Preface
Three people associated with this study require individual mention. I owe a very special debt to Dr V.P. Butt of the Russian Academy of Sciences; his position as co-ordinator of the project on the history of the Russian Civil War meant he could give invaluable advice and support, as well as hospitality, at a time when the Academy itself was experiencing a period of traumatic change. As to my studies in England, they would not have been possible without the assistance of Mrs C. Menzies, Slavonic Reading Room librarian in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Finally, Jane Goulden read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. A number of institutions also helped towards the production of this book; in particular the University of the West of England provided funding and study leave, while my visits to Moscow would not have been possible without the support of a generous grant from the Nuffield Foundation.
This book is a combination of primary research and a reworking of established material. Chapter One is based entirely on published work, but an attempt has been made to put the Kornilov conspiracy into the context of other anti-government plots and to escape from the rather arid debate about what Kornilov and Kerensky knew of each other’s plans in the last week of August 1917. Chapter Two, on the other hand, is based substantially on the archives of the Russian Railway Workers’ Union (Vikzhel), first made available to western scholars in 1990; a different version of this chapter was published as ‘Before the fighting started’ in Revolutionary Russia, December 1991. Chapter Three is again based largely on published work, but tries to pull together the available material on the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, a topic remarkably under-studied by historians in both Russia and the west. Chapter Four is based largely on the personal papers of Lord Milner and Sir William Wiseman; a revised version, ‘Maugham, Masaryk and the “Mensheviks”’, appeared in Revolutionary Russia, June 1994. Material first published in Revolutionary Russia is reproduced here with the kind agreement of the editor.
Although Chapter Five is largely based on published material, this is supplemented by more references to the Milner papers, supported by cabinet minutes, to reinforce how real the prospects were for a British–Soviet rapprochement in spring 1918; up to now historians have tended to dismiss the views of Sadoul and Lockhart as those of Bolshevik-sympathizing dreamers out of touch with their governments. Chapter Six is a similar mix: references from the British archives are used to show the extent of the ‘great enterprise’ planned in Russia; while long-ignored memoirs of Russian participants are used to reconstruct the importance of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia.
Chapters Seven and Eight can be considered together: both are based substantially on the Russian archives, opened fully to western scholars after December 1991. Use was made of three collections in particular: the Archangel government; the Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch); and, to a lesser extent, the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) trial in 1922, the latter being used simply to fill in gaps. Material from the Archangel government archive makes clear that, while there was constant tension between the Allies and Chaikovskii’s administration, the reason for the attempted coup in September 1918 had nothing to do with this; it was prompted by anger at the SR administration’s attempt to exercise more control over the military. Material from the Komuch archive sheds new light on two aspects of its history: the intensity of Komuch’s opposition to the Omsk government in July and August 1918, and the refusal of Komuch to resign in November 1918 in line with the Ufa accord; this latter incident enables a reinterpretation of the achievements of the so-called directory government to be made. Incorporating this Russian material into the British archival record reinforces the point made constantly by the British consul Francis Lindley, that if the Bolsheviks were to be defeated, democrats not monarchists needed to be supported.
It is remarkable how little has been written about the history of Russia over the summer of 1918; the temptation to dash from the excitement of the October Revolution to the blood and gore of the full blown civil war has been too much for most historians who have glossed over the early fighting on the Volga. In a very real sense, then, I can blame any errors in this book on no-one but myself.
Dates
In general I have used the Russian calendar up until 1 February 1918 when this was brought into line with that of the west. The exception is Chapter Four, where events occurring in London are referred to by the western calendar, and events in Russia and the Ukraine by the Russian calendar; the reports sent back to England by Somerset Maugham and other agents were always dated according to the western calendar, and have been kept as such.
To the general public all that is known of the Russian Civil War is a dim memory of the film version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, of trains, of snow, and of bloodshed. To those with slightly more historical knowledge, the civil war was between Reds and Whites, between Bolsheviks and generals with strange names; and one of the generals actually an admiral, for some inexplicable reason leading an army in Siberia thousands of miles from the sea. To the more politically aware, the Russian Civil War showed the true nature of the imperialist stage of capitalist development, when a wide array of rival imperial powers – Britain, France, Japan, and the USA – sank their differences in a determined effort to destroy the first socialist state in the world by rallying to the White cause.
Yet even when approached through Doctor Zhivago, the civil war seems rather confusing, right and wrong are hard to determine, who exactly was fighting whom is not always clear; and for much of the novel Zhivago himself is fighting not with the Reds or the Whites, but with the Greens. Equally, when historians try to explain how the White generals could make such dramatic advances towards Moscow in 1919, followed by even more dramatic retreats, they have sought an explanation in the activities of Green commanders such as the peasant anarchist leader Nestor Makhno who was allied to the Bolsheviks, but remained independent of them. The civil war, it seems, was not fought between two sides, but three: the Whites are easy to identify, but their opponents were not all Bolsheviks, and those opposing the Bolsheviks from the democratic camp were far from always united. This ambivalence of the anti-White forces, so characteristic of developments throughout the civil war, is an echo of an earlier civil war, a war between Reds and Greens, between Bolsheviks and moderate socialists that is all too easily forgotten.
The Russian Civil War was not just the war between the Reds and the Whites, Bolsheviks and generals, which is etched in the popular memory; indeed, this war did relatively little to shape the subsequent Soviet regime - although it did much to create its propaganda image. The Russian Civil War was also a Red versus Green civil war, a war between the Bolsheviks and their socialist opponents led by the pro-peasant Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), which started in May 1918 and ended only in June 1922 when the leaders of that party were put on trial. It was this Red versus Green civil war which shaped the Soviet regime, by establishing at the heart of Bolshevik policy a deep-seated antagonism towards the peasantry, something epitomized within less than a decade by Stalin’s policy of the forced collectivization of agriculture.
For the years 1919–20 this Red versus Green civil war became hopelessly entangled with the White versus Red civil war and subsumed within it. As a result, most studies of the Russian Civil War have concentrated on the White versus Red struggle, a complex enough topic in its own right, and skated over the Red versus Green civil war, describing the fighting of summer 1918 in terms of preliminary skirmishes before the fighting proper started, and treating all fighting after 1920 as essentially a policing operation by the victorious Bolsheviks, rather than a continuation of the events of 1918. This book takes a different approach: when the fighting which took place between 1918 and 1922 is seen as a whole, the origins of both the White versus Red and Red versus Green civil wars have to be traced. Indeed, any study of the origins of the Russian Civil War inevitably leads to a more detailed analysis of the Red versus Green war which both proceeded the Red versus White war and continued after it. A history of the origins of the Russian Civil War must be in essence the rediscovery of this forgotten civil war before the civil war.
The White versus Red civil war has been ably described many times and this book takes as read that the Russian Civil War, the well-remembered second civil war between Whites and Reds fought out between the autumn of 1918 and the autumn of 1920, was a war that the Whites were never going to win. In the conclusion to his definitive study, Evan Mawdsley was scathing about the Whites:
The Whites had little chance of winning … The Bolsheviks had had a year to consolidate their position, they controlled most of the military resources of old Russia, they had more popular support, and their forces outnumbered those of the Whites by ten to one.1
As to the Allied powers that came to their aid he noted:
Contrary to what is often thought … the ‘fourteen power’ anti-Bolshevik Allied alliance that was featured in Soviet propaganda was a myth. The Americans were cool about intervention; the Japanese stayed on the Pacific coast. The French gave up an active role after the spring of 1919; … few Allied troops were sent; none fought in the main battles.2
The White forces were so derisory, and attracted such half-hearted support from the Allies, because their social foundation was the property-owning minority, a small group of narrow conservative nationalists, who disliked popular politics and the very idea of motivating popular support for their regime by developing a progressive social programme. The parties of the right in Russia never commanded many followers, and the educated minority which belonged to them found itself opposed to the revolution and more and more isolated as time went on. ‘The Whites feared the people’, Mawdsley concluded.3
The origins of the White versus Red civil war are not ignored in this book. The continuity between the activities of Admiral Kolchak in the early summer of 1917 and his overthrow in November 1918 of the patriotic socialist government formed in opposition to the Bolsheviks is something which is constantly stressed. But a reconsideration of these affairs only serves to reinforce Mawdsley’s point that the White generals represented no-one but themselves and a small business and land-owning elite. The greater part of this book is therefore devoted to the origins of the first forgotten civil war, the Red versus Green civil war of Bolsheviks versus patriotic socialists.
For, after the defeat of the White generals in 1920, Russia’s forgotten civil war was sparked off again. Not in an organized way it is true, but the Red versus Green tensions so characteristic of Zhivago’s experience and that of the battlefields of 1919 soon spilled over into haphazard outbreaks of fighting. From the autumn of 1920 to the summer of 1921 civil war between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry raged in Tambov Province, while nearer the centre of power February 1921 saw strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd organized by the Menshevik Party (moderate social democrats). The rebellion in the Baltic naval base of Kronstadt in early March 1921 marked the high point in this fighting, since it clearly revealed both the idealism of the rebels – fighting for ‘soviets without [Bolshevik] commissars’ – and the brutal determination of the Bolsheviks to concede nothing; the Red Army marched across the ice and recaptured Kronstadt. Soviet Russia’s first ‘show trial’ in 1922 – that of the SRs, the party committed to peasant socialism and the Bolsheviks’ main rival for the hearts and minds of the Russian population – was the logical consequence of Bolshevik victory in the fighting in Kronstadt and Tambov.
The SR trial in 1922 marked the end of the first civil war in Russia, the forgotten Red versus Green civil war before the White versus Red civil war. The origins in the years 1917–18 of this forgotten civil war, and the way it became intertwined with the remembered White versus Red civil war, in November 1918, forms the subject matter of most of this book. As the reader will see, however, writing a history of that forgotten civil war involves rewriting history - for the concerns of the historian of the forgotten civil war are inevitably not always those of the historian of the Russian Revolution.
Writing a History of Russia’s Forgotten Civil War
Rediscovering Russia’s forgotten civil war requires that the history of the years 1917–18 be rewritten; the classic periodization of the Bolsheviks’ rise to power and first year in office does not suffice. This is less of a problem where the origins of the White versus Red civil war are explored. The traditional concerns of the historian of the Russian Revolution are repeated here with only a small change of emphasis: the overthrow of the Tsarist monarchy in February 1917; the first crisis of the Provisional Government in April followed by the formation of the First Coalition Government in May, a government made up of liberals (mostly belonging to the Kadet Party) and moderate socialists (either Mensheviks or SRs) and supported by the First Congress of Soviets in June 1917; the disastrous disintegration of this coalition after the failure of the military offensive launched by the government against the Central Powers at the end of June 1917, which in turn sparked off the anti-government demonstrations known as the July Days organized by the Bolsheviks, and resulted in the formation of a shaky Second Coalition Government made up from the same political parties as the first; and finally the attempt by the Supreme Army Commander General Lavr Kornilov to overthrow the Prime Minister of the Second Coalition Government Alexander Kerensky and seize power on behalf of conservative politicians, generals and business leaders, the right in Russian politics. To this familiar story it is only necessary to add the web of intrigue surrounding the various anti-government plotters.
It is with the formation of Kerensky’s Third Coalition Government in September 1917 that the history of the forgotten first Russian Civil War begins and the story of that war starts to diverge from the established history of the Russian Revolution. The Third Coalition Government was even weaker than the Second Coalition Government and to many contemporaries never established any authority in Russia beyond the immediate confines of the Winter Palace. Understandably, therefore, historians of the Russian Revolution have tended to concentrate on other things. Their concerns have been directed towards the Bolsheviks’ preparations for an armed uprising to seize power from the government and the rising mood of popular anger against Kerensky as preparations began for the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October 1917. They have not had time to explore what was taking place in the rather strangely named Preparliament established at this time by Kerensky in order to give some popular authority to his tottering regime.
For the historian of Russia’s first civil war, however, the events of the Preparliament are of enormous importance. Boycotted by the Bolsheviks as they prepared for insurrection, the Preparliament became the arena in which the battle-lines for the future struggle between the patriotic socialists and their right-wing opponents were drawn. The same patriotic socialist politicians who ran the Preparliament in September and October 1917 went on in September 1918 to form the so-called directory, the anti-Bolshevik administration of patriotic socialists established in Siberia. The same tussle over co-operation between the patriotic socialists and left-leaning liberals was fought out in the autumn of 1917 as was fought out in the summer of 1918. These situations were not identical – in the summer of 1918 the patriotic socialists and the left-leaning liberals agreed to co-operate, while in the autumn of 1917 such agreement proved illusory – but for the historian of Russia’s forgotten civil war the Preparliament cannot be ignored, especially since on 24 October 1917 the patriotic socialists passed a vote of no confidence in the Third Coalition Government, but were beaten in this constitutional attempt to overthrow Kerensky by the October Revolution, the Bolshevik insurrection which began that very same evening.
While to the historian of the Russian Revolution the Bolshevik insurrection on the night of 24–25 October 1917 and Lenin’s announcement to the Second Congress of Soviets that his government would enact decrees on peace and land are of epoch-making importance, the very essence of the October Revolution, to the historian of Russia’s forgotten first civil war these events can be mentioned, as it were, in passing. The Bolshevik insurrection is just one episode in a ten-day crisis which lasted from 24 October to 4 November 1917. It was during these ten days that the first shots in Russia’s forgotten civil war were fired at the battle of Pulkovo Heights; but this was also a period when, more than once, it looked as if a compromise negotiated by representatives of the Railway Workers’ Union would make civil war unnecessary. The October Revolution and its famous decrees were followed by talks aimed at persuading the Bolsheviks to surrender power and form a coalition administration with the patriotic socialists. Lenin’s decision of 4 November 1917 that the Bolsheviks should remain in government alone put that civil war back on the agenda.
This divergence between the concerns of the historian of the Russian Revolution and those of the historian of Russia’s forgotten civil war continues for the first three months of Bolshevik rule. The fate of the Constituent Assembly, the only freely elected parliament in Russia before the fall of communism, is just one of the many issues faced by Lenin’s Bolshevik administration, and to the historian of the Russian Revolution it must be considered alongside such issues as the decree on workers’ control; the nationalization of the banks; and the implementation of the land reform, something facilitated by the decision of left-wing members of the SR Party to form a new political party, the Left SRs, and join the Bolsheviks in government. To the historian of Russia’s first civil war the fate of the Constituent Assembly is crucial: it was Lenin’s willingness to allow the elections to the Constituent Assembly to go ahead in mid-November 1917 which stopped any further outbreak of fighting after Pulkovo Heights. Through the elections to the Constituent Assembly the moderate socialists, especially the SRs, hoped to supplant the Bolsheviks by constitutional means, thus obviating the necessity for civil war; the SRs’ victory in those elections served notice on Lenin that the days of the Bolshevik government would be numbered when the Assembly convened. Lenin’s decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly after its single sitting on 5 January 1918 and base his rule on the soviets instead ensured that all subsequent moves by Russia’s moderate socialists would be undertaken in the name of recalling the dissolved Constituent Assembly; the most significant of these was the Committee of the Constituent Assembly (referred to by its Russian acronym Komuch) established in Samara in June 1918.
When the interests of the historian of the Russian Revolution and the historian of Russia’s forgotten civil war again coincide, as they do with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the emphasis remains different. When considering this treaty signed by the Bolsheviks with the Imperial German government on 3 March 1918, the historian of the Russian Revolution is concerned with the narrowness of Lenin’s victory in the debate to ratify the peace; the formation as a consequence of the first significant opposition faction within the Bolshevik Party, the pro-war Left Communists; the decision of the Left SRs to leave Lenin’s government in protest; and the opposition of both Left SRs and Left Communists to the new economic policy announced by Lenin in April 1918 which amounted to restoring one man management in the factories and confiscating grain from the peasantry by the establishment of fictitious ‘committees of poor peasants’. For the historian of Russia’s first civil war, it is not the peace brought about by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty that is important, but the war fever it provoked, the sense of outrage and a renewed sense of national unity in the struggle against a common enemy. The rebirth of the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the patriotic socialists, implied by the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, was put on one side by the spirit of sacred unity against Imperial Germany. The SRs, the Allies, the army and many Bolsheviks, including such unlikely soul-mates as Trotsky and Stalin, came together between March and May 1918, working to annul what seemed to them the treaty of shame. It was Lenin’s decision in mid-May 1918 not to annul the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk after a suitable breathing space but to make further economic concessions to Germany which ended this period of harmony.
After May 1918 the historian of the Russian Revolution and the historian of Russia’s forgotten civil war must follow very different roads, for by then serious fighting had begun between moderate socialists and Bolsheviks. For the historian of the Russian Revolution action centres on Moscow and the story is one of the Bolsheviks clinging to power by the skin of their teeth as they became progressively more and more isolated. With the patriotic socialists making gains in soviet elections and announcing publicly that they would no longer be bound by the treaty with Germany, the Bolsheviks expelled the patriotic socialists from the soviets, allowing only the Left SRs to continue to participate. When the Left SRs staged a coup attempt on 6 July 1918 during proceedings at the Fifth Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks felt justified in removing them too from the soviets; in future they would rule alone with only the Bolshevik Party deputies in the soviets to serve as a constitutional check on their power. Thus isolated and surrounded by enemies, the Bolsheviks resorted to institutionalized terror in August 1918 until their military position in the forgotten civil war with the moderate socialists improved somewhat in September. From this Moscow perspective just who the Bolsheviks were fighting is less important than the ability of the Bolsheviks to survive.
For the historian of Russia’s first forgotten civil war it is crucially important that the Bolsheviks’ enemies in the summer of 1918 were the patriotic socialists who had first won the Constituent Assembly elections and then declined to take up arms against those who had dissolved it in the hope that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk might be annulled. Far from having a Moscow focus, the historian of Russia’s first civil war must roam far and wide: from Archangel in the north where the Allies tried but failed to give aid to the patriotic socialist leaders; down the railway network to Yaroslavl, where patriotic socialists unsuccessfully took up arms against the Bolsheviks; down the river Volga to Samara where the Allied Czechoslovak Legion joined with local SRs in overthrowing the Bolsheviks and establishing a rival socialist administration; and east to the Siberian towns of Ufa and Omsk where the socialist opponents of Bolshevism first sank their differences and then established the base for their government.
From a Moscow perspective it is understandable that little attention need be paid to the coup staged in Omsk by Admiral Kolchak on 18 November 1918; the Bolsheviks’ enemy changed its leading cadres, but remained the enemy. Kolchak’s coup, however, has monumental significance from the perspective of the historian of Russia’s forgotten first civil war. Kolchak’s coup meant this: Russia’s first civil war had been brought to an end. It had been transformed overnight from a war between Bolsheviks and patriotic socialists to a war between Bolsheviks and right-wing generals. The first civil war had been brought to an end not by Bolshevik victory in that war but the armed action of White generals whose action changed the whole nature of the civil war. Kolchak’s coup was the last act in Russia’s first civil war and the first act of Russia’s second civil war, the civil war of popular memory. Kolchak’s action ended a war that the moderate socialists might have won and started a war the Whites would inevitably lose, putting the real civil war, the forgotten first civil war, on ice until 1920. By the time fighting resumed in Kronstadt and Tambov, the majority of Russians, after seven years of war, were no longer prepared to take up arms.
The Lessons of the Forgotten Civil War
What, then, does the rediscovery of Russia’s forgotten civil war teach us? Ironically considering the short shrift given to the Whites, this study tells us something about the steadfastness of the counter-revolutionary right. The plans for armed action drawn up in the spring and summer of 1917, when men of property first moved to stem the revolutionary tide and restore order, were essentially similar to the plans of Kolchak’s supporters in November 1918. The small group of property-owners referred to by Mawdsley did not distinguish between shades of red, between Red and Green, between Bolsheviks and SRs; to them all parties represented in the soviet were ‘Reds’, and all their actions were to weaken and destroy Great Russia. From April 1917 onwards this group was looking for a political saviour, turning first to General Kornilov, then to Admiral Kolchak, and then back to Kornilov, who obliged by staging an ill-judged and unsuccessful coup in late August 1917. Almost exactly a year would pass before such groups felt strong enough to act in a similar way again, but when they did it was the same people with essentially the same motivation.
As to the forgotten civil war itself, three main themes are subsequently developed. First, that this Red versus Green civil war, the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the SRs, Bolsheviks and democracy, was a quite unnecessary war. It was a war brought about by Lenin for purely doctrinaire reasons: the great social demands of the day – peace, land and a democratized economy – would have been implemented by Bolsheviks and SRs alike. In fact the most obvious solution to Russia’s social crisis in the autumn of 1917 was the formation of a coalition socialist administration; Lenin was determined that only a government headed by himself, alone, could safely undertake the socialist experiment he envisaged. So he seized power to prevent the Second Congress of Soviets appointing a socialist coalition government, and refused to cede power even when the Railway Workers’ Union succeeded in ending the SRs’ attempt to remove his government by force and restored the idea of a socialist coalition government to the political agenda.
Lenin again faced the choice between coalition politics and dictatorial rule in January 1918 when the Constituent Assembly met. Lenin had prevented the Second Congress of Soviets appointing a socialist coalition government, but the Constituent Assembly might well do the same. The SRs, who won most seats in the Constituent Assembly elections, were alarmingly conciliatory. They endorsed the Bolshevik proposals on peace and land, and even seemed willing to accept the idea of a hybrid political institution known as the Revolutionary Convention, which would have brought together both the Constituent Assembly and the soviets. Confident that they would retain their following in both soviet and Constituent Assembly, the SRs threw down the gauntlet to Lenin, who responded by dissolving the Constituent Assembly.
Up until the Constituent Assembly crisis in January 1918, Lenin had looked to support for his socialist experiment from beyond Russia’s borders, from socialist revolutions elsewhere in Europe. During the Constituent Assembly crisis he resolved for the first time to rely on a rather different source of support beyond Russia’s borders, the Imperial German government. The enormity of this decision was not immediately apparent because, far from bringing immediate peace, the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk at first resulted in a brief war with Germany, and then the widespread belief that the ‘breathing space’ provided by the treaty would last no more than a few weeks. When the Germans overthrew the democratic government in the Ukraine at the end of April 1918, Lenin was forced to spell out clearly that this was not an appropriate moment to resume the struggle with Germany; his vision for Russia required the Bolsheviks to continue to rule alone, dissolving soviets as well as the Constituent Assembly, under a protective umbrella provided by the German Kaiser. But as this book shows, there was, even at this stage, an alternative. Democracy could have been restored in the soviets, the German protective umbrella could have been discarded; but that would have involved as in November 1917 and January 1918, a willingness to form a coalition government with the SRs. It would also have involved renewing the military alliance with the Allies.
The attitude of the Allies, and of the British in particular, to the nascent civil war in Russia is another theme of this book. Quite unlike the picture portrayed in Bolshevik propaganda, the Allies had no time for White politicians and devoted their energies to wooing the pro-war patriotic socialists. This was the avowed aim of the mission sent to Petrograd in autumn 1917 under the leadership of W. Somerset Maugham, a mission which laid the groundwork for developments in the summer of 1918 by linking the British closely both to the Allied Czechoslovak Legion and moderate socialist politicians like the veteran populist N.V. Chaikovskii, whose revolutionary pedigree went back to the 1870s. When the Bolsheviks themselves became pro-war socialists, as was the case between late February and early May 1918, the British did everything in their limited power to help, culminating by sending the mission of General Poole to Murmansk on 11 May, just two days before the Bolshevik Central Committee finally agreed to adopt Lenin’s pro-German policy. Thereafter the Allies favoured action against the Bolsheviks, but action organized by Russian democrats like Chaikovskii, not the White generals.
With the Bolshevik decision in favour of Germany, and the related decision to expel the SRs and Mensheviks from the soviets, the civil war within democracy, the Red versus Green civil war, on hold since November 1917, began in earnest. The third theme of this book, therefore, is why the patriotic socialists in Russia failed to overthrow the Bolshevik dictatorship. Victims of hostile commentary on the part of both Bolsheviks and White generals, the history of the attempt by patriotic socialists to build an alternative democratic socialist state stretching from the Volga in the south to Archangel in the north and stretching eastward across the Urals has never been seriously addressed. Yet the failure of this experimental ‘third way’ was in no sense predetermined, and its People’s Army’s defeat at the hands of the Red Army by no means inevitable or final.
The very first fighting in this civil war took place in the Volga town of Samara in the first week of June 1918 and was linked to the mutiny a week earlier of the Czechoslovak Legion. That mutiny, while of tremendous importance on the lower Volga, actually set back the cause of Russian democracy by two crucial months, since it wrecked plans for co-ordinated Allied action, involving both the Czechoslovaks and the British in northern Russia; the first stage of this operation, the uprising in Yaroslavl, was completely mistimed as a consequence. The separate fighting on the Volga and in northern Russia was partly pure chance, but also in part a reflection of disagreements between the various wings of the SR Party as to how best to develop the anti-Bolshevik struggle.
Those commentators dismissive of the directory’s socialist experiment, the Volga ‘third way’, have tended to seize on these divisions; this book, however, seeks to stress unity rather than disunity and the overall competence of those who established the directory administration in Ufa. By September 1918 there were two socialist states in Russia, that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Moscow and that of the SR-dominated directory formed at Ufa, which included the northern territory around Archangel. The social policies of the two were really very similar: in Ufa, just as in Moscow, land had been distributed to the peasantry; in Ufa, just as in Moscow, the economy was to be planned by the state; in Ufa, just as in Moscow, a degree of workers’ control was to be exercised by the trades unions. The main difference between the two states was Ufa’s more tolerant attitude to free trade and private enterprise, and the exercise of local democracy through regionally-based councils rather than workplace soviets.
It was precisely these similarities between the regimes established in Moscow and Ufa that breathed new life into that ‘small class of property-owners’, referred to by Mawdsley, who had been inactive since August 1917. First unsuccessfully in Archangel in September, and then successfully in Omsk in November 1918, the ‘Kornilovite’ generals and the class they represented moved against the democrats, those forerunners of the Greens, the people the generals still contemptuously dismissed as ‘Reds’. Their action highlighted the weakest point of the directory’s democratic regime. On both occasions, the generals acted when the democrats ‘interfered’ in military affairs. This interference was actually very timid, an attempt to clip the wings of ambitious monarchist officers; in reality the democrats should have interfered in military affairs more often, more consistently and more ruthlessly. Only a political commissar system similar to that of the Bolsheviks could have secured the loyalty of the old officer corps. In Archangel the British consul Francis Lindley could put the coup attempt into reverse; in Omsk the democrats’ unpractical attitude to military affairs was their undoing.
Kolchak’s coup against the directory on 18 November 1918 destroyed the Russian democrats as a fighting force and ended the first civil war. For the record, this happened before the democrats had been defeated in their war with the Bolsheviks. The German alliance enabled Lenin to transfer all his forces to the fighting on the Volga, and forced the democrats to cede ground, evacuating both Kazan and Samara; whether this was a definitive victory is an open question, for on the very eve of Kolchak’s coup the front had steadied and the democrats were beginning an advance aimed at retaking Samara. But with Kolchak’s coup the forgotten first civil war between the Bolsheviks and the democrats had become entwined with the second civil war between the White generals and the Bolsheviks. The Russian public was offered the depressing choice between dictatorships of the right and left, and, after some seven million deaths,4 opted for the left; it at least would allow peasants to keep their land and offered the promise of a progressive social programme. When the struggle between the Bolsheviks and the democrats resumed in 1920, the population was on its knees; when the SR trial in 1922 put the final nail in the democrats’ coffin, the population at large was too exhausted to protest and grudgingly accepted that between dictatorships of left and right there could be no ‘third way’ of democracy in Russia.
This book is in essence a history of the failure of that ‘third way’. It is a sad, at times depressing story of lost opportunities and the triumph of brutality and naked political opportunism. It makes clear that Lenin’s victory in October 1917 was insecure in the extreme, and that Russian politics remained fluid throughout the first year of Bolshevik rule. British official commentators were right: there seemed no way Lenin’s regime could survive; its survival against all the odds was in large measure the responsibility of Kolchak and the White generals.
Notes
1. E. Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London 1987), p. 281.
2. Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 283.
3. Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 279.
4. Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 287.