By staging the coup in Omsk on 18 November 1918, the White generals hijacked the civil war, turning it from a war between Bolsheviks and patriotic socialists, a Red versus Green civil war, into a war between Whites and Reds. By their action, by turning the first civil war into a second civil war, the White generals guaranteed the Bolshevik victory; whether the patriotic socialists could have won their first civil war was left unknown, for they had suffered military reverses, but not a military defeat. But after the White versus Red civil war was over, after seven million deaths, the Russian population was in no state to see a resumption of the Red versus Green struggle in 1921. The Russian Civil War did much to form the nature of the Bolshevik regime; but it was in the Red versus Green civil war that the Bolsheviks’ nature was first revealed. When peace returned to Russia, the Bolsheviks put the victors of the Constituent Assembly elections on trial; seventy years later, when they put their own record to the electorate for the first time, the Bolsheviks were no more successful than they had been in 1918.
From Terror to Defence of the Nation
When news of Kolchak’s coup reached Archangel, Lindley responded with typical far-sightedness. He informed Balfour:
The coup d’état of Kolchak seems to me as unfortunate as it could well be. I do not believe that any dictator relying for support on the officers and upper classes only, has any chance of success. He will only serve to alienate the mass of the population from the cause of order and throw the waverers into the arms of the Bolsheviks … We have got to choose between supporting the old officers and upper classes, who, thoroughly discredited under the old regime, have learned nothing and dream of a return to the old order, and supporting people who are unpractical and difficult to work with but who have a real following in the country and wish to see a new order arise out of the present chaos.1
Realistically there was no more chance of Kolchak succeeding in his mission than there had been of Kornilov succeeding in his. Those standing behind them were the same industrial interest groups that had bandied around the names of both Kornilov and Kolchak as possible saviours of Russia in the conspiracies of spring 1917. They had no chance of success, and they did indeed ‘throw waverers into the arms of the Bolsheviks’.
This was all the more remarkable because in August and September 1918 the Bolshevik regime had never been more isolated; with the loss of Kazan, it clung to power sandwiched between the democratic forces on the Volga and the Germans in the Ukraine, sustaining itself by a trade treaty with Germany which reduced Russia to a state of ‘slavery’ and the ruthless application of terror. While the economic terms of the treaty were indeed humiliating – Russia had to supply Germany with one quarter of all Baku’s oil production and pay six billion marks in alleged compensation for nationalizations and other losses2 – the treaty enabled Lenin to win the first round of the civil war on the Volga. The battles for Kazan, lost by the Bolsheviks at the start of August but retaken at the start of September, were crucial in this regard. Had the People’s Army been able to retain control of Kazan the whole future of the war would have been different.
Three days after the fall of Kazan, the Russo–German trade agreement was initialled on 10 August 1918. Although the treaty would not be signed until 27 August 1918, Lenin at once began a massive reorientation of his army on the correct assumption that the Germans had taken his bait. Troops were pulled away from the defensive screens established in the spring to check a German advance and sent to the Volga; between 25 July and 18 August 1918 30,000 men were moved to the Eastern Army Group to confront the People’s Army. By 28 August 1918 the fighting on the Volga reached a crucial turning point. General Kappel’s People’s Army made a dramatic move to outflank the Red Army and seize the Romanov bridge across the Volga at Sviyazhk, some twenty miles west of Kazan. The manoeuvre failed, the Red Army advanced and Kazan was recaptured. Lenin’s reliance on the Germans had worked; if Field Marshal Haig saved Lenin in the early summer of 1918, when British troops stemmed the German advance in France and dissuaded the Kaiser from overthrowing the Bolshevik regime, then in the late summer the Kaiser saved Lenin by agreeing to the August 1918 trade treaty.3
Whether Lenin had won a definitive victory against the democratic forces was by no means certain. The capture of Kazan in September and then Samara in October certainly put the People’s Army on the defensive, but as the SRs constantly stressed during the last days of the directory, after an initial rout, volunteer units were staging a successful counter-offensive by the first fortnight in November 1918. On 5 November 1918 an offensive aimed at recapturing Samara was begun, and on 12 November 1918 the SR administration in Ufa could boast that a whole Bolshevik regiment had been taken prisoner. The successful recapture of Samara was expected with some confidence.4
The other prop on which the survival of Lenin’s isolated regime had depended in the autumn of 1918 was terror. Official statistics put the number of those shot by the Bolsheviks in the second half of 1918 at 4,500, but that figure included only those who underwent some sort of trial; summary executions after incidents like the Yaroslavl insurrection gave a total, admittedly calculated by hostile commentators, of over 50,000 executions. Martov put the number of those executed by the end of October at 10,000. Whatever the precise figures, Lenin and his regime had no qualms about admitting that their regime depended in the autumn of 1918 on the judicious use of ‘red terror’.5
That terror also affected the Allies. Captain Cromie had been killed in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks raided the British Embassy on 3 September 1918, and Lockhart had been arrested and held virtual hostage, along with the whole of what remained of the British community in Russia. They were released only when Germany’s defeat in the First World War was certain. The end of that war removed the reason for Allied intervention; after 11 November 1918 there was no need for a new Eastern Front on the Volga. What motivated continued intervention was Lenin’s use of terror. When on 13 November 1918 the British government debated whether or not to continue its efforts in Russia, its decision to do so was to be accompanied with the publication of all the details Lockhart had gathered about the true nature of the Bolsheviks’ bloody regime: Balfour pointed out that ‘the people they had treated worst were people whom we should regard in this country as “blood-red socialists”’. Such was the nature of the civil war within democracy.6
Kolchak’s coup put an end to the Bolsheviks’ isolation and brought many patriotic socialists into an unhappy alliance with Lenin, just as Lindley had predicted it would. Lenin was no less committed to the doctrinaire socialist experiment on which he had embarked and which had led to his isolation than he had been in November 1917 when he expelled the conciliatory Bolsheviks, in January 1918 when he dissolved the Constituent Assembly, or in May 1918 when he decided on an alliance with German imperialism; but after Kolchak’s coup he was able to wrap that experiment up in the twin flags of progress and nationalism. The Allies, although inspired by Balfour’s moral outrage at the evils of Bolshevism, took an essentially pragmatic stance of supporting any anti-Bolshevik government that might emerge; this dragged them down the road not only of half-hearted support for Kolchak but support for the generals on the Don who, with the end of the First World War, the defeat of Turkey and the German evacuation of the Ukraine, could suddenly be reached with ease through the Black Sea.
Kolchak’s coup destroyed the URR: it had looked to the Allies to support democracy, and the Allied willingness, no matter how half-hearted, to continue to aid Kolchak and the other civil war generals after the coup simply removed the organization’s raison d’etre; some members swallowed hard and joined Kolchak, others quietly emigrated. As an organization it simply evaporated, leaving no records other than the memoirs of a few activists – and yet it had so nearly succeeded in forming a patriotic socialist government for Russia. The URR’s fellow socialists, the SRs and Mensheviks, had always been suspicious of Allied motives, and with the defeat of Germany on 11 November 1918 could see little justification for continued Allied involvement, and none at all after the 18 November 1918 coup.
In October and November 1918, as the First World War came to an end, the Mensheviks began to issue statements critical of the continuing foreign intervention, banning further armed struggle against the Bolsheviks and recognizing the July 1918 Soviet Constitution; reconvening the Constituent Assembly was relegated to a long-term aim. As early as October 1918 British agents were picking up rumours of secret talks between the Bolsheviks and the SR and Mensheviks about the formation of a coalition government. Kolchak’s coup accelerated this process. The first three months of 1919 saw ‘something like pluralism’ develop in the political life of Moscow, and the key development in this regard was the willingness of the more left-wing SRs to sink their differences with the Bolsheviks in a joint struggle against reaction.7
On 5 December 1918, as the Red Army approached Ufa, the remnants of the Komuch (CDD), the remnants of the Congress of Constituent Assembly Deputies, and those members of the SR Central Committee then in Ufa, met and resolved to end the armed struggle with the Bolsheviks. This was in line with the decision reached on 8 December 1918 by the Moscow Bureau of the Central Committee that the struggle on two fronts now meant temporarily suspending the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. Thus when Ufa fell Volskii, the former president of Komuch, and Central Committee member K.S. Burevoi stayed in the city and took the lead in opening talks with the Bolsheviks on 10 January 1919 which culminated in a public call by the Congress for the People’s Army to stop fighting the Red Army and turn its weapons instead on Kolchak.8
The Ufa delegation then came to Moscow for further talks, conducted on the soviet side by Kamenev, that long-term protagonist of the idea of a socialist coalition. The talks were in Ufa’s eyes talks held not between the Bolshevik and SR parties, but between the Constituent Assembly and the Soviet; the Ufa delegation’s demand was a coalition socialist government, responsible to the Constituent Assembly, but in line with their earlier stance in the directory negotiations, a new Constituent Assembly would be elected at once. As the talks continued into February 1919, Volskii appeared willing to concede that the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly was no longer essential, a stance for which he was censured by an SR conference in Moscow on 6 February 1919; but even this conference hinted that a reform of the Soviet constitution to give peasants equal voting rights with workers might be the basis of a compromise. On 20 February 1919 Kamenev announced that the ban on the SR Party participating in the soviets had been lifted, a ban imposed on 14 June 1918 after the insurrection on the Volga had begun. Political pluralism within the Soviet constitution seemed to be back on the agenda with the reappearance of both the Menshevik and SR press.9
Political pluralism was not Lenin’s style, especially since defeat at the hands of Kolchak had seriously weakened the SRs’ negotiating stance; once the order for the People’s Army to lay down its arms had been obeyed, the SRs had played their only card and, as during the Railway Workers’ Union talks and the fighting on Pulkovo Heights in October 1917, Lenin could safely ignore any political agreement once the military position was clear. Freedom for the SR and Menshevik press lasted for only a few weeks as the Bolsheviks reasserted their dictatorship, and only one faction of the SR Party signed a formal agreement with the Bolsheviks.
Nevertheless, the Mensheviks and SRs loyally sank their differences with the Bolsheviks until victory had been achieved and Admiral Kolchak, General Denikin and General Yudenich defeated. Then, with the strike wave in Petrograd in February 1921, the insurrection in Kronstadt in March 1921, and the peasant war in Tambov from August 1920 to June 1921, the Red versus Green civil war burst into flames again. Of these incidents the most serious was Tambov, since it was inspired by SR policies, organized by SRs and former SRs, and forced on Lenin the New Economic Policy based on concessions to the peasantry. For these concessions to be purely economic and not political, it was essential to ensure that the SR Party was destroyed. And so in 1922 a show trial of the surviving SR leaders was staged which involved such prominent participants in the events of 1918 as Gendelman, Gots, Likhach, Vedenyapin, Dedusenko, Perkhurov and Verkhovskii.10 This was the last, brutal act of the Red versus Green civil war which had started in June 1918 with the insurrection in Samara, but had been smouldering since Lenin’s seizure of power in October 1917; it finally buried the hope that legitimacy might be restored to the regime by a return to political pluralism within the soviets.
Unpractical People
The Russian Civil War was an unnecessary war. It was a war brought about by Lenin when he wrecked the Railway Workers’ Union talks on 4 November 1917, but held in check by the political crisis brought about by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. That crisis led Lenin to amend his strategy, but not his vision. His vision was a muddled version of Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, his strategy at first a European-wide revolutionary insurrection to turn the First World War into an international civil war. He did not abandon his vision, but realized that in the absence of an international civil war he would have to impose his views through a civil war in Russia, and could do so by relying on the greed of the German imperialists. The German alliance enabled him to win the difficult civil war with Russian patriotic socialists; he could manage the easy civil war with the White generals without any assistance.
But once this unnecessary civil war had started, why did the regime established by the patriotic socialists collapse so ignominiously, especially since by the autumn of 1918 the Bolsheviks had so little popular support and the SRs appeared to have retained the support of the peasantry? The British consul Lindley talked in his letter to Foreign Minister Balfour of the difficulty of working with ‘unpractical people’ like the leaders of the URR; the failure of Russian patriotic socialists to overthrow the Bolshevik dictatorship could well have such a simple explanation. There were, of course, other reasons, but if what was meant by unpracticability was an absence of the sort of political ruthlessness shown by their opponents on both left and right, then Lindley’s judgement had more than a grain of truth in it.
At one level the URR leaders were very practical people. They nearly succeeded in turning a disaster into a triumph. The URR would certainly have succeeded if the Allies’ ‘great enterprise’ had all gone according to plan. If the Czechoslovaks had started moving towards Archangel on 22 May 1918 they would have arrived in position spread out along the track from Archangel to Vologda well before General Poole’s full complement arrived on 23 June 1918; Savinkov’s insurrection would then have been a success in the first week of July, and Chaikovskii would have found himself at the head of a URR administration commanding a new Eastern Front extending from Archangel to Kazan. When none of these things happened, the URR set about retrieving a near impossible situation.
Their greatest triumph was to win round the SRs to the idea of a directory. The mutiny of the Czechoslovak Legion was responsible for involving the SRs in the ‘great enterprise’, by agreeing to help the insurgents in Samara. This chance act opened up divisions between the URR and the SRs about the future role of the Constituent Assembly, divisions which severely weakened the anti-Bolshevik front; at the very moment Kazan fell to the insurgent People’s Army, antagonism between the Samara, Urals and Siberian governments was at its height and the so-called customs war in full swing. Yet these antagonisms were overcome: the directory, despite all the disagreements, was formed; and although the Vologda plan might have to be abandoned, the Vyatka route towards a new British, Czechoslovak and People’s Army rendezvous remained viable. The ‘unpractical’ politicians had actually achieved quite a lot by the autumn of 1918.
Where their lack of practicality was evident, however, was in military matters. Both in Archangel and Omsk the army interpreted the actions of the URR administrations as interference in military affairs, and used this to justify their unconstitutional activities. And yet not even in Samara was it official policy to establish political commissars in the army. For all the complaints from officers about ‘hidden commissars’, and the activities of cultural education units, the army was left to itself as a point of principle, since the politicization of the army was widely seen as one of the causes for the Provisional Government’s collapse. On the eve of Admiral Kolchak’s coup, General Boldyrev was en route to destroy once and for all the idea of volunteer party militias. In retrospect this was a profound error of judgement, he should have been using the same vigour to enforce the sort of political commissar system operated by the Bolsheviks; an army committed to the Constituent Assembly would have been less willing to act against the directory.
During the Volga campaign of August-September 1918 the Red Army took a much more determined approach to the politicization of the army and forged a command structure that would ultimately lead it to victory. The old army leaders were finally removed from office, the Supreme War Council wound up and the political commissar system used to determined effect. But it was not simply a question of organization. Trotsky showed in his command of the Red Army all the ruthlessness seen since the moment the Bolsheviks seized power. The battle at the Romanov bridge, the key to the recapture of Kazan, was closely fought and during it a Red Army unit deserted; Trotsky’s response was to shoot one man in ten, killing twenty in all.11 This was the sort of determined use of terror of which he had boasted back on 29 November 1917 when he had told the Soviet Executive:
You wax indignant at the naked terror which we are applying against our class enemies, but let me tell you that in one month’s time at the most it will assume more frightful forms, modelled on the terror of the great French revolutionaries. Not the fortress but the guillotine will await our enemies …12
The unpractical people of the URR could not so easily resort to terror, indeed in Archangel the question of restoring the death penalty had almost brought the directorate down. At the lowest point in the life of the Omsk directory, when it was forced into a humiliating deal with the administrative council of the Siberian government, Avksentiev stressed: ‘I will not have on my conscience unleashing a civil war in the anti-Bolshevik camp’. Lenin was less troubled by his conscience; little had changed since he had written back on 30 August 1917: ‘we must speak about [taking power] as little as possible in agitation (remembering very well that even tomorrow events may put us in power and then we will not let it go)’.13 An excess of conscience was perhaps that element of ‘unpracticality’ that Lindley found so infuriating in the Russian patriotic socialists with whom he worked.
Notes
1. Lloyd George Papers, F/29/1/27.
2. R. Debo, Revolution and Survival (Liverpool 1979), pp. 349–51.
3. E. Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London 1987), p. 66; B. Pearce, How Haig saved Lenin (Basingstoke 1987), p. 69.
4. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) 144.1.22.12, 144.1.22.21, 144.1.22.23.
5. S.P. Melgunov, Krasnyi terror v Rossii (New York 1979), p. 45. For Martov, see V. Brovkin, The Mensheviks After October (Cornell 1987), p. 282.
6. War Cabinet 502.
7. V.N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War (Princeton 1994) pp. 25, 31; for the rumours reaching British agents, see P. Dukes, Red Dusk and the Morrow (New York 1922), p. 67.
8. Brovkin, Behind, p. 41; L.M. Spirin, Klassy i partii v grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii, 1917–20 (Moscow 1968), p. 297; M. Jansen, A Show Trial under Lenin (The Hague 1982), p. 5.
9. Jansen, Show Trial, pp. 6–8, 31; Brovkin, Behind, pp. 25, 39, 42–5.
10. Jansen, Show Trial, pp. 53, 77.
11. Mawdsley, Civil War, pp. 67, 69.
12. J.L.H. Keep (ed.), The Debate on Soviet Power: the Minutes of VTsIK, Second Convocation (Oxford 1979), p. 177.
13. For Avksentiev, see I. Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya Kontrrevolyutsiya (Moscow 1923), p. 310; for Lenin, see Collected Works (Moscow 1960) vol. 25, p. 263.