The Romanovs’ removal to Ekaterinburg had been planned on the premise that they could be held there more safely than in Tobolsk until such time as Moscow was ready to receive them for a big show trial. The only thing right about this calculation was that Tobolsk was insecure as a place of confinement. The Bolsheviks had never had a strong political base in the vicinity, and Sovnarkom’s sovereignty was entirely attributable to the external military agencies from Petrograd, Omsk and Ekaterinburg. Violence as yet was minimal. A Red Guard detachment made yet another sortie to Golyshmanovo in June. When the village priest rang the church bell at their approach, the Red Guards thought he was sounding an alarm for anti-Bolsheviks to escape into hiding. After an exchange of fire, the priest was taken captive and marched off to be executed.1
Most of the armed conflicts in the Urals and adjacent regions in the first months of 1918 remained local in nature, having little practical significance for Moscow or Petrograd, and it was the same situation in most other territories of the former Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks, despite frequently talking in 1917 about the potential outbreak of civil war, were remarkably slow to appreciate the scale of the fighting that their seizure of power was likely to bring about. Komuch’s People’s Army was aiming to move into central Russia as soon as it had enough troops and equipment. When this happened, it would be a war between two left-wing forces, one led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the other by the Bolsheviks. But armies were also being formed which adhered to the political right. General Kornilov, after escaping captivity, joined General Alexeev deep in southern Russia, where they were recruiting a volunteer army. Initially it consisted mainly of ex-officers, but Alexeev planned to expand its ranks and, as soon as possible, march on Moscow. Admiral Kolchak was pursuing a similar purpose in mid-Siberia. It was only a matter of time before these military preparations would burst into all-out civil war and compel the Bolsheviks to organize a stern defence of the cities that they held in central Russia.
Lenin himself nevertheless felt sure that the civil war was already over as early as February when the Reds in southern Russia defeated a small Cossack force under Afrikan Bogaevski. As late as April he was still displaying a pronounced military complacency:
The task of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters was already resolved in the period from 25 October 1917 to (approximately) February 1918 or to the surrender of Bogaevski.
Next on to the agenda there comes . . . the task – the task that is urgent and the peculiarity of the current moment – of organizing the administering of Russia.2
It remained an article of faith among Bolsheviks that so long as they could hold on to their support among industrial workers, their security would be guaranteed. In February, after having demobilized the old imperial army, they started to form their own Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, but with less than total urgency, and much prejudice against military professionalism remained to the fore throughout the party leadership.
The Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in Ekaterinburg focused their military preparations on defence against General Dutov’s force. It is estimated that there were 12,375 Red Guards in the Urals in the last winter months and that 3,000 were based in Ekaterinburg alone.3 The Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee brought them together in two groups. The first was led by Ivan Malyshev, the second by Sergei Mrachkovski. Malyshev took his people off in early 1918 to Orenburg to confront a force headed by Ataman Dutov. Mrachkovski concentrated on preparing the defences of Ekaterinburg.4 These volunteers were no match for experienced troops. Local Red Guards were used to doing as they pleased rather than obeying orders. They objected to the instructors who provided weapons training; they also disliked the idea of marching or deploying in formation. Bolshevik leaders only made a bad situation worse. A. Kadomtsev was famous as a veteran of the faction’s armed units in the 1905 Revolution. He was proud of Bolshevism’s accomplishments without assistance from the detested officer corps of the Russian Army. For him, it was a good thing that each Red Guard unit (or druzhina) should act on its own initiative. Preference was given to recruits from the industrial factories. In the early military encounters there were often bursts of ill-aimed fire when the enemy appeared ahead.5
But outside the Urals there were other forces that allied themselves with Dutov. Chief among them was the People’s Army of Komuch, which radiated out from the Volga region and looked for organized armed formations to challenge Sovnarkom and its local governmental agencies. As yet the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee faced no direct menace from Komuch and its allies, but there was an obvious necessity to prepare for any sudden change in the strategic situation, and efforts were made in Ekaterinburg to strengthen the city’s military capacity.
The Urals enlistment campaign intensified after the peace treaty with Germany was signed at Brest-Litovsk, and some of the Urals volunteers were to claim – admittedly as prisoners of counter-revolutionary forces, when they might have wanted to appear more patriotic than they really were – that they yearned to fight the Germans and instead were mobilized against Dutov.6 The Bolshevik regional leadership encouraged all this. Although they could not rip up the peace treaty and continued to believe that Lenin had committed a terrible mistake, they aimed to make the best of a bad job by making military preparations; they also lent their weight against any more concessions being made to imperial Germany.7 Their hope was that the Party Central Committee would see the error of its ways and proclaim an armed crusade against world capitalism. Recruitment of troops was conducted with a view to being ready for a ‘revolutionary war’ that would pitch the Reds against Germany and Austria-Hungary, shatter the political regimes in central Europe and install communist administrations throughout the continent. The Urals leadership accepted that it could not start such a war by itself. While it waited on events at the national level, it aimed to bring the Urals under proper control. This above all else required a decisive campaign on the ‘Dutov front’; recruits were also deployed to the villages to requisition grain from a reluctant peasantry.8
The military situation worsened still further after the transfer of the Romanovs to Ekaterinburg. Although the origins of the process had nothing to do with the Urals, the impact on the region would soon become profound.
Violence reached a new peak of intensity in the Urals with a revolt by the Czechoslovak Legion that exploded in Chelyabinsk, only 140 miles to the south of Ekaterinburg and linked to it by a direct rail line. The Legion was a force consisting of Czech and Slovak POWs travelling in groups to Vladivostok. Their intention was to re-enter the Great War on the Allied side in Western Europe. After Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs sought to keep up a degree of cooperation with the Allies as a counterbalance to the Germans. He and Lenin were aware that the Brest-Litovsk peace might not hold. It was always possible that Germany might suddenly invade Russia and overthrow the Bolsheviks. To guard against a worsening of relations with Berlin, Trotsky continued to talk to British, French and American diplomats and forged working links with Robert Bruce Lockhart, the United Kingdom’s leading emissary in Moscow. The permission for the Czechoslovak Legion to leave for abroad was one of Sovnarkom’s gestures designed to prove that the Soviet authorities were not yet wholly under Germany’s control. There was also the hope that this would dissuade the Allies from dispatching a military expedition against Soviet Russia.
This was always a risky policy, and Trotsky’s growing distrust of the Czechoslovak Legion commanders pushed him into issuing an order for the travelling force to be disarmed. In the first clashes in Chelyabinsk, the Red forces were no match for men of the old Austro-Hungarian army who had seen action on the Eastern Front and retained their morale and determination. The Czechoslovaks seized the telegraph facilities and transmitted a call to arms to the groups that were dispersed to the east and west of Chelyabinsk along the Trans-Siberian Railway. At every station on the line they crushed the Red resistance and cabled their news to their comrades elsewhere.
The Czechoslovak plan as it quickly developed was to gather together all their groups and ally with Komuch to overthrow the Bolsheviks. From Chelyabinsk they sent units west to secure a number of mining townships including Miass and Zlatoust in the direction of Ufa. A force of Czechoslovaks also moved north up the Chelyabinsk–Ekaterinburg link, stopping at Kyshtym; they also moved east from Chelyabinsk along the Trans-Siberian Railway and took Shadrinsk and Kurgan. Omsk fell to Czechoslovak troops on 7 June.9 Their victories encouraged Russian anti-Bolshevik armed detachments to begin operations. Further north, Tyumen fell to an anti-Bolshevik force. Nizhni Tagil followed shortly afterwards. These were heavy losses for the regional administration because Tyumen lay directly to Ekaterinburg’s east and Nizhni Tagil to its north. The ring of enemies was near to being closed around Ekaterinburg by early July.10 They could travel neither to the north nor to the south, and if they wanted to inspect Alapaevsk they had to take the branch line that avoided Nizhni Tagil. The Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee had lost almost all authority over the provinces in its region.
Panic spread throughout Ekaterinburg when the news of the fall of Chelyabinsk arrived. As the military emergency intensified, the Ekaterinburg Soviet mobilized a section of its own deputies to bolster the Red Army as it prepared to withstand attack by the Czechoslovak Legion.11 The railway stations were packed with people.12 Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg needed all the voluntary assistance they could find to halt the Czechoslovak advance. They turned to the anarchists, whom they had recently expelled from their political headquarters in the city. The Czechoslovak threat brought them together again, and joint action by Red Guards and anarchist armed groups was established.13
The circle of Soviet power was being rapidly constricted. In the middle of June, Omsk fell to assault by Siberian Cossacks, and the advancing Czechoslovaks, who also seized control of the railway close to Tyumen. Red forces and their political leaders conducted a strategic retreat.14 Workers’ uprisings in the Urals against the Bolsheviks were widespread in the early summer.15 Discontent with Sovnarkom’s failure to bring about economic recovery was rife, and resentment of police terror was intense. Lenin and his comrades had promised the moon in the previous year. The disillusionment among even the industrial working class was quick to reach the Urals. Demands were frequent for re-elections to the soviets across the entire region.16 It could merely be a matter of time before the Czechoslovak Legion would decide to move on Ekaterinburg, and the prospects for the city’s defenders were grim. The Bolsheviks had little over a thousand men under arms. These included Red Guards whose discipline was far from dependable. A lot of their weaponry was of poor quality – many of the troops were shouldering only hunting rifles.17
Within days almost the entire railway between the Volga and Vladivostok had tumbled out of Soviet control. Well-organized armed forces, however small, were capable of huge military impact if they had sufficient determination. The Bolshevik leadership in the capital was acutely aware of its insecurity. Without the Latvian riflemen in and around the Kremlin, Sovnarkom was in constant danger of being taken by surprise. By the same token it was entirely possible that the Czechoslovaks, no longer able to trust Lenin and Trotsky, might act as the vanguard of an offensive designed to crush the October Revolution.