The House of Government

5

THE LAST BATTLE

On August 30, 1918, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, was assassinated. Later that day, Lenin was shot and wounded at a factory rally in Trans-Moskva. That same night, Sverdlov wrote an appeal “To all Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, and Red Army Deputies, to all the armies, to all, all, all.” The appeal, published in Pravda the next day, put the blame on the Right SRs and other “hirelings of the English and the French,” and promised that the working class would respond to the attempts on the life of its leaders “with merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the revolution.” On September 2, the Central Executive Committee adopted Sverdlov’s resolution “On the Attempt on the Life of V. I. Lenin,” which formally announced “mass red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”¹

Sverdlov looked particularly “severe” during this period. According to Novgorodtseva, “he seemed even firmer, even more determined and focused than usual.” He moved into Lenin’s office in the Kremlin and took over the chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars (while remaining in charge of the Central Executive Committee and the Party secretariat). He was present at the first interrogations of the accused shooter, Fannie Kaplan (conducted by Yurovsky, among others). The next day, Kaplan was moved from the Cheka headquarters to a basement room beneath the Sverdlovs’ apartment in the Kremlin. The children were at the dacha in Kuntsevo at the time. On September 3, the commandant of the Kremlin, Pavel Malkov, was summoned by Sverdlov’s deputy, Varlam Avanesov, and ordered to shoot Kaplan.²

“When?” I asked briskly.

In Varlam Aleksandrovich’s face, usually so kind and friendly, not a muscle trembled.

“Today. Without delay.”

Then, after a minute’s silence:

“And where, do you think?”

I pondered for a moment and said:

“Perhaps in the courtyard of the Mechanized Detachment, in the blind alley.”

“Good.”

“Where do we bury her?”

Avanesov looked thoughtful.

“We hadn’t considered that. We must ask Yakov Mikhailovich.”

The two men walked over to Sverdlov’s office, where Avanesov repeated Malkov’s question.

Yakov Mikhailovich looked at Avanesov, then at me. He slowly rose and, resting his hands heavily on the desk as if crushing something beneath them, leaned forward a bit and said, firmly and distinctly:

“We are not going to bury Kaplan. The remains are to be destroyed without a trace.”

Malkov went back to his office to fetch several “Latvian communists.”

I ordered the commander of the Mechanized Detachment to roll out several trucks and start the engines and to park a car in the alley facing the gate. After placing two Latvians at the gate and ordering them not to let anybody in, I went to get Kaplan. Several minutes later I led her into the courtyard of the Mechanized Detachment.

… “[Walk over] to the car!” I ordered curtly, pointing toward the car parked in the alley.

Her shoulders twitching, Fannie Kaplan took one step, then another I raised my revolver.³

■ ■ ■

The killing of Fannie Kaplan, announced in the newspapers as an execution carried out “by Cheka decree,” formally launched the Red Terror against the “bourgeoisie and its agents.” As Malkov claims to have thought on his way out of Avanesov’s office, “the Red Terror is not an empty word, not just a threat. There’ll be no mercy for the enemies of the Revolution!” The main forms of “social defense” were mass executions, mostly of random hostages. The main selection criterion was class belonging, manifested (or not) in antigovernment actions and opinions. The main markers of class belonging were in the eye of the beheader: Bukharin had listed nine categories of external enemies, including the “intelligentsia in general,” and one open-ended category of proletarians who required “coercive discipline” to the degree that they lacked “coercive self-discipline” (“the less voluntary inner discipline there is, the greater the coercion”).⁴

There were no people in Russia who considered themselves to be “the bourgeoisie and its agents” and no armies or individuals who considered such a cause worth fighting for, but there was one group that combined a sense of social superiority with distinctive myths, uniforms, and institutions to allow for some coincidence of identification and self-identification: the Cossacks. The Cossacks were, traditionally, a self-governing estate of peasant warriors, who worked the land in the imperial borderlands and served in territorially raised cavalry units employed in frontier defense and regular war duty, as well as, during the last years of the empire, the suppression of internal unrest. At the time of the revolution, the Cossacks were divided into “hosts” that comprised nobles, priests, merchants, and rank-and-file Cossacks, some of whom had little or no land, had seen much service at the front, and were open to the message of millenarian egalitarianism. Most of the Bolsheviks, however, associated the Cossacks with pogroms and violent dispersals of anti-tsarist demonstrations and counted them among the plants that God had not planted. Stalin’s 1919 formula seems to have been as reflective of Bolshevik fears and expectations as it was of their experiences: “Who else could become the bastion of the Denikin–Kolchak counterrevolution if not the Cossacks—that centuries-old tool of Russian imperialism, which enjoys special privileges, is organized into a martial estate, and has long exploited the non-Russian peoples of the borderlands?”⁵

The Bolshevik campaign against the Don Cossacks was the greatest single test of the Party’s commitment to apocalyptic violence, the most radical application of Marxist class analysis to a named social group, and the most serious challenge to the categorical distinction between class and nation. The fate of the revolution, rhetorically and militarily, seemed to hang in the balance.

The Cossacks themselves were not sure. One of the first anti-Bolshevik uprisings, organized by the Don Cossack government of General Kaledin, failed for lack of popular support. As one of the founders of the White Volunteer Army, General M. Alekseev, wrote on January 27, 1918, “the Cossack regiments returning from the front are in a state of utter moral collapse. The ideas of Bolshevism enjoy wide popularity among the Cossack masses. They do not even want to fight to defend their own territory and property. They are absolutely convinced that Bolshevism is directed exclusively against the wealthy classes, the bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia, and not against their region.”⁶ Two days earlier, the leader of the pro-Soviet frontline Cossacks, Lieutenant-Colonel Filipp Mironov, had written an appeal titled “Down with the Civil War on the Banks of the Don”:

Socialism believes that only because of private property are there people who have large fortunes. That is why socialism, in order to put an end to such things, demands the abolition of private property….

Citizen Cossacks! We are all socialists, except that we don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it out of obstinacy. Did not Christ, whose teaching we profess, think about the happiness of mankind? Was it not for the sake of this happiness that he died on the cross? …

Socialists, like Christian believers, are divided into many schools and parties.… But remember one thing: the ultimate goal of all these parties is the remaking of society in accordance with the principles of socialism.

It is toward this goal that various parties are taking different roads.

For example. The Party of Popular Socialists says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 50 years have passed.

The Party of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 35 years have passed.

The Party of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 20 years have passed.

The Party of the Social-Democrats-Mensheviks says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 10 years have passed.

But the Party of the Social-Democrats-Bolsheviks says: You can go to hell with your promises. The people should get the land, the freedom, the rights, and the power right now, not in 10, 20, 35 or 50 years!

Everything to the working people, everything at once!⁷

After several months of socialism, the Cossacks rebelled again. This time (in the spring and summer of 1918), the Cossack elite was more unified, outside help (from the advancing Germans) more effective, and forcible mass mobilization, more successful. The battle-cry of General Krasnov’s anti-Bolshevik “All-Great Don Host” was “the Don for the Don Cossacks.” Don peasants who were not Cossacks were equated with the “Bolsheviks,” and Don Cossacks who were pro-Bolshevik (about one-fifth of all Cossacks under arms) were considered non-Cossacks. Mass searches, executions, and expulsions were conducted accordingly. “Terror” came in more than one color.⁸

Most participants in the Russian Civil War viewed political choices as expressions of social interests, identified social interests with “class” belonging, consigned alien classes to history’s trash heap, and saw local conflicts as fronts of a single war. The Bolsheviks emerged victorious because their sociology was all-encompassing, their apocalypse inescapable, their leader infallible, their “address” unquestioned, their “record-keeping” unmatched, and their commitment to violence by numbers, absolute. Presiding over both the records and the violence was the man around whom “the intricate mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat constantly rotated.”

On November 26, 1918, Sverdlov sent out a Central Committee circular letter to all the Party members: “Today, the Red Terror on the Southern Front is more necessary than it has ever been anywhere or anyplace—not only against direct traitors and saboteurs, but also against all cowards, self-seekers, aiders, and abetters. Not a single crime against the revolutionary military spirit and discipline will remain unpunished.” The improvement in Red Army discipline coincided with the withdrawal of the German troops and the collapse of the All-Great Don Host. As entire Cossack units were surrendering, Sverdlov wrote to the head of the political department of the Southern Front, Iosif Khodorovsky, that the release of prisoners was “absolutely impermissible.” “Organize concentration camps immediately. Make use of any mines or pits for the prisoners to work in, in their capacity as such.” The next task was to dispose of the rest of the Cossack population. On January 24, 1919, Sverdlov’s Orgburo issued a secret circular on how to proceed.⁹

Considering the experience of the civil war against the Cossacks we must recognize that the only correct strategy is a merciless struggle against the whole Cossack elite by means of their total extermination. No compromises, no halfway measures are permissible. Therefore it is necessary:

1. To conduct mass terror against the rich Cossacks, exterminating them totally; to conduct merciless mass terror toward all the Cossacks who participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power. With regard to the middle Cossacks, measures must be taken that would preclude any further attempts on their part to rise against Soviet power.¹⁰

Other mandated measures included the confiscation of grain and “all other agricultural products,” the mass resettlement of non-Cossacks in Cossack areas, and the execution of all Cossacks found to possess weapons after the “total disarmament” deadline.

Interpretations varied. Given the Don Host’s universal mobilization and requisitioning policies, the entire Cossack population had participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against the Soviet order. The determination of who was eligible for extermination was left to the local officials. The Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front, led by Khodorovsky, ordered the immediate execution of

(a) every single Cossack who has held a public office, either through election or appointment …;

(b) every single officer of Krasnov’s army;

(c) all the active participants in Krasnov’s counterrevolution;

(d) every single agent of autocracy who has found refuge in the Don area, from ministers to policemen;

(e) all the active participants in the Russian counterrevolution who have gathered in the Don area;

(f) every single rich Cossack.¹¹

At the same time, the Council recommended “intensive political work” among the “middle” Cossacks, “with the purpose of splitting this social group and attracting a part of it to the side of Soviet power.” The less conciliatory Don Bureau of the Party’s Central Committee advocated indiscriminate violence by means of mass hostage-taking and the execution of hostages along with the owners of hidden weapons. A member of the Revolutionary Council of the Eighth Army, Iona Yakir, ordered “the extermination of a certain percentage of the entire male population.”¹²

Local officials tended to err on the side of more resolute action. According to a Trans-Moskva Bolshevik assigned to the Khoper District, members of the local revolutionary tribunal “were executing illiterate old men and women who could barely move their feet, Cossack corporals, and, of course, the officers, saying that they were following orders from the center. On some days, they killed groups of 50–60 people.” The Morozov District chairman later claimed that, having received a telegram urging a “more energetic … implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” he “got drunk to dull the pain, walked over to the jailhouse, picked up a list of prisoners, summoned them by number one by one, and executed the first sixty-four of them.”¹³ According to another Moscow Bolshevik sent to the Khoper District,

Executions were carried out during the daytime in plain view of the whole village. Groups of 30 to 40 people were led—with shouts, jeers, and insults—to the place of execution. At the place of execution, the convicted were stripped naked—and all this in plain sight of the villagers. When the women attempted to cover their nakedness, they were mocked and forbidden to do so. All the executed were buried in shallow graves by the mill, not far from the village. As a result, a pack of dogs formed by the mill, viciously attacking passers-by and carting off the arms and legs of the executed to various spots around the village.¹⁴

In mid-March, the Cossacks of the Upper Don rebelled again. According to a report sent to the Central Executive Committee, “the beginning of the uprising centered around one of the villages, which the revolutionary tribunal, consisting of Chairman Marchevsky, a machine gun, and twenty-five armed men, had entered sometime earlier, in order to as Marchevsky vividly put it, ‘pass through this village like Carthage.’” On March 16, faced with a serious threat to the rear of the Southern Front, the Central Committee passed a resolution suspending the policy of extermination. “Considering the obvious split between the northern and southern Cossacks and the fact that the northern Cossacks can be of help to us, we are hereby halting the application of anti-Cossack measures and withdrawing our objections to the policy of stratification.”¹⁵

■ ■ ■

The decision to suspend the “de-Cossackization” decree was made in the absence of its author and chief sponsor. In the first week of March, Sverdlov had traveled to Kharkov in order to supervise the election of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s central committee. As one of his assistants put it, “by constantly reshuffling the ‘left’ and ‘right,’ like pieces on a chessboard, Sverdlov was trying to preserve the unity of the party.” On the way back to Moscow, he began feeling sick. His wife, children, and brother Veniamin met him at the station and rushed him home. The Kremlin doctors diagnosed his illness as the Spanish flu. He continued to prepare for the Eighth Party Congress, but his fever kept getting worse and, on March 14, he lost consciousness. “In his delirium,” wrote Novgorodtseva, “he kept talking about the Eighth Party Congress and attempting to get out of bed to look for a set of resolutions. He thought the resolutions had been stolen by certain ‘Left Communists,’ and kept asking us not to let them in, to take the resolutions away from them, to kick them out. He kept calling for our son, in order to tell him something.” He died on March 16, the day the de-Cossackization decree was repealed. He was thirty-four years old.¹⁶

On March 18, Lenin made a speech at a special session of the Central Executive Committee. “In the course of our revolution and its victories,” he said, “Comrade Sverdlov succeeded in expressing more fully and consistently than anybody else the most important and fundamental features of the proletarian revolution.” Of those features, the most visible was the “resolute and ruthlessly determined annihilation of the exploiters and enemies of the working people,” but the most profound and durable was “the organization of the proletarian masses” and total dedication to Party work. “Comrade Sverdlov stood before us as the most perfectly complete type of professional revolutionary, a man who had entirely given up his family and all the comforts and habits of the old bourgeois society, a man who had devoted himself heart and soul to the revolution…. The illegal circles, the revolutionary underground work, the illegal Party, which nobody personified or expressed more fully than Yakov Sverdlov—such was the practical school through which he had passed, the only path that could have allowed him to reach the position of the first man in the first socialist Soviet Republic.”¹⁷

In the heat of revolutionary struggle, few things were as important as “absolutely unquestionable moral authority, the kind that derives its strength not from some abstract morality, of course, but from the morality of the revolutionary fighter.” Sverdlov had such authority. “One word from him was enough to be sure, on his say-so alone, without any debates or formal votes, that a particular problem would be settled once and for all.” (Or, as Osinsky put it two days later in a speech on “bureaucratism,” “the Central Committee did not, in fact, exist as a collegial organ…. Comrades Lenin and Sverdlov made all the decisions by talking to each other and to certain other comrades who represented particular branches of the Soviet apparatus.”) Great revolutions, in Lenin’s view,

develop talents that would have been unthinkable before…. No one could have believed that from the school of illegal circles and underground work, the school of one small, persecuted Party and the Turukhansk prison, would emerge an organizer of such absolutely unchallenged authority, the organizer of the whole Soviet order throughout Russia, the man, unique in his knowledge, who organized the work of the Party that created the Soviets and established the Soviet government, which is embarking on its arduous, painful, bloody but triumphant procession to all nations, to all the countries of the world.¹⁸

A year later, Kira Egon-Besser and her parents visited Novgorodtseva in the Kremlin. “When she saw us, Klavdia Timofeevna, usually a very calm and reserved person, began to cry. For several minutes, we stood in silence in the room in which Yakov Mikhailovich had died, though in our memories he would always be alive.”¹⁹

Meanwhile, Sverdlov’s legacy in “the Russian Vendée” was still in question. On the day the de-Cossackization decree was repealed, the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front ordered “(a) the burning of all insurgent villages; (b) the merciless execution of every single person who has taken a direct or indirect part in the uprising; (c) the execution of every fifth or tenth adult male resident in all rebellious villages; and (d) the mass taking of hostages in villages located near the rebellious ones” (among other things). The next day, Iona Yakir and Yakov Vesnik, on behalf of the Revolutionary Council of the Eighth Army, ordered the total annihilation of all those connected to the uprising, “including the extermination of a certain percentage of the village population.” Trotsky agreed. “The nests of these dishonest traitors and betrayers must be destroyed,” he wrote in his May 25 order for a general counteroffensive. “These Cains must be exterminated.”²⁰

But the real question was what to do next. The Don Bureau, led by Sergei Syrtsov, argued consistently that “radical reprisals” (as Syrtsov put it in conversation with Yakir) should be followed by a final solution: “The complete, immediate, and decisive annihilation of the Cossacks as a specific cultural and economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations; the physical elimination of all Cossack bureaucrats and officers, generally of the whole Cossack elite and any actively counterrevolutionary Cossacks, as well as the dispersal and neutralization of the rank-and-file Cossacks and the formal liquidation of the Cossackry.”²¹

Another prominent member of the Don Bureau, Aron Frenkel, agreed with the overall goal but argued (in a report to the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919) that the timing and priorities would have to change:

The terrorist method of physical extermination of as many Cossacks as possible cannot be effective alone while there is still no iron Soviet rule in the Don Area because it will be impossible to annihilate all the Cossacks, and, under such conditions, the uprisings will continue. The solution is to accompany this method with more radical terrorist methods, indicated in the original Central Committee resolution but so far not implemented, such as: the expropriation of the Cossacks (de-Cossackization), their mass resettlement in the Russian hinterland, and the settlement of immigrant working elements in their place.²²

By August 1919, when the Don area, along with the rest of southern Russia and Ukraine, was lost to the Whites, Frenkel broke with Syrtsov and abandoned the goal of physical extermination. “I consider correct the change in the Central Committee’s Don policy…. The estate struggle between the Cossacks and the peasants (outlanders) in the Don area should, in my opinion, be conducted within the framework of class struggle, and not as an amorphous zoological struggle.” No one argued against terror as such; no one could argue against terror and remain a Bolshevik. The debate was over the appropriate targets of terror—or, in this case, over the social nature of the Cossacks as a caste. The two options had been clearly formulated by Sverdlov: “inciting civil war” versus the “total extermination of the rich.” The choice depended on whether some Don Cossacks were poor enough not to be considered rich.²³

Valentin Trifonov, the commissar of the Special Expeditionary Corps for the suppression of the Upper-Don uprising, believed that they were. In a report sent to the Central Committee Orgburo on June 10 (and forwarded to Trotsky on July 5), he called the policy of indiscriminate terror “outrageously careless and criminally thoughtless.” Every Marxist knew, he argued, that consciousness was determined by social being; the social being of the northerners was radically different from that of the southerners; ergo, “there was more than enough justification for the policy of splitting the Cossacks and fomenting the ancient hostility felt by the north toward the dominant south.” Right now, what was needed for the conversion of all redeemable Cossacks was “skillful agitation and propaganda” that would “uncover all the dark aspects of Cossack life (there are many of them) and, through the practice of Soviet construction, demonstrate all the bright aspects of the new life.” Finally, it was “absolutely imperative for the Don Area that it be governed by comrades with Russian names.”²⁴

Trifonov, who was thirty-one at the time, was born a Cossack (in a village in a southern district) but was orphaned at the age of seven and worked in a railroad depot in Maikop before moving to Rostov and joining the Bolsheviks at sixteen. Most of his prerevolutionary life was spent in prisons and exile, including three years in the Turukhansk region. His closest friend and mentor was Aron Solts, whom he met in exile when he was nineteen and Solts was thirty-five. After his release, Trifonov moved into the Petrograd apartment of Tatiana Slovatinskaia, where Stalin once stayed before his own exile to Turukhansk. As a young conservatory student, Slovatinskaia was recruited into the Party by Solts. She was married before (to Abram Lurye, Solts’s cousin) and had two children, but it appears that the people she felt closest to were Solts, her old friend, and Trifonov, her common-law husband. Trifonov was nine years younger than Slovatinskaia. In February 1917, he was, according to his son, “in the whirlpool of Tauride Palace.” During the October Revolution, he was one of the commanders of the Red Guard in Petrograd.²⁵

Valentin Trifonov

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Filipp Mironov

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Trifonov’s mention of “comrades with Russian names” referred to the Cossack rebels’ attempts to distinguish between “Soviet power” and “Jewish Communists.” This was, in part, the tribal version of the “two hostile camps,” but it was also a reaction to what the Cossack socialist Filipp Mironov called a regime “headed for the most part by young men of eighteen to twenty who can’t even speak Russian properly.” This was an exaggeration (the head of the local regime and the most persistent advocate of indiscriminate terror against the Cossacks was Sergei Syrtsov, who came from nearby Slavgorod), but it is true that many of the Bolshevik commanders in the “Russian Vendée” were young men from the former Jewish Pale of Settlement. Aron Frenkel and Yakov Vesnik were both twenty-five, and Iona Yakir was twenty-three. Iosif Khodorovsky, at thirty-five, was from the same generation as Sverdlov (as was Grigory Sokolnikov, the most persistent opponent of indiscriminate terror against the Cossacks).²⁶

The government officials in Moscow were not sure whose advice to follow. The Council of People’s Commissars did order a mass transfer of peasants to the Don Area, but the Whites continued to advance, and most of the settlers were stuck in overcrowded railway stations along the way. In early June 1919, when things at the front became desperate, Trotsky recalled Filipp Mironov from honorary exile in Serpukhov (where he had been sent at the request of the Don Bureau during the extermination campaign) and put him in charge of the Don Expeditionary Corps, with Valentin Trifonov as his commissar. Mironov issued several appeals (“Can Anti-Semitic and Pogrom Agitation Be Permitted in the First Socialist Republic in the World?”; “Should a Red Army Soldier, a Soldier of the People’s Army, Be Allowed to Refuse an Order?”), but within a short time the Don Area had been lost, the Expeditionary Corps dissolved, and Mironov sent to Saransk to form a regular Cossack Corps. Trifonov refused to “participate in the creation of units that will conquer the Don Area in order to defend it later from Soviet Russia.” In a letter to Solts, he called Trotsky a “completely inept organizer” and Mironov, an “adventurer.”²⁷

■ ■ ■

Filipp Mironov was an adventurer insofar as he was a prophet of a different revelation. The swamp and flood produced many who, “whether within or without temples, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons.” When one of them proved his authenticity by moving into the house of government, all the others became adventurers. The choice they faced was to oust Lenin from the Kremlin, build their own house of government, or accept the truth of Bolshevism and renounce all claim to a separate prophetic vision.

Mironov tried all three possibilities. A forty-seven-year-old native of the Ust-Medveditskaia District and a much-decorated veteran of the Russo-Japanese and “imperialist” wars, he thought of himself as the voice and conscience of the “working Cossacks.” The Bolsheviks thought of him in the same way—and treated him accordingly, depending on what they thought of the working Cossacks. Some believed that a Soviet Cossack corps was a necessary condition for reconquering the Don Area; others believed that the whole thing was an act of treason or gullibility. Meanwhile, Mironov sat in Saransk waiting for men and supplies, feuding with the local commissars (who kept warning Moscow of his unreliability), and trying to find out what had happened on the Don in his absence. Having been told about “Cain’s work done in the name of the government,” he wrote a letter to Lenin: “I cannot be silent anymore, for I cannot watch the people suffer for the sake of something abstract and remote.… The entire operation of the Communist Party over which you preside is aimed at the extermination of the Cossacks, the extermination of humanity as a whole.”

He was still for the “social revolution,” understood as “the transfer of power from one class to another.” He was still awaiting the true “apostles of communism,” who would bring to the people the gift of “the means of production.” But the Communists had gotten it backward: “We haven’t even built the foundation yet, … but here we are, in a hurry to build the house (communism). Our house is like the one Jesus spoke of when he said, ‘the winds blew away the sand, the stilts fell down, and the house collapsed.’ It collapsed because there was no foundation, just the stilts.” “Building” had become the central metaphor for reaching communism. Communism, like government and revolution, was a house. The building of the house of communism, according to Mironov, required “many decades” of “patient and painstaking example-setting…. I will not give in to the insanity that has only now revealed itself to me, and I will fight against the annihilation of the Cossacks and middle peasants with whatever strength I have left. Only now have I come to understand the devilish plan of the Communists, and I curse the day when, out of naïveté, I defended their position.”²⁸

The next day, on August 1, 1919, Mironov wrote that his slogans were: “Down with the Autocracy of the Commissars and the Bureaucratism of the Communists!”; “Long Live the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, and Cossack Deputies, Elected on the Basis of Free Socialist Agitation!”; and “Down with the Ruthless Extermination of the Cossacks Proclaimed by the Jew Trotsky-Bronstein!” Then a week later, on August 8, he applied to join the Communist Party, citing his belief in Soviet power and the abolition of private property, as well as his desire to dispel “the atmosphere of slander that makes it difficult to breathe.” A few days later, after his application had been rejected by his commissars, Mironov wrote the program of a new party he called the “Party of Workers, Peasants, and Cossacks”:

Listen, all you Russian workers, rouse your conscience and let it tell you if you should continue to support the bloody Communists, who, having finished with the Cossacks, will move on to the middle peasants, because they consider real human beings merely a means to fulfill their program. For them there are no individuals, just class, and no human beings, just humanity, so go ahead and build your commune at the cost of loving your neighbor for the sake of loving the stranger. In short, exterminate present-day human beings for the happiness of the humanity of the future….

If this is socialism, then anyone who still has some conscience should turn away from this horror.

Bent on provoking the Cossacks into counterrevolution by means of arbitrary violence and animated by sheer malice rather than compassion for their ignorance, the Communist Party, or rather, some of its leaders, have set themselves the goal of exterminating the Cossacks.

Having set two categories of people against each other, they are laughing at the Russian, the “goy” who is choking on his own blood.

Is this not why the Russian village has come to hate the Communists?

Is this not why there are so many deserters?

Free speech has died all over Russia.²⁹

On August 15, one of Mironov’s commissars wrote to the Central Committee and to the Southern Front that “the political backwardness and benighted consciousness” of the Cossacks, along with their privileged position before the Revolution, “makes it difficult for them to understand and desire progress toward a better world, toward communism.” As a consequence, “Mironov’s unrestrained agitation is making a big impression on the minds of the Cossacks.” The only solution was to stop the formation of the Don Cossack Corps and “disperse the Cossacks among the other divisions.”³⁰

On the same day, Mironov wrote a personal letter to two friends fighting in the Red Army:

I don’t know what to do. My soul cannot reconcile itself to the thought that if we reconquer the Don area, we will see them begin to exterminate our poor, ignorant Cossacks, who will be forced by the cruelty and ferocity of the new Vandals and new Oprichniks to burn their farms and villages. Will our hearts not break at the sight of this infernal vision? Will we ignore the curses of the tormented people?

On the other side are Denikin and the counterrevolution, who stand for the slavery of the working people, against which we have been fighting for a year and must go on fighting until their final destruction.

And so here I am, like the ancient Russian folk warrior, at the crossroads; if you ride to the left, you will lose your horse; if you ride to the right, you will lose your head; if you go straight, you will lose both your horse and your head.³¹

Waiting for her ancient Russian warrior, praying for him, and bearing his child was a twenty-one year-old village schoolteacher and Red Army nurse, Nadezhda Suetenkova. Her love poems dedicated to Mironov were modeled on folk poetry:

I love you like the sun

Looking down brightly

Through an open window.

I love you like the wind

Rustling the steppe grass,

Blowing softly on our faces.

I love you like the waves

Gurgling and frolicking

As they wash our feet.

I love you the way we love

Our brightest hopes:

More than happiness, more than life,

Brighter than the flowers in the forest.³²

She wrote to him about their love; about his other terrible choice—between her and his wife of many years; and about his sacred mission as a folk warrior and a prophet. “Believe firmly in your destiny and wait patiently for your hour. It will strike.”³³

Your path may be arduous,

But for you it is joyous:

You are weary, and your breast is heavy,

But isn’t human happiness the highest of rewards?³⁴

On August 19, a special envoy of the Cossack Department of the Central Executive Committee sent a report to Moscow:

Because Mironov has absorbed all the thoughts, moods, and wishes of the popular and peasant masses at this time in the development of the revolution, one cannot help but see in his demands and wishes that Mironov is the anxious, restless soul of the enormous mass of middle peasants and Cossacks, and that, as a man devoted to the social revolution, he is capable, at this last dangerous moment, of inspiring the hesitating mass of peasants and Cossacks to wage a ruthless struggle against counterrevolution….

On the other hand, … Comrade Mironov gives the impression of a hunted and desperate man. Fearing arrest or assassination, Mironov has started using bodyguards. The commissars are afraid of Mironov. The Red Army men are agitated and ready to defend Mironov with firepower against any attempt on his life by the commissars.³⁵

Two days later, on August 21, one of Mironov’s officers, Konstantin Bulatkin, wrote to his former commander, Semen Budennyi: “Comrade Mironov … is not only a great strategist and military commander, but also a great prophet. He is under political suspicion because he loves the truth…. If he were allowed to form his corps, I swear on my life that as soon as he appeared at the front, the morale would immediately improve and the advantage would be ours.” The next day, Mironov ordered his men to get ready. “Remember, you are not alone. The true soul of the tormented people is with you. If you die on the battlefield, you will die for the truth. Jesus Christ has taught us to love the truth and to be ready to die for it.”³⁶

The following afternoon, Mironov received a call from a member of the Party Central Committee and the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, Ivar Smilga. Smilga was twenty-six years old and the highest-ranking commissar in the Red Army. He was born and grew up in Latvia and joined the Party at the age of fourteen, after his father was executed by a government tribunal. He spent five years studying philosophy and political economy in Siberian exile, before presiding over the October military insurrection in Finland.³⁷ The call he made to Mironov was transcribed:

SMILGA. I categorically insist that you not complicate the situation of our armies with your unauthorized actions….

MIRONOV. If you, Comrade Smilga, think as a true statesman, I also categorically insist that you not prevent my going to the front. Only there will I feel fulfilled. I ask you not to stir up tensions. I have made up my mind, seeing the agony of the revolution, and only death will stop me. I want to give my life to save the revolution, which needs my life right now. I repeat, if I am denied, I will lose all faith in the people in power.

SMILGA. Comrade Mironov, nobody is trying to deny you … [Mironov interrupts]

MIRONOV. But I will not lose my faith in the idea of the popular masses. I never wanted these things that are happening around me, and the atrocities perpetrated against the Urals Cossacks by the Communist Ermolenko and against the Don Cossacks, by the Don Bureau, have made a deep impression on me….

SMILGA. Moscow is calling about your action. In the name of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, I order you not to send any units to the front without permission.

MIRONOV. I am leaving by myself. I cannot live here because I am being badly insulted.

SMILGA. Come to Penza. The Commander of the Special Group Shorin is here, as is Trifonov. We’ll agree on a common plan. Don’t create confusion.

MIRONOV. I cannot go to Penza because I cannot be sure of my safety. I could bring my division.

SMILGA. Nothing threatens your safety. I state this officially.

MIRONOV. I ask for permission to bring 150 men as my escort.

SMILGA. Fine. Take 150 men and come right away.

MIRONOV. I ask that you inform the 23rd Division that I am being summoned to Penza, so they know what has happened to me. I entrust myself to you, Comrade Smilga, a man I have profound confidence in.

SMILGA. Set out immediately. I am quite certain that we will sort out all the misunderstandings. I have to go answer a call. Good bye.³⁸

Mironov seemed willing to set out immediately, but then changed his mind because someone, he would later claim, had warned him that he was going to be arrested. On August 24, he left for the front at the head of several thousand men, half of them unarmed. “All the so-called deserters are joining me,” he wrote, “and will come together as a terrible force before which Denikin will tremble and the Communists will bow their heads.” Smilga proclaimed him a traitor and called him “Denikin’s lackey.” Trotsky called on all “honest citizens” to “shoot him like a rabid dog” and accused him of spreading “a vile rumor that the Soviet government supposedly wants to exterminate the Cossacks.” After three weeks of evasive maneuvers, minor skirmishes, and mass defections, Mironov and about five hundred of his men were surrounded by Red Army troops. On September 13, Konstantin Bulatkin wrote to the Red Cavalry Commander Budennyi that Mironov was “a true leader of the revolution” and that “the long-suffering, tormented soul of the people was with him.” The next day, Mironov, Bulatkin, and their men surrendered to Budennyi without a fight. Budennyi ordered Mironov’s execution, but Trotsky decided to stage a show trial for “educational” purposes. In a special Pravda article, he agreed with Bulatkin’s characterization but revealed its true sociological meaning. There were the Cossack elites hostile to the proletariat, the Cossack proletarians loyal to the Soviet government, and “the broad intermediary stratum of middle Cossacks, politically still very backward.” Mironov embodied “the confusions and waverings of the backward middle Cossack.”³⁹

One of the first things Mironov did after his capture was to ask the Extraordinary Investigative Commission to legalize his common-law marriage with Nadezhda Suetenkova, “in order to give a name to the child that she is expecting.” In his prison diary, he wrote: “My spirit is floating in space, free; Nadezhda’s free spirit is next to it.”⁴⁰

One of the first things that Konstantin Bulatkin did after his arrest was to deny his prophet. In a letter to Lenin and Trotsky, he wrote: “Great Leaders of the proletariat and Apostles of the world Commune, I am not a Mironovite, I am the knee over which Mironov tripped before falling, as he himself will confirm. Read my confession that I have submitted to the head of the Political Department of the Ninth Army, Comrade Poluian. For two years now, I have been an armed servant of Yours and of the Commune. I am boundlessly devoted to it and, in its name, beg You not to allow a fateful mistake that would doom my life.” At the trial, according to a newspaper report, Bulatkin “tried to put all the blame on Mironov, whom he had allegedly followed with the only purpose of killing the traitor.” According to the same report, Mironov “conducted himself calmly and with dignity.”⁴¹

At Trotsky’s request, the role of public prosecutor was given to Smilga, and that of presiding judge, to Smilga’s brother-in-law, the Kuban Cossack, Dmitry Poluian. Mironov pleaded guilty and cited his state of mind as the reason for his words and actions:

MIRONOV. When, after the October coup, I took the side of the Soviet government, Krasnov called me a traitor, while I, in the Don Area, was tirelessly explaining to the Cossacks the nature of the new order as an order in which all the working people would participate. Listening to me, the Cossacks agreed and eagerly joined the Soviet side. So when I saw all the crimes and atrocities being perpetrated by the Communists in the Don Area, I felt like a traitor to all those people I had talked into serving the Soviet government. I believed that Trotsky was the initiator of such a policy toward the Don Area, and I felt bad that the center viewed the Cossack question in that light, but, when I called Trotsky “Bronstein,” I did not mean to stir up national hatred.

PRESIDING JUDGE. Did you attribute that policy to Trotsky as a political leader or a Jew?

MIRONOV. As a Jew, and I admit my mistake.

The defense of most of the accused was that they had followed Mironov. The defense of Mironov was that he had been blinded by emotion. “Of course I acted irrationally, but do understand my state of mind and the atmosphere that I was surrounded by for seven months. I feel bad that I did not fulfill your order and left for the front, but believe me that I had no ill intentions and that everything I did, I did in order to strengthen the Soviet order.”⁴²

In his speech, Smilga claimed that Mironov was a rooster, not an eagle or a folk hero. Mature leaders understood “the objectives of their class”; Mironov, on the other hand, was a “political runt” who had produced the “most confused and nebulous ideology” in the history of the revolution. Mironov’s vision of the future state was a “semi-Tolstoyan, semisentimental melodrama” because he did not understand that “the path to socialism has to pass through a dictatorship of the oppressed over the oppressor.” The meaning and essence of the revolution was “the struggle between two extremes: the working class, Communist Party, and Soviet Government on the one hand, and the bourgeois counterrevolution, on the other.” Owing to the “inexorable iron logic of things,” all attempts at appeasement and conciliation led to Denikin and counterrevolution. There was only one truth, one true evil, and one force that “would come out victorious from this terrible, colossal struggle.” As for the Communist atrocities, they had, indeed, taken place, but most of those responsible had already been executed and, according to Communist teachings, atrocities as such meant nothing at all:

Recall the French Revolution and the struggle between the Vendée and the National Convention. You will see that the troops of the Convention committed terrible acts—terrible from the point of view of a particular human being. But the acts committed by the troops of the Convention can only be understood in the light of class analysis. They are justified by history because they were committed by a progressive class that was sweeping its path clean of the survivals of feudalism and popular ignorance. The same thing is happening today. You, too, should have understood this. You are talking about Marx, but I dare say you have not read a single line by him. The quotations you use do you no credit. You should be more humble about quoting authors whose work you are not familiar with.

Smilga concluded by saying that “the litter of petit bourgeois ideology must be swept off the road of the Revolution” and that Mironov and his followers must be punished “without pity.” He asked for the death sentence for Mironov and his officers and for the execution of every tenth soldier from Mironov’s personal escort and every twentieth soldier from the rest of the rebel army.⁴³

In his final statement, Mironov accepted the “student”-worker relationship suggested by Smilga and admitted to being “an experienced fighter, but a politically backward person incapable of understanding all the subtleties of politics and Party questions.” He was, it is true, unfamiliar with the works of Marx, but in his prison cell he had read a book about “the social movement in France” and had found a scholarly name for people like him:

People who lack scientific knowledge but seek justice with their heart and their emotions are called “empirical socialists.” That is exactly what I am, that is my undoing, and I ask the revolutionary tribunal to take that into account…. I am not even talking about how I grew up and what my childhood years were like. Wearing a uniform that was not my own and eating dinner from a kitchen that was not my own made me understand the misery and burden of poverty. You can see for yourselves that I spent my whole life trying to help the people, to ease their suffering. I came from the people myself and I understand their needs very well and have never abandoned the people from the first days of the revolution until now.

Mironov’s last words were: “My life is a cross, and if I must carry it to Calvary, I will, and, whether you believe it or not, I will shout ‘Long live the social revolution, long live the Commune and Communism!’”⁴⁴

The court, in the person of Poluian and his two assistants, sentenced Mironov and ten of his officers to be shot within twenty-four hours. Mironov asked the court to allow the condemned to spend their last night together. He also asked for some paper and ink. Both wishes were granted.⁴⁵

Ivar Smilga

Back in prison, Mironov wrote a letter to his former wife, asking her to forgive him and to bless their children “for the hard life to come,” and a long letter to Nadezhda, telling her that he had never betrayed the revolution; that he believed in the Commune and the Communists (“not the kind that spread bile through the body of the people, but the kind that are like a spring in the desert, for which the weary soul of the people is reaching out”); that she had made him “the happiest of mortals—even at the moment of death”; and that his only regret was that he would not get to see their child.⁴⁶

In his diary, he wrote:

At our request, they have brought us to a common cell, the same one in which we were interrogated. Those sentenced to death are gathered together. The psychology of the condemned has been described in Andreev’s story about seven hanged men. But we have some stronger men among us….

Everyone has been trying to find something else to think about, to banish the thought of our imminent and, from the point of view of the crowd, inglorious end. We have sung songs, one man has danced, etc., but it is the walls that have taken most of the punishment: it is our attempt to justify ourselves in the eyes of the inevitable.

“I have just finished talking to God …”—“Man, prepare yourself for death: in a few hours, you must die. Cleanse your soul and your conscience, and come to Me, so I can ask you—did you fulfill the mission that I gave you when I sent you down to earth?” 7/X-1919 (eight hours before the execution), F. Mironov.

Some time later, he wrote:

This is not the kind of fear of death when, in the heat of the battle, amidst the rattling of machine guns, the buzzing of bullets, and the screeching of shells a man is playing with danger because he knows that his death is a matter of chance. He accepts death as a possibility. In battle, death is not frightening: one moment and it’s over. What is terrible for the human soul is the awareness of an imminent, inescapable death, when there is no hope for another chance and when you know that nothing in the world can stop the approaching end, when there is less and less time before the terrible moment, and when finally they tell you: “your grave is ready.”⁴⁷

The verdict was read on October 7 at 3:00 a.m. Several hours later, Trotsky wrote to Smilga that, given Mironov’s behavior at the trial, it might be expedient to pardon him. “The slowness of our advance into the Don Area requires concentrated political action with the objective of splitting up the Cossacks. In order to accomplish this mission, perhaps we could use Mironov, summoning him to Moscow after the sentencing and then pardoning him by a Central Executive Committee decision on condition that he go behind the lines and start a rebellion there.” Trotsky had begun to reconsider the Party’s Cossack policy around the time Mironov was captured in mid-September. It is impossible to know whether he staged the whole trial in order to pardon Mironov in the end, for “educational purposes.”⁴⁸

Ivar Smilga and Valentin Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Smilga seemed happy to oblige. In a conversation with Trifonov the same day, he said that he “did not consider the killing of Mironov and his comrades useful.” As he explained later, “the pardoning of a middle peasant—such was the political meaning of this trial.” The Politburo promptly voted to stay the execution. On the night of October 8, Smilga entered the cell of the condemned and told them of the decision. According to Smilga’s recollections, Mironov, whose hair had turned completely gray overnight, “sobbed like a child and solemnly vowed to dedicate the rest of his strength to fighting for the Soviet order.”⁴⁹ On October 11, while still in prison, Mironov wrote an appeal to the Don Cossacks:

Our old, silver-haired Don has lived through untold horrors.

Because of the backwardness and ignorance of its sons, it is turning into a desert.

Brother Cossacks! The killed, executed, and tortured people on both sides cannot be resurrected. It is beyond the ability of human beings. But the decision to stop more killings and executions is our decision to make. And we must do it, come what may. It is in our hands, it depends on us.

I am appealing to you, the Cossacks of the Don, as someone who has, in a sense, returned from the other world.

I am talking to you from beyond the grave, which, empty, has just been filled with earth behind me:

Enough. Enough! Come to your senses, think hard before it is too late, before everything has been lost, while it is still possible to find a way toward peace with the working people of Russia….

I say this as a prophet….

The idea of Communism is sacred.⁵⁰

Two days later, the Orgburo of the Central Committee ordered the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Party Committee to release Nadezhda Suetenkova from prison, where she was being held as a hostage. Two weeks later, on October 26, 1919, the Politburo resolved to appoint Mironov a member of the Don Executive Committee, publish a revised version of his appeal to the Don Cossacks, and allow him to travel to Nizhny Novgorod “to be with his family.” In January 1920, he was admitted to the Communist Party.⁵¹

In late August 1920, Trotsky appointed Mironov commander of the Second Cavalry Army, and Mironov’s former judge, Dmitry Poluian, a member of his Revolutionary Military Council (“let bygones be bygones,” he wrote in his telegram). The “Second Cavalry” distinguished itself in the fighting against Wrangel and played an important part in the occupation of Crimea. Mironov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and, in January 1921, recalled to Moscow. The Civil War was over, the invading armies defeated, the false prophets gone, and the era of “coercive self-discipline” (as Bukharin put it) about to begin.⁵²

Mironov and Nadezhda traveled by special train. Their infant daughter had died in the fall, and Nadezhda was pregnant again. At railway stations along the way, Mironov was greeted by large rallies and what he called “mass pilgrimages.” In Rostov, he was visited by Smilga, who was then commander of the North Caucasus Front. Before setting off for Moscow, Mironov went to his hometown of Ust-Medveditskaia, where he heard stories of searches, arrests, starvation, food requisitioning, unhappiness among returning Red Army soldiers, and of an armed uprising led by one of his former officers. As Mironov wrote later, “what I heard from the villagers made a strong impression on me. At the front, amidst constant battles, I had no idea of how difficult our country’s situation was, but now, having found myself away from the army and among the peasants, I felt great pity in my soul for their condition, because every single one of them had something to complain about.” Mironov made several speeches against “false Communists,” food requisitioning, and the continued ban on private trade and peasant markets. At a meeting in his house, several of his old friends and one new acquaintance agreed to keep him informed and send coded reports to him in Moscow. The new acquaintance was a secret police agent. On February 12, 1921, Mironov and Nadezhda were arrested and sent to the Butyrki prison in Moscow.⁵³

According to Nadezhda, male and female inmates would be taken for walks in the same prison courtyard, but in separate circles. “During one of the walks, I suddenly saw him. We ran up to each other and embraced. I told him about my situation and asked him what I should do. He was pale and agitated, but he told me not to worry and to take care of myself and the baby, whatever happened to him. The guards yelled at us and told us to separate. I was greatly shocked by that meeting, and started having all kinds of terrible thoughts.” They saw each other several more times. On March 31, Mironov gave Nadezhda a copy of a letter he had written to Kalinin, Lenin, Trotsky, and Kamenev, in which he expressed his sense of vindication over the Party’s decision, made two weeks earlier, to replace forcible requisitioning with the “new economic policy” (NEP) of legalizing trade. “I remember he asked me to be sure to come to the walk on April 2 because he was hoping to get an answer to his letter by then. But from what I remember, on April 2 the walk was cancelled.”⁵⁴

On April 2, the VChK Presidium ordered Mironov’s execution. He was shot later that day in the prison courtyard during the scheduled walk in which only he participated. There was no trial and, apparently, no warning. He was spared “the awareness of an imminent, inescapable death, when there is no hope for another chance and when you know that nothing in the world can stop the approaching end.” Nadezhda remained in prison for another four months. As one of the investigators put it, “Mironova is guilty insofar as she denies the guilt of her husband, considering his actions only from her point of view.” She was never informed of Mironov’s fate. On two occasions, she threatened to go on a hunger strike. It is not known whether she ever did. In late August or early September, she gave birth to a baby boy who died “several years later.”⁵⁵