Chapter Three
Despite the breakdown in the Railway Workers’ Union talks, the Red versus Green civil war did not start up again at once. Although Lenin had refused to agree to the formation of a coalition socialist government – the proposal that the Railway Workers’ Union and a majority of socialists felt was the essential basis for peace between the Bolsheviks and SRs – Lenin had agreed that the Constituent Assembly elections should go ahead; this they did within a week of the conciliatory Bolsheviks storming out of Lenin’s government.
For the SRs, the elections to the Constituent Assembly obviated the necessity for civil war. The SRs argued that they would win the elections and the Bolsheviks would then transfer power to them. On the first point the SRs were right: they won the Constituent Assembly elections; but on the second point they were completely wrong: Lenin had no intention of transferring power to the SRs. Like a rugby football player under pressure from all sides Lenin treated the Constituent Assembly elections as a desperate kick for touch; it would buy time and relieve his struggling government until external forces came to his aid. For in the weeks immediately after the seizure of power, Lenin believed that world revolution was imminent.
Lenin’s theory of Russia being the weak link in a chain of interlocking imperialist countries presupposed that a socialist revolution in Russia would quickly spread to other countries, and Germany in particular, as workers throughout Europe turned against their governments, transforming the First World War into a Europe-wide civil war. Despite the revolutionary unrest in Finland in December 1917, nothing went according to plan in the six weeks between the Constituent Assembly elections and the moment deputies began to assemble in Petrograd. By January 1918 Lenin had concluded that world revolution would not happen in the foreseeable future and certainly not before the Constituent Assembly opened, that German imperialism was still in the field, and that if his regime were to survive he would have to look for a different source of external support. Thus his decision to sign a separate peace with the German imperialists. However, this epoch-making decision was not made after any detailed analysis of the condition of the international labour movement – the revolutionary general strikes in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest of late January 1918 had still not taken place – the decision was forced on Lenin by the domestic political agenda, how should the Bolshevik Party react to the SRs’ victory in the Constituent Assembly elections. Rather than come to terms with the SR-dominated Constituent Assembly, Lenin preferred betraying the international labour movement by signing the Brest-Litovsk peace with Imperial Germany, thus keeping open the danger of a Red versus Green civil war within Russia.
The Elections to the Constituent Assembly
Between Lenin’s announcement on 4 November 1917 that the Bolsheviks would rule alone and their decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly on 5 January 1918, Russia was in a curious state of limbo. The Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks alone, headed the government, but that government was universally seen as an interim administration until the Constituent Assembly met. In the debates within the Bolshevik Central Committee about the fate of the Railway Workers’ Union compromise and the possibility of sharing power in a coalition government ‘from Popular Socialists to Bolsheviks’, Lenin had got his way by securing the crucial support of centrists like Sokolnikov and Stalin; but Sokolnikov expected power to be ceded to the Constituent Assembly. He had stated publicly ‘power will not remain in our hands for long: we are not planning to delay the Constituent Assembly; we will assemble it immediately after the elections and transfer power to it’. And the official position of Lenin’s government was that it had established a ‘provisional workers’ and peasants’ government’ pending the Constituent Assembly. That the Soviet Executive still expected this arrangement to hold was evident from the fact that on 8 November it agreed to set up a Finance Commission to control the expenditure of funds requested by the Council of People’s Commissars ‘until the Constituent Assembly meets’.1
There were other clear signs that, whatever Lenin may have felt in his heart of hearts, whatever hopes he might have had of world revolution breaking out before the Constituent Assembly could convene, the majority on the Bolshevik Central Committee still assumed its administration to be purely temporary and would soon cede power to a socialist coalition administration, since this was seen as the most likely outcome of the Constituent Assembly elections. Indeed Bolshevik propaganda posters for the Constituent Assembly election campaign made clear that by voting Bolshevik, people would be voting for a party prepared to take the lead in forming a socialist coalition government.2 This reflected the continuing influence of Kamenev, who despite his resignation from the government and Bolshevik Central Committee on 4 November, was on 6 November nominated by the Soviet Executive as both a member of its presidium and the person heading the department overseeing the Constituent Assembly elections; he also served on the editorial team running the soviet newspaper Izvestiya. No doubt because of this continuing conciliatory activity Kamenev was ordered by the Bolshevik Central Committee to leave all his official posts in the Soviet Executive on 8 November.3
For Bolsheviks like Kamenev, who took the Constituent Assembly elections seriously and wanted the Bolsheviks to work with the assembly, it was important that it should adequately reflect the divisions which had emerged within the SR Party since the Kornilov rebellion. The issue was this: the SR electoral lists had been drawn up before the Kornilov rebellion, before the consequent ‘second revolution’ had radically changed many party members’ attitude to the continued existence of a coalition government. The lists favoured the more conservative SR establishment, rather than dissidents, and, of course, predated the decision of the Left SRs to form a separate party. Thus, when discussing the Constituent Assembly elections on 6 November the Soviet Executive raised the possibility of delaying the poll so that a separate electoral list could be drawn up for the newly formed Left SR Party. Its leaders, however, decided against such action, since they confidently expected to win over a hundred seats.4
Thus on 8 November the Soviet Executive resolved that the elections should go ahead as planned on 12 November. The results of the Constituent Assembly elections, in which the turnout was approximately 55 per cent, gave the Bolsheviks 23.7 per cent of the vote and the SR Party 37.3 per cent, although if the votes of allied parties like the Ukrainian SRs were added to these the SRs had won approximately 50 per cent of the votes. In terms of the numbers of deputies elected, the combined total for the SR Party and its allies was 54 per cent and the Bolsheviks 24 per cent. Thus, as the details began to come in after 15 November, the picture emerged of a spectacular SR triumph. The SRs had clearly won and had scored particularly well in the Volga provinces. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, had done far worse than the 30 per cent or so that Kamenev had hoped for; but they had retained their solid working-class support in Petrograd and the central industrial region. As to the Kadets, their overall vote at 7 per cent and a mere seventeen deputies was derisory, but in Moscow and in Petrograd their vote had increased since the local elections in August and September to 35 per cent and 26 per cent respectively.
For conciliatory Bolsheviks like Kamenev the only good news in these results was the fact that the SRs did not have an absolute majority; they needed the support of the Ukrainian SRs, well to the left of the mainstream of the party. There were other signs that the SR majority might be whittled away in time. A large number of unofficial peasant lists put up in opposition to the official SR candidates had been successful, and potentially more significant still, in nine areas – Petrograd City, Petrograd Province, Kaluga, Kazan, Ufa, Poltava, Kharkov, Kherson and the Baltic Fleet – those elected as SRs had been nominated by party organizations which were after October 1917 in the hands of the Left SRs.5 Things would have been easier if the Left SRs had won the hundred seats they had hoped for and the Bolsheviks the one-third of the vote they had anticipated – then the Bolsheviks and Left SRs could have formed a coalition socialist government which commanded a majority in the Constituent Assembly – but it was still possible that some sort of arrangement might be reached between the Bolsheviks, Left SRs and dissident peasant deputies. The chances of this happening were reinforced by the results of elections to the Extraordinary Congress of Peasant Soviets which assembled in Petrograd on 10 November and gave a small but significant victory to the Left SRs.
The Left SR victory at the Extraordinary Congress of Peasant Soviets did not resolve the question of how to form a government responsible to the Constituent Assembly, but it did help point to a possible way forward. First, it meant that until the Constituent Assembly convened, the Soviet Executive, elected at the Second Congress of Soviets, and the Peasant Soviet Executive, elected at the Extraordinary Congress of Peasant Soviets, could form a joint executive to which Lenin’s government could be held responsible, a joint executive representing the vast majority of Russia’s population. Thus the Extraordinary Congress of Peasant Soviets endorsed a resolution which demanded that the two central soviet executives should merge on the basis of parity; a new government should then be formed comprising representatives of all the socialist parties ‘from Popular Socialists to Bolsheviks’, but bound by the programme endorsed at the Second Congress of Soviets. As the only two parties to endorse the programme of the Second Congress of Soviets were the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, this resolution opened the way for the formation of a Bolshevik-Left SR coalition government.
Negotiations then began which resulted in the membership of the Soviet Executive being dramatically expanded along lines not dissimilar to those proposed in the Railway Workers’ Union talks. The agreed compromise was reached on 14 November and on 15 November the new structure of the Soviet Executive was announced: there would be 108 representatives from the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets; 108 representatives from the peasants’ soviets; 100 representatives from the army and navy committees; 35 representatives from the trades unions; 10 representatives from the Railway Workers’ Union; and 5 representatives from the Post and Telegraph Workers’ Union. The agreement was welcomed by conciliatory Bolsheviks, by the Left SRs, and by the Railway Workers’ Union. The constitutional principles underlying the relationship between this new Soviet Executive and Lenin’s government were agreed on 17 November when it was established that the government was responsible to the Soviet Executive acting as a kind of interim parliament; all legislation and ordinances had to be confirmed by the Soviet Executive; counter-revolutionary measures were the concern of the government, but actions related to such measures had to be accounted for to the Soviet Executive; government ministers had to give weekly reports to the Soviet Executive; and ‘parliamentary’ questions from the Soviet Executive, supported by fifteen signatures, had to be answered by the government at once. These arrangements were finally endorsed when the Second Congress of Peasant Soviets took place on 27 November; thereafter the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition could be formally established on 8 December with the Left SRs taking up four government posts.6
However, forming a Bolshevik-Left SR coalition was only the first part of the problem faced by those wanting to construct a government which might have a majority in the Constituent Assembly. There was no weakening of the Left SRs’, and indeed the Railway Workers’ Union’s resolve to convene the Constituent Assembly, and the Second Congress of Peasant Soviets insisted that it should assemble on time,7 but the dogged fact which would not go away was this: unless the Left SRs found some way to increase their representation at the expense of the victorious SRs, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs together would never command a majority. But, in nine parts of the country the Left SRs had captured control of party organizations represented in the Constituent Assembly by SRs. Could this not be ‘put right’, as it were, by the local soviets in these regions demanding the recall of their Constituent Assembly deputies?
The Constituent Assembly and the Soviets
The idea of some sort of continuing relationship between the Constituent Assembly and the soviets was not new. It had been raised by Kamenev in the paper he and Zinoviev wrote after the Bolshevik Central Committee had agreed on 10 October that an insurrection was ‘inevitable’; in this paper they noted ‘the Constituent Assembly and the soviets – here is the mixed type of state institution we are going towards’.8 Precisely what Kamenev and Zinoviev envisaged was left vague at the time, but after the Constituent Assembly elections, the suggestion that the soviet might bring popular pressure to bear on the Constituent Assembly was formalized into the right to recall deputies. The soviets had always had the right to recall deputies; if workers felt their deputies were not performing properly they could be recalled at any time. Instituting the same procedure for Constituent Assembly deputies would accelerate the process already seen during the elections themselves of unofficial radical peasant lists being elected in opposition to the SR Party establishment.
On 21 November, once the results of the Constituent Assembly elections were known in outline, Lenin went to the Soviet Executive to propose that the right of recall be extended to Constituent Assembly deputies: the electoral rules would have to be revised to allow this ‘exercise of the people’s revolutionary will’, it might be difficult to do, given the system of proportional representation which had been used in the elections, but such technicalities would have to be overcome. The problem was, he went on, that the SRs were ‘a party which no longer exists’ and therefore the results did not fairly reflect the voters’ sentiments, ‘but there is no need to be afraid of the results if the right of re-election is introduced … the right of recall should be given to the soviets [and] in this way power can pass from one party to another bloodlessly, by means of re-elections’. A Left SR spokesman endorsed the idea wholeheartedly, although he felt a constituency-based referendum on recall might be a better way of organizing things than giving the power to the soviets. The Soviet Executive then endorsed the principle of recall, leaving the details of how it was to be implemented to a commission.9
If the right of recall were to be exercised in a planned way, and to effect the political outlook of the Constituent Assembly, the assembly itself could not gather as planned on 28 November. Equally, if the hope was to organize the recall of certain deputies under soviet pressure, the affairs of the Constituent Assembly could not be left in the hands of the commission established by the Provisional Government. So on 23 November the members of the Electoral Commission were arrested, and on the 27th it was announced that the assembly could not open until a quorum of 50 per cent, or 400 deputies, had arrived in Petrograd. It was one thing to delay the Constituent Assembly, quite another to envisage how to implement the policy of the Constituent Assembly and soviets. When the Bolshevik Central Committee addressed the question, only one proposal was put forward. N.I. Bukharin suggested that the liberal Kadets should be expelled from the assembly, thus transforming it into a ‘Revolutionary Convention’; but while this was supported by Trotsky, it was opposed by Stalin and no decision was taken.10 The Left SRs seemed similarly uncertain. At the Soviet Executive session on 1 December they denounced the ‘arbitrary and repressive’ action taken in arresting the members of the Constituent Assembly Electoral Commission, but then went on to welcome Bukharin’s suggestion. They wanted the people to decide how best to merge the Constituent Assembly and the soviets, and agreed that ‘we should seek to turn the Constituent Assembly into a Revolutionary Convention’. Supporting this same line the Soviet Executive passed a resolution declining to guarantee that ‘both the socialist and bourgeois’ sections of the assembly would be summoned.11
However, as the Bolshevik deputies to the Constituent Assembly began to gather in Petrograd, it was clear that many of them, while happy to go along with the recall of deputies, were unimpressed with the idea of excluding any deputies at all, including the Kadets, from any new Revolutionary Convention formed by the Constituent Assembly and the soviets. The Bolshevik deputies, like all parliamentary party groups, elected a bureau to run their affairs; those elected to that bureau were all the key Bolshevik conciliators who had resigned on 4 November. By 11 December the Central Committee was seriously concerned that the deputies were getting out of control: it debated the worrying development that they had adopted ‘right-wing’ attitudes and Lenin proposed that the way forward was to ‘remove the bureau’, to issue some theses on the situation and ‘remind them of party rules that all representative bodies come under Central Committee authority’; a Central Committee representative should also be appointed to guide the group. Lenin’s proposal was accepted, and in a move reminiscent of the 4 November resignation crisis, all Bolshevik deputies to the Constituent Assembly were instructed to sign an undertaking to resign if the Central Committee so requested. When the parliamentary group assembled on 12 December with Sokolnikov and Bukharin as the Central Committee’s representatives they were told for the first time that the Constituent Assembly might have to be dissolved.12
In public the Bolshevik Party was still talking about an arrangement whereby the Constituent Assembly and the soviets could be transformed into a Revolutionary Convention, but by mid-December 1917 two views had developed concerning timing. To those around Kamenev there was no hurry, the Constituent Assembly needed to be convened and then ‘tested’; if it failed to respond to the needs of the time, radical deputies could then walk out and form a Revolutionary Convention. But this idea was attacked in Pravda on 20 December which criticized the ‘constitutional illusions’ of those who defended it. The other view, put in the Soviet Executive two days later, was that the Constituent Assembly should not be allowed this ‘test’ proposed by Kamenev and that moves to form a Revolutionary Convention between it and the soviets should begin at once. Thus when the government announced on 20 December that the Constituent Assembly would convene on 5 January 1918, the Bolshevik spokesman informed delegates at the same time that the Third Congress of Soviets and Third Congress of Peasant Soviets would be brought forward by two weeks ‘so that when the Constituent Assembly meets the opinion of the oppressed classes on the most important questions of the day may be represented’. What the Bolsheviks proposed after 20 December was that a Revolutionary Convention could be formed by a simultaneous session of the Constituent Assembly and the two congresses of soviets.13
The attitude of the Left SRs was more or less the same. On 21 December they held talks with their former comrades in the SR Party. If they had hoped to win them over to the sort of Constituent Assembly–soviet arrangement envisaged by the government coalition they were mistaken. A week later the Left SR paper Znamya truda described the Revolutionary Convention in terms of the Constituent Assembly continuing in being as a rump parliament surrounded by the soviets. When they and the Bolsheviks began working out details of just how precisely a joint session of the Constituent Assembly and the soviets might operate, Lenin insisted that the only way forward was to take a hard line. On 3 January the Soviet Executive debated the question of a Revolutionary Convention and decided to offer the assembly an ultimatum. The Constituent Assembly had the chance of joining with the Third Congress of Soviets to form a Revolutionary Convention only if it accepted the Declaration of the Rights of Labouring and Exploited People, adopted by the Soviet Executive the same day; this committed the assembly to accepting the principle of the right of soviets to recall Constituent Assembly deputies. The same Soviet Executive meeting adopted an ordinance which stated that since the declaration made clear that all power rested with the soviets ‘any attempt by any individual or institution to appropriate any function of state authority will be regarded as a counter-revolutionary act and suppressed’; powers were taken to dissolve the assembly in the event of non-compliance.14
When the Constituent Assembly held its only session on 5 January 1918 it quickly endorsed a land reform programme submitted by the SR Party and endorsed the peace negotiations that had begun with the Germans; it was not these social issues that the SRs refused to support in the government’s programme, but the Declaration of the Rights of Labouring and Exploited People. When the Bolshevik I.M. Sverdlov asked on behalf of the Soviet Executive that the deputies accept the declaration ‘as the basis on which you can enter the coming convention with the Third Soviet Congress’, his tone was offensive:
you have spent months in betraying the revolution to the Kadets. Therefore the only authority that can have the confidence of the proletariat and the peasantry is that of the soviets, and the Constituent Assembly can only serve the revolution if it recognizes the proletarian dictatorship and the removal of the propertied classes from political rights.15
When the assembly still would not accept the declaration, it was dissolved. Sverdlov’s denunciation of the bourgeoisie was picked up by Lenin in a special session of the Soviet Executive to debate the dissolution. Riding roughshod over the conciliatory Bolsheviks who argued that the assembly should not have been dissolved before it could have been tested by ‘confronting it with the Third Congress of Soviets’, Lenin said:
so long as Kaledin exists, so long as the slogan ‘all power to the Constituent Assembly’ masks the slogan ‘down with soviet power’ civil war is inevitable, for we shall not for anything in the world surrender soviet power.16
The Missing White Counter-Revolution
If Lenin were to be taken at face value, the greatest threat to his government came from General Kaledin, one of the key figures in the Kornilov affair, and the ‘bourgeois’ counter-revolution being organized on the river Don by other White generals. However, while it is true that the ‘bourgeoisie’ caused Lenin’s regime some momentary discomfiture, the counter-revolutionary forces gathering in the cossack heartland of the Don were never a serious force until the autumn of 1918. The White counter-revolution was a mirage, but a useful one since it provided Lenin with a ready justification for his attack on the Constituent Assembly.
It was only in the very first days after Lenin’s seizure of power that the liberals posed anything like a ‘counter-revolutionary’ threat. After the arrest of the Provisional Government, the so-called Minor Council of Ministers, comprising various junior ministers, continued to meet clandestinely as an ‘underground’ Provisional Government, assembling almost daily until 16 November. The key figure in this was Countess Sophia Panina, the Assistant Minister of Education, in whose house the clandestine counter-government usually met. Although they hoped in the long run to reinstate Kerensky’s government, their main activities were to frustrate the Bolsheviks by exercising continued control over the civil service and instituting a policy of non-cooperation, thus depriving the Bolshevik government of funds. The Assistant Minister of Finance, the Kadet A.G. Khrushchev, diverted 42 million roubles belonging to Kerensky’s government into foreign bank accounts or the account of the Petrograd City Council, acting on the express orders of the former Industry Minister A.I. Konovalov, whom Kerensky had nominated ‘Acting Prime Minister’ as he left Petrograd, and this money was used to fund the civil servant strike which lasted nearly two months. These actions undoubtedly troubled Lenin’s government, especially since these clandestine moves against the Bolsheviks were accompanied by a very vociferous Kadet campaign from the city council: A.I. Shingarev in particular used his position there to lambast the government on every conceivable occasion and cheerfully proposed expelling the Bolshevik delegates from the council. As a former minister in Prince Lvov’s government, and the leading Kadet in Petrograd at the time, he was the defacto leader of the party and his speeches turned the council into a continual anti-Bolshevik rally. His efforts were rewarded by an increase in the Kadet vote to 26.2 per cent in the Constituent Assembly’s Petrograd constituencies elections.
Lenin’s first move against this Kadet enterprise came on 16 November. When the city council announced plans to organize a welcome for the Constituent Assembly, the government decided to close it down. Then, when on 23 November the Bolsheviks instructed the Constituent Assembly Electoral Commission to wind up its affairs, the Kadet-dominated commission refused and its deputy chairman V.D. Nabokov and others were promptly arrested, although they were released five days later. On 27 November, when the government announced that the Constituent Assembly, instead of opening as promised on 28 November, could not meet until a quorum of 50 per cent had been achieved, the Kadet Central Committee met under Shingarev’s leadership at Panina’s flat: they decided to turn up as if nothing had happened and try to establish a temporary presidium until the assembly was quorate, but they were arrested on the morning of 28th. Other members of the electoral commission gathered on 28 October at the Tauride Palace, where the Constituent Assembly was due to meet, and established a commission to welcome the delegates, but hearing of the arrest of the Kadet Central Committee and fearing for their own safety, they abandoned the attempt. This marked the end of any serious Kadet opposition to the government. On 1 December the Minor Council of Ministers issued a farewell statement which not only denounced the Bolsheviks but was highly critical of the behaviour of the SRs and Mensheviks in doing nothing to help bring back Kerensky’s legitimate government but instead supporting the creation of a socialist coalition.17
The reality was that, whatever its success in November, the Kadets’ opposition to the government had been abandoned by the start of December. They could still embarrass the government – between 10–19 December Petrograd was entertained by the trial of Countess Panina, who cheerfully admitted she had been in possession of 93,000 roubles from the Ministry of Education, but pointed out that she had merely prevented these public funds of the Third Coalition Government from being handed over to a non-governmental political organization, the Bolshevik ‘government’; sentenced to be detained until the sum was repaid, by 19 December the Women’s University in Petrograd had organized a collection and obtained her release.18 Systematic, organized opposition by the Kadets, however, was over.
And yet it was the Kadets who bore the brunt of the government’s criticism. After the attempt to open the Constituent Assembly on 28 November, it was the Kadet Party which was declared to be the ‘enemy of the people’. For the government, what the Kadets were trying to do was clear: by their campaign in Petrograd and their constant focus on the Constituent Assembly they were trying to get legality for what was happening on the Don, where General Kaledin was gathering his White forces for an armed counter-revolution. On 29 November Lenin’s government proclaimed: ‘there must be no place in the Constituent Assembly for enemies of the people, for land-owners and capitalists’. For Lenin the links between the Kadets and Kaledin’s activity on the Don were self-evident. Addressing the Soviet Executive on 1 December he pointed out:
we have introduced the right to recall, so that the Constituent Assembly will not be the sort of gathering which the bourgeoisie dreamed of … The Kadets scream ‘all power to the Constituent Assembly’ but in fact this means ‘all power to Kaledin’ …19
Links between the Kadet Party and the Don region did indeed go back a long way. Before the February Revolution the leading Kadet M.S. Adzhemov had represented the cossack territory of the Don in the Tsar’s Duma. In 1917 further links had begun to be forged as early as May when V.A. Kharlamov, president of the Don-Kuban Committee of the All-Russian Land Union, was elected to the Kadet Central Committee. Their interest in the region increased when the Provisional Government introduced a measure of regional autonomy to the cossack lands by recognizing as the local authority for the Don area the so-called Don Krug, with powers to elect a regional authority known as a Voisko government headed by an elected leader or ataman; General Kaledin was elected the first Don ataman towards the end of June. Kadet politicians were keen to exploit the traditional conservatism and patriotism of the Don cossacks to electoral advantage, and during May and June 1917 the leading Kadets Shingarev and Adzhemov toured the Don country to campaign for the establishment of a joint cossack-Kadet list in the Constituent Assembly elections. In June 1917 Milyukov and Nabokov, both members of the Kadet Central Committee, took care to address the Second All-Russian Cossack Congress when it met in Petrograd. By August it looked as if an electoral pact between the Kadets and the cossacks had been agreed and a joint list of candidates drawn up; however, these negotiations eventually foundered on the question of land rights for non-cossack inhabitants of the Don region, and the pact collapsed even before the Constituent Assembly elections had been held.20
In August 1917 the Don featured prominently in Kornilov’s military plans. Kaledin was to have been a key player in the conspiracy, particularly when it came to moving troops up towards Moscow. Kaledin had vigorously denounced Kerensky’s government at a session of the Moscow State Conference, and had made little attempt to hide his support for Kornilov. On 29 August, as the crisis developed, Kaledin announced that he intended to support Kornilov and threatened to cut communications between Moscow and the south. The same day he persuaded the Don Voisko government to order all cossack forces to obey only their ataman, Kaledin himself, and not Kerensky’s government. To Kerensky this was rebellion and Kaledin was dismissed as ataman.
After the Kornilov crisis was over, Kerensky had to decide what to do about Kaledin, who, unlike the other plotters, had not been arrested. Kaledin relied on the support of his Don government. On 3 September not only the government but the entire elected assembly, the Krug, met in the regional capital Novocherkassk and remained in session for an entire week to debate the future of Kaledin. Faced with this display of popular support, Kerensky began to back down. On 4 September he informed Novocherkassk that Kaledin would not be arrested, but should come to GHQ to report to the Investigating Commission. Then, at the end of the week, a delegation from the government and soviet arrived to request the surrender of Kaledin; the Krug assembly refused. By 8 September Kerensky had cut his losses and announced that there was insufficient evidence to implicate Kaledin; he added that in some respects he had even been misinformed of Kaledin’s activities. During the confrontation Kaledin denied he had ever participated in Kornilov’s plot, or that he favoured autonomy for the Don; he conceded only that if Kornilov had taken power, those cossack military units formed on the Don would have stayed on the Don.21
This concern for Don regionalism or Don autonomy was crucial to Kaledin retaining his power base and avoiding arrest, but a constant weakness for those liberal politicians hoping to put the cossacks to their own purposes, as seen by their complete misreading of the cossacks’ attitude to the land rights of the non-cossack population. As the authority of Kerensky’s government disappeared after the failure to bring Kaledin to book, moves towards autonomy gathered pace. On 20 September representatives of the Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, Kalmyk, Ural and Dagestan cossacks met in the southern town of Vladikavkaz and formed the South East Union; its twin aims were the establishment of a Russian Democratic Federal Republic and the fight against Bolshevism. The South East Union chose as its capital Ekaterinodar and the Kadet Kharlamov was to be its head. However, a question mark was soon put over the future of the union when on 30 October, after the Bolshevik seizure of power, a separate Don Republic was proclaimed.22
Thus although the Don seemed the natural focus for liberal counter-revolutionaries, the regionalism of the local population meant that they were uncertain of the welcome they would receive. Counter-revolutionary forces began to concentrate on the Don after 2 November, the day former Commander-in-Chief General Alekseev arrived there; he immediately appealed for the formation of a Volunteer Army which would continue the war with Germany, but his appeal met little response among the local population since many younger cossacks were opposed to the war. Only fellow officers in flight rallied to him, and although from the Bolsheviks’ point of view the activities of leading Kadets like A. Tyrkova-Williams showed a clear Kadet–Don conspiracy – her Petrograd flat became a staging post for officers fleeing to the Don – it was easy to overestimate this danger. The reality was that tension was high between the cossack population, on whom Kaledin’s authority rested, and the incoming liberal volunteer officers.
By the end of November many important Kadet politicians had gathered on the Don. Milyukov had moved there from Moscow; Khrushchev had arrived with some of the funds he had appropriated from the State Bank; and Novosiltsev, leader of the Officers’ Union, had also made the hazardous journey. They were joined by Kornilov himself on 3 December, who had escaped from detention with his fellow conspirators on 19 November and spent an eventful two weeks dodging Bolshevik patrols. The problem for the new arrivals was that the Kadets had failed to foresee the indifference of the local population. At one point Kaledin even asked Alekseev and the Kadet officer volunteers to leave his capital town Novocherkassk, but the Bolshevik attack on nearby Rostov on Don at the end of November 1917 brought the two groups together again.
The Bolshevik commander V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko had been given the task of martialling Red Guard units from Petrograd, Moscow, Kharkov, the Donbass and Odessa to take action against the Don counter-revolution. On 25 November local Bolsheviks succeeded in seizing power in Rostov and Antonov-Ovseenko sent his units in to support them. Kaledin’s forces counter-attacked, but after three days fierce fighting the Bolsheviks were still in control. Thus at that time when the Kadet Party in Petrograd was anathematized as the ‘enemies of the people’, its forces on the Don were more or less on the run.23 Only on 2 December, when supported by Alekseev’s Volunteer Army, did Kaledin succeed in retaking the city and driving the Bolsheviks from Rostov. After this joint action Kaledin allowed the Volunteer Army to carry arms in public, something he had refused to agree to until then.
The situation would scarcely improve in the following two months. During December all the old tensions among the Kornilov plotters began to resurface. Kornilov saw no need for a political apparatus, but Alekseev and his Kadet advisors did. The issue was resolved on 18 December when the politicians and generals held a large and at times vitriolic conference, during which it was agreed to establish a sort of triumvirate on the Don: Alekseev would be in charge of politics, Kornilov in charge of the military campaign, and Kaledin in charge of Don affairs. Alekseev’s role was perhaps the most important for the long term. His Special Council, dominated by Kadet politicians like Struve, Milyukov and Prince G.N. Trubetskoi, came out against the Constituent Assembly even before it had had a chance to assemble. The Constituent Assembly, it was argued, had not fairly represented the views of the people: it would therefore be the job of the Volunteer Army to stand guard over the country’s civil liberties until the country could express its will by electing a new Constituent Assembly; this was an open call for the establishment of a military dictatorship.24
By 10 January 1918 Bolshevik forces were ready to start a co-ordinated anti-Kaledin campaign, again led by Antonov-Ovseenko. On 17 January, in an effort to distance itself from wavering cossack support and rely on the bourgeois citizenry of a Russian town, the Volunteer Army moved its base from Novocherkassk to Rostov. But, despite the arrival of such prominent liberal figures as Rodzianko and N.N. Lvov, the local population raised little money to support them, and financial support promised from Moscow never arrived. By the end of January Kaledin’s military situation appeared to be so tenuous that the Volunteer Army decided to retreat to the Kuban, leaving Novocherkassk to soviet occupation; by 24 February Rostov had been recaptured by the Bolsheviks. As the volunteers’ retreat continued, Ekaterinodar, the nominal capital of the once proclaimed South East Union, fell to the Red Army in mid-March. Its recapture on 12 April 1918 did little to help the morale of the volunteers, since Kornilov was killed in the fighting. The Volunteer Army was at rock bottom and after its retreat beyond the Don, the cossack government collapsed in crisis. Kaledin committed suicide and the Don cossacks elected as their new ataman General Krasnov, who established a stable regime only by agreeing to co-operate with the Germans.25
Thus, at the time of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 5 January 1918, the counter-revolutionary threat from the Kadets had virtually disappeared. Their forces on the Don were already in check, and the party itself had dropped all interest in the Constituent Assembly as the salvation of Russia, preferring instead to pin its hopes on a military dictatorship – to be led by generals who were about to be sent into an ignominious rout. The Bolsheviks had won this skirmish in the White versus Red civil war, the war against the generals, as easily as the soviet had prevented Kornilov seizing power in his rebellion: any counter-revolution Lenin would have to face in January 1918 would not come from the Whites but the Greens, the SRs, the victors in the Constituent Assembly elections.
The SRs and the Constituent Assembly
When the Kadet politicians turned up on 28 November 1917 to try to open the Constituent Assembly on the planned date, an act for which they were declared ‘enemies of the people’, they found themselves outnumbered by SRs and their supporters, with the SR mayor of Petrograd G.I. Shreider in the chair and Chernov making a speech promising that the Constituent Assembly would give peace, land and freedom. The SRs’ dominant position reflected the fact that a week earlier, on 22 November, they had set up the Committee to Defend the Constituent Assembly under the leadership of the veteran Popular Socialist Chaikovskii; from that time on the Constituent Assembly was very much an SR concern. They dominated the proposed welcoming committee on 28 November, which included both Chernov and Chaikovskii. Of the 46 deputies who attended this first attempt to open the assembly, 37 were SRs, including Zenzinov, Sorokin, Ya T. Dedusenko, and N.P. Oganskii - all fey figures in the summer of 1918. Sorokin took an especially high profile.26
The attempt to open the Constituent Assembly on 28 November coincided with the Fourth Congress of the SR Party, which took place from 26 November to 5 December. This was a triumph for the cautious policies of the Central Committee led by Chernov. By an overwhelming majority (126–7) it voted to adopt a ‘businesslike’ approach to the Constituent Assembly. As Chernov himself recalled, the party should:
counter-pose the Bolshevik method of giving out unobtainable promises with the tactic of serious and well-thought-out legislation, divorced from any opportunist compromise. In the first rank that meant addressing the questions of peace, land, control of production, and the restructuring of the Russian Republic on federal principles; equally all issues of social policy should be linked to the task of demobilizing the army and industry.
The party would put these issues to the masses and eschew any thoughts of plotting terrorist activity. Those on the right of the party who had been so quick to take up arms against the Bolsheviks in October were to be kept in check.27
SR deputies to the assembly gathered in Petrograd throughout December - by the end of December some 250 had arrived - and met almost daily under the leadership of an elected bureau whose membership included Argunov, Gendelman, S.S. Maslov, K.S. Burevoi, Gots, Dedusenko and Zenzinov. For a time this bureau became even more influential than the SR Central Committee. Some fourteen commissions were established, to which the Mensheviks and Popular Socialists were invited to send representatives; that with the most difficult task was the commission for the opening day, whose membership included Gots, S.S. Maslov and M.A. Likhach, head of the party’s military commission – more key figures in the summer of 1918.28 Ironically, given the triumph of Chernov at the Fourth Party Congress, the majority of these leading deputies were on the right of the party. This was not a problem at this stage since there was a community of interest between the Central Committee’s determination to use the Constituent Assembly for businesslike work, and the traditional passivism and political caution of the right. Thus the veto powers over the deputies, which the Party Central Committee had insisted on instituting at the Fourth Congress – making SR deputies to the Constituent Assembly either accept Central Committee instructions or resign – were never a serious issue.29 (The question of the veto powers of the SR Central Committee would only cause controversy in autumn 1918.)
The SR Party was not planning any spectacular developments. It made no response when on 16 December 24 leading members of the Committee to Defend the Constituent Assembly, including Avksentiev, were arrested. It agreed de facto to go along with the government decision that a quorum of 400 was needed before the assembly could open and that the opening should take place on 5 January. The opening ceremony would be accompanied by nothing more than a peaceful demonstration. The majority of party leaders clearly felt that, on its first day, by issuing manifestos on peace, land and workers’ control, the Constituent Assembly would win sufficient popular support to win the hearts and minds of the people. The SRs simply found it hard to believe that an assembly which had introduced such legislation could be dispersed without a popular outcry.30
When the details of the Declaration of the Rights of Labouring and Exploited People became clear on 3 January, along with the open statement by the Soviet Executive that any organization which refused to accept it would be ‘counter-revolutionary’ and subject to arrest, the SRs took no serious measures. They simply set up a special commission including Likhach, Dedusenko and B.N. Moiseenko to draft a manifesto. Indeed, while the party’s military commission had been asked to draw up plans for possible military action, and S.S. Maslov, a strongly pro-war right-winger, had been busy assembling a force of 11,000 men, the Central Committee saw this simply as a policy option to be used or rejected according to the circumstances. The day after this military commission held its final meeting with its military staff on 3 January at Chaikovskii’s flat, the Central Committee simply informed them on the night of 4–5 January that there would be no armed action; it should act only if the assembly were dissolved and a spontaneous insurrection developed from below. Likhach had to inform members of the Semenovskii regiment that their services would not be required.31
What was also clear by the eve of the Constituent Assembly was that the SRs were quite happy to play the Revolutionary Convention game, and hoped to win. When the SR Central Committee met on 26–27 December to finalize its plans, it agreed to take part in the Third Congress of Soviets, but at the same time to rally a parallel Congress of Soviets which supported the Constituent Assembly. This was not empty rhetoric: SR successes in recalling Bolshevik delegates from the soviets had forced the Bolsheviks increasingly to delay by-elections, prompting in turn the SRs to organize counter ‘workers’ conferences’. Thus it was extremely likely that if the Revolutionary Convention went ahead it would have to operate against a backdrop of rival congresses of soviets supporting rival groups of peasant deputies in the Constituent Assembly. This was not the sort of risk Lenin was prepared to take, hence the decision to impose the Declaration of the Rights of Labouring and Exploited People.32
Peace and the Ukraine
At their Central Committee meeting on 26–27 December the SRs raised another issue that caused Lenin discomfort. In planning their future activities within the Constituent Assembly they agreed to use their contacts with the Ukrainian SRs to reopen talks with the Ukrainian government (the Rada, which was SR in outlook) about the constitutional position of the Ukraine in a reformed Russian federal state. They did so at the precise moment when Lenin’s relations with the Rada had deteriorated to the point where military operations against the Ukrainian government had begun.
Shortly after Lenin’s seizure of power, the Rada had claimed full power in a newly declared People’s Republic of the Ukraine on 7 November 1917, making clear that, henceforth, the Ukraine would have a federal relationship with Russia. At first this caused few problems: on 17 November, Stalin, as Lenin’s Commissar of Nationalities, had talks with the Secretary of Labour in the Rada and asked simply that a Congress of Soviets be held in the Ukraine with the aim of establishing soviet power there; the Secretary of Labour readily agreed, and the Rada duly summoned a Congress of Soviets for 4 December 1917.33 It was only the following month, when peace negotiations began between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers that the attitude of the Ukraine began to cause problems.
Moves towards peace began on 8 November when Lenin called on the last Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army General N.N. Dukhonin to begin armistice talks with the aim of establishing a general armistice on all fronts of the First World War. General Dukhonin consulted the All-Army Committee and the Allied representatives of Britain, France and Italy then at GHQ. The All-Army Committee responded by proposing the formation of a socialist coalition government led by Chernov and backed by the SRs Gots and Zenzinov and the Menshevik Skobelev, all of whom were at GHQ; the Allies suggested playing for time. Dukhonin followed the Allies’ advice and on 9 November replied that he needed further talks with the Allies before agreeing to an armistice. When Lenin questioned the necessity of this, Dukhonin conceded that he did not recognize the legitimacy of Lenin’s government; for the Bolsheviks it was then a simple matter to portray GHQ as ‘counter-revolutionary’, since it had refused to take the first steps towards peace, and Dukhonin was dismissed.
Dismissing Dukhonin was one thing, enforcing his dismissal quite another. In a classic instance of Lenin using the ‘creativity of the masses’, he appealed on 9 November for the troops to take matters into their own hands and organize local armistices. Although motivated by a desire to circumvent GHQ, the armistice ferment Lenin unleashed involved the population at large in the struggle for peace and greatly strengthened the position of the Bolsheviks in the army; the idea of a GHQ supported government headed by Chernov was promptly vetoed by the SR and Menshevik central committees at meetings held on 10 November. Popular enthusiasm for peace was such that Lenin’s nominee as new Supreme Commander-in-Chief, N.V. Krylenko, had little difficulty taking over GHQ on 20 November with a force of 3,000 sailors and garrison troops. Indeed the wrath directed at Dukhonin for trying to resist the armistice was such that he was brutally murdered by Krylenko’s forces on the 21st.34 Armistice talks with Germany began at Brest-Litovsk two days earlier, on 19 November 1917.
The Ukraine, however, was not bound by this decision. Since the Rada’s declaration of 7 November, control of GHQ did not give Lenin control over Ukrainian troops; the Ukrainian army might conceivably carry on fighting on the Allied side. At first nothing of the sort happened. The Rada issued a separate call for a general peace on 10 November, and separately proposed an armistice on 26 November. Relations between Lenin and the Rada began to deteriorate when, at the time of the Bolsheviks’ attack on Rostov on Don, on 24 November, the Rada refused Krylenko’s request to allow Bolshevik troops to cross Ukrainian territory to reach the Don; the refusal contrasted sharply with the blind eye it had turned to White officers trying to join Alekseev’s Volunteer Army. A few days later, on 29–30 November, in what was seen by the Bolsheviks as a further hostile act, but for the Rada was simply a stage in the Ukrainianization of the old Imperial Army, the Rada dissolved pro-Bolshevik units in Kiev.35
But these issues were symptomatic of a more fundamental antagonism. This worsening of relations between the Russian and Ukrainian governments coincided with Lenin’s decision to change his policy towards peace with Germany; he moved from linking his request for an armistice to German acceptance of a general armistice on all fronts, to simply requesting a separate armistice with Germany in order to struggle towards a general peace. The armistice talks had begun in Brest-Litovsk with opening statements concerning the need for a general peace, and then adjourned for a week. On 24 November Kamenev, who had been a member of the delegation to this first round of talks, told the Soviet Executive:
We can only accept an armistice that is the prelude to a general peace which will render impossible any resumption of hostilities … My impression is that Germany is willing to make very great concessions to get a separate peace, but that is not what we have been negotiating for … Our representatives proposed not some secret treaty but peace without annexations or indemnities on the basis of self-determination.36
Yet within days, Lenin had decided to authorize the delegation on its return to explore the concessions available in a separate armistice, and the Soviet Executive suitably amended its instructions. By 27 November the mandate of the Soviet Executive’s representatives was to ‘undertake all steps necessary to achieve an armistice as rapidly as possible in order to struggle for a general peace, on a democratic foundation, between the peoples’. The escape clause ‘to struggle for a general peace’ opened the way for a separate armistice to be negotiated, and an armistice was rapidly agreed on 2 December.37
Until the beginning of December, Lenin’s government could justifiably hope that its nascent disagreement with the Rada would be put right when the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets met and established a more sympathetic government than the Rada. However, the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, far from endorsing soviet power when it gathered in Kiev on 4 December, turned out to be dominated by the Ukrainian SRs who endorsed the Rada as the legitimate government. Lenin was furious. The same day he issued an ultimatum to the Rada demanding that within 48 hours it should stop allowing White officers to join Alekseev’s Volunteer Army on the Don, join the struggle against Kaledin, and stop disarming pro-soviet regiments. Lenin’s ultimatum prompted the Bolsheviks at the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kiev to walk out and move to Kharkov where the Regional Congress of Soviets of the Donets Basin and Krivoi Rog was then in session. The Bolsheviks transformed this congress into a rival Ukrainian Congress of Soviets. On 11–12 December this rival Congress of Soviets declared itself the legitimate First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets with power over the whole of the Ukraine and on 13 December the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was declared in Kharkov.38 Lenin had thus engineered a potential Red versus Green, Bolshevik versus SR civil war in the Ukraine, but one in which the Ukrainian Bolsheviks would have the support of Russian Red Guard troops.
In Kiev the Rada rejected Lenin’s ultimatum on 7 December and the following day the Soviet Executive in Petrograd debated the situation. After noting that ‘self-determination for the Ukrainian people is not, of course, self-determination for counter-revolution’, the executive called for talks; Ukrainian representatives duly came to Moscow and invasion plans were shelved. Lenin’s problem was that he had to take the views of the Left SRs into account. They were deeply sceptical about the idea of encouraging Red versus Green civil war in the Ukraine, since they had much support in the Ukraine. On 12 December they told the Soviet Executive that the struggle against the Ukrainian bourgeoisie could only be waged from inside the Ukraine and pointed out ‘we should not rely on the military forces present in the Ukraine or on the chance of a military victory’. In contrast, two days later Stalin was justifying the government’s actions before the Soviet Executive in the following words:
It may seem strange that the Council of People’s Commissars, which has always resolutely defended the principle of self-determination, should have come into conflict with the Rada, which likewise proceeds from the principle … [But] if the Rada prevents us moving against Kaledin and shields him, then our blows against Kaledin will fall upon its forces.39
However, in the same speech Stalin hinted at the government’s true concerns, since the danger on the Don was quite ephemeral. Stalin noted that Lenin’s government had intercepted a coded telegram making clear that the Rada was in touch with the French military mission and was considering ways of delaying the conclusion of the peace talks until the spring. The danger presented by a separate Ukrainian delegation at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks, a delegation that might follow a pro-Allied policy, this was Lenin’s true concern regarding the Ukraine. On 11–12 December a Ukrainian representative in Moscow told the Guardian journalist Philips-Price that this really was the crux of the matter: the Ukraine wanted special representation at the peace conference and although from 9–15 December they had simply been prepared to observe the Russian delegation, on 11 December the Rada formally demanded that their delegation be separate; ominously for Lenin after 12 December the German side in the Brest-Litovsk talks began to ask pointed questions about the exact status of the Ukraine. A welcome recess allowed the Bolshevik government some time to consider its position before the talks were due to resume on 28 December. But when on 24 December news came that a Rada delegation had reached Brest-Litovsk before the Russian delegation and was already talking to the Germans, something had to be done.40
A Separate Peace for Civil War
The Ukraine, peace, the Constituent Assembly: issues were crowding in on Lenin, and all were interrelated. If the Constituent Assembly gathered, if the SRs succeeded in turning the Revolutionary Convention to their advantage, if they made common cause with the Ukrainian SRs at the Brest-Litovsk talks, if those talks then broke down and the war recommenced, if any of these things happened the days of the Bolshevik revolution were numbered. As Lenin had done throughout his career at times of crisis, he took a short break and settled down to think things through from first principles. Thus Christmas 1917 found Lenin in Finland sketching out the future in two short works Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New and From a Publicists Diary; Notes for Elaboration.41
Getting back to first principles for Lenin meant getting back to Marx and Engels and what they had had to say about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Thus he wrote in Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New:
We have always said that a long period of ‘birth-pangs’ lies between capitalism and socialism; that violence is always the midwife of the old society; that a special state (that is a special system of organized coercion of a definite class) corresponds to the transitional period between the bourgeois and the socialist society, namely the dictatorship of the proletariat. What dictatorship implies and means is a state of simmering war, a state of military measures of struggle against the enemies of proletarian power. The Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat, and Marx and Engels reproached it for what they considered to be one of the causes of its downfall, namely, that the Commune had not used its armed force with sufficient vigour to suppress the resistance of the exploiters.42
Clearly Lenin had resolved on the use of force, and in this essay in which he was essentially musing to himself, there was no mention of Kaledin or the Don; neither was there any mention of the peasantry or even poor peasantry. Lenin was talking about ‘the enemies of proletarian power’, and they were the SRs.
Lenin’s concerns were expressed even more clearly in From a Publicist’s Diary: Notes for Elaboration. The points to be elaborated at a later date included ‘how to “win over” to the side of the Russian Socialist Republic of Soviets other nations, in general, and the nations formerly oppressed by the Great Russians in particular’, the Ukraine was the most prominent of these; ‘the Constituent Assembly’, a justification for its dispersal; and ‘a separate peace’, how it was not a compromise with the imperialists. As the list of points neared its end, the direction of Lenin’s thought became clear: ‘first defeat the bourgeoisie in Russia, then fight the foreign, alien bourgeoisie’, ‘gain time through a separate peace’.43 Lenin was not entirely abandoning the notion that Russia was the weak link in the chain of imperial powers, but he was abandoning the vision of a transnational civil war against imperialism with simultaneous insurrections throughout Europe; the struggle would have to be waged country by country and his revolution would have to be defended first, to ensure the survival of the revolutionary ideal.
Lenin’s idea on how to ‘win over’ the Ukrainians, so long victims of Great Russian chauvinism, was immediately put into effect. It was clear to all Bolsheviks that the presence of an antagonistic Ukrainian delegation at Brest-Litovsk would make the work of the Bolshevik delegation doubly difficult. When the talks resumed on 28 December Trotsky was at first willing to recognize the Ukrainian delegation after it had agreed to consult the Russians on all matters. However, on 1 January 1918 the Ukrainian delegation broke this undertaking and met the Germans alone for the first time. So in the last days of December 1917 the Bolsheviks launched an all-out invasion of the Ukraine from their base of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in Kharkov. From there Red Guard units from Petrograd, Moscow and other industrial centres advanced into the Ukraine extending soviet power to Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, Poltava, Aleksandrovsk, Mariupol, Kherson and Zhmernik.44
Antonov-Ovseenko was the nominal head of this army, but he was also engaged in driving the Volunteer Army from the Don. The main army in the Ukraine was headed by Muraviev, the victor of the battle of Pulkovo Heights, who took the task of social revolution seriously: as his troops advanced the local soviets were ignored and revolutionary committees of Bolsheviks and Left SRs established in the towns he conquered; in Poltava he threatened to arrest the entire local soviet executive and physically destroy the city unless it obeyed. Militarily, however, Muraviev’s campaign was a triumph. Although his advance towards Kiev was too slow to coincide with the Bolshevik uprising there on 29 January – 2 February 1918, which was suppressed by the Rada, by 7 February he had captured the Ukrainian capital and by the 11th the Bolshevik Ukrainian Government, the People’s Secretariat, had arrived from Kharkov. But Muraviev’s campaign came too late to prevent the Germans playing the Ukrainian card. On 5 January 1918 the Germans presented their demands to Trotsky and called an adjournment for ten days; during those ten days, on 9 January, the Ukraine declared itself a fully independent state and was recognized as such by Germany on the 19th.
The Germans’ skilful handling of the Ukrainian issue reinforced Lenin’s growing conviction that the only way forward was a peace treaty with Germany. Trotsky returned to Petrograd to find Lenin openly arguing for his policy of accepting the German terms for a separate peace.45 The ensuing clash between Lenin and Trotsky was reminiscent of an earlier disagreement between the two men when, before returning to Russia, they had fallen out over the policy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. Lenin, unlike any other leading anti-war socialist, had argued that the logic of an anti-war stance required a commitment to take measures which might result in the defeat of your own country; for Trotsky this was impossible, since the consequent strengthening of German imperialism implied in such a stance meant imperialism would be strengthened rather than weakened. In 1916 this dispute had been carried out on the pages of obscure émigré journals; now it was being carried out for real.46
On 8 December Trotsky had told the Soviet Executive the following:
If Europe continues to be silent as the grave, and if this silence gives Wilhelm the chance to attack us and to dictate his terms to us, terms that would insult the revolutionary dignity of our country, then I am not sure whether, given our shattered economy and the general chaos (the result of war and internal strife), we could fight. I think, however, we could do so. For our lives, for our revolutionary honour, we would fight to the last drop of blood … we would sound the call and would raise an army of soldiers and Red Guardsmen, strong in its revolutionary enthusiasm, which would fight for as long as it could. We have not yet played our last card … If they offer us conditions that are unacceptable … we shall present them to the Constituent Assembly and say: decide. If the Constituent Assembly accepts them, the Bolshevik Party will relinquish power …47
In the last weeks before the Bolshevik seizure of power Lenin had frequently spoken in similar terms about the need for revolutionary war – on 13 September he had said of the Bolsheviks after seizing power ‘we will become the defencists, we will head the war party’48 – but in January 1918 a clash with Trotsky seemed inevitable.
When the issue was first discussed at an expanded Central Committee session on 8 January, a clear majority favoured war rather than succumbing to a dictated peace. However, in the less public atmosphere of an ordinary Central Committee session on 11 January, with echoes of the sequence of expanded and ordinary sessions seen on 1 and 2 November 1917 when discussing the issue of a coalition socialist government, Lenin secured a compromise: the meeting adopted the formula advanced by Trotsky of ‘no peace, no war’; this would be put to the Germans when the talks resumed after the recess and if there was no adequate response, Trotsky promised Lenin, he would support peace. In public, however, as his speech to the Third Congress of Soviets on 13 January showed, Trotsky spoke of ‘No peace with German militarists! Revolutionary war against world imperialism!’, and the congress itself resolved that Russia ‘would never willingly sign an unfortunate and imperialistic peace and would prepare to defend itself against the exploiters of all lands’.49
When Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk four days later, he hoped against hope that the industrial unrest then sweeping through Berlin and Vienna might result in the overthrow of the imperial regimes in Germany and Austria. On 17 January the third phase of the talks began and, as Lenin had feared, was dominated by the Ukraine. After some ten days of negotiations, with the strikes in Berlin and Vienna visibly on the wane and Muraviev’s army still not in control of Kiev, the Germans signed a treaty with the Ukrainians on 28 January and prepared to issue an ultimatum to Trotsky, who issued the declaration ‘no war, no peace’ later that same day. Trotsky returned to Petrograd on the 30th and three days later, on 16 February – the western calendar was adopted on 1 February 1918 – the Germans announced they would resume the war on the 18th, and did so. The policy of ‘no war, no peace’ had led directly to war and the German occupation of the Ukraine. The Bolshevik Ukrainian government moved to Poltava on 28 February, and then retreated with some degree of order to Ekaterinoslav on 15 March, but within a month further the German advances had put an end to its brief existence.50 Lenin had wanted peace with Germany so that he could dissolve the Constituent Assembly in relative safety and resume the Red versus Green civil war against the SRs, but Trotsky had let him down. Russia and Germany were again at war, and that put the nascent Red–Green civil war on ice for a further three months.
Notes
1. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) 5498.1.74, protocols of session 3 November; J.L.H. Keep (ed.), The Debate on Soviet Power, the Minnies of VTsIK, Second Convocation (Oxford 1979), pp. 107, 307.
2. In September 1993 the Lenin Museum in Moscow had a poster display on the Constituent Assembly elections, and the Bolshevik posters clearly implied that the Bolsheviks would be taking part in a coalition socialist administration.
3. The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the RSDLP(b) (London 1974), p. 151; Keep, Debate, p. 90.
4. O.H. Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer (Columbia 1963), p. 359.
5. O.H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls (Cornell 1990). Mostly these figures are taken from chapter 2.
6. Keep, Debate, pp. 135–41, 374; T.A. Sivokhina, Krakh melkoburzhuaznoi oppozitsii (Moscow 1973), p. 72 et seq.
7. V.M. Chernov, Pered burey (New York 1953), p. 347.
8. Minutes, p. 90.
9. Keep, Debate, p. 144 et seq.
10. Minutes, p. 153.
11. Keep, Debate, p. 180.
12. Minutes, p. 167; Keep, Debate, p. 403.
13. Keep, Debate, pp. 243, 403.
14. Keep, Debate, pp. 257, 414.
15. M. Philips-Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London 1921), p. 219.
16. Keep, Debate, p. 264.
17. These events are described in W.G. Rosenburg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution (Princeton 1974), p. 264 et seq.; A. Tyrkova-Williams, From Liberty to Brest Litovsk (London 1919), p. 275 et seq., V.D. Medlin and S.L. Parsons (eds), V.D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government (Yale 1976), p. 165 et seq.; N.G. Dumova, Kadetskaya kontrrevolyutsiya i ee razgrom (Moscow 1982), p. 30 et seq.
18. Rosenberg, Liberals, p. 279.
19. Keep, Debate, p. 177.
20. Dumova, Kadetskaya, p. 41 et seq.; G.A. Brinkley, The Volunteer Army and Allied Intervention in Southern Russia (Notre Dame 1966), p. 12 et seq., F.I. Rodichev Vospominanii i ocherki o russkoi liberalizme (Newtownville 1982), p. 133 et seq.
21. P.N. Milyukov, The Russian Revolution (Gulf Breeze 1984), p. 219; N. Ya Ivanov, Kontrrevolyutsiya v Rossii v 1917g. i ee razgrom (Moscow 1977), p. 204 et seq.
22. Brinkley, Volunteer, p. 13; A.K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army (Princeton 1980) vol. 2, p. 395.
23. This summary is taken from: Rosenberg, Liberals, p. 309 et seq.; Brinkley, Volunteer, p. 15 et seq.; Dumova, Kadetskaya, p. 43 et seq.; A. Suvorin, Pokhod Kornilova (Rostov on Don 1918), pp. 2–9.
24. Brinkley, Volunteer, p. 19.
25. For the funds from Moscow, see Suvorin, Pokhod, p. 8; otherwise Brinkley, Volunteer, p. 20 et seq.
26. O.N. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie (Moscow 1976), p. 309.
27. Chernov, Pered burey, pp. 347–51.
28. Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe, p. 322.
29. Radkey, Sickle, p. 355.
30. For the arrests on 16 December, see Keep, Debate, p. 403; otherwise Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe, p. 325.
31. Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe, p. 337; Radkey, Sickle, p. 421.
32. Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe, p. 331; Chernov, Pered burey, p. 351.
33. Keep, Debate, pp. 365–7.
34. For events at GHQ, see Wildman, Imperial Army, p. 353 et seq.
35. Keep, Debate, pp. 193, 366–70.
36. Keep, Debate, p. 154.
37. Keep, Debate, p. 169; for the details of the peace negotiations, see R. Debo, Revolution and Survival (Liverpool 1979).
38. J. Reshetar, ‘The Communist Party of the Ukraine and its role in the Ukranian Revolution’, in T. Hunczak (ed.), The Ukraine, 1917–21: a Study in Revolution (Harvard 1977), p. 169; O. Fedyshyn, Germany’s Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution (New Brunswick 1971), p. 63.
39. Keep, Debate, pp. 194, 198, 217.
40. Keep, Debate, p. 370; Philips-Price, Reminiscences, p. 197; Debo, Revolution, p. 55.
41. For Lenin’s ideas at this time, see Debo, Revolution, p. 62 et seq., on whom part of this section is based.
42. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1960) vol. 26, p. 401.
43. Lenin, Collected Works vol. 36, p. 460.
44. Debo, Revolution, p. 66; Fedyshyn, Drive to the East, p. 66.
45. Reshetar, ‘Communist Party of the Ukraine’, p. 173; Debo, Revolution, p. 70.
46. B. Pearce, ‘Lenin versus Trotsky’, Sbornik 13 (1987).
47. Keep, Debate, p. 187.
48. Minutes, p. 63.
49. Debo, Revolution, p. 79; Philips-Price, Reminiscences, p. 226.
50. Debo, Revolution, p. 124; Reshetar, ‘Communist Party of the Ukraine’, p. 174.