Chapter Seven

Disunity in the Green Camp

At the start of August 1918 it looked as if the Green side in Russia’s Red versus Green civil war had overcome the military problems caused by the mutiny of the Czechoslovak Legion and the premature Yaroslavl uprising. The Czechoslovaks were not in Archangel, but they were fighting on the Allied side, supporting the SRs’ People’s Army in its march north up the Volga river; and the URR forces had landed in Archangel and were marching south towards Vologda. It seemed as if a giant pincer movement might lead to a rendezvous at Vologda or Vyatka, thus securing a new Eastern Front. By the middle of August 1918 the People’s Army and the Czechoslovak Legion had not advanced beyond Kazan, and the URR forces and their British and French supporters had not broken out of Archangel. There was to be no giant pincer movement. Of course, there were military reasons for this failure, but there were also political ones: in August 1918 political divisions within the Green camp helped stall the military advance.

These divisions were felt most acutely in Samara. The tensions felt between the URR People’s Army commander Lebedev, as he planned his advance from Kazan, and his SR political masters in Samara were only part of a broader problem facing the whole of the territory liberated in the course of the Czechoslovak mutiny. For by mutinying in the way they did the Czechoslovaks involved in the anti-Bolshevik struggle groups both to the left and right of the URR whose attitude was not always as favourable to the Allies as they might have hoped. At the core of the problem lay the long-standing disunity within the SR Party. Those on the right of the party were always ready to co-operate with the Popular Socialists and the left-leaning Kadets; the bulk of the party eschewed all alliances and was loyal only to its own party programme.

The URR had put at the head of its agenda re-opening the Eastern Front with the help of the Allies; the decision of the Eighth SR Party Conference in Moscow in May 1918 had been rather different. The SRs, unlike the URR, had drawn a clear distinction between the international war against Germany and the civil war with the Bolsheviks; while they were prepared to co-operate with the Allies in the war with Germany, the SRs’ prime concern was the domestic civil war and they were determined not to involve the Allies in this.¹ The struggle with the Bolsheviks was their affair, as was what they saw as the equally important domestic issue, the continuing struggle against counter-revolutionary White forces of the ‘Kornilovite reaction’. Lebedev at Kazan and the SRs in Samara were following different agendas.

Komuch and its Rivals

By the end of June 1918 the SRs had established a power base in Samara. Implementing the policy agreed by deputies to the March 1918 first Inter-group Conference of Constituent Assembly Deputies, that everything should be done to make the assembly quorate and resume its work, they set about establishing a Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) comprising any member of the Constituent Assembly who could reach Samara, with the exception of Bolsheviks and Left SRs who were excluded on principle for having supported the dissolution of the assembly in January 1918. Initially there were just five deputies, all involved in the Czechoslovak action in liberating Samara: Klimushkin, Brushvit and Fortunatov, who were deputies for Samara; they had been joined on the eve of the insurrection by V.K. Volskii, deputy for Tver and a member of the SR Central Committee, and I.P. Nesterov, deputy for Minsk. In those first days after 8 June 1918, Komuch stood quite alone and a few dozen Bolsheviks could have overthrown them; it was a full week before people really began to rally to the cause, but by the end of July 1918 some fifty to sixty deputies had arrived, and by mid-August 1918 Komuch had elected a fourteen-member governing administration known as the Council of Departmental Directors (CDD), which included several people who were not deputies to the Constituent Assembly but were considered experts in their field.

The most prominent of these was I.V. Maiskii, the Menshevik and future Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, who was Departmental Director for Labour; other leading figures were Klimushkin, Departmental Director for Internal Affairs; V.N. Filipovskii, Departmental Director for Trade and Industry; V.I. Almazov, Departmental Director for Produce and Supply; N.A. Galkin, Departmental Director for War; Nesterov, Departmental Director for Railways; and M.A. Vedenyapin, Departmental Director for Foreign Affairs. The chairman of the CDD was E.F. Rogovskii, who was also Departmental Director for State Security. As Komuch grew, it established its own presidium, with Volskii as president, Brushvit and Gendelman as vice-presidents and S.N. Nikolaev as secretary; the presidium was empowered to implement Komuch decisions and to call its meetings and arrange its agenda and activities. This arrangement meant that the lines separating the CDD and Komuch itself were sometimes confused and the precise constitutional relationship was never defined. Even after the CDD had been established, the old habit of letting rank and file deputies attend the CDD, and even take part in the voting, died hard.²

The Komuch administration was aggressively socialist - its egalitarian ethos included paying its departmental directors 400 roubles per month, the same as drivers and only twice the salary of cleaners. It was determined to turn the clock back to before October 1917, but no further. Thus it continued to fly the red flag, it talked of forming a federal democratic republic, and its slogan was ‘all power to the people’. All bath-houses, cinemas, and hotels remained under local authority control, and the leather monopoly was retained. It wanted to undo the excesses of the Bolsheviks’ socialist experiment, while retaining the social gains of February 1917. Thus on 12 June 1918 the banks were denationalized; on 6 July 1918 Kerensky’s government’s land committees were restored; on 9 July 1918 a commission of thirty (thirteen workers, thirteen employers and four arbitrators from the city council) began the task of denationalizing industry; and factory committees were to operate according to the legislation of 23 April 1917. On the other hand, on 7 July 1918 lockouts were made illegal and all soviet laws on labour protection endorsed; on 24 July 1918 trade union rights were guaranteed; and after the Bolshevik-controlled soviet had been dissolved a new soviet was elected in August 1918, although its political powers had been transferred to the restored local government councils. At the end of August 1918 Maiskii introduced the same law on the eight-hour day once shelved by Kerensky’s government.³

This policy inevitably led to contradictions. On 15 July 1918 Komuch’s Finance Committee was the scene of a bitter row over the future of the denationalized commercial banks: the former owners wanted compensation for their losses under Bolshevik rule, but the egalitarian instincts of the SRs were enraged at the amount demanded and the dubious way in which they felt it had been calculated. Yet, having antagonized local capitalists in this way, on the same day Komuch antagonized the workers by overruling the suggestion that striking workers should receive 25 per cent of their pay. On 21 July 1918 Komuch felt the need to issue a programmatic declaration, signed by the leader of the SR group of deputies to the Constituent Assembly V. Ya Gurevich as well as the Komuch leaders, designed to clear up any doubts about its socialist credentials. The declaration conceded that those working for the restoration of soviet power had had some success in questioning the regime’s social policy, and made clear that peasants would not lose their land in any revision of the land reform, and that workers would never again be victims of capital. It added, however, that workers were expected to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and could be legally sacked if they did not show sufficient commitment.⁴ The declaration was only a partial success in calming popular concerns. It did not prevent the re-elected soviet becoming an arena for criticism; roughly half its members were Bolsheviks, thinly disguised as ‘internationalists’, and on 30 August 1918 it passed a resolution proposed by them critical of the Komuch administration.

Komuch had far less trouble retaining the support of the peasantry. The Bolshevik policy of grain requisitioning had inevitably alienated the peasants; in its place Komuch established a free trade in grain and thereby retained peasant support to the end. Komuch’s grain policy was similar to that of Kerensky’s government. Komuch retained the right to fix the price of grain, but contracted out rights to food procurement to private and co-operative organizations; distribution was the task of the regional councils and their so-called ‘provisions assemblies’. This policy soon led to a thriving market and ample supplies; those people arriving in Samara from Moscow were always struck by the low prices and ample supplies.⁵ The only element of Komuch’s agrarian policy which caused some peasants concern was the way in which an attempt to regulate land seizures was implemented in some parts of the territory.

In an attempt to secure the harvest and end what it felt had become ‘anarchic land seizures’, Komuch decreed on 22 July 1918 that winter sown land should not be subject to seizure and redivision but temporarily retained by either the existing owner or the local food supply authorities. While this did not contradict Komuch’s constantly repeated refrain that the land reform was irreversible, it did prompt some land-owners to try and seize back their land by force, incidents that the Bolsheviks were always willing to exploit in their propaganda.⁶ What eventually turned some peasants against Komuch was not its agrarian policy but its policy of conscription to the People’s Army, an army charged with the ambiguous remit not only of defending Samara and its free trade in grain from the Bolsheviks but also of resuming the First World War by opening a new Eastern Front; for peasants who welcomed the end of the war, and with a harvest to bring in, the decision to introduce conscription seemed questionable. Yet, even in Samara’s last days, when rationing had been introduced and deserters were being threatened with execution, the SR leader Chernov could persuade the Samara provincial congress of peasants to give Komuch a vote of confidence.⁷

The SRs in Samara took their slogan of power to the people seriously by establishing a never-ending series of committees. Thus to oversee the economy Komuch established a ‘special meeting on defence’, comprising representatives from trade and industry, the local authorities, the war department, the trades unions, the co-operatives, and the Samara Council of the National Economy (established by the Bolsheviks and retained by the SRs). Its main concerns were worthy enough, combating speculation and combating unemployment by creating public works, but its administration was unwieldy. On 20 August 1918 it established a special unit for supplying the army. This unit had enormous powers: it could override any previous orders, and any claims by the former factory owners; but even this unit was overseen by the duly elected representatives of all those groups represented on the special meeting on defence, with additional representation from the trades unions. Decisions were frequently postponed since agreement among such disparate groups was impossible. To its critics, Komuch was ‘committee-mad’.⁸

Where the SRs’ love of committees led to most problems was in the People’s Army. Formally established on 8 June 1918, the People’s Army at first had a General Staff comprising Galkin, Fortunatov and Bogolyubov plus the Czechoslovak commander Colonel Cecek. Initially relying on 5–6,000 volunteers, it soon resorted to conscription and eventually mobilized some 50,000 men; however, the volunteers remained the core of those 10,000 soldiers considered to be capable of holding their own under fire, while 40 per cent of the total were never properly armed.⁹ The People’s Army’s defining characteristic was its democratic structure: it instituted eight ranks distinguished by plain coloured epaulettes and paid officers only 250 roubles per month, little more than the basic workers’ wage. Officers also had to contend with a regular diet of lectures from the cultural educational recruitment section of the SR Party and the ‘hidden commissars’, or Komuch representatives, who exercised the same powers granted to Kerensky’s commissars in the period prior to October 1917. Galkin and his senior commander Lebedev were constantly in dispute with Komuch over the related questions of which institution, Komuch or the General Staff, made senior military appointments, and whether or not to turn the hidden commissars of the cultural educational recruitment section into a formalized system of Komuch commissars modelled on the Bolshevik political commissars in the Red Army. Komuch decided against a formalized system, but by retaining the informal and costly activities of the cultural educational recruitment section succeeded in alienating many of the more conservative officers without ever really controlling them.¹⁰

Komuch, as the re-creation of Kerensky’s political system which had apparently brought Russia to its knees in the autumn of 1917, was not to the liking of those more conservative politicians who came to the fore in Siberia as the mutinous Czechoslovak Legion fought its way eastward. Here power fell into the hands of former SRs, so disenchanted with the ‘committee madness’ of their fellows that they had swung dramatically to the political right since the autumn of 1917 and considered a return to the policies of Kerensky as a recipe for chaos and disaster. Yet ironically what brought these former SR politicians to power in Siberia was their pre-October association with the SR Party.

Siberia had long been an area of strong popular support for the SRs. After the Constituent Assembly was dissolved on 5 January 1918, the SR-dominated Siberian Regional Assembly met in Tomsk on 7 January 1918 and announced plans for the formation of a Siberian government. These deliberations were interrupted on 26 January 1918 when the Bolsheviks dispersed the regional assembly, but during the night of 25–26 January 1918 some twenty regional assembly deputies representing the major party groups met in secret under the presidency of the SR P. Ya Derber and appointed an underground Siberian government. These circumstances meant that many of those elected to the government were chosen in their absence and by reputation alone: two of those chosen in particular had by the winter of 1918 only the most tenuous links with the SR Party they had once served; I.A. Mikhailov was at one time Director of the Economic Council of the Provisional Government and as such an SR, but his experience in economic policy-making had pushed his views far to the right, and P.V. Vologodskii was a former SR member of the 1907 Tsarist Duma.

Control of the extensive Siberian co-operative movement enabled the SRs to retain a considerable organizational network in the region throughout the spring and early summer of 1918; doctrinaire persecution of the co-operatives by the area’s ruling Bolsheviks served to strengthen rather than weaken the SRs’ position since the Bolshevik attempt to turn all credit co-operatives into branches of a nationalized bank and put all co-operative shops under the control of the local councils of the national economy sparked off widespread anger. Thus the underground Siberian government retained a shadowy influence throughout the first half of 1918, even after it had divided its authority with six ministers basing themselves in Omsk and a further seven, led by Derber, moving to the Far East. To exercise some sort of democratic control over the ‘ministers’ in the underground Siberian government, the Siberian Regional Assembly divided itself into west Siberian and east Siberian ‘commissariats’.

During March and April 1918 the SRs of the west Siberian commissariat, based in Novonikolaevsk, began to co-operate with various officers’ organizations like those of A.N. Grishin-Almazov and ‘organization 13’ headed by P.P. Ivanov-Rinov with a view to the military overthrow of the Bolsheviks. In April they contacted the British consul in Vladivostok to see if he would help arm the troops being formed by the underground Siberian government, but, in line with the then British policy of supporting the Bolsheviks, he turned the proposal down. By May 1918, however, these organizations were strong enough to hold a congress of underground military groups in Novonikolaevsk and declare that some 7,000 men were under arms, being fed at the expense of the local co-operatives. Thus when in mid-May 1918 the Bolsheviks broke with the Allies and at the end of the month the Czechoslovak mutiny began, the Czechoslovak forces based in Chelyabinsk and the anti-Bolshevik forces gathered in Novonikolaevsk united. As the Czechoslovaks took control of the Trans-Siberian railway, so the underground Siberian government in Omsk reasserted its authority. But as the Siberian government was reformed, it came to the notice of the SRs for the first time that its Siberian government was dominated by people whose views were now far to the right of the SR Party.¹¹

On 30 June 1918 the SR-controlled west Siberian commissariat endorsed the proposal that the six members of its underground Siberian government then on Czechoslovak controlled territory – P.V. Vologodskii, V.M. Krutovskii, G.B. Patushinskii, I.A. Mikhailov, 1.1. Serebrennikov and B.M Shatilov – should formally establish a Siberian government; the SRs then looked on in disbelief as that Siberian government dissolved the soviets and the land committees, restored private ownership and private trade, and declared martial law on the railways, such was its determination to remove all traces of ‘Bolshevik’ socialist experimentation. The Siberian government argued that its real authority lay not with the SR-controlled Siberian Regional Assembly which had spawned the underground government back in January 1918, but in its own insurrection, the fact that it had ‘carried out the coup against the Bolsheviks and was unanimously supported by all sections of the population and public organizations’. The reality of the times, the Siberian government stressed, meant it had to act ‘in a sovereign manner, dependent on no other source of authority’; it certainly should not be responsible to the Siberian Regional Assembly. To ensure this desire for unfettered self-legitimacy was not sullied by the claim of Komuch to be governing the whole of non-Bolshevik Russia in the name of the Constituent Assembly, on 4 July 1918 the Siberian government declared Siberia, with its western border tantalisingly undefined, independent until the formation some time in the future of an All-Russian government.¹²

The URR and the Chelyabinsk Talks

It was into this burgeoning dog-fight between the SRs in Samara and the former SRs in Siberia that a URR delegation arrived early in July 1918, trying to persuade both sides to support the programme agreed between the URR and the Allies in their absence. The SRs who had established Komuch in Samara and the former SRs who had established the Siberian government in Omsk had not been in Moscow when the URR was founded and knew nothing of its detailed plans drawn up with the support of the Allies. Even the Komuch Departmental Director for Foreign Affairs Vedenyapin, who had arrived in Samara sometime after the founding group had staged its successful insurrection, knew nothing about the URR until 8 July 1918. While the SR Central Committee knew of the existence of the URR, and that many of its leading right-wingers were members, the party as a whole did nothing to encourage its members to join.¹³ The big issue which divided Komuch and the URR was the question of the future of the Constituent Assembly. To the URR the assembly dispersed in January 1918, by the very fact of being dispersed, had lost all authority: even if reformed, it would lack authority since it would inevitably operate without the Left SRs and Bolsheviks, who made up a considerable proportion of its membership, and would be forced to operate without representatives from the Ukraine and Baltic provinces; a clean slate was needed. When in the first week in June 1918 the URR received news of the Czechoslovak mutiny, a high level URR delegation of Argunov (SR), Pavlov (Popular Socialist) and Krol (Kadet) was assembled and sent east to investigate, leaving Moscow in the last week of June and arriving in Samara between 8–10 July 1918. What the delegation found in Samara was not to its liking. Vesting supreme authority in the haphazard collection of SR deputies who had arrived in Samara was far from the creation of an All-Russian government which all parties would respect. While Komuch representatives talked of the need for a coalition government, and did in August include the Menshevik Maiskii in their administration, the fact was that, with the exclusion of the Bolsheviks and Left SRs, a reconvened Constituent Assembly would be made up almost exclusively of SRs; to talk of a coalition government controlled by an assembly made up entirely of SRs was a nonsense.¹⁴

The URR delegation arrived in Samara shortly after the Siberian government in Omsk had announced its independence. On 11 July 1918 one of its members, Krol, a Constituent Assembly deputy himself, attended a session of Komuch and with the fifteen or so others present heard the French liaison officer Major Guinet ask what Komuch’s attitude was to the Siberian government recently formed in Omsk, since its programme seemed acceptable to the Allies. Clearly the Allies were looking to co-ordinate common action between Samara and Omsk, but the omens did not look good. Most of the Komuch members present were hostile to the Omsk government, insisting that it challenged the position of Komuch as the voice of the Constituent Assembly, the representative body of all Russians. Krol, however, intervened for the URR and made a speech developing what was to become the key to future URR policy; the task of the moment was not to assert the authority of any one government over any other government but to unite these local anti-Bolshevik governments into one All-Russian government. This was music to Guinet’s ears and the URR delegation set off with Guinet for Chelyabinsk where talks between Komuch and the Siberian government were planned. They arrived in Chelyabinsk on 13 July 1918.

Allied pressure had persuaded the Siberian government that, despite its declaration of independence, it had to hold talks with Komuch. In Chelyabinsk the Siberian War Minister Grishin-Almazov and the Finance Minister Mikhailov were delighted to find that they would not be talking to the Samara-based Ko much administration alone, but to a URR delegation as well; they soon developed a rapport with Krol and his colleagues. The atmosphere worsened dramatically when the Komuch delegation arrived. Before any formal talks began, one of the Komuch delegation Brushvit sent a note to ‘Comrade’ Grishin-Almazov reminding him of SR Party policy in view of the latter’s one-time party membership; Almazov responded that he was not a ‘comrade’ but the Minister of War. To the bewilderment of Allied representatives, the Komuch train and Siberian government train were soon stationed in neighbouring sidings but communicating only by diplomatic notes, with the URR group acting as an unwanted go-between; the Komuch delegation was particularly hostile to the URR group, since all three members of the group were deputies to the Constituent Assembly but all three had refused to join Komuch. A way out of this extraordinary impasse was only found on 15 July 1918 when Major Guinet suggested that a photograph should be taken of the two government delegations and the URR group: as the photographer took charge, Guinet and a Czechoslovak representative Bogdan Pavlu publicly proposed a formal joint session at 3 p.m.; even so Komuch at first seemed quite ready to spurn even a public invitation to talks, and were only persuaded to do so after further private pleadings from the URR and the Allies.¹⁵

When the formal talks began on 15 July 1918, there was no meeting of minds. The full Siberian delegation comprised Grishin-Almazov, Mikhailov, and M.P. Golovachev, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs; the Komuch delegation was Brushvit, Vedenyapin, and Galkin. Mikhailov, Finance Minister in the Omsk government took the lead for the Siberian side, insisting that they had been delegated simply to explore how practical day-to-day tasks could be co-ordinated between the two governments; the question of how an All-Russian government should be formed was beyond their powers. Brushvit, who had been elected to preside over the session, proposed that even though the talks represented not negotiations but simply an exchange of information, they nevertheless should discuss Komuch’s project for how a central government authority could be established. That project was this:

1.     that any central government authority recognize the Constituent Assembly;

2.     until this assembled, its committee (Komuch) would be made up of all its deputies, except Bolsheviks and Left SRs;

3.     all basic laws (constitutions etc.) should be taken out of the government’s sphere of interest and delayed until the assembly met;

4.     the government’s immediate tasks were to convene the Constituent Assembly, democratize the country and establish an army;

5.     to achieve these aims Komuch would form a coalition-based central executive, acting on behalf of the central government which would exercise all state functions;

6.     routine legislation would be in the hands of Komuch, but the war, finance and foreign policy would be the exclusive concern of central government. Komuch would receive these powers when its membership reached thirty.

Since this merely restated the Komuch position there was little chance of agreement.¹⁶

Clear as to the legitimacy of its own delegation, Komuch was keen to clarify what the mandates were of those present; it objected especially to the idea of the URR attending since they seemed to have no constitutional authority. The URR did not, therefore, attend the talks on 15 July 1918, but after Guinet’s and Pavlu’s intervention Komuch allowed the URR delegation to attend subsequent sessions and thereafter progress was quickly made. It was resolved to establish a commission, on which Argunov would serve for the URR, whose purpose would be to summon a so-called state conference which would decide how best to establish a new central government for all of liberated Russia. In some ways this was a big concession by Komuch, since the very fact that other groups would be involved undermined its claim that the existing Constituent Assembly was the only source of governmental authority; but the agreement also made clear that this new central government would have to be sanctioned by Komuch, since it represented the Constituent Assembly. The commission was instructed to organize the state conference in three weeks time in Chelyabinsk to be attended by all members of the Constituent Assembly; delegations of the central committees of the major political parties and the URR; and representatives of governments formed in the liberated territories. In reality, however, this planned Chelyabinsk State Conference was not held until 23 August 1918, a delay occasioned by the fact that, rather than the planned conference resulting in improved relations between Komuch and Siberia, relations worsened dramatically as both sides jockeyed for advantage in the run up to its opening.¹⁷

Customs War, Politicking and Paranoia

Immediately after leaving the July 1918 talks in Chelyabinsk, the Siberian government decided to clarify the western borders over which it claimed authority. On 18 July 1918 it asserted that Chelyabinsk, Zlatoust and Troitsk districts, claimed by Ko much, actually fell under its administration. Komuch issued an immediate protest and sent Brushvit to Siberia for talks, but before he arrived the situation deteriorated even further. On 26 July 1918 the Siberian government established a customs border between the two territories, and Komuch could only protest once again that the Siberian government had no jurisdiction outside the administrative borders of Siberia.¹⁸ This ‘customs war’ had developed around the fate of a large quantity of supplies destined for transportation to central Russia but still within the confines of Siberia when the Bolsheviks were overthrown. Komuch assumed that, as the new All-Russian government, the supplies were now destined for the new All-Russian capital Samara; the Siberian government, however, decided to keep them, first refusing to allow the trains to travel further west than Chelyabinsk and then distributing the supplies throughout Siberia. Komuch responded by refusing to deliver oil and manufactured goods to Siberia; the Siberians refused to pay Komuch for postal distribution; and as the atmosphere worsened the customs barrier was established.¹⁹

As recrimination followed recrimination, the SRs became increasingly intransigent. On 5 August 1918 the SR Party held a congress for the whole Komuch area; this resolved that only the Constituent Assembly deputies had the power to form a new central government, a view endorsed by the party’s Central Committee and the Volga Regional Committee. Then, as part of the war of words surrounding preparations for the Chelyabinsk State Conference, Komuch’s Departmental Director for Foreign Affairs Vedenyapin gave the French a summary of the Komuch views to be presented at Chelyabinsk:

Above all Komuch considers Russia to be a united whole which, on the basis of a democratic republic, must restore internal order with a state administration that guarantees the rights of national and regional self-rule and ends the shameful Brest peace by forming an army to drive the enemy from Russia. Komuch considers itself to be a democratic body, empowered by national elections, which will unite and organise the country. All regional governments without exception are considered to be regional rather than national and provisional. The state sovereignty of all these governments is denied by Komuch, as it denies the state sovereignty of Krasnov, Skoropadskii and other traitors to Russia; therefore Komuch considers Russia must now be united not on the basis of a union of statelets, but only on the basis of uniting all that is strong in a united Russia - a scattering of new statelets will leave Great Russia torn to shreds. Such shreds are not recognised by Komuch, which considers the Constituent Assembly alone as the united body around which state power can be built.

The statement went on to denounce reactionaries of all kinds as ‘traitors as harmful as the Bolsheviks’, insisting that only democrats were really committed to fighting German militarism. It concluded by expressing its willingness to talk to other regional governments and even form a central government authority, but one ‘responsible to the Constituent Assembly until its re-election’. This was not only a repeat of the stance taken on 15 July 1918, but an escalation of the attack on the Siberian government; putting it on a par with the pro-German governments of Skoropadskii and Krasnov was a doctrinaire exaggeration which the Siberian government could hardly be expected to appreciate.²⁰ Not surprisingly, perhaps, when Brushvit arrived for talks in Omsk on 9 August 1918 he was not received. Feelings were running so high in Samara that when it came to deciding who should be sent to Chelyabinsk, a vociferous minority argued that there was no point in sending any delegation to the talks since agreement with the Siberian government would be impossible.²¹

That might well have been the majority view of the Komuch deputies if the Chelyabinsk State Conference was to be confined to bi-lateral talks between Komuch and the Siberian government. However other groups were to be represented in Chelyabinsk and some of those invited to attend could play a useful role in weakening the Siberian government from within. Among the groups to be invited were the deputies from Siberia to the Constituent Assembly, and those same deputies were also to be involved in the work of the Siberian Regional Assembly. The Siberian Regional Assembly was the Achilles’ heel of the Siberian government, enabling the Samara SRs to take their battle into the enemy camp; for the struggle between the Siberian government and the Siberian Regional Assembly in the second half of August became the main element in the political life of the region.

The Siberian government was nominally responsible to the Siberian Regional Assembly on which the SRs had a clear majority. In the first week of its existence, between 30 June and 6 July 1918, the Siberian government debated at length its relationship with the assembly. The main point at issue was the proposal that the assembly elected back in January 1918 was not representative of all shades of political opinion, since property-owners had not been allowed to take part in its election. The Siberian government therefore argued that the regional assembly should not be allowed to meet until it was fully representative and property-owners adequately represented; when this caused the most unreformed SR member of the government, Shatilov, to walk out in protest, it was agreed to compromise by summoning the regional assembly in its existing form but asking it immediately to legislate for adequate representation from the property-owning bourgeoisie.

Having agreed that the Siberian Regional Assembly still had a role to play, the Siberian government had no choice but to come to terms with it. A delegation of Siberian government ministers travelled from Omsk to the regional assembly’s base in Tomsk for talks with the elders of the assembly prior to the planned opening on 15 August 1918; they were presented with a series of demands they found unacceptable. The regional assembly was willing to concede the point about representation from the property-owners, but determined to get its way on two other issues: it should be represented at the Chelyabinsk State Conference, and its authority increased by co-opting to it the Siberian deputies to the Constituent Assembly. During the talks between Vologodskii, Prime Minister of the Siberian government, and the elders of the regional assembly, it was quickly agreed that the Constituent Assembly deputies from Siberia could join the Siberian Regional Assembly, but on the question of the Chelyabinsk State Conference Vologodskii tried to stand firm. In prior discussions the elders had agreed to drop any suggestion that the assembly be represented in Chelyabinsk, but this issue suddenly reappeared on the agenda. Vologodskii insisted that there could not be two delegations, one from the assembly and one from the government; as a compromise it was eventually agreed that an assembly delegation could attend simply to ‘welcome’ the opening of the conference.²²

This was a two-fold victory for the SRs. The Siberian members of the Constituent Assembly would be able to attend both the Siberian Regional Assembly and the Chelyabinsk State Conference, and a Siberian Regional Assembly delegation would be able to attend the Chelyabinsk State Conference if not fully participate in it. SR deputies to these two assemblies could launch a two-pronged assault on the Siberian government. No wonder the message sent from Tomsk to Komuch in Samara was the cheery news that ‘all was well’. On 20 August 1918, however, the SRs overplayed their hand. In a further resolution to the regional assembly in Tomsk, they suggested that not only should the regional assembly delegation to the Chelyabinsk State Conference make a speech of welcome, but read out a resolution; this went well beyond the agreement with the Siberian government, which promptly suspended the assembly’s sitting until 10 September 1918.²³

For the Allies the situation was infuriating. As relations between Komuch in Samara and the Siberian government in Omsk steadily worsened, little fighting was being done on the supposed new Eastern Front. In July and August 1918 even enthusiastic supporters of the Siberian government in Omsk recognized it only had a ‘paper army’: it was only in early September 1918 that its forces took the decision to mobilize fully and advance to the Urals; in the summer its commanders refused point blank to fight on the Volga.²⁴ The Allies had to rely on the People’s Army which had its own rather different priorities. Vologda and Vyatka were the Allies’ goal, but the capture of Kazan, so crucial to Allied strategy, was not a priority of the Komuch administration in Samara, so absorbed had it become in its struggle with the ‘reactionary’ Siberian government in Omsk. Relations between Komuch and the Allies were therefore strained.

In the middle of July 1918 Departmental Director for Foreign Affairs Vedenyapin received what he described as a ‘rude telegram’ from the French liaison officer Major Guinet, and although when Kazan was captured the leading SR Brushvit could report on 9 August 1918 that Guinet had informed him that the sympathy of the French mission was with Komuch, the reality was that there was much mutual distrust.²⁵ As far as Komuch was concerned, far too many resources were wasted in trying first to take and then to hold Kazan; when the French agent Colonel Bordes had flown from newly liberated Kazan to talk to Komuch in Samara, he had upset them by suggesting that the red flag should no longer be flown. During the mid-July 1918 talks in Chelyabinsk, a paranoid Vedenyapin interpreted French talk about moving the centre of gravity of the struggle from the Volga to the Urals as a deliberate attempt to weaken Komuch, rather than recognize the real motive of concentrating Allied forces in the Vyatka area; Komuch had rejected the idea. Vedenyapin was instinctively hostile to the Allies. He was convinced they were imperialists trying to undermine a state which tolerated the red flag, soviets, land socialization and a regulated economy. On 3 August 1918 Komuch issued a decree concerning co-operation with the Allies which implied, by tone if nothing else, that, whatever the Allies might have said to the contrary, in reality they intended to make territorial claims on Russia, something Komuch considered unacceptable. The decree repeated the SR view that Allied forces were in Russia only to fight the Germans and should not be used against the Bolsheviks unless explicitly invited by Komuch or the full Constituent Assembly.²⁶

The URR, The Ekaterinburg Government, and the Allies

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Allies decided to cultivate their good relations with the URR, rather than with Komuch or the Siberian government, and adopted a strategy which both favoured the URR and concentrated on the need to make progress towards the capture of Vyatka. After desperate fighting, during which Tsar Nicholas II and the whole of his family were executed on 16 July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion captured Ekaterinburg on 25 July 1918 and established their army headquarters there. Ekaterinburg, from where a thrust towards Perm and Vyatka could most easily be developed, was the home town of one of the leading URR members L.A. Krol. At the insistence of the Allies - he was specifically approached by the French liaison officer Major Guinet on 25 July 1918 as the Czechoslovak Legion marched in – Krol established a Urals government based in Ekaterinburg, separate from both the Komuch administration in Samara and the Siberian government in Omsk. This Allied sponsored URR government would be used to broker an agreement between Komuch and the Siberian government, and focus attention on the Allies’ needs. Krol set to work at once; by 1 August 1918 the talks were well ahead and the government formed in under a week. Soon other key URR figures like Argunov, Pavlov and Breshko-Breshkovskaya had passed through Chelyabinsk on their way to take up residence in Ekaterinburg.²⁷

The Allies’ clear preference for this new Urals government had an immediate effect on both the Siberian government in Omsk and the Komuch administration in Samara. The URR government in Ekaterinburg found itself wooed by delegations from both Omsk and Samara: War Minister Grishin-Almazov, joined later by Finance Minister Mikhailov, arrived from Omsk on 10 August 1918, and the next day an SR delegation including Bogolyubov arrived from Samara. Krol’s concerns about the All-Russian pretensions of Komuch were of long-standing and his sympathies were clearly at first with the Siberian government in Omsk. The attitude of the Komuch delegation from Samara hardly improved things: it criticized Krol’s introduction of martial law and his refusal to introduce factory committees for industry. In fact, the Komuch delegation of SRs spent much of its time in Ekaterinburg talking to the Czechoslovak command, who were also unhappy with the sudden ‘French’ interest in a Urals government and had expressed the hope that ‘the adventure might be liquidated’. Komuch decided to use the same sort of tactics against Krol’s URR government in Ekaterinburg as were being used against the Siberian government in Omsk: rather than engaging talks, the best thing to do was to try and mobilize the local working population against Krol’s administration. On 14 August 1918 Bogolyubov simply issued a protest to the Allied representatives in Ekaterinburg and the Czechoslovak National Council that the question of the formation of a Urals government was one of principle and should not have been taken before the Chelyabinsk State Conference.²⁸

The attitude of the Siberian government in Omsk was quite different. Realizing that Allied support for the Urals government was an overt snub to the All-Russian pretensions of the Komuch administration in Samara, they were immediately conciliatory and had no qualms about recognizing Krol’s administration as an autonomous government, insisting only, but crucially, that its military power should be limited and put under the control of Omsk. It was also agreed that the Siberian government in Omsk would have overall control of the Trans-Siberian railway, allowing Ekaterinburg joint control over its Urals section, with no tariffs between the Urals government in Ekaterinburg and the Siberian government in Omsk. As part of the agreement, finalized on 19 August 1918, the Siberian government in Omsk recognized the Ekaterinburg government’s right to attend the Chelyabinsk State Conference. With the Ekaterinburg issue resolved in its favour, the Siberian government in Omsk could afford to be magnanimous concerning its customs war with the Komuch administration in Samara, thus improving its standing with the Allies still further. On 20 August 1918 the Siberian government in Omsk reaffirmed in a long telegram to Samara that it considered itself sovereign, and that in the absence of a national government, all regional governments should operate on federal lines, while cooperating together in trying to reconstruct a national government. It was then at pains to point out that the establishment of a customs barrier and other financial disagreements between the two administrations resulted from a misunderstanding; no barrier existed, it had simply been a question of temporary taxes imposed to resolve temporary financial problems experienced by the government.²⁹

As the delegations gathered for the Chelyabinsk State Conference on 23 August 1918, the URR and the Allies began to reap the rewards of their hard work; it was in most ways their show. The proceedings were dominated by Avksentiev, the former president of the Preparliament and a founder member of the URR, who constantly stressed that he was acting as a member of the URR not the SR Party, and whose arrival, with that of the other URR activist Argunov, gave hope to the Siberian government that not everything would go Komuch’s way. In his first press interview Avksentiev made clear that he thought it preposterous that those members of the Constituent Assembly gathered in Samara, numbering about fifty, could claim to represent the nation; a coalition government, he said, which was what the country needed, could never realistically be seen to be dependent on a group of deputies from just one political party. Avksentiev also made clear that there were, in his view, no possible parallels to be drawn between the Siberian government in Omsk and the actions of Skoropadskii in the German-occupied Ukraine.³⁰

The URR’s dominance of the Chelyabinsk State Conference proceedings was clear to all. It was opened by Argunov on behalf of the Organisation Bureau, and Breshko-Breshkovskaya was elected honorary chairwoman. The elected presidium comprised: president Avksentiev (URR), vice-presidents Rogovskii (Komuch) and Mikhailov (Siberia); secretaries Murashev (URR) and Moiseenko (URR). Krol had been joined by fellow Kadet and URR member V.N. Pepelyaev. But the most important new arrival was General Boldyrev: he had reached Samara early in August 1918, but had turned down the invitation of the Komuch president V.K. Volskii to take up the post of Komuch’s Departmental Director for War; in turning down the post he stressed that his mission on behalf of the URR was to form a united government and he would therefore continue his journey to the Chelyabinsk State Conference.

There was only one minor hiccough in this URR triumph. In order to work out the details of a future agreement, the conference resolved to establish an agreement commission comprising representatives from all the relevant delegations. Arguing that the URR Urals government in Ekaterinburg had not existed at the time of the mid-July meeting between Komuch and the Siberian government, Volskii, the leader of the Komuch delegation, prevented the Urals government having a seat on the agreement commission. However, in a compromise arrangement the Urals government leader Krol won a place as the URR representative on the agreement commission and so could defend what he called ‘this first born of the URR’.³¹ Thereafter, in spite of the original expectations of many of the participants, the Chelyabinsk State Conference passed peacefully, never even having to resort to a vote. With complete unanimity it was agreed to allow all groups who wanted to attend a more representative state conference, originally scheduled for 1 September 1918. Typical of that spirit of compromise was Avksentiev’s proposal that this conference should be held in Ufa, a town in Komuch territory but far enough away from Samara for the Siberian government to feel it was not being forced to come cap in hand to its political rival.³²

This willingness to compromise was prompted in part by a partial reconciliation between Krol and Komuch. In the days immediately preceding the opening of the Chelyabinsk State Conference the Siberian government had started trying to enforce conscription in territory claimed by the Urals government. The Ekaterinburg government protested, and talks were called to resolve the matter, talks which soon broke down. For Krol conscription went beyond the scope of his original agreement to allow the Siberian government authority in military matters, which he had interpreted as simply meaning Ekaterinburg troops would be put under Siberian command. Thus, although Krol travelled to Chelyabinsk with Mikhailov, the Finance Minister in the Siberian government, and on the surface their relations seemed good, in fact Krol felt he had been deceived by Mikhailov as to the real degree of autonomy he had achieved for his government. On arrival in Chelyabinsk Krol was determined to try and mend fences with Komuch by exploiting his personal friendship with the SR Central Committee member Zenzinov, using him as a channel through which to stress to Komuch that, far from being an appendage of the Siberian government in Omsk, the URR Urals government in Ekaterinburg was acting as an honest broker.³³

However, the willingness of all sides to compromise at the Chelyabinsk State Conference was also due to Allied pressure. With the successful landing in Archangel and the capture of Kazan constantly in their minds, the Allies wanted all squabbling put on one side. As Maiskii, the Menshevik Departmental Director for Labour in the Komuch administration, arrived in Chelyabinsk, the Czechoslovak representative Bogdan Pavlu told him that in his view both the army and the central government administration were being formed too slowly: the Czechoslovaks, he reminded Maiskii, had agreed to help the Russians onto their feet and stay for perhaps two or three months; instead they were doing all the fighting. If things did not improve radically, he warned, the Czechoslovaks might have to review their position. Immediately after the Chelyabinsk State Conference the Czechoslovaks tried to use their influence to introduce a common economic policy between the Samara, Omsk and Ekaterinburg governments when they asked Komuch on 30 August 1918 to come into line with a policy already agreed between Omsk and Ekaterinburg.³⁴

The Archangel Government and the White Danger

It was not only on the Kazan front that political in-fighting behind the Green lines was weakening the military position, on the Archangel front too there were political problems; but in the north the threat came not from a dispute between SRs, the URR and former SRs, but the resurgence of White counter-revolutionary officers. In Archangel, as in Samara, the new government tried to turn the clock back to September 1917 and the days of Kerensky, only to be reminded that in August 1917 the White Kornilovite generals had preferred to move against Kerensky’s government rather than act against the Bolsheviks in co-operation with it.

The administration established by Chaikovskii, at its first meeting at 12.00 a.m. on 2 August 1918, was like that in Ekaterinburg, a child of the URR. Its key members were Chaikovskii himself, who was also Departmental Director for Foreign Affairs; his old associates of Petrograd and Vologda, Maslov, Departmental Director for Defence, Dedusenko, Departmental Director for Trade and Industry, and Likhach, Departmental Director for Labour; plus Departmental Director for Justice A.I. Gukovskii, Departmental Director for Finance G.A. Martyushin and Departmental Director for the Interior P. Yu Zubov. All Chaikovskii’s colleagues were SRs and deputies to the Constituent Assembly, except for Zubov who was a Kadet and formerly deputy mayor of Vologda. Chaplin, organizer of the insurrection, was appointed Commander of the Armed Forces. Since the URR insisted that all members of the government had to be members of the Constituent Assembly, or at least some elected representative body where this was impossible, Chaplin’s local contact, the liberal Startsev, did not become a departmental director but was appointed provincial commissar.³⁵

The government’s daily The Regeneration of the North echoed both the theme of the URR and its political outlook; it retained on its masthead the SRs’ twin legends ‘workers of all countries unite’ and ‘through struggle you will obtain justice’. As on the Volga, until the formation of an All-Russian government, the ministers called themselves departmental directors, rather than ministers, and their government was called the Supreme Directorate. True to their inspiration, that they were returning to the glorious heritage of the February 1917 Revolution, the pre-October 1917 committees for overseeing the railways were restored and the Bolshevik committees closed down. In its proclamation ‘To the Workers’ of 7 August 1918, the government made clear that, if Bolshevism had been overthrown, the clock had only been turned back to the summer of 1917: thus, while recognizing the importance of reviving private trade and industry, the government asserted this would be overseen by ‘broad state control with the participation of workers’ representatives’; ‘only with the most energetic support of the workers and their class organizations’ could the Department of Labour do its job. Later, on 13 August, the government made clear that only the Bolshevik decree on workers’ control had been suspended, all other labour legislation remained in force and ‘state regulation of economic life’ would continue.³⁶

Unexpectedly, given the close relationship between the Allies and the URR, the first problems faced by Chaikovskii’s administration came from General Poole. The URR quickly found that there was a gap between the theory of co-operating with the Allies and the reality of that co-operation. Ever conscious of the small number of troops at his disposal, and the fact that the bulk of them had already left Archangel in a dramatic dash towards Vologda and Vyatka, Poole was obsessed with what he saw as the security problem in Archangel; with so few reliable troops, a Bolshevik counter-insurrection might succeed at any moment. The first sign of this tension on security matters between the URR administration and the British military came on 4 August 1918 when Poole’s adjutant sent a letter to the directorate asking for the red flag flying over a government building to be taken down. The following day Poole repeated the order direct to Chaikovskii, reminding him that Archangel and its province were under martial law and he saw the issue of the flag as a military rather than a political issue.³⁷

The directorate, however, was working to a very different agenda. The very first topic to be discussed by the new government at its first full session on 4 August 1918 was not the requirements of martial law but what it saw as the urgent need to re-establish the system of civilian justice; it ordered the reappointment of magistrates and the restoration of the Archangel district court. Concern for the rule of law soon became a cause of tension both within the government and between the government and the British military. On 5 August 1918 the Departmental Directors of Justice and Labour, Gukovskii and Likhach, clashed over the proposed ‘temporary decree on assemblies’, which required all public meetings to give 24 hours notice to the authorities and gave the government power to close such meetings down if they threatened ‘social peace’. Likhach argued that this temporary decree had not gone through proper cabinet discussion and should not be issued; as it turned out this row was unnecessary, the decree was not draconian enough for Poole who refused to publish it.³⁸

The row about security continued the next day when Likhach, whose experience with the Petrograd Assembly of Factory Delegates made him the obvious choice for the labour portfolio, protested at the arrests of workers, restrictions on the trades unions, and in particular, the closure of the arbitration chamber; he also raised the issue of whether or not the soviet should be allowed to operate, as a class, rather than a political body. The Departmental Director for the Interior Zubov responded that the conciliation chamber would be reopened, but, as Chaikovskii made clear, the question of the soviet would have to be raised with the Allied ambassadors when they arrived before any final decision was taken.³⁹ But before then the security row with Poole reached a climax.

On 7 August 1918 Poole informed Chaikovskii he was appointing Colonel Donop, the French military attaché, to the post of Military Governor of Archangel: this was sensible, he explained, since an Allied officer needed to be responsible for those military measures necessary both to defend Archangel and keep order within it; Chaikovskii was instructed to appoint a subordinate Russian officer to work with Donop and inform all concerned. When Chaikovskii reported this to his directorate on 8 August 1918 he made clear that Poole had acted without consulting him and in ignorance of Russian law, which did not recognize a military governor of this type since the Russian military governor had long-established civilian as well as military powers. In protest at Poole’s action the directorate resolved to break off all relations with Poole until the matter was clarified.⁴⁰

Poole was exasperated. His attitude to the directorate was clearly summed up in a report he sent back to London at the end of September 1918:

The government which had assumed control about two hours before our arrival here was hopeless to a degree. It was composed entirely of Left Social Revolutionaries who in politics and ideas are not far removed from Bolsheviks … Their immediate needs of urgent necessities for [the] town and occupied district they absolutely neglected … [and were] totally incapable of understanding the necessity for any military precautions being taken for the safety of the port. Any action of this kind they considered as repressive and as undue interference with the liberties of the people.⁴¹

The Allied ambassadors arrived in Archangel in the middle of this blazing row and at once held long talks with Chaikovskii on 10 August 1918. The British consul Francis Lindley came down firmly on Chaikovskii’s side and defended the position of the URR; Poole’s proposal was withdrawn. In a long telegram to London dated 12 August 1918 Lindley outlined his fears concerning Poole. While he thought that tension between the civilian and military ‘will probably disappear should our movement succeed in embracing a large area’, he was nevertheless worried that Poole had behaved as if ‘he was in conquered territory’. He went on:

He considered having declared martial law he was completely free to deal with any question which might arise and make any regulation he chose without consulting anyone. I trust I have convinced him this is a radically wrong point of view and that while it is necessary to avoid the fatal weakness of Kerensky’s government, it is still more vital to avoid the mistakes made by the Germans in the Ukraine. Without active good will of the inhabitants our movement is doomed to ignominious failure.

Lindley went on to point to a far more worrying aspect of the affair. In his talks with Poole on 11 August 1918 it had emerged that many Russian officers were dissatisfied with Chaikovskii and proposed overthrowing him. Lindley expressed himself forcibly:

I pointed out to General Poole the folly of allowing a lot of Russian officers to turn out the government just set up whose members had been working for months in our cause whose programme suited us, whose leader was in touch with Moscow Centre and who by being members of the Constituent [Assembly] had some legal claim to authority. The only object of turning them out was to place some openly monarchical party in power which in my opinion would at present ruin us completely.

Poole promised to talk to the officers and make clear that both the British military and British civilian authorities supported Chaikovskii’s administration, but he clearly did not share Lindley’s view that ‘it would be difficult to find a man more suitable for head of the Provisional Northern Government’ than Chaikovskii, nor Lindley’s view that the other departmental directors ‘have indubitable following among the peasantry whom they have been most successful in gaining over’.⁴²

Even after the intervention by the ambassadors, tension continued between Poole and Chaikovskii. Some of this was rather silly: Chaikovskii objected to orders from Poole bearing the words T forbid’; and he also protested that Poole had requisitioned all the biggest and best houses in town. Other issues were more serious: when Regeneration of the North published an article on 14 August talking about the ‘colonial policy of the Allies’, Poole sent a military officer to the paper’s offices to make a protest and promptly requisitioned the available newsprint to support the launch of a right-wing paper. Earlier, however, the head of British military intelligence Captain Thornhill had complained that newsprint, destined for a right-wing paper at Poole’s specific request, had been appropriated by the Archangel civil authorities.⁴³

The question of public meetings also dragged on. On 18 August 1918 it was agreed that legislation should ensure that granting permission for these should primarily be a civilian rather than a military concern. However, on 19 August 1918 the government was persuaded to agree to transfer from the police to the military authorities the question of granting permission for such meetings within the city boundaries, and on 22 August 1918 it finally agreed to an amendment making it clear that in all areas of military operations, the military command had to give its consent to all public meetings. Yet none of this fully resolved the issue, since on 23 August 1918 Likhach was again protesting at the arbitrary arrest of sixteen workers by Captain Thornhill. A similar security row developed over the question of summary courts.⁴⁴

Poole had first requested on 12 August 1918 that civilian summary courts and military courts should be established; the government delayed discussion until 15 August 1918 and then simply took note of the request, with Chaikovskii reporting to his directorate the same day on the ‘cases of interference by the British command in the internal affairs of the region’. The following day the directorate explained its inactivity on the issue by referring to the delay on Poole’s side in clarifying certain points of the proposed legislation, although the real reason for the delay was a split within the directorate itself over the issue of the death penalty. On 22 August 1918 the Departmental Director for Justice Gukovskii told his colleagues that he could not accept a law which gave military courts the power to condemn to death; his colleagues disagreed, the cabinet split and as the vote was taken and the death penalty endorsed, Gukovskii announced his resignation. Chaikovskii refused to accept the resignation, but the split meant Poole’s law was only finally agreed on 30 August 1918. In the meantime Poole had lost all patience with the scruples of philosopher politicians and sent an angry letter to Chaikovskii demanding to know why, after more than a week, his orders had not been carried out.⁴⁵

Chaikovskii and the Archangel Military

However, the main source of tension in Archangel was not this constant and unexpected bickering between the Allies and the URR, Poole and Chaikovskii, but a specifically Russian issue; the rift opening up between the directorate and its army. In the first few days of Chaikovskii’s administration Departmental Director for Defence Maslov and the Russian Army Commander Chaplin collaborated quite well. British policy was to ignore the Russian Army as a fighting force and subsume it within ‘Slavo-British Allied Legions’ staffed by British officers; even these would be used for auxiliary rather than active service.⁴⁶ When this idea was first discussed on 4 August 1918 at a directorate meeting attended by Chaplin, Deputy Departmental Director for Defence General N.I. Zvegintsev and Startsev, they suggested it might be possible to achieve something less demeaning if the Allies were approached in the right way; Maslov undertook to draw up proposals. The directorate was determined that Russian troop formations should be put under a Russian commander and, meeting on 5 August 1918, an order to this effect was passed; front-line troops would be subject to the Supreme Allied Command, but through the hierarchy of a Russian high command Poole initially welcomed Maslov’s plans.⁴⁷

Thereafter, however, Maslov’s relations with Chaplin were characterized by antagonism rather than co-operation, a dispute in which Poole clearly came down in favour of Chaplin. Maslov, who was not lacking in military experience and who at the time of the SR walk-out form the Second Congress of Soviets had been an active member of the CSRM’s military commission during the Junker rising in November 1917, became almost a departmental director without a job; his active involvement with SR politics only made the situation worse. On 13 August 1918 Poole asked the directorate to explain reports he had received that Maslov intended to give a talk entitled ‘The aim of Allied interference in Russian affairs’. Increasingly the directorate found itself operating through, and being dependent on Maslov’s deputy Zvegintsev rather than Maslov himself. By 16 August 1918 it was Zvegintsev who was reporting on the need to introduce conscription and Zvegintsev who was using his good offices with Poole to try to persuade the British both to pay for their use of the railway network and to supply the railway workers with food. From 17 August 1918 on it was decided to invite both Chaplin and Zvegintsev to the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday cabinet meetings to ensure joint discussion of military affairs. At their insistence, it was agreed a military treaty should be signed between the government and the Allies; something implemented on 19 August 1918.⁴⁸

It was Maslov’s determination to reassert his authority over the army that provoked Archangel’s White officers to action. On 23 August 1918, the date of the opening of the Chelyabinsk State Conference, Maslov brought a paper to the directorate which sought to end what he saw as the harmful competition that had arisen between his department and Chaplin’s staff: the staff had grown from a body concerned primarily with operational matters, to a body that had taken over economic and supply issues, the correct concern of the department for defence; the solution was to merge the two organizations into an expanded war department. Discussion of this contentious issue was shelved until 25 August 1918 when it was debated in Chaplin’s presence and the decision taken to go ahead. Then the issue of the new powers for the war department and the routine wrangling with Poole about security matters became intertwined. Likhach had already protested to the directorate on 23 August 1918 about the arbitrary arrest of sixteen workers by Captain Thornhill. On 29 August 1918 Chaikovskii got the whole directorate to endorse a letter of protest to Poole about these arrests; this simply provoked the Allied command into publishing a series of decrees on public order without consulting the directorate. Chaikovskii sought the intervention of the ambassadors, but on this occasion they were far from sympathetic. After a bruising session with the US ambassador David Francis, who had bluntly informed him that Poole would not have had to issue any of his decrees if Chaikovskii had got a grip on the security issue earlier, Chaikovskii arrived at the directorate meeting of the 30th late and angry.⁴⁹

Poole’s decrees had been issued through the offices of the Archangel commandant. On 31 August 1918 Maslov announced that the commandant had been sacked and ordered Chaplin to implement this decision at once, thus intervening directly in a purely military appointment. This put the rivalry between Maslov and Chaplin into sharp focus, as did Maslov’s co-ordinated decision to take the first step in revamping the war department by establishing a war economy committee. Then, on 3 September 1918, with Maslov’s enthusiastic support, the directorate revived the notion of establishing a military governor: the job, they suggested, should be offered not to a French officer but to Dedusenko, Chaikovskii’s closest confidant. Dedusenko was asked to approach the Allied ambassadors forthwith and discuss with them the thorny question of the boundaries between military and civilian administration in view of the Allies’ declared position that they would not interfere in Russian affairs.⁵⁰

The proposal for a military governor would have gone some way to satisfying Poole’s concerns, while the delimitation of military and civilian authority was something diplomats of the calibre of Lindley, Noulens and Francis could have resolved in no time. However, a military governor in the person of a current member of the directorate, an SR and a close associate not only of Chaikovskii but of Maslov as well – against the background of the newly strengthened war department’s determination to interfere in military appointments – none of this was what was needed in the eyes of White officers, who saw in it the revival of military commissars and the traditional SR obsession with politicizing the army. Clashes between Chaplin and Maslov increased in number and intensity, and on 5 September 1918 Chaplin acted. He and his fellow officers staged a coup, arrested the directorate and imprisoned them in the monastery on Solovetskii Island in the White Sea. It was left to the Allies’ diplomats to try and sort things out.⁵¹

The British consul Lindley was horrified at Chaplin’s coup. He had been worried about the growing antagonism between Chaplin and Maslov, but his solution was a minor cabinet reshuffle – Maslov and Likhach were his targets as a later report made clear – not a coup. As he told London, he had rather been hoping that it might be possible to remove from the government some of the departmental directors ‘not whole-heartedly pro-ally’; the coup attempt had strengthened rather than weakened the position of these men.⁵² Lindley first learned that something was afoot on the evening of the 5th when the French ambassador Noulens warned him that Chaplin intended to act; Lindley had in turn informed Poole, who ordered Chaplin to abandon his plans. In retrospect, Poole should perhaps have acted more forcefully: other British officers sympathized more or less openly with Chaplin; in particular Thornhill, described by Chaplin as his personal friend and ‘the scourge of the local reds’, did nothing to prevent the directorate’s arrest even though his intelligence headquarters were opposite the directorate building. Lindley certainly believed that the language of General Poole’s officers ‘no doubt led Captain Chaplin to believe [the coup] would be winked at’.⁵³

On the other hand Lindley believed that since the government had ‘taken quite unnecessary measures which could not fail to irritate the military authorities’ simply reinstating the existing ministers might not be the best way forward. He was therefore prepared to negotiate when talks were held with Chaplin on 6–7 September 1918. The ambassadors demanded Chaplin restore a democratic government; Chaplin, realizing he would get no support from Poole, agreed to a new government being formed without Likhach, Maslov and Dedusenko; while Chaplin and his fellow plotters would not be accused of treason but allowed quietly to resign their posts.⁵⁴ However, this was not acceptable to Chaikovskii. He would accept the departure of Likhach and Maslov, but not Dedusenko. So, instead of accepting the compromise the ambassadors had reached with Chaplin, Chaikovskii issued a public statement on 9 September 1918 making clear that all members of the government would stay in office. Then, when the directorate resumed its activities on 12 September 1918, Chaikovskii dissolved all its departments, including the war department, appointed a Russian Colonel, V.A. Durov, Military Governor, and resigned.⁵⁵

This at first sight rather strange decision was motivated by two things: first, Chaikovskii had agreed to head a government on the understanding that rapid progress would be made towards Vologda, the Czechoslovaks and liberation; but none of this had happened. Second, even if Chaikovskii had gone on to head an All-Russian government covering the territory from Archangel in the north to Samara in the south, he would have considered his position as being only temporary until some sort of constitutional body had been set up; the news reaching Archangel by the middle of September 1918 suggested that at that very moment moves were underway in Ufa to establish an All-Russian government linked to an All-Russian representative body. Chaikovskii’s resignation was in favour of these All-Russian institutions. In future, he believed, power should be exercised in Archangel through a governor, ultimately to be appointed by the All-Russian government but in the first instance to be appointed by Chaikovskii himself.⁵⁶ At first Chaikovskii seemed intent on leaving Archangel and joining the All-Russian government which he believed had been formed in Ufa, but Lindley persuaded him to stay on as its Archangel representative. The younger members of the dissolved directorate, however, were determined to try and reach Ufa; Maslov, Likhach and Dedusenko left Archangel on 21 September 1918.⁵⁷

Chaikovskii’s decision to resign on 12 September 1918 was fully in line with URR policy. He had established a URR government which was supposed to evolve into an All-Russian government but had failed to do so because of the vicissitudes of war; it was logical that he should abandon the attempt in favour of that being made by his URR colleagues at the Chelyabinsk State Conference when they resolved to call a further Ufa State Conference. His experience of power, however, was a bad omen for the URR in Siberia. If the URR had at first considered the greatest hindrance to unity came from the more doctrinaire SRs in the Komuch administration who were prepared to compare the Siberian government in Omsk to that of pro-German reactionaries like Skoropadskii and Krasnov, the experience of Archangel showed the impatience of White officers with any regime which looked back only to the summer of 1917; just as Kornilov moved against Kerensky, so Chaplin moved against Chaikovskii. The URR would face the same problems of a revenge-seeking military after the Ufa State Conference; but in Siberia there would be no compromise-seeking diplomats of the stature of Lindley to ensure that Allied policy was actually carried out.

Notes

1. M. Jansen, A Show Trial under Lenin, (The Hague 1982) p. 2.

2. For the founding of Komuch, see S. Nikolaev, ‘Vozniknovenie o organizatsiya Komucha’ Volya Rossii (Prague 1928) vols 8–9, p. 241, and I. Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya Kontrrevolyutsiya (Moscow 1923), pp.49, 56–8; for its insecurity during the early days, see state Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) 749.1.4.17–19.

3. For the salaries, see GARF 749.1.28.7; otherwise Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, pp.60, 74, 85, 89, 91. A summary of some of these points appears in S. Berk, ‘The democratic counter-revolution: Komuch and the civil war on the Volga’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies vol. 7 (1973).

4. GARF 749.1.3.4, 749.1.28.5, and 749.1.28.10.

5. For the grain procurement policy, see O. Figes, Peasant Russia and Civil War: the Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–21 (Oxford 1989), p. 170. I find it hard to accept Figes’s view that the abundance of goods in Samara was largely the result of a good harvest than the policies of Komuch; the problem with the supply situation in Russia has always been to persuade peasants to part with their grain rather than an absolute shortage of grain. His point that the Bolsheviks introduced a more relaxed grain policy on retaking Samara, suggests that they had been forced to recognize the popularity of such a policy with the peasantry. On a related point, Figes’s assertion on p. 168 that the Komuch administration was weak in the countryside seems hard to square with the massive scale of their agitation and propaganda department.

6. Again, I find myself in disagreement with Figes. Although the incidents of land-owners using force to drive poor peasants off land that had recently been allocated to them did occur, just how typical they were is open to doubt. Writing in order to ingratiate himself with the Bolshevik authorities, Maiskii’s account of 1922 has to be considered with great caution, and the frequent repetition of such incidents in Soviet sources does not prove that the incidents were widespread, simply that they help propagate the Soviet myth that the Komuch regime was counter-revolutionary because it favoured the rich ‘kulak’ peasant at the expense of the, allegedly pro-Bolshevik, poor peasant. The Bolsheviks themselves were always thinking of ways ‘model farms’ could be saved from those dividing up the land in order to ensure grain supplies.

7. Nikolaev, ‘Vozniknovenie’, p. 243; Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, pp. 128, 135. Although I disagree with Figes’s assessment of the popularity of Komuch’s agrarian policy, he is probably right to suggest that the Komuch administration had great difficulty persuading peasants that its policy towards the war with Germany was correct. Whether this unwillingness to fight reflected a deeper hostility to Komuch I doubt – as will be shown below, some peasants did volunteer and the volunteer brigades were eventually very successful. Most peasants wanted peace, welcomed Komuch’s agrarian policy, and felt that volunteers could go and fight the Germans.

8. GARF 749.1.27.5, 749.1.27.9, 749.1.27.15.

9. Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, pp. 55, 162; V.G. Boldyrev, Direktoriya, Kolchak, Interventy (Novonikolaevsk 1925), p. 32.

10. For People’s Army wages, see V.L. Utgofa, ‘Ufimskoe Gosudarstvennoe Soveshchanie 1918’ Byloe no. 16 (Petrograd 1921), p. 17, but note Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, p. 149 talks of extra payments to the families of serving soldiers. For tension over military appointments and the role of commissars, see Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, pp. 153–60. For the ‘hidden commissars’, see Nikolaev, ‘Vozniknovenie’, p. 242 and K.V. Sakharov, Belaya Sibir’ (Munich 1923), p. 11. The records of the cultural educational recruitment section form one of the biggest collections in the archives of Komuch, see GARF 671.

11. This summary is taken from S.P. Melgunov, Tragediya Admirala Kolchaka Part 1 (Belgrade 1930), pp. 62–72. For the contacts with the British consul, see GARF R–1005.la.348.67.

12. G.K. Gins, Sibir’, Soyuzniki i Kolchak vol. 1 (Peking 1921), pp. 95, 105, 142. An edited version of this appeared as ‘Organizatsiya beloi vlasti v Sibiri’, in S.A. Alekseev (ed.), Revolyutsiya i grazhdanskaya voina v opisaniyakh Belogvardeitsev vol. 3, p. 380 et seq; the quoted passage is p. 388.

13. For the attitude of the SRs, see L.A. Krol, Za tri goda (Vladivostok 1921), p. 29; for the Samara SRs, see GARF R-1005.1.348.202.

14. Krol, Za tri goda, pp. 12, 50.

15. Krol, Za tri goda, pp. 60–5; for the Allied pressure on the Siberian government, see Utgofa, ‘Ufimskoe’, p. 20.

16. GARF 749.1.41.1; for the composition of the delegations, see Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, p. 133.

17. For the establishment of the commission, see Krol, Za tri goda, p. 66; for the sanction of Komuch, see GARF 667.1.27.22; see also Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, p. 202.

18. For the Siberian government, see Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, p. 142; for Komuch see GARF 749.1.2.1, 667.1.27.1v.

19. Gins, Sibir’, p. 147; Boldyrev, Direktoriya, p. 30 n. 17.

20. GARF 667.1.27.1b; for the SR congress, see Melgunov, Tragediya part 1, p. 95.

21. For Brushvit, see GARF 667.1.32.3; for the views in Samara, see 670.1.1.9.

22. Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, pp. 122, 151 et seq.

23. For the attitude of Komuch, see GARF 667.1.19.23; for the suspension of the Duma, see Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, p. 178.

24. Gins, Sibir’ vol 1, p. 131; Boldyrev, Direktoriya, p. 30.

25. For the ‘rude’ telegram, see GARF 667.1.27.1b; for Guinet on Komuch, see 667.1.32.3.

26. For Vedenyapin, see GARF R-1005.1a.346.206; for the Komuch decree, see Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, p. 76. Boldyrev, although a member of the URR, also felt too much effort was being made to take Kazan; but as a close ally of Chaikovskii, he may well have had his eyes focused on Vologda and Perm, see Direktoriya, p. 32.

27. Krol, Za tri goda, pp. 71–8. These arrivals were noted sadly by Komuch, see GARF 667.1.33.5.

28. For the URR, see Krol, Za tri goda, pp. 71, 76; for the SRs, see GARF 667.1.19.66, 667.1.33.3.

29. For the URR’s right to attend the Chelyabinsk conference, see Krol, Za tri goda, p. 78; otherwise, Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, pp. 134, 148.

30. For Avksentiev on the URR, see Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, p. 208; for his press interview, see Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, p. 183.

31. For Boldyrev’s arrival, see his Direktoriya, p. 28; otherwise Krol, Za tri goda, pp. 80–4.

32. For the absence of any votes, see Gins, Sibir’ vol. 1, p. 184; for the date of 1 September and the proposal of Ufa, see Maiskii, Demokraticheskaya, pp. 206–8.

33. Krol, Za tri goda, p. 82.

34. For Pavlu and Maiskii, see the latter’s Demokraticheskaya, p. 172; for the economic plan, see GARF 677.1.7.7.

35. For the importance of membership of the Constituent Assembly see G.E. Chaplin, ‘Dva perevorota na severe’ Beloe delo no. 4 (Berlin 1928), p. 25; otherwise GARF 17.1.1.1.

36. GARF 16.1.1.8, 16.1.1.11, 16.1.1.20, 16.1.1.34.

37. I. Mints (ed.), Interventsiya na severe v dokumentakh (Moscow 1933), p. 17.

38. GARF 16.1.1.2, 16.1.1.56.

39. GARF 16.1.1.11.

40. For the instruction to Chaikovskii, see Mints, Interventsiya, p. 18; for Chaikovskii’s response, see GARF 16.1.1.22.

41. Public Records Office WO32.57903 Poole’s report.

42. For Chaikovskii’s talks with the ambassadors on 10 August, see L.I. Strakhovsky, Intervention at Archangel: the Story of Allied Intervention and Russian Counter-revolution in North Russia, 1918–20 (Princeton 1944), p. 39; Lindley’s telegrams of 12 August 1918 are in Public Records Office FO 371.3319.423, 371.3339.81.

43. Public Records Office FO371.3339.110; Mints, Interventsiya, p. 19.

44. GARF 16.1.1.52–8.

45. For Poole, see Mints, Interventsiya, p. 29, otherwise GARF 16.1.1.39, 16.1.1.49, 16.1.1.57, 16.1.1.69.

46. For the plans to exclude the Slavo–British Allied Legions from active service, see Public Records Office WO32.5673 Report of General H. Needham.

47. GARF 16.1.1.6, 16.1.1.11; Mints reproduces part of this discussion in Interventsiya, p. 26.

48. For Maslov’s role in the CSRM, see G. Semenov, Voennaya i boevaya rabota Partii Sotsialistov–Revolyutsionerov za 1917–18 (Moscow 1922), p. 11; otherwise GARF 16.1.1.34, 16.1.1.46, 16.1.1.51–3.

49. GARF 16.1.1.58, 16.1.1.61, 16.1.1.67, 16.1.1.69.

50. GARF 16.1.1.70, 16.1.1.76. In his book Strakhovsky was able to link Chaplin’s attempted coup to the commandant’s dismissal (Intervention p. 49), but until the Russian archives were opened the details of the proposals for a new war department and a military governor were unknown.

51. Chaplin, ‘Dva perevorota’, p. 27.

52. For the idea of a reshuffle, see Public Records Office FO371.3339.178; for the impact of the coup on Maslov and Likhach’s position, see 371.3339.122.

53. Lindley’s relations with Poole are in Public Records Office FO371.3339.129 and 3319.440; for Thornhill, see Chaplin, ‘Dva perevorota’, p. 23; for the intelligence building, see Strakhovsky, Intervention, p. 51. Noulens (Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 1917–19 (Paris 1933) vol. 2, p. 200) also suspected British officers of sympathizing with Chaplin.

54. For Lindley, see Public Records Office FO371.3319.440; for Chaplin, see Chaplin, ‘Dva perevorota’, pp. 29–30.

55. For Chaikovskii and Dedusenko, see Public Records Office FO371.3339.131b; for the public statement, see FO371.3339.140; for the dissolution of the directorate, see GARF 16.1.1.79, 16.1.1.93. These developments are summarized in Strakhovsky, Intervention, pp. 63–70.

56. Public Records Office FO371.3339.143; FO371.3339.183.

57. For Chaikovskii’s plans to leave Archangel, see Noulens, Ambassade vol. 2, p. 221; for Lindley, see Public Records Office FO371.3339.165; for those going to Ufa, see 3339.175 and 3339.188. Chaikovskii delayed making the resignation of his administration public because no firm news had come from Ufa about the formation of an All-Russian government. On 24 September he received a report from Omsk suggesting there was still a question mark over whether a stable government had been formed or not, and so on 27 September he reluctantly agreed to form a modified cabinet, see 3339.188–200. The formation of Chaikovskii’s second administration is summarized in Strakhovsky, Intervention, p. 76 et seq.