Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

2

The Civil War: The Climax (1919–1920)

The campaigns that were to decide the outcome of the Civil War opened in the spring of 1919 and concluded seven months later, in November, with the crushing defeat of the principal White armies.

The Soviet government resolved in the fall of 1918 to proceed in earnest with the formation of a regular army. The initial plan called for a force of one million men: on October 1, 1918, however, Lenin ordered the creation by the next spring of an army of 3 million “to help the international workers’ revolution.”^* General conscription followed, in the course of which hundreds of thousands of peasants were inducted.

The creation of an army of such size confronted the Soviet leadership with the problem of command. Clearly, an army of millions could not be led by elected commanders or party veterans, who alone were trusted, since few of them had any military experience at all, and fewer still had ever commanded units larger than a battalion. The regime therefore decided it had no choice but to draft tens of thousands of ex-Imperial officers considered irreconcilably hostile to Communism, officers whom it would keep in line through a combination of political controls and terror. This crucial decision made by Lenin and Trotsky, though controversial at the time, was undoubtedly a sound one. A few officers followed their consciences and, at the risk of their lives, collaborated with the Whites;^* but by and large, the old officers, once they donned uniforms, performed as professionals, and it was they who won the Civil War for the Communists.

The first officers to fight for the Red Army were volunteers who enlisted in February and March 1918, during the breakdown of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, when German troops were advancing into Russia. Responding to the government’s call, over 8,000 ex-tsarist officers signed up, among them 28 generals and colonels.¹ They meant to defend Russia from the Germans; but the expected Soviet-German war never materialized, and before long they found themselves fighting fellow Russians.²

The drafting of commissioned personnel got underway in late July 1918 when ex-Imperial officers, military medical personnel, and civil servants between the ages of 21 and 26 were ordered to register or face trial by a Revolutionary Tribunal.³ A decree of September 30, written by Trotsky, reinstituted the medieval Russian practice of collective responsibility by holding families of officers (“fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children”) personally liable for their loyalty.⁴ Finally, on November 23, all officers under 50 and generals under 60 were ordered to register, again under the threat of severe penalties.⁵

Lenin’s and Trotsky’s orders to draft peasants along with ex-tsarist officers did not go unchallenged. The controversy over the hiring of “military specialists” paralleled the concurrent debate over “bourgeois specialists” in industry. It came to a head at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919. Trotsky, who had had to dash off to the Eastern front, was absent, but his “Theses” served as the text of the secret debates.^† In the “Theses,” Trotsky called for strict centralization of the army command and the recruitment of ex-tsarist officers, both to work under the close supervision of the Central Committee. The opponents of the Lenin-Trotsky policy argued that such an army would be unreliable and that it was offensive for Bolshevik veterans to be ordered about by onetime tsarist officers. They preferred a collegial system of army management and greater authority being vested in commissars to intervene in military directives.⁶ Lenin, however, supported Trotsky: the time had come, he said, to end the “partisan” style of waging war. Under his prodding, the Eighth Congress approved Trotsky’s “Theses.”

The pool of officers available to the Communists was large (250,000) and socially diversified, since a high proportion consisted of commoners commissioned during World War I. The Russian officer corps on the eve of the Revolution was anything but an aristocratic preserve: of the 220,000 lieutenants commissioned during the war, 80 percent were peasants, and 50 percent had no secondary school diploma.⁷ Officers differed from the rank and file not so much socially or economically as culturally: to peasant soldiers, any educated man—one who had attended, even if he had not finished, secondary school—was an intelligent and as such a barin’, or “master.”⁸ It was not the least of Russia’s tragedies that for the population at large, the acquisition of an education above basic literacy made one an outsider and, as such, a potential enemy.

After the old army fell apart, officers living under Bolshevik rule led a miserable existence, persecuted by the regime as “counterrevolutionaries,” shunned by civilians who feared the Cheka, and destitute, since their pensions had been cut off.⁹ Other defeated countries neglected their returning war veterans, but only Bolshevik Russia dishonored and hunted down demobilized officers as if they were rabid dogs. The involvement of hundreds of officers in the Savinkov conspiracy and in his July 1918 uprisings on the upper Volga led to regular manhunts in which many perished.¹⁰ By October 1918 no fewer than 8,000 officers sat in prison as hostages under the terms of the Red Terror.¹¹ But toward the end of the year the situation changed: the Communists needed the ex-officers to command their forces; the ex-officers needed jobs and status to shield them from persecution. In the winter of 1918–19 they began to enroll in the Red Army, some willingly, some under duress, to take command of newly created regiments, brigades, divisions, and armies.

The regime that was to prevail in the Red Army in the second, decisive phase of the Civil War represented an original blend of responsibilities under which the Communist Party exercised tight political supervision over the officers while conceding them wide discretion in the conduct of military operations. The system was put in place in early September 1918 after the Red Army had been severely mauled by the Czechs.

Following the decision on September 4 to transform Soviet Russia into a “military camp” (voennyi lager’), the government established a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (Revoliutsionnyi Voennyi Sovet Respubliki, or Rewoensovet);¹² it replaced the Vysshyi Voennyi Sovet and assumed full command of the country’s war effort.^* The new Council operated directly under the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Its Chairman was the Commissar of War, Trotsky; during Trotsky’s frequent visits to the front, it was run by his deputy, E. M. Sklianskii, an old Bolshevik and a physician by profession. Subordinated to it were Revolutionary Councils of the fourteen armies, made up of the army commander and his commissars. Members of the central Revvoensovet were regularly dispatched to the front to serve as “organs of communication, observation and instruction”; they were under strict orders not to interfere with the military decisions of the professional officers. The Revvoensovet included the Commander in Chief of All the Armed Forces of the Republic, a “military specialist” entrusted with broad authority in strategic and operational matters. For his directives to acquire force, however, they had to be countersigned by a civilian member of the Revolutionary Military Council. He was empowered to recommend the appointment and removal of subordinate officers.¹³ Under him served the Field Staff (Polevoi Shtab RVSR), which worked out the day-to-day operational directives. It was headed by four generals of the old army.¹⁴ The Revvoensovet enjoyed immense powers not only over the entire military establishment but over all state institutions, which were required to assign its requests the highest priority.

8. A demobilized officer of the Russian Army trying to make ends meet.

At this time, emulating tsarist practice, the armies were organized into “fronts.” Each was commanded by its own Revolutionary Military Council made up of one “military specialist,” nearly always an ex-tsarist officer, and two political commissars, who countersigned his directives. A similar arrangement prevailed in the armies. Below the army level (division, brigade, regiment), political supervision of each unit was exercised by a single commissar. These traditional military units replaced the “detachments” (otriady) of 700 to 1,000 men under a commander and two assistants, as a rule elected by their troops, prevalent in the first year of Communist rule.¹⁵

In the course of the Civil War some 75,000 ex-Imperial officers served in the Red Army, in that number 775 generals and 1,726 other officers of the Imperial General Staff.¹⁶ The preponderance of old officers in the command structure of the Red Army during the Civil War can be demonstrated statistically. They made up 85 percent of the commanders of fronts, 82 percent of the commanders of armies, and 70 percent of the commanders of divisions.¹⁷ The extent to which the tsarist officer corps was integrated into the new, Soviet one, is illustrated by the fact that the two last tsarist Ministers of War (A. A. Polivanov and D. S. Shuvaev) and one Minister of War of the Provisional Government (A. I. Verkhovskii) also joined the Red Army. In addition, Moscow inducted many thousands of noncommissioned officers of the old army.

Although few of the old officers sympathized with the Bolshevik dictatorship or joined the Communist Party, most remained true to the Russian tradition that the military should stay out of politics. In photographs, with their indelibly old-regime faces, they look highly uncomfortable garbed in rough, ill-tailored revolutionary uniforms.

While maintaining tight political control over the military, the Bolshevik leadership did not, on the whole, interfere with the conduct of military operations. The Commander in Chief submitted recommendations to the Revvoensovet, which, after routine approval, forwarded them for implementation. S. S. Kamenev, an ex-colonel in the Imperial army who served as Commander in Chief from July of 1919 on, maintains that the High Command was “wholly responsible for military operations.”¹⁸

Trotsky, often depicted as the man who “had founded a great army and had guided it to victory,”¹⁹ made no such claims on his own behalf. The decision to build up a regular army staffed by ex-tsarist officers was taken not personally by him, but by the majority of the Central Committee, although admittedly he pressed extremely hard for it; the conduct of military operations was in the hands of professional generals of the Imperial army. Trotsky had no military experience and his strategic sense left, in any event, a great deal to be desired.^* A Soviet general turned historian, having studied the archival sources on Trotsky’s activities during the Civil War, concluded that in military matters he was a “dilettante.”²⁰

9. Trotsky and Commander in Chief S. S. Kamenev.

Even so, he performed several important services. He would resolve disagreements among the Red generals, usually after consultation with Moscow, and ensure that they carried out the Center’s decisions. Touring the front in his private train guarded by Latvians, equipped with telegraph, radio transmitter, printing press, and even a garage and an orchestra, accompanied by still and cinema photographers, Trotsky could assess the situation on the spot and, cutting through red tape, make rapid decisions on matters involving manpower and logistics. Thirdly, his appearances and speeches often produced an electrifying effect on dispirited troops:²¹ in that respect he was, not unlike Kerensky, a “Persuader in Chief.” His directives of the period are filled with exhortations, bearing edifying titles and often ending with exclamation marks: “Southern front, pull yourself together!”; “Round them up!”; “Proletarians, to horse!”; “For shame!”; “Don’t waste time!”; “Once more, don’t waste time!”; and the like.²² He was also responsible for introducing draconian discipline into the Red Army, including capital punishment for desertion, panic-mongering, and even unjustified retreat: subject to such measures were commanding officers and Communist commissars as well as military soldiers. Essentially, he managed the armed forces by terror. He justified this with the argument that

One cannot form an army without repression. One cannot lead human masses to their death without the commanding officers having in their arsenal the death penalty. As long as the evil tailless apes called human beings, proud of their technology, build armies and wage war, so long will those in command present soldiers with [the choice of] possible death in front and certain death in the rear.²³

In reality, as we shall see, such discipline was only haphazardly enforced because it would have exterminated more than half of the Red Army.

As for Lenin, his wartime role was largely confined to sending alarmist messages to frontline commanders and commissars, demanding that they either hold the line at all costs, “to the last drop of blood,”²⁴ or advance and decisively smash the enemy, otherwise the “revolution” was lost. Typical was his communication to the commissar at the Southern front in August 1919 as the Red Army was falling back before Denikin’s offensive:

The delay in the advance in the direction of Voronezh (from the first to the 10th of August!!!) is monstrous. Denikin has had immense successes. What is the matter? Sokolnikov said that there (near Voronezh) we have 4 times superior forces. What is the matter? How could we sleep like that? Tell the Commander in Chief this cannot be. One must pay serious attention. Should we not send to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern front … the following telegram: (In code). It is entirely unacceptable to delay the offensive, because such a delay will deliver the entire Ukraine to Denikin and will cause us to perish. You are responsible for every lost day and even every hour of delaying the offensive. Let us immediately have explanations and the time when you will finally launch the decisive attack.

Lenin

Chairman, Council of Defense²⁵

It is doubtful whether such exhortations had any influence on the course of operations. Lenin also never tired of urging his officers to terrorize the civilian population: “Try to punish Latvia and Estonia by military means,” he suggested to Sklianskii, “(for instance … somewhere penetrate the border even for one verst and hang there 100–1,000 of their officials and rich people).”²⁶ In February 1920 he threatened to “slaughter” the entire population of Maikop and Groznyi if the local oil fields were sabotaged.²⁷

As concerns the third major Communist figure, Stalin, who subsequently claimed the major credit for victory in the Civil War, a recent Russian publication has this to say:

Careful study of the protocols of the meetings of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Sovnarkom of the Russian Republic leads to the following definite conclusion: during all the years of the Civil War Stalin did not once advance in these bodies an independent constructive idea or suggestion on major problems of military organization and strategy.²⁸

There were several occasions when the Bolshevik leaders as a group involved themselves in major strategic decisions. According to Trotsky, this was done because officers of the old school lacked appreciation of social and political issues.²⁹ In the spring of 1919 disagreement broke out among Bolshevik leaders over the question of whether to adopt a defensive stance against Kolchak in order to concentrate on the Southern front, where the danger seemed greatest, or to finish off Kolchak first. Trotsky and his protégé, I. I. Vatsetis, the Commander in Chief, favored the former course; Stalin and S. S. Kamenev, Commander of the Eastern front, the latter. Then another disagreement erupted, over the direction of the thrust against Denikin, which Trotsky wanted to focus on the Donbass, while Kamenev, supported by Stalin, preferred to invade the Don Cossack region. In the fall of 1919, a conflict arose over the defense of Petrograd, which Lenin wanted to abandon as a lost cause. Trotsky, for a change with Stalin’s backing, persuaded the Politburo, the policy-making body of the Central Committee, that retaining Petrograd was essential. Finally, in the summer of 1920, during the war with Poland, the Central Committee settled the controversial question of whether to stop the advance of its armies at the ethnographic boundary known as the Curzon Line or to march on Warsaw.

In no time the new army came to resemble the old, even to the point of reintroducing the practice of saluting. In January 1919, the Red Army placed on the sleeves of uniforms “badges of rank” (znaki razlichiia): red stars with hammer and sickle plus red triangles for the lower ranks, squares for commanders up to the regimental level, and diamonds for those heading units of brigade size and larger. In April, the army received distinct uniforms; their most visible symbol was a peaked cap, popularly called bogatyrka, supposedly modeled on those worn by the heroes of medieval legends, but from a distance strikingly reminiscent of the dreaded German spiked helmet, or Pickelhaube.^*

10. Trotsky and Vatsetis.

Because the Red Army won the Civil War, it is natural to assume that it had superior leadership and better-motivated troops. The evidence does not support this assumption. The Red Army suffered from the same problems as its adversary: mass desertions, a tendency on the part of commanders to ignore orders, difficulty of recruitment, inefficient logistics, inadequate medical services. What enabled the Red Army to cope better with these difficulties was its vast superiority in numbers.

Archival sources reveal a staggering rate of both refusals to obey induction orders and desertions.³⁰ Between October 1918 and April 1919, the government ordered the mobilization of 3.6 million men; of this number 917,000, or 25 percent, failed to report for induction. In the Ukrainian provinces in early 1919 only a fraction of those mobilized showed up at induction centers, for which reason mobilization orders sometimes had to be canceled.³¹ The desertion statistics for 1919 were on a similar scale, as shown by the table on this page. The number of deserters between June 1919 and June 1920 is estimated at 2.6 million.^† In the second half of 1919, each month more soldiers fled from the Red Army than the Volunteer Army had in its ranks. The vast majority of deserters returned within 14 days and were classified as “weak-willed,” which would correspond to Absent Without Leave (AWOL). The punishments for desertion were very severe, but for obvious reasons could not be strictly enforced. Most deserters were returned to their units; some were sentenced to hard labor. In the second half of 1919, 612 were executed.³³ Desertions continued at the same rate during 1920. In February 1920, for example, a division deployed on the Western front in anticipation of a war with Poland lost 50 percent of its men.³⁴ That year, sweeping searches in the Ukraine yielded in five months half a million deserters.³⁵ In view of this evidence, it is impossible to maintain that the Red Army was made up of politically conscious masses fired with revolutionary spirit. A Soviet philologist found that many Red Army soldiers had no idea what the terms used by their government meant; included in that category was “class enemy.”³⁶

DESERTERS FROM THE RED ARMY IN 1919³²

February

26, 115

March

54,696

April

28,236

May

78,876

June

146,453

July

270,737

August

299,839

September

228,850

October

190,801

November

263,671

December

172,831

Total

1,761,105

A rare insight into the problems of the Red Army is provided by the records of an investigation carried out in December 1918 at Lenin’s request by Stalin and Feliks Dzerzhinskii, head of the Cheka, to ascertain the causes of the defeat of the Third Red Army at Perm. As a rule such information, damaging to the army’s reputation, has been kept locked up in archives: in this instance, Stalin ordered it published to discredit Trotsky. Stalin’s and Dzerzhinskii’s account of the “Perm catastrophe” could, with minor changes, have come from an inquest carried out in the White armies. “This was not, strictly speaking, a retreat,” the two reported. “This was an ordinary disorderly flight of a routed and completely demoralized army whose staff had no idea what was going on.” Artillery was surrendered without firing a shot. Soviet officials in Perm, said to be mostly holdovers from the tsarist era, abandoned their posts. Among the reasons for the wretched performance of the troops, Stalin and Dzerzhinskii cited the poor food supply, exhaustion, and hostility of the local inhabitants: in the Perm and Viatka provinces the population was ranged solidly against the Communists, they reported, partly from resentment of food requisitioning, and partly from the effects of White propaganda. As a result, the Red Army had to defend itself not only from the enemy in front of it but also from enemies in its rear.³⁷

There are numerous corroborations of this analysis. In April 1919, after inspecting the front at Samara, Trotsky reported that wounded were left unattended because there were no physicians, medicines, or hospital trains.³⁸ The same month, G. Zinoviev, the boss of Petrograd, complained that while boots were piling up in his city, the troops defending it went barefoot.³⁹ Clothing and footwear sent to the front were routinely pilfered before reaching their destination. In August 1919, Trotsky reported that Red Army troops were going hungry, between one-half and one-third had no boots, and “everyone in the Ukraine has rifles and ammunition except the soldiers.”⁴⁰

An indication of the problems of loyalty and morale in the Red Army can be found in the extraordinary severity of its disciplinary provisions. Harsh punishments, including the death penalty, were decreed for military commanders not only for acts of treason but also for defeat. We have noted Trotsky’s instructions making families of officers accountable for their loyalty. In a secret instruction Trotsky ordered registers to be compiled of the family status of every ex-tsarist officer and civil servant in Soviet service: only those were to be retained whose families resided in Soviet territory. Ex-tsarist officers were to be informed that the fate of their next of kin lay in their hands.⁴¹ If an officer merely acted in a suspicious manner, he was to be treated as guilty and shot.⁴² On August 14, 1918, Izvestiia published Trotsky’s order mandating that in case of “unjustified” retreat, the commissar of the front was to be shot first, followed by its military commander.⁴³ In line with this instruction, the Military Revolutionary Council of the Thirteenth Army required commanders and commissars of units that retreated on their own authority to be turned over to a field Revolutionary Tribunal that was “mercilessly” to execute those found guilty:

Units may and must perish in their entirety but not retreat, and this must be understood by the commanders and commissars; they must know that there is no turning back, that in the rear there awaits them ignominious death, and in front, certain victory, because the enemy advances with small forces and acts only from impudence.⁴⁴

The first known instance of mass execution of troops occurred on Trotsky’s orders and with Lenin’s approval at the end of August 1918 on the Eastern front, when the principle of “decimation” was applied and 20 men were shot, among them the regimental commander and commissar.⁴⁵

Lenin, for whom execution by shooting was a favorite way of disposing of problems, was not averse to eliminating even his highest officers. On August 30, 1918—hours before he himself was shot and nearly killed—he wrote Trotsky, in connection with the poor performance of Red forces at Kazan, that it might not be a bad idea to execute Vatsetis, the Commander of the Eastern front, for further “delay or failure.” This was the same Vatsetis who two months earlier had saved him and his government from the Left SR rebellion.⁴⁶

Terror was applied also to the rank and file.⁴⁷ On entering active service, soldiers were required to acknowledge that their comrades had not only the right but the duty to shoot them on the spot if they fled from the field of battle, failed to carry out orders, or even complained of food shortages. In some Soviet units, the commanders and commissars were empowered to execute, without trial or any other formality, all “troublemakers” and “self-seekers.” Documents show that on occasion reserve battalions deployed in the rear were ordered to open fire with machine guns to stop retreating Red Army units. In August 1919, Trotsky created on the Southern front “barring detachments” (zagraditel’nye otriady), composed of dependable and well-armed troops with a high proportion of Communists, to patrol the roads in the immediate rear of the combat zone. The number of Red Army soldiers executed during the Civil War is not known: but an idea can be obtained from statistics which indicate that in 1921, when the fighting stopped, 4,337 soldiers were shot.⁴⁸

Such draconian measures exceeded in savagery anything known in the tsarist armies even under serfdom. They also had no counterpart in the White armies: Red Army deserters are said to have been astonished at the laxity of discipline on the White side.⁴⁹ They indicate that the Red Army experienced unusually serious problems of morale and discipline. Vatsetis thought the methods used to keep soldiers in line were counterproductive: “The discipline which has been and continues to be enforced in our Red Army, based on severe punishments, has led only to fear and the mechanical execution of orders, without any inspiration and sense of duty.”⁵⁰

Disciplinary provisions were implemented with intensive propaganda and agitation among frontline troops.⁵¹ All armies and some divisions were equipped with printing presses that turned out posters and newspapers. Propaganda trains incessantly toured the front. The thrust of this effort was to instill in the troops the conviction that the Red Army was invincible and that a White victory would mean the restoration of the monarchy, the return of the landlords, and pogroms of workers. Whether it succeeded in creating the state of mass hypnosis which was its purpose is questionable, given the evidence of the extraordinary problems the Red Army had with discipline, desertions, and flight from the battlefield.

The Russian Civil War cannot be discussed without reference to the role of foreign powers, notably Great Britain. There never was anything resembling an “imperialist intervention” in the sense of a concerted, purposeful drive of the Western powers to crush the Communist regime. Western involvement in Russia, especially after November 1918, suffered from lack of clear purpose as well as from serious differences both within the Allied camp and among diverse groups in each Allied country. At the same time, without foreign intervention on the White side there would have been no Civil War (in the military sense of this word) because the immense superiority of the Bolsheviks in manpower and weaponry would have enabled them quickly to overcome all armed resistance.

Until the November 1918 Armistice, the objective of Allied intervention in Russia had been clear: to reactivate the Eastern front by helping Russians prepared to continue the war against Germany. After November 11, its purpose turned murky. This much was conceded by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George: “Our honorable obligations to the remnants of the Russian Army which, disregarding the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, remained in the field to fight the Germans, put us in the embarrassing position of being under an obligation to help one of the parties in the Russian Civil War.”⁵² If the decision had been entirely up to him, the Prime Minister would have disengaged from Russia at once; his political instincts told him that the British people would not countenance involvement in another war, far from their shores, to settle a quarrel among foreigners. But the matter could not be resolved in such a simple manner. There were strong anti-Communist feelings among the Tories, of whom Winston Churchill was the most forceful spokesman. The elections of December 1918 returned a coalition government: his Liberal Party being both in a minority and divided within itself, Lloyd George became heavily dependent on Tory support. “Personally,” Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs,

I would have dealt with the Soviets as the de facto Government of Russia. So would President Wilson. But we both agreed that we could not carry to that extent our colleagues at the Congress, nor the public opinion of our own countries which was frightened by Bolshevik violence and feared its spread.⁵³

As a result, he maneuvered and equivocated, intervening to please the Tories, but only in a halfhearted manner, to placate the trade unions and the Labour Party.

Dislike and dread of Bolshevism, on the one hand, and unwillingness to make a serious commitment to fight it, on the other, explain the vacillations of Allied policy toward Soviet Russia throughout the Civil War. Lloyd George justified his reluctance to render effective help to the Whites with various excuses: that the French Revolution had shown the futility of foreign powers trying to suppress revolution by force; that the Bolsheviks were certain to fall from power if they failed to win popular support; that their ability to beat off challenges indicated that they did enjoy such support; that the Whites were monarchists bent on restoring an expansionist empire that would hurt British interests more than Bolshevism. American President Woodrow Wilson largely shared these sentiments.

After the Armistice, the victorious Allies had one interest in common: to stabilize the situation in Russia in order to have a government there with which to agree on the frontiers of postwar Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, the Caucasus, and Transcaspia. Simply put, in the words of President Wilson, “Europe and the world cannot be at peace if Russia is not.”⁵⁴ Lloyd George concurred: “There will be no peace until peace is established in Russia. It means that you have got war in half Europe and nearly half Asia as well.… Civilization cannot afford a distracted and desolate Russia.”⁵⁵ The statesmen who gathered in Paris in early 1919 cared less who governed Russia than that Russia be governed. Ideally, they would have liked an accommodation between the warring parties that would make it unnecessary to choose between them; if this did not prove possible, they were prepared to come to terms with Moscow.

This one common interest apart, each Allied power had its own stake in the area. Britain, which throughout the nineteenth century had competed with Russia in the Middle East, wavered between the wish to see Bolshevism replaced by a traditional authority and the fear that such an authority would once again threaten India and encroach on the eastern Mediterranean. France wanted to recover the investments she had lost through Soviet expropriations and defaults, as well as to prevent a Russo-German rapprochement. The United States had no well-defined policy toward Russia, for she had no territorial and no significant financial claims on her: she wished the restoration of stability, preferably but not necessarily by democratic means. If this objective was not attainable, Washington was prepared to abandon Russia to her fate. Only Japan had a clear objective in mind and that was to annex Russia’s Far Eastern provinces. To complicate matters still further, within each country there were rival groupings, some demanding the destruction of the Communist regime, others calling for accommodation with it: it was a conflict pitting Churchill against Lloyd George, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing against President Wilson and his adviser Colonel Edward House. Not surprisingly, intervention enjoyed greater support when the Whites were winning. In sum, foreign involvement in the Russian Civil War never approached the unity and purposefulness that Lenin had expected from it and Communist historians have attributed to it.

In the beginning, Britain and the United States sought to resolve the Russian problem by bringing the warring parties to the negotiating table.

Lenin never doubted that as soon as the fighting on the Western front stopped, victors and vanquished would join forces to launch a “capitalist crusade” against his regime. In early 1919, the Red Army command expected massive Allied military intervention on the side of the Whites. To avert this threat, Lenin had recourse to preemptive peace initiatives. Because he greatly overestimated the readiness of the Western allies to commit military forces in Russia, he was prepared to go as far as he had done a year earlier in accommodating the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that most of the proposals he made in the winter of 1918–19 were honestly meant.

On Christmas Eve 1918, Maxim Litvinov, an old Bolshevik and Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, sent President Wilson a note from Stockholm phrased so as to appeal to the President’s sentimental nature. In it he offered on behalf of his government to resolve by negotiation all outstanding problems with the West, including the matter of Russia’s debts and Communist propaganda abroad.⁵⁶ In response, Washington sent an emissary to Stockholm to communicate with Litvinov. He reported that the offer appeared genuine, whereupon Lloyd George, with President Wilson’s concurrence, proposed that the parties to the Russian Civil War meet in Paris. When it transpired that the French would not offer hospitality to such a conference, its location was shifted to the Turkish island of Prinkipo, off Constantinople.⁵⁷ Moscow promptly accepted the invitation, repeating its readiness to acknowledge Russia’s foreign debts, make territorial adjustments, offer mining concessions, and suspend hostile propaganda.⁵⁸ The authors of an official Soviet history of diplomacy explain these concessions as a “diplomatic maneuver” designed not to satisfy the Western powers but to “unmask” their true aims.⁵⁹ The mercenary tone of the Soviet response produced an effect contrary to the one intended, offending the Western heads of state, who indignantly responded that they repudiated “the suggestion that such objects influenced their intervention in Russia. The supreme desire of the Allies is to see peace restored in Russia and the establishment of a Government based upon the will of the broad mass of the Russian people.”⁶⁰

The Prinkipo Conference never materialized because the White generals, appalled by the idea of negotiating with their mortal enemies, rejected it out of hand. The proposal seemed so preposterous that when Kolchak’s advisers first heard it on the wireless, they believed a mistake had occurred in transmission and that the Allies were in fact proposing a conference of anti-Bolshevik parties.⁶¹ It has been argued, however, that it is unfair to place the entire blame for the failure of the Prinkipo proposal on the White generals. They were so dependent on Allied assistance that if sufficient pressure had been brought to bear on them they would have had no choice but to acquiesce, especially if the alternative was a separate peace of the Western powers with Lenin.⁶² If such pressure was not exerted the reason has to be sought in the attitude of France, which opposed the Prinkipo proposal and privately advised White representatives in Paris to ignore it. Churchill, who had just then taken over the War Office, gave similar counsel and promised the Whites military help whether they came or not.⁶³

Determined to pursue the peace initiative, Wilson, with Lloyd George’s tacit support (of which Lloyd George says that “our attitude was that of the Fox Whigs toward the French Revolution”⁶⁴) initiated secret steps to determine whether it was possible to come to terms with Moscow without White participation.⁶⁵ To this end Wilson’s principal foreign policy adviser, Colonel House, employed an American socialite, William Bullitt, an employee of U.S. intelligence services in Paris. Bullitt had expressed sympathy for the Soviet cause, which was probably the reason he was chosen for the mission, since he lacked any other qualifications: only 28 years old, he had no previous diplomatic experience. Formally, his assignment was to inquire into the actual state of affairs in Soviet Russia; but privately, Colonel House authorized him to ascertain the terms on which the Soviet government was prepared to make peace. In return for peace, he was to promise Lenin’s government generous economic assistance.⁶⁶ Bullitt’s mission was so secret that only four persons were privy to it: among those kept in the dark were the U.S. Secretary of State, the French government, and the British Foreign Office. Such extraordinary precautions were inspired by the fear that those who had aborted the Prinkipo proposal would also prevent direct contacts with Moscow. Bullitt took with him Captain Walter W. Pettit of Military Intelligence and Lincoln Steffens, a journalist known for his pro-Communist sympathies.

The three Americans arrived in Moscow in the middle of March 1919, shortly after the Communist International had concluded its first congress (see below, Chapter 4). Its proceedings and resolutions held for them no interest. Their Soviet hosts were friendly and eager for an accord. On March 14 the Central Committee handed Bullitt the terms on which it was prepared to make peace with the Whites.⁶⁷ The respective claimants to power in Russia were to retain the territories they actually controlled. Allied troops on Russian soil were to withdraw gradually, but assistance to the White armies was to cease at once. Russians who had taken up arms against the Soviet regime would be amnestied. The Russian parties would recognize joint responsibility for the country’s debts. The issue of compensation for nationalized foreign properties was not addressed.

Bullitt’s mission had an air of unreality about it. Only people ignorant of the causes of the conflict and the passions that it aroused could have conceived such a plan. Steffens, its author, treated the mission as high adventure: “I feel as I were going to see a good play at a good theater,” he wrote.^†

It is quite possible that had the Soviet offer been accepted, Eastern Europe would have gained a certain degree of stability. For a time, at any rate. The critical clause in the Soviet proposal called on the Allies immediately to suspend military assistance to the Whites. Had this been done, it would have been harmless enough for Moscow to leave the Whites in place. Cut off from their only available source of armaments, they would have inevitably succumbed to the combined pressures of the three-million-strong Red Army and internal subversion.

Bullitt sent back to Paris an enthusiastic report, in which he depicted Lenin, Georgii Chicherin, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and Litvinov as “full of a sense of Russia’s need for peace” and unequivocally committed to paying off Russia’s foreign debts.⁶⁸ The world had a unique opportunity to come to terms with Soviet Russia, where “a dull, inexperienced, a young people were trying rudely but conscientiously and at the cost of great suffering to themselves to find a better way to live for the common good than the old way.”⁶⁹ On the basis of this report, Colonel House was ready to recommend a separate peace with Moscow.⁷⁰ But the Bullitt mission came to naught, aborted by French opposition and Lloyd George’s fear of the Tories. Embittered, Bullitt retired to the Riviera to “lie on the sands and watch the world go to hell.”^† Further attempts to come to terms with Moscow were given up.

For the next six months, the Allies pursued a policy of half-hearted intervention on the side of the Whites. It was half-hearted because they did not quite know what they meant to achieve by it, had grave doubts about the viability of the White cause, and were divided among themselves as to the wisdom of intervening. Of the three powers most directly involved—Britain, France, and the United States—only Britain made a serious commitment to the Whites. France lost the taste for military intervention as soon as her troops in Russia had received a drubbing in the Ukraine from local partisans and mutinied, following which she turned her attention to constructing a cordon sanitaire to insulate Europe from Communist Russia. The United States withdrew most of her forces, leaving only those that were necessary to prevent the Japanese from seizing eastern Siberia. Essentially, the story of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War is one of Britain’s involvement, for it was she who bore virtually the entire cost of assistance to the Whites. And Britain’s involvement was due primarily to Winston Churchill, who earlier than any other European statesmen understood the threat that Russian Communism posed to the West.

Although weakened, Britain remained after World War I the leading world power, with global interests directly affected by what happened in Russia. But her attitude toward Russia was anything but consistent. The records of British cabinet discussions reveal contrary pulls resulting in hesitations and confusion. These sources show that while reports of Bolshevik atrocities published in the British press (especially the details of the murder of the Imperial family) produced universal revulsion, they did not significantly affect Britain’s policies.

Britain’s policy toward Soviet Russia was primarily guided by two concerns: the fear of a rapprochement between Russia and Germany, and memory of Russia’s historic threat to British Middle Eastern possessions. These twin concerns raised a fundamental question: what kind of Russian government better suited British interests—Lenin’s or the one likely to be installed by the victorious Whites? A related question was whether it was preferable to encourage the dismemberment of the Russian Empire or to preserve her territorial integrity. Each position had its proponents.

Although the Bolshevik regime had no admirers in the British government, it had its advocates, who argued that from Britain’s vantage point it was preferable to any realistic alternative. Between the battle of Waterloo and the emergence in the early twentieth century of an aggressive, militaristic Germany, the containment of Russia had been the foremost concern of British diplomacy. The weaker Russia was, the less of a threat she posed: and Bolshevik misrule seemed to ensure her permanent debility. The reasoning behind this position was analogous to that which in 1917–18 had prompted Germany to overcome her aversion for the Bolsheviks and offer them critical support: namely that they were ruining Russia and thereby lifting the threat to Germany’s eastern frontier.⁷¹ This view was held by Lloyd George, who throughout the Russian Civil War silently favored a Bolshevik victory even while, as minority premier of a coalition government, he had to yield to Tory pressures and intervene on the side of the Whites. On December 12, 1918, he told the War Cabinet that he did not think that a Bolshevik Russia “was by any means such a danger as the old Russian Empire was, with all its aggressive officials and millions of troops.” In this assessment he was supported by the Tory Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour.^* On another occasion, Lloyd George assured the cabinet that the “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed was fundamentally anti-militarist.”⁷² He made no secret of his desire to stay out of Russia: at a War Cabinet meeting on December 31, 1918, he said that he “was opposed to military intervention in any shape.”⁷³ In expressing such opinions, based on intuition and wishful thinking rather than knowledge, the Prime Minister enjoyed the backing of the majority in the cabinet, which throughout 1919 opposed involvement in the Russian Civil War: according to Churchill’s biographer, not one minister apart from Churchill favored supporting General Denikin.^*

Such were the political realities behind the hesitations of Britain in the Russian Civil War. Like the Polish leader Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, who at a critical phase of the Civil War would leave the Whites in the lurch, Lloyd George and Balfour considered the threat posed by a restored national Russia to be greater than that posed by international Communism.

In addition, there were compelling domestic reasons for not pushing a pro-White policy too hard. British labor overwhelmingly opposed intervention, viewing it as an attempt to suppress the world’s first workers’ government. Since the Armistice had resulted in severe economic and social dislocations in Britain, continued involvement in Russia threatened domestic turmoil. In June 1919, the War Cabinet was advised that the growing labor unrest in the country was due mainly to the unpopular intervention in Russia.⁷⁴ As the year progressed, the hostility of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress to intervention intensified. This factor was probably decisive in Lloyd George’s resolve to pull out of Russia by the end of 1919.

The most ardent advocate of military intervention was Churchill, who on taking charge of the War Office in January 1919 immediately adopted an anti-Communist rather than an anti-Russian stance. In this he enjoyed the support of Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but of no one else who mattered. Churchill concluded that World War I had ushered in a new historical era in which narrowly national interests and conflicts would yield to supranational and ideological interests and conflicts. This conviction enabled him to grasp the meaning of both Communism and National Socialism sooner and better than other European statesmen, who tended to treat them as phenomena domestic in origin and scope. Churchill regarded Communism as unadulterated evil, a satanic force: he had no qualms about referring to the Bolsheviks as “animals,” “butchers,” “baboons.” He was convinced that the White cause was also Britain’s cause. In a memorandum written on September 15, 1919, when Britain was about to abandon the Whites, he warned:

It is a delusion to suppose that all this year we have been fighting the battles of the anti-Bolshevik Russians. On the contrary, they have been fighting ours; and this truth will become painfully apparent from the moment that they are exterminated and the Bolshevik armies are supreme over the whole vast territories of the Russian Empire.⁷⁵

Even though in a minority of one in the cabinet, he managed to play a leading role in Britain’s policies toward Russia in part because he headed the War Office, and in part because he possessed formidable powers of persuasion.

The danger of an alliance between a reactionary or revolutionary Russia and a reactionary or revolutionary Germany worried the British cabinet even before Germany’s surrender.⁷⁶ But no one except Churchill was haunted by this prospect and no one was prepared to draw from it the logical conclusions. Churchill foresaw a potential “combination of interest and policy” between the two pariah nations that would coalesce into a “mass against which the Western Powers will be quite unable to assert themselves and even, possibly in a few years to defend themselves.”⁷⁷ “There will be no peace in Europe until Russia is restored,” by which he meant “restored” under a non-Communist government. With prophetic insight he predicted the alliance of Soviet Russia, Germany, and Japan that would materialize twenty years later and nearly destroy England and her empire:

If we abandon Russia, Germany and Japan will not. The new states which it is hoped to bring into being in the East of Europe will be crushed between Russian Bolshevism and Germany. Germany will regain by her influence over Russia far more than she has lost in colonies overseas or provinces in the West. Japan will no doubt arrive at a somewhat similar solution at the other end of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In five years, or even less, it will be apparent that the whole fruits of our victories have been lost at the Peace Conference, that the League of Nations is an impotent mockery, that Germany is stronger than ever, and that British interests in India are perilously affected. After all our victories we shall have quitted the field in humiliation and defeat.^*

Churchill conceived the idea of containing Soviet Russia,⁷⁸ which his own country ignored but the United States would adopt after World War II. Had he had his way, the Western powers would have mounted an international crusade against Bolshevik Russia. The next best thing in his mind was enlisting Germany against the Bolsheviks. Fear of Bolshevism and of a Bolshevik-German alliance drove him after the Armistice to plead for a conciliatory policy toward Germany (“Feed Germany; fight Bolshevism; make Germany fight Bolshevism”).⁷⁹ Whereas the majority of his colleagues eventually concluded that the ability of the Bolsheviks to defeat their adversaries reflected popular support, Churchill understood that it derived from unrestrained terror.

But while Churchill was a superb diagnostician, his remedies were quite unrealistic. His vision of an international crusade against Soviet Russia was sheer fantasy: there was not the slightest chance that the great powers, exhausted by four years of war, would dispatch hundreds of thousands of troops to the frozen wastes of Russia.^* Lloyd George told Churchill—and in this he was probably right—that if Britain went to war against Russia there would be a revolution at home. The Germans not only would not fight the Russians, but would enter with them into secret military collaboration. In the end, Churchill had to settle for desultory intervention on behalf of the Whites—an involvement too small to affect the outcome of the Civil War, but large enough to enable the Communist regime to depict the struggle for its own survival as the defense of Russia from foreign invaders.

The British cabinet took the first steps toward intervention on November 14, 1918. Having rejected as impractical the idea of an anti-Bolshevik “crusade,” it decided instead to support diplomatically and materially the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia as well as those countries, once part of the Russian Empire, that had succeeded in separating themselves from it.⁸⁰ In early 1919 Lloyd George laid down the following guidelines for Britain’s involvement:

“1. There must be no attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia by force of arms.

2. Support would only be continued as long as it was clear that in the areas controlled by Kolchak and Denikin the population was anti-Bolshevik in sentiment.

3. The anti-Bolshevik armies must not be used to restore the old tsarist regime … [and] reimpos[e] on the peasants the old feudal conditions [!] under which they held their land.”⁸¹

Once decided upon, British intervention took several forms: (1) the provisioning of the anti-Bolshevik forces with military matériel ranging from uniforms to airplanes and tanks, mostly drawn from surplus stores left over from World War I; (2) the maintenance on Russian soil and off the Russian coast of British military and naval contingents whose main mission was to perform guard duties and enforce the blockade, but which could, when threatened, defend themselves; (3) the training of White officers; (4) help with intelligence and communications; and (5), ultimately, evacuation of the remnant of the defeated White armies. The aid, although far below what Britain could have offered, was vital to the White cause.

On the question of the borderlands that had separated themselves from Russia, Britain could never quite make up her mind. On the one hand, she realized that the new states weakened Russia and her ability to commit aggression. On these grounds, Lord Curzon persuaded his government at the end of 1918 to recognize de facto the independence of Azerbaijan and Georgia, and to deploy small troop contingents in Transcaucasia and Transcaspia to protect India. In the winter of 1918–19, British naval forces would also help defend Estonia and Latvia from a Soviet invasion. On balance, however, the position of Britain was to support the territorial integrity of the Russian Empire, even under Communist rule, partly to avoid alienating the Russian population and partly to prevent the Germans from dominating the separated borderlands. While Britain pressured the White leaders to adopt democratic formulas, she did not object to the slogan “Russia One and Indivisible.”

France’s position on the Russian question was uncomplicated because, her colonial empire notwithstanding, she was primarily a continental power. Her overriding concern was preventing Germany’s revival as a military power capable of launching a revanchist war. To this end, the friendship of a strong, stable, and friendly Russia was now, as before 1914, of paramount importance; barring that, France needed a chain of client states along Germany’s eastern frontier. Secondly, France had lost the most from Lenin’s nationalization degrees and defaults on state obligations: these losses she was determined to make good. Since, in spite of his occasional assurances that he was prepared to compensate foreign powers, Lenin seemed unlikely to do so, France was of all the great powers the most consistently anti-Communist. Her support of the White cause, however, was lukewarm. France’s leaders did not give the Whites much chance and as early as March 1919 urged the other allies to abandon them to their fate and instead to transform Poland and Romania into a “barbed wire” to contain Communism.⁸² Its pillar was to be independent Poland, whose function was to separate Russia from Germany. Not surprisingly, for nationalist Germans and Communist Russians, Poland, the product of Versailles, became the object of shared hatred and the basis for collaboration that began as early as 1919 and twenty years later found consummation in the fourth partition of that country.

American policy, as formulated by President Wilson, was that after the Armistice the Allies had no business keeping troops in Russia: they were to be withdrawn, leaving the Russians to settle their quarrel among themselves.⁸³ Wilson felt it was “always dangerous to meddle in foreign revolutions”: “to try to stop a revolutionary movement by a line of armies is to employ a broom to stop a great flood.… The only way to act against Bolshevism is to make its causes disappear.” Unfortunately, he confessed, “we do not even know exactly what its causes are.”⁸⁴ In addition to noninterference, Wilson favored the nonrecognition of the Soviet government and the preservation of Russia’s territorial integrity.⁸⁵

Japanese policy toward Russia was the most consistent and the most transparent. The Japanese landed their first troops in the Russian Far East in the spring of 1918 on the initiative of the Allied Supreme Command, which had planned to deploy them against the Germans in a reactivated Eastern front. Nothing came of this idea, not only because it was impractical but also because the Japanese had no intention of fighting the Germans. Their interests were strictly predatory: they wished to take advantage of the Russian turmoil to seize and annex the maritime provinces. The United States, aware of these designs, deployed military forces in eastern Siberia, but American troops, whether in the Far East or the northwest, at no time engaged the Red Army in combat.^*

On December 23, 1917, two weeks after the armistice between Russia and the Central Powers had gone into effect, the French and the British divided among themselves the spheres of responsibility for combat operations on Russian territory: France took charge of the German front and Britain of the Turkish. The British zone included the Cossack territories, the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia, and Kurdistan. The areas to the west of the Don River—the Ukraine, the Crimea, and Bessarabia—fell in the French sector.⁸⁶ During the year that followed, the arrangement remained inoperative, because all these regions were under German or Turkish occupation.

As soon as the guns fell silent on the Western front, the Allies dispatched expeditionary forces to the Black Sea. On November 23, 1918, a small British-French naval detachment debarked at Novorossiisk.⁸⁷ A month later, the French landed troops in Odessa and the Crimea, recently evacuated by the Germans, while the British took over Baku from the Turks and assumed naval control of the Caspian Sea. British warships concurrently took up positions off the Russian coast in the eastern Baltic. This deployment was part of the post-Armistice blockade of Germany enacted to prevent her from securing foreign economic assistance until she submitted to the Allied peace terms.^* It was believed in the White and Red camps alike that these forces were the vanguard of a massive Allied army, deployed to protect Denikin’s rear while he advanced on Moscow. The Soviet government took this threat very seriously: in drawing up campaign plans for the spring of 1919, the Red Army staff assumed that it would confront in the south a hostile Allied expeditionary force numbering between 150,000 and 200,000 troops.⁸⁸ In fact, no such massive military intervention was ever contemplated, since Great Britain could not afford, as Balfour put it, “to see its forces, after more than four years of strenuous fighting, dissipated over the huge expanse of Russia in order to carry out political reforms in a State which [was] no longer a belligerent Ally.”⁸⁹ Nor, for that matter, could France.

France’s small expeditionary force brought her little honor. In March 1919 France had on the Black Sea coast an ethnically mixed contingent of 65,000–70,000 men, a minority of them French, the remainder Greeks, Poles, Romanians, Senegalese, and other colonials. These units were sent not to fight but to occupy the areas evacuated by the Germans between Kherson, Nikolaev, Berezovka, and Tiraspol. But in the Civil War raging all around them, foreign troops could not act as a peaceful occupation army, and soon they were compelled to defend themselves. On March 10, a battalion of Greeks and two companies of French stationed in Kherson came under attack from a band of Ukrainian marauders led by a bandit named Nikifor Grigorev who had made common cause with the Red Army. After eight days of stiff fighting, in which they suffered heavy casualties, the defenders abandoned Kherson.⁹⁰ Grigorev moved on to Nikolaev and, following its capture, to Odessa. At this time, French sailors at Sebastopol, exposed to Communist antiwar propaganda, mutinied. The French had no appetite for combat: in the words of one of their officers, “Not one French soldier who saved his head at Verdun and the fields of the Marne will consent to losing it on the fields of Russia.”⁹¹ Having learned of these setbacks and the Sebastopol mutiny, and advised by the commander of the French contingent, General L. F. M. F. Franchet d’Esperey, that he could not supply Odessa with essentials, Paris ordered an immediate withdrawal of all French and French-led forces. Of this decision it did not even bother to inform Denikin.⁹² On April 2, Franchet d’Esperey announced that the troops under his command—4,000 Frenchmen, 15,000 Greeks, and 3,000 Russian volunteers⁹³—would evacuate Odessa in three days. They did so in two:

The [French] evacuation was carried forward in such haste and confusion that it closely resembled a flight. Only a small number of the civilian population could procure passage. Thousands lined the docks, begging the French to take them anywhere. Not a few committed suicide. Pandemonium reigned in the city, for all knew that Red troops were ready to march in as soon as the guns of the French cruisers were out of range.⁹⁴

In Sebastopol, arrangements for the withdrawal were coordinated with the Bolshevik soviet that had assumed control of the city while the French were still occupying it. The French navy evacuated 10,000 Russian military and 30,000 civilians;⁹⁵ among them were the Empress Dowager and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.

This was the extent of French involvement in the Russian Civil War. And although the French remained the most ardent Red-baiters throughout, and sabotaged every Anglo-American effort at a rapprochement with Moscow until they themselves were ready for it, the brunt of the involvement henceforth was borne by Britain.

In the fall of 1918, after Latvians serving in the Red Army had recaptured from the Czechs several cities along the Volga, the situation on the Eastern front looked reasonably satisfactory from Moscow’s point of view; it improved even more after November, when the Czechoslovak Legion withdrew from combat. Under these circumstances, the Red Army High Command began to shift forces from the east to the south. But it received a rude shock on Christmas Eve when Kolchak’s troops unexpectedly routed the Third Red Army at Perm. The loss of Perm alarmed Moscow because it raised the possibility of Kolchak’s troops linking up with the Allied contingent in Archangel.⁹⁶

Kolchak knew little about land warfare. He entrusted strategic planning to D. A. Lebedev, a 36-year-old veteran of the Imperial General Staff, one of the leaders of the November 1918 coup against the Directory. Lebedev surrounded himself with an immense staff: at the height of his offensive, Kolchak had 2,000 officers to plan operations for 140,000 combat troops, whereas during World War I the Imperial headquarters made do with 350 officers to direct a field army of three million.⁹⁷ Most of these officers were youths commissioned during the war, few of whom had any staff experience.⁹⁸

Kolchak proved to be a total disaster as an administrator. Omsk, his capital, teemed with malingerers, who speculated in all kinds of goods, especially British supplies: staff officers and their families are said to have enjoyed the right of first refusal on British uniforms and other goods that passed through Omsk en route to the front. Speculators bribed railway personnel to remove military equipment from trains and replace it with luxury goods destined for the civilian market.⁹⁹ Kolchak’s army assumed responsibility for feeding 800,000 men, although its combat strength did not exceed 150,000. The staff of the Czech General Rudolf Gajda, the commander of Kolchak’s Northern Army, which had fewer than 100,000 men, drew rations for 275,000. An investigation carried out on Gajda’s orders revealed that of the meat, clothing, and shoes sent to his front from Ekaterinburg to Perm, only 35 to 65 percent reached their destination. Vegetables, canned and fresh, were pilfered in their entirety.¹⁰⁰ Many Russian officers, including those in the combat zone, lived with their wives and mistresses in well-furnished railroad cars that served as both command posts and billets.¹⁰¹ The venality drove British liaison officers to exasperation. General Knox, head of the British military mission, was referred to by Omsk wits as the Quartermaster General of the Red Army: he even received a spurious letter from Trotsky, originating in the same circles, thanking him for the help he had rendered in equipping Red troops.¹⁰²

A major handicap of the White Eastern Army was poor transport. Kolchak’s troops were dependent for logistical support on the single-track Transsiberian linking Omsk with Vladivostok. The railroad, whose easternmost sectors were under the control of the Japanese and their protégés, atamans Semenov and Kalmykov, came under frequent attack from Bolshevik partisans and ordinary bandits. The situation improved in the spring of 1919, when the American army took charge of one major segment of the Transsiberian and the Czechs of another, but it remained far from satisfactory. Under even the best conditions, it took trains several weeks to deliver supplies from the Pacific port.

Much of the blame for the appalling state of the army’s rear must be placed on Kolchak, who was so single-mindedly preoccupied with military matters that he regarded all else, civil administration included, as diversions undeserving of his attention. As late as October 1919, when his army was well on its way to extinction, he told a civilian associate:

You know I view as hopeless all your civil laws and for this reason I am sometimes rude and you chide me for this. I have set myself a high goal: to crush the Red Army. I am Commander in Chief and do not trouble myself with reforms. Write only those laws which are necessary at present, and leave the rest to the Constituent Assembly.

When told that laws were necessary, if only to demonstrate that he was not a reactionary, he replied: “No, leave this alone, work only for the army. Don’t you understand that no matter what fine laws you write, if we lose, they will all the same shoot us!”¹⁰³

Fighting on the Eastern front resumed after a two-month lull in March 1919, before the onset of the thaw, with a White offensive employing over 100,000 troops. The plan of operations envisaged the main thrust to be in the north: the largest and best-equipped White force was Gajda’s Northern Army. Its objective was Archangel, to be reached by way of Viatka and Vologda; its purpose, to link up with Allied and Russian contingents deployed there under the command of Major General Edmund Ironside, and to make available another and much closer port through which to receive British supplies. The central front, aiming at Ufa and Kazan, was commanded by General M. V. Khanzhin. The Ural and Siberian Cossacks operated in the south along with Bashkir units, under Ataman Alexander Dutov. Their mission was the capture of Samara and Saratov for the double purpose of linking up with the Volunteer Army and isolating the Red forces in Central Asia.

The Red Army on the Eastern front underwent several reorganizations that ended in its division into two fronts: the northern under V. I. Shorin (Second and Third Armies) and the central under M. N. Tukhachevskii (First, Fourth, and Fifth Armies, and the Turkestan Army). Overall command of the Eastern front was entrusted to S. S. Kamenev. On March 1, according to the Red Army’s estimate, its forces numbered 96,000 men and 377 field guns, while Kolchak had 112,000 men and 764 guns.¹⁰⁴ It was a rare instance of White numerical superiority, but it did not last, for before long Red reinforcements began to arrive in the east. According to confidential Red Army reports, the caliber of the two armies was roughly equal, with the Whites enjoying a considerable edge in the quality and numbers of officers.¹⁰⁵ The latter was of no small concern to the Red Army, because under the conditions of combat in Siberia, field commanders enjoyed a great deal of discretion:

The tactical peculiarities of the Civil War, when relatively modest masses of troops operated on a broad front, when battles broke up into discrete nuclei and, for the major part, were conducted by regiments or, at best, brigades, the absence of proper communications and other technical means, the immense maneuverability of the units—all demanded of the commanders, commissars, and fighters great independence as well as boldness in making decisions and acting.¹⁰⁶

Kolchak’s forces made rapid progress, covering almost 600 kilometers in one month. Their advance was facilitated by anti-Soviet peasant uprisings in the rear of the Red Army in the provinces of Simbirsk, Samara, Kazan, and Viatka. The enemy retreated, offering little or no resistance: the Fifth Red Army proved to be especially loath to stand and fight.¹⁰⁷ By the middle of April, White troops reached a line extending from Glazov to Orenburg and Uralsk that was to mark their farthest advance. At this point they were less than 100 kilometers from the Volga, and in some places as close as 35 kilometers. They had occupied 300,000 square kilometers with over five million inhabitants.¹⁰⁸

The Red command now realized how greatly it had underestimated the danger in the east. On April 11, the Central Committee decided to assign this front the highest priority.¹⁰⁹ Orders were given to mobilize the middle and poor peasantry, from 10 to 20 recruits per volost’, the smallest rural administrative unit. The order must have run into considerable resistance, given that in the end no more than 25,000 peasants were inducted.¹¹⁰ The authorities were more successful in mobilizing party members and trade unionists. The Eastern front received all the new manpower and war matériel, and on June 12 the Red Army outnumbered Kolchak’s by 20,000–30,000 men.¹¹¹ The advantage would grow prodigiously in the weeks that followed.

The strategic environment for Kolchak’s army changed for the worse in May, with the advent of the spring thaw. In the late winter, combat operations had been conducted along well-defined roads, but now the front widened as “streams [turned] into rivers and rivers into seas.”¹¹² In these conditions, the growing numerical superiority of the Red Army proved of decisive advantage. On paper, Kolchak’s situation looked brilliant: but his troops were outnumbered as well as exhausted from the rapid advance, which had outrun supply trains.

To win domestic support, Kolchak needed Allied diplomatic recognition. This was important for psychological reasons, to bolster the authority of his ministers in the eyes of the population.¹¹³ In 1918, the Bolshevik regime had drawn a great deal of strength from the popular perception that behind it stood the power of Germany. Inquiries by Soviet authorities into the causes of desertions from the Red Army revealed that one of the reasons given by the defectors was the feeling that it was useless to fight “the mighty power” of Russia’s onetime allies.¹¹⁴

But the Allies procrastinated. On May 26, the Allied Supreme Council informed Kolchak that it no longer expected to come to terms with the Soviet government and was willing to provide him with munitions, supplies, and food—diplomatic recognition was not mentioned^*—if he would accept the following conditions: (1) agree to convene, on victory, a democratically elected Constituent Assembly; (2) allow on territories then under his control free elections to organs of self-government; (3) renounce class privileges, refrain from restoring the “former land system,” and “make no attempt to reintroduce the régime which the revolution had destroyed”; (4) recognize the independence of Poland and Finland; (5) accept assistance of the Peace Conference in settling Russia’s territorial disputes with the Baltic, Caucasian, and Transcaspian republics; (6) join the League of Nations; (7) reaffirm Russia’s responsibility for her debts.¹¹⁵

It was a strange set of conditions, intended to reassure the Allies’ domestic constituencies about Kolchak, whom Bolshevik and socialist propaganda depicted as a reactionary monarchist. It served the additional purpose of ensuring that should Kolchak win, which in May seemed likely, he would follow policies agreeable to them.¹¹⁶ Although the first of these conditions required Kolchak to convene a Constituent Assembly, presumably to decide on all issues in dispute, the Allies preordained that there would be no restoration of the monarchy as well as no return of the seized lands to their rightful owners, and that the borderlands that had separated themselves from Russia—Finland and Poland, and by implication, the Baltic as well as the Transcaucasian and Transcaspian republics—would be recognized as sovereign states. In other words, for all their democratic professions, they decided on their own the constitution and borders of the future Russia.

Kolchak was in no position to bargain, since nearly all his war matériel came from abroad: every round of rifle ammunition fired by his troops was of British manufacture. Between October 1918 and October 1919, Britain sent to Omsk 97,000 tons of supplies, including 600,000 rifles, 6,831 machine guns, and over 200,000 uniforms.¹¹⁷ (The French provided Kolchak only with a few hundred machine guns that had originally been destined for the Czechs.)

Kolchak drafted his response with the help of General Knox and dispatched it on June 4. He accepted all the conditions posed to him, hedging only on the issue of Finnish independence, which he was prepared to recognize de facto but wanted the Constituent Assembly to settle de jure. He confirmed emphatically, however, “that there cannot be a return to the régime which existed in Russia before February 1917.” He further affirmed that his government acknowledged “all the pledges and decrees” made by the Provisional Government of 1917.¹¹⁸

To enhance Kolchak’s claim to foreign recognition, on June 12, Denikin acknowledged him as Supreme Ruler. This action is said to have antagonized the general’s Cossack allies, who thought Kolchak and the Siberians were too liberal.¹¹⁹

Even though he had met their terms, the Allied leaders would not as yet grant Kolchak the diplomatic recognition that Churchill, Curzon, and the British General Staff were urging on them. The delay was largely due to the hostility of President Wilson, who mistrusted the Admiral and doubted that he would honor his pledges.¹²⁰ In Russian matters Wilson was strongly influenced by Alexander Kerensky, the former head of the Provisional Government that Lenin had overthrown, whom he regarded as the spokesman for Russian democracy. Kerensky, who worked assiduously to discredit Kolchak in Western eyes, told American diplomats that if he succeeded in taking power, Kolchak would “inaugurate a regime hardly less sanguinary and repressive than that of the Bolshevists.”¹²¹ Under the impression of Kolchak’s battlefield victories, Lloyd George inclined toward recognition, but at this critical moment Kolchak’s armies were forced to retreat and he promptly lost interest. In mid-June 1919, when the Supreme Council met in Paris to decide what to do about him, Kolchak’s armies were losing. They never recovered. And recognition never came.

In March-May 1919, when Kolchak stood at the peak of his fortunes, Denikin’s armies were mired in the Cossack hinterland. The British thought that his was a secondary front and hence gave him much less generous aid.

With the approach of spring, Denikin once again had to define his operational objectives. In January, his staff had drawn up plans for a campaign against Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan to effect a junction with Kolchak’s left wing.¹²² But these plans had to be abandoned because in March and April the Red Army had mauled the Don Cossacks and was about to invade the Don region. Moscow was determined to capture the Donbass and its coal: in directives to the Red Army, Trotsky claimed that allowing the Whites to control the Donbass would be a greater calamity than losing Petrograd.¹²³ On March 12, the Southern front of the Red Army was ordered to initiate operations against the Donbass to clear out the Whites. But beyond this, as has become recently known, the Red Army was assigned the task of liquidating the Cossacks. A secret directive from Moscow ordered

the complete, rapid, decisive annihilation of Cossackdom as a separate economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations, the physical extermination of its officials and officers, and altogether the entire Cossack elite.¹²⁴

When the Cossacks responded with rebellion, Trotsky, carrying out Lenin’s mandate, demanded that the “nests of the dishonorable traitors and turncoats be extirpated.… The Cains must be exterminated.”¹²⁵

Denikin was equally determined to keep the Reds out of the Donbass region. Having gotten wind of this directive, on March 15 he attacked the Eighth Red Army southeast of Lugansk.¹²⁶

But the main strategic decision still had to be made. Denikin faced a choice: either to send his main forces against Tsaritsyn and abandon the Donbass, or save the Donbass and the Don Cossack army, forfeiting the opportunity to forge a common front with Kolchak. In his memoirs he writes: “Without hesitation, I chose the second course.”¹²⁷ But it could not have been that simple. Denikin’s decision met with considerable opposition from the generals, whose spokesman was Peter Wrangel, the commander of the Caucasian Army and possibly the ablest White officer. Wrangel subjected Denikin’s strategic plan to fierce criticism. The Donbass was indefensible and should be given up, he argued. The Don Cossacks should protect the Volunteer Army’s flank while it attacked Tsaritsyn: “Our principal and sole operational direction, I suggest, ought to be against Tsaritsyn, which will give us the opportunity to establish direct contact with the army of Admiral Kolchak. Given the immense superiority of enemy forces, simultaneous operations in several operational directions are impossible.”¹²⁸ Indeed, at this time, Kolchak’s left flank, made up of Ural Cossacks under Dutov, stood only 400 kilometers from Tsaritsyn, and half that distance from Astrakhan. Denikin rejected Wrangel’s advice on the ground that the Don Cossacks, left to themselves, would not be able to hold on to the Donbass for one day; Rostov, as a result, would fall to the enemy.¹²⁹

Denikin now divided his army in two: a smaller force, under Wrangel, was sent against Tsaritsyn, the major one into the Donbass. Some military historians consider this to have been the fatal decision that doomed the White cause. It deserves note that the Red Army general A. I. Egorov, who in the fall of 1919 would defeat Denikin, in his memoirs supports Denikin’s strategic decision, saying that the main threat to the Soviet side came not from the prospect of a White capture of Tsaritsyn and a conjunction with Kolchak, but from an offensive against the Donbass and Orel.¹³⁰ But the immediate result of Denikin’s ruling was a personal rift between him and his most outstanding officer, which in time would grow into open enmity and split the officer corps into contending pro-Denikin and pro-Wrangel factions.

In January 1919, Denikin had issued a decree stating that all laws issued by the Provisional Government remained in force.¹³¹ In the spring, under British pressure, he went further and released a statement defining his political objectives. These called for the destruction of Bolshevism, reunification of Russia, convocation of a Constituent Assembly, decentralization of government, and civil liberty.¹³² On the land issue he remained deliberately vague from fear of alienating the Cossacks. Denikin altogether hesitated to issue clear, specific programs because he felt that the anti-Bolsheviks, conservatives and liberals with differing aspirations, formed a coalition that could be held together not by divisive platforms but by the patriotic appeal to liberate Russia from Communism.¹³³

Initially, the course of events vindicated Denikin’s military decision. His forces made spectacular advances, in some measure because the Red Army command, having decided to concentrate on defeating Kolchak, had depleted the Southern front. He was also helped by the outbreak of Cossack uprisings in March in the rear of the Eighth and Ninth Red Armies; these the Communists suppressed with great difficulty with the help of Cheka units.¹³⁴

Breaking out of the Rostov enclave in several directions, the Volunteer Army cleared out Bolshevik forces from the Donbass, following which it captured Kharkov (June 21) and Ekaterinoslav (June 30). The offensive culminated on June 30 with the fall of Tsaritsyn to Wrangel’s Caucasian Army. This was a remarkable operation, in the course of which White cavalry and infantry traversed 300 kilometers of the Kalmyk steppe, where it had access neither to water nor to vegetation. Tsaritsyn was heavily defended by lines of trenches and barbed wire. Victory was achieved with the help of a few tanks, manned by British volunteers, which flattened barbed-wire entanglements and rolled over trenches, sending the defenders fleeing in panic. In Tsaritsyn, the Whites captured 40,000 prisoners of war along with immense booty, including thousands of trucks loaded with munitions.¹³⁵

Main Fronts of the Civil War

But by the time this spectacular victory had been won, the strategic importance of Tsaritsyn was lost because the Red Army, while yielding in the south, had advanced in the east. By the end of June, Kolchak’s armies had been pushed back and a juncture of the two forces was no longer possible.

The Red counteroffensive in the east began on April 28 with a drive on the central front against Ufa.¹³⁶ At this point some White troops mutinied and went over to the enemy, but on the whole Kolchak’s forces acquitted themselves well and gave the Red command anxious moments. At the end of May, the Whites counterattacked, but they were outnumbered and had to retreat. The fighting was fierce.

Ufa fell to the Reds on June 9; the Whites, however, retained their hold on Perm in the north, and Orenburg as well as Uralsk in south. According to reports submitted by S. S. Kamenev, his troops were adversely affected by anti-Soviet uprisings.¹³⁷ The Red Army enjoyed a slight advantage in manpower in the center and on the left flank, with 81,000 troops confronting 70,500 Whites; in the northern sector, it was outnumbered.¹³⁸ But the Whites had few reserves with which to compensate for battlefield losses.

The tide of battle took a decisive turn in late June, when the Fifth Army penetrated the Urals, the only natural defensive barrier in the area. The commander of the Fifth Army, the 27-year old Michael Tukhachevskii, was an aristocrat by origin, and his military record included wartime service in the elite Semenovskii Guard Regiment. He had joined the Bolsheviks in April 1918 and made a rapid career. Once the Red Army spread east of the Ural slopes—they captured Cheliabinsk on July 24–25—Kolchak’s armies were unable to contain them. With the White forces in the center pushed back hundreds of kilometers, the northern and southern flanks had to be pulled back as well. To Gajda this was a bitter disappointment. Dismissed from command of the Siberian army, he broke with Kolchak and departed for Vladivostok, where in mid-November, in collaboration with the SRs, he staged an unsuccessful coup against him.^*

The news of Kolchak’s reverses had a decisive effect on Britain’s attitude toward intervention. It led to a thorough reexamination of British policy in Russia, which in early August produced the decision to withhold from Kolchak all further assistance.¹³⁹

Kolchak’s troops, however, were far from beaten, and for the next two months (from mid-August to mid-October) they made a successful stand at the Tobol and Ishim rivers, 500 kilometers east of Omsk: fighting stubbornly, they stopped the Red advance.¹⁴⁰ Their cause was hopeless, but the sacrifice helped Denikin, who at this time was at the height of his offensive. It succeeded to the extent that it restricted the number of troops the Red command could transfer to the Southern front. The cost in human lives was great: between September 1 and October 15, Kolchak’s army lost in wounded and dead 1,000 officers and 18,000 soldiers, more than one-quarter of its remaining combat force. Some White divisions lost up to one-half of their manpower.¹⁴¹ These casualties could not be made good because Kolchak had in reserve no more than 1,500 troops. By contrast, the Red Army had a virtually inexhaustible pool of replacements. In September, Moscow dispatched tens of thousands of fresh recruits to the Eastern front: by mid-October, Soviet forces there had doubled in strength. On October 14, having replenished and rested their forces, the Reds resumed the offensive, crossing the Tobol River. The Whites continued to offer determined resistance: notable courage was displayed by a division of workers from the Izhevsk armaments plant. But by early November, the issue could no longer be in doubt and the Red command began to withdraw troops from the Eastern front to send them against Denikin.¹⁴² The remnant of Kolchak’s army retreated to Omsk.

Arriving in Tsaritsyn shortly after its capture, Denikin held a staff meeting to decide on the next strategic objective. At this time (July 1) the frontline ran from Tsaritsyn to Balashov–Belgorod–Ekaterinoslav–Kherson, with the flanks resting on the Volga and Dnieper rivers.¹⁴³ The generals agreed that the army had to advance on Moscow, but once again Denikin and Wrangel were at odds over the best way to attain this goal. It was typical of the lack of coordination between the disparate White armies that Denikin launched his drive on Moscow just as Kolchak was retreating.^*

On July 3, Denikin issued order No. 08878, known as the “Moscow Directive.”¹⁴⁴ It designated as the Army’s next and presumably final mission the capture of the capital city. This was to be accomplished by means of a three-pronged attack:

1. Wrangel, in command of the Caucasian Army, was to advance on Saratov-Rtishchevo-Balashev, relieve the Don Cossack units there, then march on Penza, Arzamas, Nizhnii Novgorod, Vladimir, and Moscow;

2. V. I. Sidorin, leading the Don army, was to send some units to take Voronezh and Riazan, and the rest against Oskol, Elets, Volovo, and Kashira;

3. V. Z. Mai-Maevskii, at the head of the Volunteer Army, was to advance from Kharkov by way of Kursk, Orel, and Tula. This was to be the principal thrust since it was the shortest route to the capital. To protect his left flank, Mai-Maevskii was to detach some troops to capture Kiev. Other units were to secure Kherson and Nikolaev, which the French had abandoned three months earlier.

The offensive was to be carried out on a broad front extending from Samara in the east to Kursk in the west—a distance of 700 kilometers, which, after the projected advance into the Ukraine, would expand to 1,000 kilometers. Denikin committed nearly all his effectives, keeping next to nothing in reserve. As the front enlarged, so did the need for troops, and in the fall, the ranks of the Southern Army were filled with conscripts and prisoners of war.

Wrangel objected to Denikin’s plans, warning of the danger of expanding the front without adequate reserves and a secure, well-administered rear. He outlined an alternative plan that concentrated the thrust on Saratov, in his own sector. According to Wrangel, after hearing him out Denikin exclaimed, “I see! You want to be the first man to set foot in Moscow!”¹⁴⁵ To Wrangel, Denikin’s plan was “nothing more nor less than a death-sentence for the Armies of Southern Russia,” since by failing to choose a single principal thrust of the offensive, it ignored all the principles of military strategy.¹⁴⁶

It was, indeed, an “all-or-nothing” effort, a gamble necessitated by the realization that time was running out and that unless Moscow was captured before the winter, Britain would end all further support. The sense that British patience was wearing thin accounts in no small measure for Denikin’s strategy, in which he who had previously been overly cautious now staked all his forces on a gamble. But behind the gamble also lay the awareness that the Red Army was growing by leaps and bounds, and that every day the disparity in forces increased to his disadvantage.

Denikin conceded that in overextending himself he was violating the principles of traditional strategy, but he felt that given the unconventional conditions under which he was forced to fight he had to act unconventionally:

The strategy of external warfare has its laws: eternal, immutable.… It does not permit the dispersal of forces and demands that the front be of a size proportionate to them.… We occupied an immense expanse because only by following on the heels of the enemy, by denying him the opportunity to collect himself, had we the chance of breaking the resistance of his superior forces. We seized from the Soviet government its most fertile regions, depriving it of bread, of an immense quantity of military stores, and of inexhaustible reserves for replenishing the army. Our strength lay in the enthusiasm aroused by victories, in maneuverability and the momentum of the advance.… We extended the front hundreds of kilometers and by so doing we grew not weaker but stronger.… Only under this condition could we continue the struggle. Otherwise we would have been smothered by our opponent’s vastly superior strength, with his inexhaustible resources of manpower.¹⁴⁷

General N. Kakurin, an ex-tsarist officer in the Red Army, in his authoritative history of the Civil War sides with Wrangel, agreeing that Denikin fought on too broad a front given the size of his army and that a concentrated thrust by way of Saratov would have been preferable. At the same time he concurs with Denikin that under the circumstances he had no alternative but to toss strategy to the winds and wager everything on one lucky throw of the dice.¹⁴⁸

Although during the summer of 1919 Denikin’s forces expanded by means of conscription, the Red Army increased its numerical superiority. By Soviet accounts, the Southern Red Army numbered 140,000 infantry, 20,600 cavalry, and 541 guns, as against 101,600 infantry, 50,750 cavalry, and 521 guns (inclusive of “deep reserves”) for the Whites. According to Denikin, in mid-July the Reds had in the south 180,000 men, and the Whites 85,000.^* Whichever figure is the more accurate, Communist superiority is an uncontested fact and it grew in the course of the campaign when the Red ranks received reinforcements of 60,000 fresh troops.

The fighting in the south during the next half year was exceedingly savage, accompanied by terrible brutalities, especially on the part of the Red Army. Trotsky forbade executions of prisoners of war, but this injunction was frequently ignored, especially in regard to captured White officers, sometimes on orders of the high command itself. Thus, in August, when White cavalry under the Don Cossack General K. K. Mamontov made a deep foray into Red territory, the Commander in Chief, S. S. Kamenev, ordered that “no prisoners be taken.”¹⁴⁹

Wounded or captured [White] officers were not only finished off and shot, but tortured in every possible way. Officers had nails driven in their shoulders according to the number of stars on their epaulets; medals were carved on their chests and stripes on their legs. Genitals were cut off and stuffed in their mouths.¹⁵⁰

The Whites also executed many captured Red officers, but they do not seem to have engaged in torture.

Denikin’s offensive gained a striking success on August 10, with the raid of Mamontov’s Don Cossacks on Tambov. The Cossack force of 8,000 men, breaking through a gap between the Eighth and Ninth Red Armies, penetrated nearly 200 kilometers into Soviet territory. It disrupted lines of communication, blew up ammunition dumps, and demolished railway facilities. At their appearance, peasants rose in rebellion against the Soviet regime. Red troops sent to intercept the raiders were so terrified that they refused to leave the railway cars that brought them to the front: Lenin ordered soldiers who refused to detrain shot.¹⁵¹ Twenty thousand recruits about to be inducted into the Red Army were taken prisoner, and like so much cattle conscripted into the White Army. Mamontov’s cavalry took Tambov almost without resistance, following which it captured Voronezh. The raid, had it been pursued, could have inflicted incalculable damage on the Red Army. But the Don Cossacks soon turned from fighting to looting, and their movement was slowed to a crawl by wagons filled with booty. Before long, many of the raiders left for home to store the spoils and help out with the harvest. By September 19, when the operation ended, the Cavalry Corps had fewer than 1,500 men left.¹⁵² The main consequence of Mamontov’s raid was to alert the Red commanders to the importance of cavalry, which they had previously neglected. Shortly afterwards, the Red Cavalry Corps was formed under Semen Budennyi, which would be used with devastating effect against Denikin in October and November.

Denikin’s armies continued to advance in all directions throughout August and September. In the lead were Mai-Maevskii’s Volunteers, who on September 20 captured Kursk. By then, the Red front between Kursk and Voronezh lay in tatters.¹⁵³ The general who won these victories was a most unlikely hero: according to Wrangel, “If he had not worn a uniform, you would have taken him for a comedian from a little provincial theater. He was as round as a barrel, and had a chubby face with a bulbous nose.”¹⁵⁴ A good strategist, Mai-Maevskii had an unfortunate weakness for women and drink, in both of which he indulged at the height of combat.

Mai-Maevskii commanded three crack units of the Volunteer Army bearing the names Kornilov, Markov, and Drozdovskii. Their core consisted of volunteers who passionately hated the Bolsheviks. However, to compensate for combat losses, their ranks were diluted with draftees and POWs, and the units were enlarged from regiments to divisions, resulting in a decline of morale and fighting spirit.¹⁵⁵ The White front, 1,000 kilometers long, resembled a wedge, the base of which rested on Kiev in the west and Tsaritsyn in the east, with its tip on Kursk. It was not solid but porous: one historian describes it as “a series of patrols with occasional columns of slowly advancing troops without reserves.”¹⁵⁶ Between them lay a spacious no-man’s-land that an enemy counteroffensive could quickly fill:

By virtue of the general strategic considerations and the peculiarities of the Civil War, which was conducted not with a solid front but along railroad lines and waterways, the occupation by the Volunteer Army, in its advance from the east to the west (and from the [south to the north]) of some railway station, especially a junction, meant that the Soviet army had to clear … a whole strip of territory to the east (or north) which thus fell to the victor without fighting. The mere fact of occupying a strategic railroad point automatically led to the conquest of vast stretches of territory: there was no need to expel the enemy from most localities—these were peacefully occupied by constabularies and guards.¹⁵⁷

This manner of campaigning made possible very rapid progress with small forces; by the same token, it made the advancing forces highly vulnerable to counterattack.

The only solid White sector was a short segment between Rzhava and Oboian. Here, on a front 12 kilometers wide, the Whites concentrated nearly 10,000 troops, or 800 per kilometer—a density previously not seen in the Civil War. They were to accomplish the decisive breakthrough and capture Moscow.¹⁵⁸

A major problem confronting the White generals—one that the Bolsheviks resolved in a characteristically cynical manner—concerned the status of the non-Russian borderlands. The White leaders, who viewed themselves as trustees of Russian statehood, felt they had no authority to change the country’s boundaries: that was a matter within the purview of the Constituent Assembly. They further reasoned that the nationalist platform on which they sought to rally their followers required the ideal of Russia one and indivisible: no one, wrote Denikin, would risk his life for a federated Russia.¹⁵⁹ On these grounds, the White leaders refused to recognize the independence of any of the secessionist states. It was a disastrous policy: Kolchak’s refusal to acknowledge the independence of Finland and Denikin’s unwillingness to accommodate Poland had a fatal effect on their cause, depriving them of help at critical moments in the war.

The White generals and their diplomatic representatives in Paris were reconciled to the ultimate independence of Poland, but they thought in terms of “Congress Poland,” the diminutive kingdom created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna. The Poles had much vaster ambitions. Resurrected after more than a century of foreign occupation, theirs was to be a Great Poland, ideally extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but even at its smallest including large areas inhabited by Belorussians and Ukrainians, once part of the Polish Commonwealth. Russians, both White and Red, regarded Belorussia and the Ukraine as inalienable parts of Russia. In the conflicts arising between Poles and Russians over these opposing territorial claims, the Whites proved intractable and the Reds very accommodating.

Of all the European leaders, Joseph Pilsudski, head of the independent Polish Republic, knew the Russians best, especially the Russian socialists, since he had been one of them: he had been arrested in 1887 for conspiring to assassinate Alexander III (in the same plot for which Lenin’s brother, Alexander, was executed), and exiled for five years to Siberia. On taking office, he faced the problem of Poland’s eastern frontier, which the Versailles conference had left open. A patriot with a deep sense of history, he wanted to ensure Poland’s independence against the day when Russia and Germany, risen from the ashes, would again combine against her. His strategy was to exploit Russia’s temporary weakness to detach from her the western and southern borderlands (Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine) and shape them into buffer states. The result would be a new balance of power in Eastern Europe capable of deterring Russian expansionism:

Reduced to its frontiers of the sixteenth century, cut off from the Black and Baltic Seas, deprived of the agricultural and mineral wealth of the South and Southeast, Russia might easily sink to the status of a second-class power, incapable of seriously threatening the newly gained independence of Poland. And Poland, as the largest and strongest of the new states, might easily establish a sphere of influence which would range from Finland to the Caucasus Mountains.¹⁶⁰

In pursuit of this objective, from February 1919 on, Polish forces in the east engaged Red Army troops in intermittent battles without a formal declaration of war, occupying disputed territories.

Pilsudski sounded out Denikin and the White diplomatic representatives in Paris on the issue of Poland’s eastern frontiers and received what he considered entirely unsatisfactory answers. In late September 1919 he dispatched a mission under General Karnicki, a former tsarist officer, to Denikin’s headquarters at Taganrog.^* Karnicki quickly determined that Denikin was not prepared to satisfy Polish territorial demands.¹⁶¹ Diplomatic sources independently confirmed this assessment. On the basis of this information, Pilsudski concluded that it was in Poland’s interest to help the Red Army eliminate Denikin. The reasoning, as later explained by one of his generals, went as follows:

The defeat of the Red Army would have resulted in the solidification of Denikin’s regime and, in consequence, in the non-recognition in full of Poland’s independence. It was a lesser evil to help Soviet Russia defeat Denikin, even though it was realized that we, in turn, would not escape a military conflict with the Soviets, should we desire to have a peace corresponding to our interests. Therefore, as long as there was an army of Denikin, Poland’s war with the Soviets would be a struggle over Russia, whereas after the fall of Denikin it would be a struggle over Poland.¹⁶²

Karnicki also sent an unfavorable assessment of Denikin’s army, which led Pilsudski to predict that, their current successes notwithstanding, the Whites would fail to capture Moscow and end up being thrown back to the Black Sea.¹⁶³ In a conversation with the British ambassador on November 7, before the decisive battles between the Whites and Reds had been resolved in the latter’s favor, Pilsudski dismissed the White and Red forces as of equally low quality, and expressed the opinion that by the spring the Red Army would recover from its defeats.¹⁶⁴

The issue of frontiers was not the only consideration behind Pilsudski’s hostility toward the Whites. Some Polish diplomats calculated that once the Whites were out of the picture, Poland would be the main beneficiary of French and possibly British aid, and the young republic would become the fulcrum of Allied diplomacy in Eastern Europe.¹⁶⁵ This was a very flawed judgment, which both overrated Poland’s international importance and underestimated the readiness of the Allies to come to terms with the Bolsheviks once the Civil War was over.

It was on these grounds, however, that Pilsudski decided in the fall of 1919 to deny the Whites all military assistance: he wanted Denikin crushed so as to be able to deal with a weak and isolated Bolshevik Russia. In late 1919, orders were issued to Polish forces in the east, deep inside contested territory and in a de facto state of war with Soviet Russia, to undertake no operations against the Red Army that could benefit Denikin.¹⁶⁶

The shift in Polish policy was not lost on the Bolshevik leaders. They were prepared to pay a heavy price to prevent cooperation between Denikin and Pilsudski, offering the Poles not only unconditional independence but virtually any border arrangement that suited them. Such concessions were a tactical maneuver made in the conviction that before long not only the territories Poland claimed from Russia but Poland herself would become Communist. In the words of Julian Marchlewski, a Polish Communist who would serve as intermediary between Moscow and Warsaw, “The members of the Soviet government as well as other comrades whose opinion counted, myself included, were firmly convinced that in the near future all frontiers would lose significance because the revolutionary upheaval in Europe, therefore in Poland as well, was only a matter of time, a matter of a few years.”¹⁶⁷

Denikin, whose political perspicacity left much to be desired, seems to have been quite unaware of Pilsudski’s calculations and the possibility of a Polish-Bolshevik rapprochement. In preparing the drive on Kiev, he believed he could count on combining forces with the Polish army, whose forward units were less than 200 kilometers from the Ukrainian capital, in the rear of the Red Twelfth Army.¹⁶⁸

The groundwork for an understanding between Warsaw and Moscow against Denikin was laid in March 1919, during Marchlewski’s secret talks with Jozef Beck, Sr., Vice-Minister of Internal Affairs and the father of the future Polish Foreign Minister. Marchlewski had spent the war years in Germany, where he helped found the extremely radical Spartacus League and in early 1919 participated in the Spartacist revolution there. Later on he would become an official of the Communist International. He impressed on Beck that the Whites represented a mortal danger not only to the Bolsheviks but also to the Poles.¹⁶⁹ This encounter produced no immediate results. In May 1919 Marchlewski left for Moscow, where he suggested that the Soviet government enter into negotiations with Poland. In early July, when things were going badly for the Red Army, Moscow approved this proposal. Ostensibly, the negotiations that began later that month concerned the exchange of prisoners. When in the spring of 1919 the Poles had occupied Vilno, they arrested some local Communists. Moscow retaliated by taking hostage several hundred Poles residing in Russia.¹⁷⁰ Marchlewski proposed to the Central Committee that this dispute be used as a cover for diplomatic negotiations: the Poles, he maintained, could be bought off from intervening in the Civil War with territorial concessions. With the approval of the Soviet government, he initiated informal talks with Polish representatives in the middle of July in a hunting lodge in the Bialowierza Forest, in the course of which he indicated that the Soviet government was prepared to make to Poland the most generous territorial concessions.¹⁷¹ The Poles responded cautiously out of fear of an adverse reaction from the Allies should they learn that Poland was negotiating behind their backs with Moscow. The talks were suspended in August and September when Polish troops continued to advance eastward.

They were resumed on October 11 and conducted intermittently until December 15 at Mikaszewicze, a small, out-of-the-way railroad station near Luck.¹⁷² Confident that he held all the trump cards, Pilsudski instructed his diplomats to say that Poland would give up no territory that she had occupied and might even insist on the restoration of the 1772 borders. Marchlewski assured the Poles that Soviet Russia was willing to surrender to her Belorussia and Lithuania: “territorial questions do not exist, and Poland will receive what she wants.”^* Pilsudski’s resolve to strike a deal with the Bolsheviks was strengthened by reports of Polish intelligence and diplomatic sources in the West that the Whites, feeling on the verge of victory, contemplated granting Poland independence only within the borders of “Congress Poland” and would insist on the evacuation of all other Russian territories occupied by Polish troops.¹⁷³ On October 26, Pilsudski’s representative, Captain Ignacy Boerner, told Marchlewski, “We need you to defeat Denikin. Take your regiments, send them against Denikin or against Iudenich. We shall not touch you.”¹⁷⁴ True to their word, at this very time when Red and White troops were fighting in the vicinity of Mozyrz (Mozyr) in Volhynia, Polish forces deployed in the rear of the Reds did not stir. This was an exposed area on the extreme right flank of the Red forces. Had the Poles advanced on Chernigov, they could have trapped a good part of the Twelfth Red Army. The inaction was deliberate. The Polish pledge of noninterference rendered an invaluable service to the Red Army, which had deployed its third largest contingent against the Poles. It enabled Moscow to withdraw 43,000 troops from the Western front and throw them against Denikin.¹⁷⁵

On November 14, having heard Marchlewski’s report, the Politburo agreed to Pilsudski’s terms with one qualification, namely that Moscow would not promise to refrain from attacking Petlura, the commander of a Ukrainian national army.¹⁷⁶ Marchlewski returned to Mikaszewicze on November 22. On Polish insistence, the secret understanding produced no treaty, only an accord on the exchange of hostages: Pilsudski was displeased with Lenin’s reservations about Petlura, on whom he had his own designs. He also did not want a formal treaty with the Bolsheviks, since that would compromise him in the eyes of the Allied powers. He mistrusted Bolshevik promises in any event and expected the frontier issue to be settled by force of arms the following spring.¹⁷⁷

Pilsudski subsequently boasted through his emissary that the deliberate inaction of his troops at Mozyrz may well have decided the outcome of the Civil War.¹⁷⁸ Denikin and some other Whites came to see in this tacit Polish-Bolshevik collaboration the principal cause of their defeat.¹⁷⁹ Tukhachevskii and Radek agreed that if Pilsudski had cooperated with Denikin the tide of battle might well have turned the other way.¹⁸⁰

On December 22, barely one week after the talks at Mikaszewicze had adjourned, by which time Denikin’s forces were in full flight, the Polish Ministry of War was ordered to prepare the armed forces for a “definitive settlement of the Russian question” by early April 1920.¹⁸¹

So much for the Polish issue. Only marginally less detrimental to the White cause was the Whites’ refusal to accommodate Finnish and Estonian nationalists. In early 1919, several Russian generals, supported by the National Center, began to assemble an ariny in Estonia with which to capture Petrograd. The troops were mostly prisoners of war released by the Germans in the Baltic. The founder of what was to become the Northern Corps was General Alexander Rodzianko, a well-known tsarist cavalry officer; in March N. N. Iudenich, a hero of World War I whom Kolchak had named his Commander in the Baltic area, took over. The force was small—16,000 men in May—and though it had the support of British naval units in the Baltic, it could accomplish its mission only with the help of the Estonians and Finns.

Here, however, the issue of Finnish and Estonian independence proved an insurmountable obstacle. Finland declared partial independence in July 1917, at which time the country’s foreign affairs and military forces were still left in Russian hands. On November 4 (NS), the Finnish Diet proclaimed the country’s full independence. Lenin’s government formally recognized Finland’s sovereignty on January 4, 1918 (NS), and immediately proceeded to subvert it. On the night of January 27–28 (NS), Finnish Communists, assisted by the Russian army and navy garrison of 40,000, staged a putsch, which gave them control of Helsinki and much of southern Finland. The Communist government dissolved the Finnish Senate and Diet, and unleashed a civil war with the view of transforming Finland into a Soviet republic.

Finnish nationalists responded by creating a Defense Corps commanded by General Karl Mannerheim, a onetime tsarist officer. Mannerheim’s volunteers had no difficulty clearing northern Finland of the Communists, but they were not strong enough to expel them from the south. The German units stationed in Finland that supplied and trained the Defense Corps doubted that the Finns could manage on their own. Fearing that the Allies would open a new Eastern front from Murmansk, they decided to help the Finns with German troops. Early in April, over Mannerheim’s objections, German units under General R. von der Goltz landed in Finland. They made short shrift of the Bolsheviks, capturing Helsinki on April 12. By the end of the month, when the German-Finnish force captured Vyborg, Finland was rid of the Bolsheviks.

A year later, Iudenich’s force, augmented by 20,000 Estonians, was deployed in Estonia. On May 13, 1919, it crossed into Soviet territory, launching an offensive against Petrograd from the south. With the help of intelligence supplied by agents of the National Center, Iudenich captured Pskov and threatened Petrograd, but his forces were not adequate to the task. He journeyed repeatedly to Helsinki to enlist Mannerheim’s help.¹⁸² The capture of Petrograd would have been immeasurably easier if attempted from Finnish territory, through the Karelian Isthmus, especially if the newly formed Finnish army were to join in the assault.

Iudenich urged Mannerheim to help him take Petrograd by launching a coordinated attack from Karelia. Kolchak seconded the request.¹⁸³ The Allies, however, were strangely ambivalent. On July 12, the Council of Four sent to the Finnish government a note advising it that if Finland desired “to accede to Admiral Kolchak’s request for action against Petrograd, the Allied Governments … have no objection to raise to such an operation.”¹⁸⁴ At the same time, they denied that they meant to exert any pressure on the Finns in this matter. Privately, the British warned Mannerheim not to attack Petrograd. Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, told General Sir Hubert Gough, as he was departing to take charge of the Allied military mission in the Baltic, that “he was to be most careful not to encourage General Mannerheim … to march on Petrograd. I was to make it quite clear to him that he could not look for British support or approval if he undertook such an operation.”¹⁸⁵ Curzon further advised Gough not to take the views of Churchill, his immediate superior, as his “sole guide.”¹⁸⁶ Neither Britain nor France expressed a willingness to give the Finnish government the kind of financial guarantees it wanted as compensation for involvement in the Russian Civil War on the White side.¹⁸⁷ There is thus no shortage of evidence that the Allies did not desire the Whites to capture Petrograd. Their attitude seems to have been inspired by fear of Finnish-German cooperation, a fact emphasized by Britain’s forbidding Iudenich to accept supplies offered him by the commander of the German force in the Baltic. A British Foreign Office official commented in October 1919 that it would be better if Petrograd were not captured than that it be captured by the Germans, by which he must have meant the German-backed Finns.¹⁸⁸ Evan Mawdsley rightly observes that if the Allies had been serious about overthrowing the Bolshevik regime, Petrograd would have been the ideal front from which to do it.¹⁸⁹

This is a matter of considerable importance for the understanding of Allied ambivalence about intervention, even though the ability of Mannerheim to send troops into Russia was by no means certain. The socialists, who had a solid majority in the Finnish Diet, opposed involvement in Russian affairs; so did most members of Mannerheim’s government.¹⁹⁰ There were fears that intervention would provoke social unrest in Finland.¹⁹¹ But the quixotic position of the Whites on the issue of Finnish independence certainly wrecked such chances as there were of Finnish involvement.

Acknowledging Finland’s independence would have been little more than a formality, given that Finland was now in fact fully sovereign and recognized as such by a number of countries, including France, Germany, and Soviet Russia. But Kolchak’s political advisers in Paris, led by the onetime Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Sazonov, firmly opposed such recognition in advance of the Constituent Assembly.

Iudenich, realizing that his cause was doomed without Mannerheim’s collaboration, and under strong pressure from the British military mission, agreed, on his own authority, to acknowledge Finland’s independence; the boundary lines were to be settled by a plebiscite. A supplementary military accord entrusted Mannerheim with the command of Russian troops taking part in the projected assault on Petrograd, with the proviso that Russian officers would take charge of both Russian and Finnish troops once they had entered the city.¹⁹² Iudenich’s concession was repudiated by Kolchak, who cabled him on July 20 that he was not to enter into any agreements with Finland because her conditions were unacceptable and her willingness to help questionable.¹⁹³ Mannerheim cabled Kolchak that he was prepared to help but only if given “a certain guarantee,” by which he meant formal recognition.¹⁹⁴ When this was not forthcoming, he washed his hands of the whole affair. He not only refused to commit Finnish troops, but, no less important, refused to permit the Whites to operate from Finnish territory.¹⁹⁵ Shortly afterwards (July 25), having lost the elections, he left for Paris to attend the Peace Conference.

After Mannerheim’s retirement, Iudenich departed with his small staff for the Pskov-Iamburg area to assume command of the Russian troops. He wanted to bring in the Estonians, but they too kept aloof from fear that a non-Bolshevik Russia would refuse to grant them independence, whereas the Soviet government offered to do so on the sole condition that they cease cooperating with the Whites.¹⁹⁶

As in the case of Poland, Moscow quickly seized the opportunity to sow disunity among its enemies. On August 31 it offered peace to Estonia, and on September 11 to Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland.¹⁹⁷ On September 14–15, representatives of the four countries meeting in Reval agreed to open negotiations with the Bolsheviks.¹⁹⁸ The three Baltic states informed Moscow they were ready to negotiate no later than October 25.¹⁹⁹ Britain protested this decision and, at the same time, urged Denikin and Kolchak to recognize these states, but received a firm refusal.²⁰⁰

For the next two months, the Northwestern front remained quiet. The operation against Petrograd resumed in late September, concurrently with Denikin’s offensive in the Ukraine. Once again, the Whites would be compelled to assault the old capital from the south rather than the northwest.

Denikin had not only the Red Army to contend with, but also numerous bands of irregulars, popularly known as “Greens,” who opposed both Reds and Whites alike. On his left flank emerged an anarchist movement led by Nestor Makhno, involving thousands of partisans who had no program other than abolishing all state authority and no objective other than looting. Born to a poor Ukrainian family, Makhno turned anarchist and spent many years doing hard labor in tsarist prisons.²⁰¹ If one is to believe his memoirs, in June 1918 he met in Moscow with Lenin and with Lenin’s aide Iakov Sverdlov, and the latter helped to smuggle him into the Ukraine to work against the Germans.²⁰² Makhno, combining whimsical cruelty with a domineering personality, attracted deserters and adventurers as well as a scattering of anarchist intellectuals. After he captured Ekaterinoslav in December 1918, Trotsky appointed him commander of a Red Army detachment which in 1919 grew to some 10,000–15,000 troops. But his relations with Moscow were strained, for even while collaborating with it, he objected to food requisitions and to the activities of the Cheka. On August 1, 1919, he issued “Order No. 1,” which called for the extermination of the rich bourgeoisie along with Communist commissars who “use force to uphold a bourgeois social order.”²⁰³ Operating in the Crimea and along the eastern shores of the Sea of Azov with as many as 40,000 followers, he had his men blow up bridges and ammunition dumps. In October, Denikin had to send six regiments against him which were desperately needed against the Red Army. The diversion had a very detrimental effect on the battle for Orel and Kursk, which decided the Civil War.²⁰⁴

The Whites also had to contend with the Ukrainian nationalist forces under Ataman Semen Petlura. Their troops and Petlura’s entered Kiev at almost the same time (August 30–31) and, to avoid a conflict, drew up a demarcation line that placed the city under White control.²⁰⁵ But Petlura’s forces were regarded by the White command as hostile, and troops had to be assigned to neutralize them. Eventually, Petlura retreated into Polish Galicia with the remnant of his army and entered into negotiations with Pilsudski that would bear fruit in the Soviet-Polish War the next year.

11. Makhno.

The Red Army faced similar problems with partisans in its rear, but in this case, too, its numerical preponderance was invaluable. In the summer of 1919, 180,000 Red Army men were assigned to combat internal resistance—a body of troops fully one-half the size of that engaged against the Whites.²⁰⁶

The collapse of Kolchak was a bitter pill for the few British statesmen not entirely averse to intervention. On July 27, having learned that the Red Army was in Cheliabinsk and thus east of the Urals, Curzon jotted down: “A lost cause.”²⁰⁷ The news led to a reassessment of the British commitment in Russia, at the very moment when Denikin stood poised for the final push on Moscow.

The War Cabinet scheduled a meeting for July 29 to discuss the Russian situation. The news of Kolchak’s reverses emboldened those who had all along wanted an accommodation with Lenin. Their thinking was reflected in a memorandum submitted to the Cabinet by a Treasury official and banker named E. M. Harvey.²⁰⁸ The document grossly distorted the internal situation in Russia to press the argument for abandoning the White cause. Its basic premise held that in civil war victory went to the side that enjoyed greater popular support, from which it followed that since Lenin’s government had beaten off all challengers it had to have the population behind it:

It is impossible to account for the stability of the Bolshevik Government by terrorism alone.… When the Bolshevik fortunes seemed to be at the lowest ebb, a most vigorous offensive was launched before which the Kolchak forces are still in retreat. No terrorism, not even long suffering acquiescence, but something approaching enthusiasm is necessary for this. We must admit then that the present Russian government is accepted by the bulk of the Russian people.

The pledge of the Whites immediately after victory to convene a Constituent Assembly meant little since there was no assurance that “Russia, summoned to the polls, will not again [!] return the Bolsheviks.” The unsavory aspects of Lenin’s rule were in good measure forced on him by his enemies:

Necessity of state enables him to justify many acts of violence whereas in a state of peace his Government would have to be progressive or it would fall. It is respectfully contended that the surest way to get rid of Bolshevism, or at least to eradicate the vicious elements in it, is to withdraw our support of the Kolchak movement and thereby end the civil war.

Although the author did not explicitly say so, his line of argument led to the inescapable conclusion that support should also be withdrawn from Denikin and Iudenich.^*

For the time being, the War Cabinet did not act on Harvey’s recommendation. It decided to continue extending help to the Whites, but to shift the bulk of the aid to Denikin.²⁰⁹ On this occasion, Lloyd George, echoing Harvey, said that “if Denikin really had the people behind him, the Bolsheviks could never overcome him”²¹⁰—as if trial by battle were but a variant of balloting.

Opponents of intervention pressed the psychological advantage they had gained from Kolchak’s reverses by demanding that the government release figures showing how much it was costing Britain. On August 14, the War Office published a White Paper itemizing direct British aid to the White Russians (including the Baltic states) during the year following the Armistice on the Western front. It came to 47.9 million pounds (239.5 million dollars).²¹¹ A week later, Curzon advised Balfour that before the end of the year the sum would rise to 94 million pounds (470 million dollars, or 730 tons of gold).²¹² Churchill described these figures as “an absurd exaggeration”:

The actual expense, apart from munitions, was not a tithe as great. The munitions themselves, though they had been most costly to produce, were only an unmarketable surplus of the Great War, to which no money value can be assigned. Had they been kept in our hands till they mouldered, they would only have involved additional charges for storage, care and maintenance.²¹³

On August 12, the War Cabinet adopted a motion of Austen Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer and an outspoken foe of intervention, that Denikin be offered a “final packet” of aid, nearly all of it to consist of “non-marketable” goods. The White general was to be told that he would receive no more.²¹⁴ The Prime Minister thus settled on a compromise: aid would continue, but the amount would be specified and when it ran out, nothing else would be forthcoming. Churchill was asked to assemble the relevant data.

The French, who had given very niggardly aid to the Whites, were also growing impatient: in September they made it known that no more supplies would be shipped on credit but only for cash or in exchange for goods. Negotiations were initiated with Denikin for the shipment of grain, coal, and other commodities from southern Russia, but before these could be delivered, Denikin’s armies collapsed.²¹⁵

These restrictions on aid, it must be stressed, were imposed at the moment when Denikin appeared closest to victory: like so much else of Allied behavior, they raise serious questions as to what the real intentions of London and Paris were.

The Whites’ sense of being abandoned was reinforced by Allied evacuation of the northern ports: the decision was made in early March, but Kolchak was informed of it only in late April.²¹⁶ At the end of September, 23,000 Allied troops and 6,500 Russians were evacuated from Archangel; the Murmansk contingent departed on October 12. They were replaced by a force of 4,000 British volunteers, veterans of the World War. The evacuation was a complicated maneuver because the Bolshevik forces deployed on the perimeter of the Allied bases stood poised to attack. To protect his men, General Ironside ordered an offensive of British and Russian volunteers (August 10): the operation cost 120 British lives.²¹⁷ In all, Britain had suffered 327 fatalities in the course of her intervention in North Russia. American losses were 139 officers and soldiers, all victims of accident or injury.²¹⁸

On October 7, as the Volunteer Army was approaching Orel, 300 kilometers from Moscow, and Iudenich was staging his second drive on Petrograd, the British cabinet agreed on a “Final Contribution to General Denikin,” amounting to 11 million pounds (55 million dollars) in surplus matériel of no commercial value, 2.25 million pounds (11.25 million dollars) in surplus marketable stores, and an additional 750,000 pounds (3.15 million dollars) in cash, mostly to pay for transport.²¹⁹

The seeds of betrayal were sown. After Kolchak had been forced to retreat, Britain’s heart was no longer in intervention and her government was looking for ways to extricate itself from Russia. There could be no doubt that as soon as Denikin suffered the first serious reverses, and, in any event, before the end of the year, he, too, would be left in the lurch.^* Thus, on top of all his other problems, Denikin had a time bomb ticking away.

In the Bolshevik camp, the strategic situation in the summer of 1919 provoked serious disagreements. After Ufa had been retaken and Kolchak’s offensive contained, Trotsky and his protégé, the Commander in Chief Vatsetis, wanted to assume a defensive stance along the Urals and transfer all the troops that could be spared to the Southern front. Stalin preferred to finish off Kolchak first. He promoted as his candidate for Commander in Chief S. S. Kamenev, who had directed the operations against Kolchak. Since Kamenev sided with Stalin, Trotsky had him dismissed. But the Central Committee overruled Trotsky and appointed Kamenev to replace Vatsetis as Commander in Chief. This post he was to hold until 1924. The Committee further criticized Trotsky for his management of the Commissariat of War.²²⁰ Piqued, Trotsky on July 5 offered to resign from both the Politburo and his post as Commissar of War on the ostensible grounds that his constant travel to the front prevented him from participating in the making of political and military decisions in the Center. He recommended that his place be taken by someone who could not be accused of “passion for bureaucratism and repressive methods.”²²¹ The Politburo unanimously rejected this request, and to appease Trotsky, Lenin gave him a carte blanche endorsement over his signature, which Trotsky could use whenever his decisions were questioned.