Map of White and Red forces with anglicised place names.
Under the tsarist regime it had been necessary to have an internal passport in order to leave one’s village. Even today, Russians must have an international passport to travel abroad, like citizens of most other countries, and also an internal passport, called vnutrenny pasport or propiska to travel within the Russian Federation. In destroying the infrastructure of the Imperial regime, the October Revolution produced a brief interlude of personal freedom such as the Russian people had never known. Aristocrats and the richer bourgeois citizens had been able to travel abroad before, but during this period more than 3 million educated Russians, more or less fluent in second languages, took the chance to flee abroad with their families, abandoning their homes, property and businesses. The more provident refugees headed for wherever their money had been stashed away; poorer ones ended up in Shanghai, Singapore, India, Latin America, Australia – wherever local regulations and low cost of living permitted them to settle, however precariously, and live on a pittance. Because the majority had fluent French, in Paris and Marseille it was common to see princes, dukes and generals driving taxis, waiting on tables and carrying bags; their wives cleaned floors and took in washing and ironing. That they were right to leave their homeland, was proven when thousands of their friends and relatives were imprisoned, sent to labour camps – at one time 5 million were locked away in the Gulag – or executed for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, a catch-all offence used throughout the seventy years of Communist rule.
Within Russia there was a widening rift between the Bolsheviks and the other revolutionary socialists who opposed Lenin’s autocratic dissolution of the Duma and many of his other actions, when he rebranded his party as the All-Russian Communist Party187 to mark its opposition not only to capitalism and any surviving supporters of the tsarist regime lurking in the woodwork, but also the foreign socialist parties, whether or not they had supported their national governments during the war, and all the other Russian socialist parties. These former allies were henceforth to be treated as dangerous enemies.
Conventionally the long periods of fighting between various White and interventionist forces and the Reds is referred to as ‘the civil war’, but it is more logical to regard it as the consolidation of Bolshevik power against considerable resistance, largely overcome with brute force by Trotsky. In June 1918, Lenin created a new economic programme labelled voyenny kommunism, or ‘war communism’. It covered the nationalisation of all banks, shipping companies, international trade, agriculture and grain supplies, mining companies, the oil business and all commercial concerns employing more than ten people. In addition, the railway system and all its employees were placed under military discipline. To the horror of the peasants, who had believed that the October Revolution, in which so many had died, would give them the land they farmed, all land was now decreed to be state property, to be farmed industrially under commissars following directives from Moscow, drawn up by party functionaries who knew nothing about growing crops or raising animals. Agricultural land was arbitrarily grouped into kolkhozy – collective farms run by committees. Even the kolkhozy had no heavy equipment. As late as the 1950s machines like tractors, reapers and binders were held in regional motortraktorniye stantsii, or tractor stations, to be allocated to each kolkhoz on a rota system for a limited number of days, with the responsibility for maintenance forever squabbled over by the users and the station personnel.
The Russian Empire was replaced by four socialist republics: the Russian and Transcaucasian Soviet federated socialist republics and the Belorussian and Ukrainian soviet socialist republics. In Ukraine, despite the installation of a soviet regime that ousted a nationalist provisional government after the break-up of the Tsarist Empire, there was no wish to be ‘south Russia’ any longer. Ukrainians looked to Austro-Hungary for protection, which was forthcoming because of the importance to Vienna and Budapest of Ukraine’s fertile black soil chernozem grain-growing area – which the Red Army had twice invaded in attempts to re-impose Russian rule.
Coming on top of the corruption under the tsarist regime and the depredations of the war, Lenin’s policy of war communism finally shattered the economy. Many factories had to close for lack of raw materials, laying-off workers and leaving their families to starve. Lenin’s insistence on central planning by theoreticians, with scant hands-on experience of anything useful, was compounded by the exodus of the middle classes, including most people with managerial or business experience.
Lenin’s constant paranoia seemed, to him at least, justified after Kaplan’s assassination attempt. At the beginning of September, he unleashed a Red Terror, with Dzerzhinsky’s enthusiastic support, using the Cheka rank-and-file to arrest and summarily execute anyone who could remotely be suspected of anti-Bolshevik feelings, or against whom they had personal grudges. The victims, many killed after torture, ran into uncounted thousands. To be condemned, it was not necessary to be guilty of anything; the problem for the innocent was to prove their innocence. How does one do that? A joke of the time tells of a kangaroo arriving at the Polish frontier and asking for asylum on the grounds that they are killing all the rabbits in Russia. ‘But you’re not a rabbit,’ says the frontier guard. ‘How do I prove that?’ retorts the kangaroo.
There were also tens of thousands of armed anti-Bolsheviks within Russia, who suffered, as had the interventionists, from their geographical separation while Trotsky could move his rigidly controlled Red forces from front to front far more easily. Anti-Bolshevik militias formed spontaneously in mid-1918 and became knows as ‘the Whites’ to distinguish them from Trotsky’s Reds. Although white had been the symbolic colour of the Romanovs, not all these anti-Bolsheviks wanted to restore the Tsar. Nor were they all volunteers, several White generals imposing conscription on men of military age in the areas they controlled.
In the Kuban General Bogayevsky was raising a cavalry army of Cossacks. On the Volga, Viktor M. Chernov, who had been Kerensky’s Minister of Agriculture and head of the Constituent Assembly, was attempting to revive the peasant rebellions of the past, now that it was obvious the peasants could expect nothing good from the Bolsheviks. In the Caucasus and elsewhere it was sometimes hard to say whether an anti-Bolshevik rebellion was political or nationalist, as when a longtime Marxist named Noe Zhordania proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Georgia and permitted Britain and other powers to ship weapons through the country to the White forces. Ossetian and Abkhazian civilians suffered attacks, as did Armenians and Azeris.
Map of White and Red forces with anglicised place names.
In addition to open rebellions throughout the former tsarist empire, the Cheka and Red Army units were tasked with suppressing strikes caused by Bolshevik policies, particularly food shortages, when rations fell far below those issued to Red troops. Not far from Georgia, in Astrakhan between 2,000 and 4,000 strikers had their wrists tied behind them and were weighted down with heavy stones before being drowned in the Volga in March 1919, their corpses carried downriver into the Caspian Sea. Nor were the strikers the only victims. Under the cover of suppressing that strike, as many as 1,000 civilians accused of being bourgeois were similarly executed. Even in the former capital Petrograd Cheka special forces stormed the Putilov Works in March 1919, arresting 900 strikers, at least 200 of whom were summarily shot without trial.
In November 1918 the coalition government of Siberia formed by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks was overthrown in a military coup d’état whose leading officers asked the famous Arctic explorer Alexander Kolchak to take command. He refused at first but was declared Verkhovny Privatel or Supreme Ruler and promoted himself to the rank of admiral for the sake of appearances during a power contest between the military and the Socialist Revolutionaries. After local Cossacks had arrested many politicians, the others voted dictatorial powers to Kolchak, who did allow hostile politicians to emigrate, mostly to France. Some SR factions called for his assassination, but when Viktor Chernov attempted to organise a revolt against him in Omsk, it was put down in a bloody repression by Cossacks with hundreds of deaths. Kolchak’s forces were for a time trained by British and American military advisers and publicly approved by President Clemenceau, Prime Minister Lloyd George, US President Wilson and Italian Prime Minister Orlando who presumably closed their eyes to the thousands of murders of Bolshevik and Revolutionary Socialists taken prisoner; this was shrugged off by Kolchak, quoting as precedent what he alleged to have been English practice during the Wars of the Roses. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, local tribal leaders submitted to him with the traditional gifts of live geese, bread and salt, which the embarrassed admiral awkwardly handed over to his aides.
In March 1919 Kolchak’s army began a westward push into Bolshevik-held territory, advancing as far as Kazan and Samara on a 200-mile wide front before being halted and pushed back by the Reds after a twenty-five-day struggle with Trotsky personally taking command at Kazan and setting up a defensive line between that city and the Ural Mountains. Given the paranoia with which the main movers of the revolution regarded each other, it says something about the unsatisfactory state of the Red forces in Kazan that Trotsky asked Lenin to send Stalin and Dzerzhinsky there to purge the regional commissars responsible for the low morale and their poor military showing against the Whites. Dzerzhinsky, as always, devoted himself to bloody repression, while Stalin, as always, played the political game. Hardly had he arrived than he was trying to push Trotsky into sacking the former tsarist officers and place the Red Army political commissars in command, something Trotsky had no intention of doing. In yet another Red Terror, even the dead were made to serve the revolution, being buried under banners bearing the slogan ‘Smert vragam trudavavo naroda’ – death to the enemies of the working people.
Lenin and Trotsky had shared the assumption that the success of their revolution would light a powder train, igniting fires of rebellion against capitalist governments worldwide. At first, it seemed they might be right. On the night of 7–8 November 1918 King Ludwig III of Bavaria was deposed by a Red coup, of which the leader, Kurt Eisner, was himself assassinated three months later. In revenge, the Bavarian revolutionary committees carried out a Red Terror, murdering thousands of perceived enemies to impose a short-lived soviet republic. This was repressed by federal German troops in May 1919, after which a backlash White Terror was unleashed against the defeated Communists.
Just five days after Eisner’s Bavarian coup, an uneasy coalition of nationalists and socialists proclaimed Hungary’s independence from Austria as the Hungarian Democratic Republic. After months of dissension, the regime was overturned by more extreme revolutionary socialists led by Béla Kun, a Hungarian POW captured in 1916 who had stayed in Russia after the revolution to become an agent of the Cheka. He declared war on the newly created state of Czechoslovakia, but when Russian reinforcements promised by Lenin failed to arrive, was forced to retreat. Serbian, Czech and Romanian troops occupied two-thirds of the country and withdrew in March 1919, when Kun declared his country the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Together with his sadistic mistress Razalia Zemlyachka – likewise a Cheka officer and already guilty of several mass murders – Kun conducted a Red Terror188 and used his Red Army to reconquer much of the territory that had been lost to the foreign invaders. He then followed Lenin’s recipe for disaster, alienating the peasantry by confiscating private estates for the state instead of distributing the land to those who lived and worked on them. Driving the economy to a standstill, with even food distribution impossible, he lost any vestige of popular support and fled to Vienna on 2 August, subsequently leading other unsuccessful coups in Germany and Austria during the 1920s until eliminated in Stalin’s purges, accused of that other catch-all crime, Trotskyist deviation.
In north-western Russia, General Nikolai Yudenich was a long-service veteran in the Tsar’s service, who had been commanding operations against the Turks in the Caucasus before the revolution. Retired by Kerensky, he went underground, reappearing in late 1918 to assume control of anti-Bolshevik forces along the Baltic coast and forming a White army with one officer to every eight men. With support in materiel, but not boots on the ground, from Britain, Yudenich launched an attack in the direction of Petrograd on 17 October 1919 when the bulk of the Red Army was committed to fighting in Siberia and southern Russia. The Red resistance collapsing before them, they reached Tsarskoye Selo in sixteen days and dug in only twenty miles from Petrograd. Lenin wanted to abandon Petrograd to Yudenich, but, according to Alexander Naglovsky, then transport commissar of the Northern Commune, which included Petrograd, Trotsky demanded and received from Lenin approval to take ‘all necessary measures’ in the former capital, including a bloodbath of Bolshevik officials who had, in his view, failed in their duty.
He then again exploited the Reds’ advantage of internal communications to summon Red Army reinforcements from the south and conscript every able-bodied man in the former capital under the slogan ‘Death to the hirelings of foreign capital. Long live Red Petrograd!’ In fourteen days, the Kronstadt sailors entered Gatchina, driving back Yudenich’s force to Tsarskoye Selo and driving them out of there in four more days of bitter fighting in the snow. Yudenich’s army was in headlong retreat under shelling and bombing by Red fliers who also released on the fleeing men millions of printed laissez-passer offers and incitements to mutiny like these:
Soldiers of the army of Yudenich, Read, listen and think! The Red army does not fight against workers and peasants. Come over to our side. We shall treat you like brothers. Without landlords, capitalists, tsarist generals and bureaucrats, our country will live a peaceful and happy life. (signed) Leon Trotsky, President of the Military Revolutionary Soviet of the Republic.
Military Order: All soldiers of the army of Yudenich are dismissed from duty on receipt of this order and ordered home. All officers resisting the execution of this order are outlawed and every soldier is required to shoot them on the spot as enemies of the people.
Military Order: For all weapons delivered to any staff headquarters of the Red Army, the soldiers of Yudenich will be paid in full. Rifles 600 roubles. Machine guns 2,000 roubles. Cannon 15,000 roubles.
Military Order: Having lost working time on account of the criminal activities of Yudenich, his demobilised soldiers will retain as their [own] property their accoutrements and their utensils useful in peasant life.189
After retreating back into Estonia, Yudenich and his troops were evacuated on British ships, he heading for France, allegedly enriched with foreign subsidies he had kept for himself instead of using them to finance his army. He died in 1933 and was buried at Nice.
To the east in Siberia, near to Irkutsk on the shore of Lake Baikal, the Czech Legion was reluctantly allied with Admiral Kolchak’s forces on the Trans-Siberian mainline, along which Kolchak was travelling with his Stavka on one of several armoured trains, aboard which was the Russian state treasury of gold and silver bullion that had been captured in Kazan, variously estimated to be worth between 409 and 651 million roubles. In September 1919 Kolchak’s columns were being pushed eastwards by the Red Eastern Army Group and heading for Irkutsk, then under the control of the moderate socialist Political Centre Party, whose leaders refused to join either side in the Red v. White fighting. With his health deteriorating, the admiral was alarmed at the defection of most of his officer corps, who had decided that there was no longer any hope of beating the Reds. He opened negotiations to win over to his side a previous enemy, Grigory M. Semyonov, self-appointed ataman of the Baikal Cossacks, who were themselves allied with the Japanese based in Vladivostok. General Wrangel had described this mysterious character as:
a Transbaikalian Cossack, dark and thickset, and of the rather alert Mongolian type. His intelligence was of a specifically Cossack calibre, and he was an exemplary soldier, especially courageous when under the eye of his superior. He knew how to make himself popular with Cossacks and officers alike, but he had his weaknesses in a love of intrigue and indifference to the means by which he achieved his ends. Though capable and ingenious, he had received no education, and his outlook was narrow.
Semyonov was a larger than life character, whose favourite mistress was a Jewish cabaret singer. He had already fought in the Caucasus and southern Russia, been made Commissar for the Baikal region by the Reds and turned his coat to ally himself with the highest bidder, taking a division of Buryat fighters with him. Once armed and completely out of control, they raped and robbed their way across Central Asia. Semyonov’s motive to join up with Kolchak had more to do with the treasure aboard the admiral’s train than any political consideration. To get it, he was prepared to execute Kolchak’s last-ditch plan to blow up some of the railway tunnels around Lake Baikal, through which the Trans-Siberian circumnavigated the vast inland sea, and thus prevent the Czechs from deserting. Had this been done, they would have been left on the wrong side of the break in the line, with no retreat to Vladivostok, but so would Kolchak, so it is hard to understand his reasoning. Maybe his serious morphine addiction had something to do with it.
The Political Centre government in Irkutsk demanded that Kolchak and the treasure be handed over to them, with the argument that Moscow had abolished capital punishment, so he would be given a fair trial. Under their own general Jan Syrový and a French general named Maurice Janin, the Czechs had had enough of Kolchak and handed the admiral over. Shortly thereafter, the Political Centre abandoned Irkutsk one step ahead of the Soviet Military Revolutionary Party marching in. Kolchak was interrogated and put on trial, the prosecutor accusing him of allowing his troops to commit a White Terror, burning down villages in the territory he occupied and mutilating the inhabitants by cutting off their ears and noses. The self-styled admiral defended himself, saying that his achievements were rather in the field of hydrography and polar exploration than on the battlefield, or even at sea. He added that he had given no orders for atrocities, although he understood that these things did happen in the heat of combat.
In January 1920 the Czechs signed an armistice with the Red forces: in return for being allowed to travel unmolested to Vladivostok, they renounced their claim to the gold in Irkutsk, although taking one wagon loaded with gold with them, and left Kolchak to face his fate. On 7 February, he was marched out of prison with one other officer to the river bank near a hole in the ice. The other officer accepted a blindfold; Kolchak refused one. A Cheka firing squad shot them both and shoved their bodies through the hole in the ice, to be carried away by the current. Kolchak’s nemesis Semyonov was finally driven back to Vladivostok in October 1920. The following month he took ship for Japan, left there for the United States but had to leave that country too after accusations that his men had committed atrocities on American soldiers in Siberia. Allowed to travel to North China, he was given a small pension by his former allies in the Japanese occupation forces and schemed to restore the last emperor Pu Yi to his throne in Beijing. What exactly he did for the next twenty years is unclear, but in September 1945 he was arrested by Soviet paratroops in Manchuria. Belatedly charged with counter-revolutionary activities, he was found guilty and hanged on 29 August 1946.
The gold removed from Irkutsk was well guarded by the Czechs all the way back to their homeland after its independence from Austria. There, some of it was used to found their own bank called Legionárska Banka at a prestige address on Na Poříčí street in Prague, of which the imposing facade is unknowingly passed daily by hundreds of tourists looking for KFC and McDonalds outlets at the end of the street.
The defeat of the White armies was as much due to their generals’ failure to offer any viable alternative to the Boshevik regime as to their geographical disadvantages. They offered no promise of a better future, only a return to tsarism with one of them sitting on the throne of the Romanovs. As to winning the hearts and minds of the Russian masses, their tactics of conscription, grain requisitioning, coercion and terror made it hard for ordinary people to choose between Red and White rule, so most civilians supported neither but gave in to whichever side was currently occupying their region.
In February 1918 General Semyon M. Budyonny created a Red cavalry unit. This grew into a regiment, then a brigade and finally into a division that performed successfully near Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd). Starting in the second half of June 1919 this Cavalry Corps under Budyonny’s command, played the decisive role in the defeat of the main forces of Denikin’s Caucasian Army on the upper reaches of the river Don. Units of the corps took Voronezh, closing a 100km gap in the Red Army’s defense line on the route to Moscow and hastened the Whites’ defeat in the Don region.
As late as 1920 there was still a small but viable White army in the Crimea, under Denikin’s successor General Pyotr Wrangel, a Balt of German origin with an enormous trademark moustache. Wrangel had a stroke of luck in the shape of the three-way war between Poland, Ukraine and the Bolsheviks, which obliged Trotsky briefly to take the pressure off the Crimean front. Wrangel’s strict but fair rule in the White-occupied territory made it briefly seem that he was there to stay, but the Reds’ cavalry under Budyonny eventually drove his rump army into a pocket on the Crimean peninsula.
There Wrangel held out long enough to evacuate 135,000 soldiers and civilian dependents, dubbed ‘enemies of the Republic’ by Trotsky, on 14 and 15 October 1920 in a flotilla of 126 French, American and Russian warships and merchant vessels from Sevastopol across the Black Sea to Turkey and onward to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and elsewhere. Because London had not formally recognised Wrangel’s regime a number of Royal Navy vessels stood by on a point of law without helping, to the disgust of many naval officers. Several hundred of Wrangel’s officers and NCOs who subsequently found themselves stranded penniless in Constantinople accepted free passage on French ships taking them directly to North Africa, where they and Cossack and Polish cavalrymen were recruited wholesale to form the 1st Cavalry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion.
At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 Alexandra Kollontai and other speakers spoke for the Workers’ Opposition faction in favour of greater involvement of the population in political affairs, but to no avail: Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was there to stay for almost the next seven decades. The war with the Central Powers, the revolution and the subsequent fighting against the Whites and interventionists in which hundreds of thousands perished had led to a situation not unlike that which took the Russian Empire out of the First World War: widespread strikes, mutinies of garrison troops and peasant uprisings. One of a number of spontaneous rebellions against the Bolsheviks came in the Tambov region, 260 miles south-east of Moscow, where Lenin’s prodrazvyorstka programme of forcible requisitions of grain and other foodstuffs was increased by 50 per cent in 1920. This meant death by starvation for many of the peasants who had produced the grain. On 19 August, after a Red Army unit applying the new regulations used exceptional violence against the population of a small town in the region, a political group calling itself Soyuz Trudovovo Krestyanstva, or Union of Working Peasants, set up an elected Duma that abolished Bolshevik power in the region, restored civil liberties and, most critically of all, returned the land and its crops to the peasants who had grown them. To fight off the Red Army, by October it had assembled 50,000 peasants, many of whom had military experience in the recent war, aided by many deserters from the Reds. This force was designated the Tambov Blue Army, to distinguish it from both Red and White forces. In January 1921 similar peasant revolts broke out in Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn and elsewhere. By then the Tambov army numbered 70,000 men and had successfully kept the Reds at bay for some months.190
Since the Polish-Soviet war had ended and General Wrangel’s army gone, Trotsky was able to unleash 100,000 Reds on the Tambov rebels, using heavy artillery and armoured trains against men armed only with personal weapons. Frequent executions of civilians launched another Red Terror, in which special Cheka detachments used heavier-than-air poison gas to kill the guerrillas hiding in the forests. This chemical warfare continued for at least three months. Some 50,000 civilian ‘enemies of the people’ were interned in seven concentration camps with a very high mortality rate from malnutrition, but total deaths among the population of the area were estimated to be four or five times higher than this. The following month in Moscow the Central Committee announced the end of the punitive requisitions of prodrazvyorstka, replacing it with a less harsh policy of prodnalog. Derived from prodovolstvenny and nalog, meaning food tax, prodnalog left about one-third of the food produced in the hands of the peasants who had grown or raised it. Since they knew in advance how much they would have to hand over, the more energetic, or those with more fertile land, could work harder and produce a surplus, unaware they would be labelled kulaki, or fists, and later subjected to cruel punishment for this ‘deviationist’ activity.
In Soviet Russia, some people did not need to be labelled with any specific ‘crime’, except the belief that moral values were still important, even under the Soviet system. On 6 February 1922 the Cheka ceased to exist, Dzerzhinsky’s organ of state terror becoming Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Uprvalenie, or state political administration, still headed by him. Its officers kept the familiar name ‘Chekisty’ – as indeed they still are called today, after all the changes of initials for Soviet and Russian secret police and espionage arms. Some of the early victims included Lenin’s list of intellectuals he had long planned to banish from Russian soil because their disappearance into the Gulag or death before a firing squad would have provoked reaction in the West. The necessary exit visas required were delayed in the Soviet bureaucratic machine. To speed up the process, disregarding Maxim Gorkys’ protests, Lenin wrote from his sickbed, which would soon be his deathbed, on 16 September to Deputy Chairman of the GPU Unshlikht that ‘these lackeys of capital, who think they are the brains of the nation … are not the brains. They’re the shit.’191 On 17 September Unshlikht’s number two, Genrikh Yagoda, replied with a list of those arrested and in prison in Moscow or Petrograd, who would be leaving on 22 September. In fact, the process of expulsion lasted until the end of the year for some of them. Forced to board, in some cases international trains, but mostly ocean-going steamers in Petrograd harbour, carrying just two sets of clothing, plus what they were wearing, some books and other small mementoes, but no icons in their luggage, they were permitted to take with them only the equivalent of £25 per person, to start their new lives in exile.
Some tried to get money from abroad to smooth their expulsion from Russia, but it was illegal for Soviet citizens to have foreign currency and even friends who might have had some were too terrified to help. Prince Sergei E. Trubetskoy belonged to a noble family that had been famous as moral philosophers for generations. He was one of the few expulsanty who did receive friendly treatment, and later wrote:
It was difficult to raise the money [to take with us]. Then, quite unexpectedly, my colleagues at the State Agricultural Institute came to my aid. My former boss, a man called Demchenko arranged back-pay for all the time I had been in prison, plus my salary for two months ahead – the entitlement for anyone made redundant. He took a considerable personal risk doing this and I begged him not to. He showed me there could be highly decent people among the Communists too. He and his staff threw me a party with ‘best wishes for your new life’ and only one Chekist and a few bourgeois worried for their own skins did not come.192
Since the expulsanty could not pay their fares, the GPU reluctantly paid for their travel. They were deposited in Central and Western Europe, the lucky ones re-emerging in the large Russian émigré community in Paris.193
On 30 December 1922, the four soviet republics created in 1918 united as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The carefully chosen word union, which implied a voluntary association of equals, stopped three generations of Western liberals seeing that the USSR ruled from Moscow was the old tsarist empire re-created in five bloody years to deprive millions of ethnic identity and political freedom for three generations. The facts of the Tambov rebellion, ruthlessly suppressed for Trotsky by General Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky, were subsequently concealed in the Soviet Union until brought to light again by a local historian in 1982. Other peasant revolts in Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan and elsewhere were crushed by a contingent of 30,000 Red Army soldiers, backed up, as a foretaste of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, by Cheka extermination units using poison gas.
The Bolsheviks should have anticipated this sort of resistance to the agricultural policies that killed 7.5 million people living in some of the most fertile regions of Russia, but were shocked when the great heroes of the October Revolution – hailed as such by Trotsky – turned against them in March 1921. Some 10,000 sailors and 4,000 soldiers on the island fortress of Kronstadt – Peter the Great’s bastion in the Gulf of Finland against a foreign attack on Petrograd – protested against the government’s failure to provide food for the population, its restrictions on personal liberty and the placing of all workers under military discipline. In sympathy with widespread strikes and demonstrations against the famine and epidemics caused by the government’s failure to provide basic food for the civilian population, for restricting political freedom and placing all workers under military law, on 26 February the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol sent a delegation across the Gulf to Petrograd, to report on the situation there. Two days later, the report of the delegates covered not only the motives of the strikers – with whom they sympathised – but also the Bolshevik government’s harsh repression of them.
The result was a mass meeting in Kronstadt on 1 March of more than 15,000 servicemen and civilians demanding free elections to the soviets, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to travrel and freedom to organise trade unions. Other demands were for a reassessment of wages and the removal of Bolshevik roadblocks preventing peasant producers of food from bringing supplies into the cities. The only voices raised against the motion were those of two paid officials of the Bolshevik Party. The meeting then voted to send a second delegation of thirty members to Petrograd, inviting strikers and others to visit Kronstadt, but that delegation was arrested by the Bolsheviks immediately on arrival in the city.
Another meeting of 303 delegates on 2 March in Kronstadt elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee of eventually twenty members to organise the defence of the island after threats were made by the Bolshevik officials there that this counter-revolutionary movement under Lenin’s slogan ‘All power to the soviets’ with the addition of the words ‘and not to parties’ would be suppressed by armed force, although it was entirely in the spirit of the two revolutions of 1917. The reply from Moscow was that the Kronstadt movement was inspired by French intelligence officers and organised by former general Kozlovsky, Trotsky’s representative on the island. Had this been true, the uprising would have taken place a few weeks later after the thaw due at the end of April when Kronstadt was again a defensible sea-girt island that could have been reinforced and resupplied from abroad by sea.
For a short time, Kronstadt was what the Bolsheviks had promised Russia would become, with free trade unions and an elected Duma. About 300 Bolsheviks who did not want to join the uprising were put in prison but treated fairly, while the families of the garrison’s soldiers and sailors were taken hostage in Petrograd. Trotsky started organising an attack with poison gas, only aborted by the defeat of the Kronstadters before he could carry it out. On 5 March two anarchists named Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman offered to act as intermediaries between the garrison and the government in a last-ditch attempt to prevent bloodshed – an offer that was completely ignored by the Bolshevik Central Committee, which had already decided to suppress the uprising as bloodily as possible – ‘pour encourager les autres’ tempted by thoughts of counter-revolution.
The Red assault on Kronstadt began on 7 March, with the first probes failing as some Red Army soldiers defected to the insurgents and others courageously suggested to their commissars that they should send spokesmen to find out the Kronstadters’ demands first. The assault dragged on intemittently for ten days as more Red Army units arrived until Trotsky had deployed an estimated 60,000 men commanded by Gen Tukhachevsky. On the night of 16–17 March, 100 so-called agitators in this force were arrested and seventy-four of them summarily shot by their own comrades. On the morning of 17 March, with party commissars manning machine-guns in the rear to force the attackers onto the ice swept by the garrison’s machine-guns, about 8,000 rebels managed to escape in small groups across the ice to Finland, causing a major problem of asylum-seekers for the newly independent Finnish state, which had not yet decided on a policy of political asylum. Casualties were heavy on both sides, with many captured rebels summarily executed or sent to prison camps set up by Dzherzhinsky, where months later groups of them were still being shot by firing squads, which an otherwise loyal Bolshevik named Viktor Serge called a senseless and criminal agony. The newspaper of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the Sailors, Red Army men and Workers of the City of Kronstadt, also titled Izvestiya, referred to Trotsky as ‘the bloody Field Marshal’.194 Alexander Berkman, an American sympathiser with the Bolsheviks, noted in his diary: ‘March 17 – Kronstadt has fallen today. Thousands of sailors and workers lie dead in the streets. Summary executions of prisoners and hostages [who had obviously not taken part in the rebellion] continue.’195
On the day following the defeat of the Kronstadt rebels, Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune by renaming the battleship Sevastopol as Paris Commune.
More than 10,000 ‘heroic’Red soldiers were killed or wounded in the ten-day campaign, the wounded mostly dying of hypothermia, while left lying on the sea ice swept by sub-zero winds. How many rebels died in the fighting is unknown. Later communiqués disagreed on whether 6,528 or 10,026 were arrested after the taking of the fortress. Officially, 2,168 were summarily shot and 1,955 sent to labour camps, although 4,836 sailors were deported to Crimea and the Caucasus, perhaps to strengthen the Black Sea Fleet, then re-deported when Lenin heard of this to labour camps in the far less hospitable Far North. Their families who had been held hostage in Petrograd during the siege were also deported to Siberia. Whatever residents were allowed to remain on the island led a very different life under the Bolshevik troika imposed on them under a new military regime to make the point that ‘All power to the soviets meant, All power to the Communist Party.’
As the Tambov rebels and the Kronstadt workers, sailors and soldiers learned too late, the Bolsheviks occupying all seats in the Soviet of People’s Commissars and key posts at every level of government made the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic a dictatorship, as would be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Trotsky’s eventual victory over all the other elements in the civil war had little to do with popular support and was mainly due to the Red Army’s brutally established control of European Russia and eventually Siberia also. This amazing military achievement for a civilian was ultimately the cause of Trotsky’s assassination – since his prominence was perceived as a threat at first by Lenin and then by Stalin.
The uprising in March 1921 made Lenin realise that his rigid adherence to the doctrine of war communism had not only brought the national economy to the brink of total meltdown, in which workers had to be placed under military discipline, it also provoked a real danger of counter-revolution without any foreign intervention. Shortly afterwards, at the Tenth Party Congress he unveiled the New Economic Policy (NEP), involving the return of most agriculture, retail trade, and small-scale light industry to private hands, with the state retaining control of heavy industry, transport, banking, and foreign trade. Men and women who took advantage of this to start up small businesses and farms were known as nepmen. Money, which had been abolished under war communism, was also re-introduced the following year. The peasants were again allowed to own and cultivate land – and pay taxes for the privilege. What the public was not told, was that Lenin only intended this programme as a temporary expedient to re-boot the economy and give the party time to consolidate its power.
One way in which he did that was to dissolve Alexandra Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition movement, which had for months been criticising the Bolsheviks’ excesses. Although having some demands in common with many of the rebels across the former empire, she advocated supporting the Bolshevik government and working within the party to solve what she saw as temporary problems. Although the Workers’ Opposition had actually supported the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt mutineers, Lenin now decided that even an open and loyal critic like Kollontai had no place in his Russia, where party solidarity under his rule was paramount because internal and external enemies were trying to exploit any disunity.