kolchak issued a succinct declaration:

On November 18, 1918, the All-Russian Provisional Government fell apart. The Council of Ministers assumed full authority and transferred it to me, Alexander Kolchak, Admiral of the Russian Navy. Assuming the cross of this authority in the exceptionally difficult condition of Civil War and the complete disintegration of political life, I declare:

I shall take neither the path of reaction nor the ruinous course of party politics [partanost’]. My principal objective is to create an army capable of combat, victory over Bolshevism, and the introduction of legality and the rule of law, which will make it possible for the nation to choose for itself, unhindered, the kind of government it desires and to realize the great ideals of freedom that have now been proclaimed throughout the world.

I call you, citizens, to unity, to the struggle against Bolshevism, to work, and to sacrifices.¹⁵⁴

On November 28 Kolchak acknowledged Russia’s obligation for her foreign debts and pledged repayment.¹⁵⁵ On another occasion he stated that he considered himself bound by all the commitments and laws of the Provisional Government of 1917.¹⁵⁶ Beyond this he would not go. In common with the other White leaders, he believed that political and social manifestos, especially in a country as contentious as Russia, unnecessarily complicated the task of fighting the Bolsheviks: “only the armed forces, only the army, can save us,” he told the officers on assuming command. “All else should be subordinated to its interests and its mission.”¹⁵⁷

The Supreme Ruler of Eastern Russia and Siberia was born in 1873 into a military family.¹⁵⁸ He pursued a military career as well, enrolling in the Naval Academy. He took part in three Arctic expeditions in the course of which he displayed notable courage, earning the sobriquet “Kolchak-Poliarnyi”—“Kolchak of the [North] Pole.” He fought at Port Arthur against the Japanese, following which he accepted appointment to the Naval General Staff. During World War I he served in the Baltic until 1916, when he was promoted to command the Black Sea Fleet: his mission was to prepare and lead a naval expedition against Constantinople and the Straits planned for the following year. In the summer of 1917 the Provisional Government sent him on a mission to the United States. His return was disrupted by the Bolshevik coup. He tried to get back to Russia by way of the Far East. In Japan he met General Knox, on whom he made a powerful impression: the English general thought he had “more grit, pluck and honest patriotism than any Russian in Siberia.”¹⁵⁹ After the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which he viewed as the beginning of Russia’s subjugation by Germany, Kolchak offered his services to the British Army. He was at first assigned to Mesopotamia and was en route there when his English superiors changed their minds (almost certainly on the recommendation of Knox) and asked him to return to East Asia. He spent the early months of 1918 in Manchuria in charge of security of the Chinese Eastern Railway. In October 1918, traveling to the Don to join Denikin’s forces, he was passing through Omsk when General Boldyrev invited him to take over the Directory’s Ministry of War.

7. Kolchak.

Kolchak had admirable qualities: he was a man of great integrity, of proven courage, of selfless patriotism—in many ways, along with Wrangel, the most honorable White commander in the Civil War. Whether he had the traits required of a leader in such a war is another matter. For one, he was a complete stranger to politics: by his own admission, he had grown up in a military milieu and had “hardly interested himself in any political problems and questions.” He saw himself simply as a “military technician.”¹⁶⁰ As he stated in the declaration of November 18, he regarded his new duties as a “cross.” To his wife, he complained of the “terrifying burden of Supreme Power” and confessed that as “a fighting man [he was] reluctant to face the problems of statecraft.”¹⁶¹ Politically untutored, he sought simplistic conspiratorial explanations for contemporary events: his favorite reading is said to have been the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^*

Secondly, he was ill at ease among people: withdrawn, taciturn, and extremely moody, he was an outsider both in and out of power. Observing him in the midst of the Directory and its ministers, Colonel Ward saw “a small, vagrant, lonely troubled soul without a friend enter unbidden to a feast.”¹⁶² An associate wrote of him:

The character and soul of the Admiral are so transparent that one needs no more than one week of contact to know all there is to know about him. He is a big, sick child, a pure idealist, a convinced slave of duty and service to an idea and to Russia. An indubitable neurotic who quickly flares up, exceedingly impetuous and uncontrolled in expressions of displeasure and anger: in this respect he has assimilated the highly unattractive traditions of the naval service, which permit high naval ranks behavior that in our army has long ago passed into the realm of legends. He is utterly absorbed by the idea of serving Russia, of saving her from Red oppression and restoring her to full power and to the inviolability of her territory. For the sake of this idea he can be persuaded and moved to do anything whatever. He has no personal interests, no amour propre: in this respect, he is crystal pure. He passionately despises all lawlessness and arbitrariness, but because he is so uncontrolled and impulsive, he himself often unintentionally transgresses against the law, and this mainly when seeking to uphold the very same law, and always under the influence of some outsider. He does not know life in its severe, practical reality, and lives in a world of mirages and borrowed ideas. He has no plans, no system, no will: in this respect he is soft wax from which advisers and intimates can fashion whatever they want, exploiting the fact that it is enough to disguise something as necessary for the welfare of Russia and the good of the cause to be certain of his approval.¹⁶³

Another associate wrote of Kolchak:

He is kind and at the same time severe, responsive and at the same time embarrassed to show human feelings, concealing his gentleness behind make-believe severity. He is impatient and stubborn, loses his temper, threatens, and then calms down, makes concessions, spreads his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He is bursting to be with the people, with the troops, but when he faces them, has no idea what to say.¹⁶⁴

His photographs show a tortured expression: furrowed brows, compressed lips, eyes suggestive of a manic-depressive personality. Unable to understand people or to communicate with them, he proved an execrable administrator in whose name were committed unpardonable acts of corruption and brutality that he personally found utterly repugnant.

Except for integrity, courage, and patriotism, nothing qualified Kolchak for the responsibilities imposed on him by the Omsk politicians. A tragic quality attended his year-long dictatorship, which he did not seek and which, after fleeting triumphs, was to end in death before a Bolshevik firing squad.

^* Lenin, PSS, XVI, 454. In a letter of April 12, 1871, to Dr. Kugelmann, Marx wrote that the Communards were defeated because they “did not want to start a civil war.” Karl Marx, Pis’ma k L. Kugel’manu (Petrograd, 1920), 115.

^* Communist historians customarily treat the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 as part of the Russian Civil War; this view has also been accepted by some Western historians. This treatment, however, is difficult to justify, given that it was not a struggle among Russians for political control of their country but a conventional war between two sovereign states over territory. The misconception seems to date back to an article by Stalin in 1920, in which he labeled the Polish invasion of the Ukraine “the Third Campaign of the Entente” (Tretii Pokhod Antanty), the first two allegedly having been the campaigns of Denikin and Kolchak (Pravda No. III [May 25, 1920], I, cited in Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, London, 1972, 89).

^* Typical was the reaction of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the most popular member of the Imperial family, who in 1918 was living in retirement in the Crimea. When asked whether he would take charge of the White movement, he responded evasively: “I was born shortly after the death of Emperor Nicholas I and my entire upbringing was shaped in his traditions. I am a soldier accustomed to obeying and commanding. Now I have no one to obey. In certain circumstances, I have to decide on my own to subordinate myself to someone—for example, to the Patriarch if he told me to do such and such.” “Otryvki iz dnevnika kn. Grigoriia Trubetskogo,” Denikin Papers, Box 2, Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, p. 52. Cf. Denikin, Ocherki, IV, 201–2.

^† N. N. Golovin, Rossiiskaia kontr-revoliutsiia (Tallinn, 1937), Book 9, 93; Book 5, 65. At the same time it must be noted that the officers who fought in White ranks in the latter phases of the Civil War became increasingly, and in some cases even fanatically, monarchist. This was observed by foreigners attached to the Whites, for example, Colonel John Ward, who spent 1919 at Kolchak’s capital in Omsk. He says that “Russian officers are royalist almost to a man,” with a “childlike adherence to the monarchist principle”: John Ward, With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia (London, 1920), 160. In dealing with this issue, however, we must not assume that in 1919 the population of the country was as negatively disposed toward the monarchy as it had been two years earlier: when Lenin ordered the execution of Nicholas II and most of the members of the Romanov dynasty in the summer of 1918 he did so from fear of a resurgence of royalist sentiment in the country.

^* By “objective” factors I mean those that were beyond the capacity of the protagonists to alter, for example, those determined by their respective geographic locations. “Subjective” factors flowed from their attitudes, values, abilities, and other personal traits.

^* Denikin, Ocherki, V, 85–90. This reality is often ignored by historians who, noting the lack of coordination among them, blame it on the ineptitude of White commanders: e.g., George A. Brinkley, The Volunteer Army and Allied Intervention in South Russia, 1917–1921 (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1966), 191.

^* Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston, 1987), 146, 213–14. According to Denikin (Ocherki, V, 126), at the height of the summer 1919 offensive, the Southern Army’s territory held 42 million people, but, as Mawdsley notes, such numbers were at Denikin’s disposal for a few months only. The same applies to Kolchak, who at one point ruled an area inhabited by 20 million, but this, too, he controlled for only a brief time.

^† Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 181. Figures for the armed forces of both sides, especially of the Red Army, are notoriously unreliable: there always existed a vast discrepancy between the theoretical order of battle and the actual number of combatants. Some units reported more men than they actually had in their ranks in order to draw larger rations; some counted as present men who were AWOL or who had deserted. Still, the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Red Army in the second half of 1919 is not in dispute.

^‡ The population of Russia in 1917, exclusive of Finland, is estimated at 172 million: S.I. Bruk and V. M. Kabuzan in ISSSR, No. 3 (1980), 86. Of this number, approximately 45 percent, or 77 million, were Great Russians.

^* This consideration influenced the French negatively toward the White movement from the beginning. Foch said in early 1919: “I do not attach great importance to the army of Denikin, because armies do not exist by themselves.… They must have behind them a government, legislation, and an organized country. It is better to have a government without an army than an army without a government.” Cited in John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace (Princeton, 1966), 201.

^* Alekseev, cited in S. Piontkovskii, ed., Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii (1918–21 gg.): Khrestomatiia (Moscow, 1925), 497. Most lower-ranking officers and troops of the Volunteer Army shared this attitude: “In the army nobody was interested in politics,” recalled one White veteran. “Our only thought was how to beat the Bolsheviks.” N. V. Volkov-Muromtsev, Iunost’ ot Viaz’my do Feodosii (Paris, 1983), 347.

^* Alekseev in Piontkovskii, Grazhdanskaia voina, 496–99. Alekseev refers to a Union of National Salvation (Soiuz Spaseniia Rodiny), but his memory seems to have played him false.

^* In his Russian Revolution (p. 590), the author stated the French subsidy to Alekseev to have been 50 million rubles. This turns out to be incorrect.

^* “NS” or “New Style” refers to the Western or Gregorian calendar, which Soviet Russia adopted in February 1918. Until then, Russia had employed the so-called Julian calendar (OS), which in the twentieth century was thirteen days behind the Gregorian.

^† Golovin, Kontr-revoliutsiia, Book 5, 72n. Denikin (Ocherki, II, 282) speaks of a total of 9,000, including civilians. General A. S. Lukomskii (Vospominaniia, II, Berlin, 1922, 7) lists 3,500 troops.

^* K. N. Sokolov, Pravlenie Generala Denikina (Sofia, 1921), 39–40. The “Time of Troubles” is the name given the interregnum at the beginning of the seventeenth century, during which Russia experienced prolonged civil strife and foreign intervention. Denikin, who like many anti-Communists saw a parallel between the turmoil of his own time and that three centuries earlier, called his memoirs Outlines of Russia’s Time of Troubles.

^* Speaking of Siberia, N. N. Golovin writes: “Bolshevism was supported only by one-time slaves”: Rossiiskaia kontr-revoliutsiia, Book 7, 107. The industrial class here was divided in its loyalties: some workers turned anti-Bolshevik, supplying Kolchak with his best fighters: Ibid., 113.

^† V. Maksakov and A. Turunov, Khronika grazhdanskoi voiny v Sibiri, 1917–1918 (Moscow, 1926), 52–55. The Kadets and Socialists-Revolutionaries traditionally dominated Siberian politics: in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the two parties obtained here between one-third and three-quarters of the votes: A. M. Spirin, Klassy i partii v grazhdanskii voine v Rossii (Moscow, 1968), 420–23.

^* S. P. Melgunov, Tragediia Admirala Kolchaka, I (Belgrade, 1930), 75. Grishin-Almazov was dismissed in early September as a result of political intrigues, following which he joined the Volunteer Army. In May 1919, while en route to Siberia carrying important messages from Denikin to Kolchak, he fell into Bolshevik hands and either was killed or committed suicide: Denikin, Ocherki, V, 88–89.

^* See NV for August 9–11, 1917, and P. N. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii, 1/2 (Sofia, 1921), Chapter 5. The membership included M. V. Rodzianko, generals M. V. Alekseev, A. A. Brusilov, N. N. Iudenich, and A. M. Kaledin, the businessmen P. P. Riabushinskii and S. N. Tretiakov, the intellectuals P. N. Miliukov, V. A. Maklakov, N. N. Shchepkin, P. B. Struve, N. A. Berdiaev, E. N. Trubetskoi, and V. V. Shulgin.

^* The principals were two High Commissioners, the Englishman Sir Charles Elliot, Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, who spoke fluent Russian and was well versed in Russian affairs, and the French Ambassador to Japan, Eugène Regnault. They were assisted by the heads of military missions, Generals Alfred Knox (UK), Maurice Janin (France), and William Graves (U.S.A.). Japanese military and civilian officials were also on hand, but they kept to themselves. G. K. Gins, Sibir’, soiuzniki i Kolchak, II (Kharbin, 1937), 60–61.

^* The others were V. M. Zenzinov, also an SR, P. V. Vologodskii, representing the Siberian Government, General V. D. Boldyrev, a representative of the Union for Regeneration, who commanded the army, and V. A. Vinogradov, a Kadet.

^* Richard Ullman claims that after reaching Omsk the British troops “had gone into combat against the Bolsheviks” (Intervention and the War, Princeton, 1961, 262). In fact, British units stationed in Omsk did no fighting. See Ward, With the Die-Hards, passim.

^* Although in October 1917 he had been the only commander willing to help restore Kerensky to power: RR, 493, 501.

^† Archival sources indicate that Krasnov’s intransigence after the armistice was encouraged by the French, who wanted to establish a protectorate over the Don, a region that, by agreement drawn up between the two powers in December 1917, lay in the British sphere of influence: Anne Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations Franco-Soviétiques, 1917–1924 (Paris, 1981), 113.

^* The fighting around Tsaritsyn in late 1918 marked the beginning of the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin. Lenin dispatched Stalin to Tsaritsyn to collect food. Stalin had himself appointed to the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Southern front and immediately began to interfere with military operations, which in the fall of 1918 were in the charge of a onetime tsarist officer, General P. P. Sytin, the Commander of the Southern front and an appointee of Trotsky’s. He also communicated on military matters then and later directly with Lenin, bypassing Trotsky’s Revolutionary-Military Council: D. V. Volkogonov, Trotskii, I (Moscow, 1992), 237. The record indicates that Stalin’s main contribution to the defense of Tsaritsyn consisted of political intrigues and the imposition of a reign of terror, directed mainly at the ex-tsarist officers in Soviet service whom he mistrusted and some of whom he had arrested and shot: Boris Souvarine, Staline (Paris, 1977), 205; Dmitrii Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/1 (Moscow, 1989), 90–92; and Robert Argenbright in Revolutionary Russia, IV, No. 2 (December 1991), 157–83. In early October 1918 Trotsky demanded Stalin’s recall on the grounds of intolerable meddling with military decisions—advice which the Politburo accepted (L. Trotskii, Stalinskaia shkola falsifikatsii, Berlin, 1932, 205–6). Stalin and his associates paid Trotsky back with a whispering campaign of slander. Stalin later claimed credit for the successful defense of Tsaritsyn and had the city renamed Stalingrad in his own honor. Cf. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (New York, 1954), 423–28.

^* After leaving the Don, Krasnov served briefly in the army of General Iudenich: George Stewart, The White Armies of Russia (New York, 1933), 415. Later, in exile, he wrote novels about the Civil War which were quite popular in the West. During World War II he collaborated with the Nazis. Captured by the Red Army at the end of the war, he was executed at the age of 78.

^* Boldyrev was captured by the Reds in Vladivostok in 1922, at which time he acknowledged Soviet authority and asked for “forgiveness.” He is said to have been given amnesty. V.G. Boldyrev, Direktoria, Kolchak, Interventy (Novonikolaevsk, 1925), 12–13.

^* Gins, Sibir’, II, 368. At the same time, unlike Denikin, he made it clear that he would tolerate no anti-Jewish excesses.