CHAPTER 8

In the Eye of a “Time of Troubles”: Terror in Russia, 1917–21

IN 1917 the overexertions of a protracted and failing war gravely unsettled Russia: the imperial army was on the verge of disintegration; famine stalked the major cities; the economy and exchequer were wasted; and industry was paralyzed. Twice before, in the time of the Crimean War and Russo-Japanese War, military defeat had shaken the tsarist regime and called forth prophylactic reforms. But in scale and intensity these earlier upheavals were nothing like the deep crisis brought on and fueled by the inordinate material and human sacrifices of the Very Great War. In February–March 1917, between the fall of the Peter-Paul Fortress and the resignation of Tsar Nicholas II, the forces of law and order crumbled, giving the signal for peasants to seize the land from their overlords and for minority nationalists along the periphery to press for autonomy or independence. This rising peasant and nationality disaffection was both cause and effect of a general dislocation which between 1917 and 1921 spiraled into an altogether peculiar and extreme “time of troubles” fraught with Furies.¹

The contrast between France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 could not be more striking. When the Bastille fell, the Bourbon monarchy was at peace with Europe. Despite a momentary budgetary squeeze, its public finances and economy were sound, and so was its state apparatus, including the armed forces. Not surprisingly, the French Revolution heated up only gradually: it took between three and four years for France to go to war, for Louis XVI to be tried and executed, for civil war to erupt in the Vendée, and for terror to be put à l’ordre du jour.

Russia in War and Revolution, 1914 to 1921

In Russia the pace was altogether quicker. The Romanov empire was at war at the time of the uprising in February 1917 in Petrograd, and both civil war and foreign intervention broke forth within less than a year. Nicholas II was executed in mid-July 1918, and mass terror was decreed in early September. In the meantime, earlier that same year, aided and abetted by the Central Powers, Ukraine and several other non-Russian “borderlands” seceded. But above all, the fact of war was omnipresent from the creation, and became an urgent defining issue and force. Whereas the provisional governments of Lvov and Kerensky used the continuation of war as a stratagem to tame the revolution, the Bolsheviks envisioned a rush to peace to revolutionize it. Especially the moderates, notably the Kadets and Mensheviks, looked to the appeals of nationalism, the flow of Allied financial and military aid, and the discipline of the barracks to help restore a minimum of order and to consolidate a revolution from above, on the model of 1905. The spectacular failure and human cost of Kerensky’s military offensive in June 1917 discredited this political strategy. Presently the unreconstructed army was devitalized by the massive desertion of peasant-soldiers bent on joining the fast-spreading jacquerie against the nearest squire in the countryside instead of fighting the distant foreign enemy in pursuit of a chimeric “peace without annexations and indemnities.”

This irreversible military predicament encouraged Lenin to intensify his drive for immediate “peace, bread, and land.” In turn, Kerensky ordered General Kornilov, the new commander-in-chief, to reestablish discipline so that the army would be fit to continue fighting the war abroad and enforce order at home. But convinced that time was running out, and distrustful of non-autocratic government, in late August Kornilov launched an armed insurrection to establish a military dictatorship to be backed by the old ruling and governing classes. With no “national guard” of its own to protect it, the provisional government summoned supporters, including the hated Bolsheviks, to take to the streets so as to parry this diehard defiance. Apart from benefiting the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers, Kornilov’s abortive coup further hastened the disintegration of the army, the rebellion of the peasantry, and the restlessness of the industrial proletariat.

Clearly, the inception and early infancy of the Russian Revolution, unlike that of the French Revolution, was marked by the political, economic, and social fallout of an exhausting and unsuccessful war effort. Russia’s general crisis in city and country was not the doing of the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, even if their militants exploited it. The ease with which Lenin’s inexperienced Red Guards invested the Winter Palace in October–November 1917 was less a measure of the Bolsheviks’ strength and perspicacity than of the provisional government’s irresolution and impotence in the face of snowballing domestic and foreign problems. To be sure, of all the political parties—which were, in any case, a fragile foreign implant in Russia’s autocratic political culture—the Bolshevik party was by far the best organized and disciplined, as well as the most adaptable. Even so, its accession to power was a perverse effect of the rampant destabilization of Europe’s largest and most populous, even if least developed, country, compounded by the dislocation of the concert of powers and the hyperbolic war in which it was trapped. While the Bolsheviks, like the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, were mentally and theoretically prepared for a conjuncture analogous to 1904–5, they did not anticipate—nor, for that matter, welcome—the colossal implosion which unhinged Russia starting in 1917. Although their decisions and actions were informed by their ideological and programmatic canon, this canon was, in turn, modified in the heat of emergent events which called forth unforeseen intentions, policies, and consequences.

Admittedly, the way the Bolsheviks took power was consistent with their credo of direct and defiant action, and their authoritarian rule following Red October was bound to provoke resistances which they were, of course, determined to counter and repress. But again, just as they were unprepared for the enormity of the crisis, so they were caught unawares by its Furies, which they were not alone to quicken. With the cave-in of sovereignty, it was relatively easy for the Bolsheviks to take the remnant residue of power into their own hands. It was altogether harder, however, to exercise and enforce this vestige of authority; to do so meant fending off a broad range of foes in an incipient civil war that was inseparable from an unbearable foreign war. It may well be that by virtue of its eventual costs and cruelties, this resolve to fight a civil war became the original sin or primal curse of Bolshevik governance during the birth throes of the Russian Revolution. Even in circumstances less wretched than those of 1917 to 1921 in Russia, war and civil war, separately or jointly, are the great scourge of limited or democratic government.

With the overall situation favorable to the intensification of chaos and the attendant friend-enemy dissociation, the Bolsheviks ventured upon a civil war freighted with the founding violence of a new Russia. Eventually this unforeseen internal war, exacerbated by the intervention of hostile foreign powers, became the formative experience of the Bolshevik leaders. This struggle, at once defiant and perilous, fostered their theoretical and mental predisposition, rooted in Russia’s authoritarian past, to centralize power, govern by ukase, resort to violence, control the economy, and impose ideological uniformity. At the same time they incited revolutionary zeal and embraced extreme voluntarism. The Bolshevik project was an inconstant amalgam of ideology and circumstance, of intention and improvisation, of necessity and choice, of fate and chance. Perhaps without the guiding historical example of the French Jacobins, which was ubiquitous, the Bolsheviks would have either hesitated to bid for undivided power or flinched once they realized that they faced an even more forbidding situation than their predecessors of the late eighteenth century. But then again, the brazen daring of the Bolsheviks, like that of the Jacobins before them, kept being vindicated by altogether improbable successes which legitimated and strengthened their tenuous and beleaguered regime.

Civil war was of much greater importance in the Russian than the French Revolution. Although the main civil war theaters were in the south and southeast, there was fighting in other regions as well. The Bolsheviks fought, above all, the White generals, who embodied the counterrevolution. Of course, they also did battle with the Kadets, the Mensheviks, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, as well as with several of the minority nationalities. In addition, they fought rebellious peasants in Ukraine, in Tambov province, and in the lands of the Volga. Ultimately, however, the struggle between the Bolsheviks and the White Guards was the crucial one, all the other conflicts being of subordinate importance. Given this primacy of absolute enmity between Reds and Whites, the peremptory dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 was of marginal consequence: while it widened the fatal split between the Bolsheviks and the bulk of the Socialist Revolutionaries, it left Kolchak, Denikin, and Iudenich, the White generals, altogether indifferent. Bent on restoring the old regime and empire, even if stripped of the Romanov dynasty, the latter were as hostile to liberal or socialist democracy as they were to proletarian dictatorship.

Actually, Kornilov’s stillborn military defiance of Kerensky’s government in late August 1917 presaged the counterrevolution in the Russian Revolution. Even though their troops kept deserting them, all ex-tsarist senior officers stayed home to organize resistance rather than go into exile, as so many of their French counterparts had done in 1789. Almost immediately following the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd, they made their way to the Don territories, with the idea of organizing White Guards of assorted volunteers and seasoned Cossacks to reclaim their world of yesterday. In any case, when, on November 3, 1917, Lenin proclaimed the start of civil war, he and his associates knew that they would have to engage not only the Kadets, but also, and above all, the implacable imperial officers corps.

The French Revolution was constantly present at the creation of the Russian Revolution.2 Many of the actors in the Russian Revolution modeled themselves after those in the French Revolution: for the Kadets, the Feuillants were the worthy prototype; for the Mensheviks, the Girondins; for the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins. Some “consciously” used the French Revolution “as a pattern or guide for action”; others did so “unconsciously,” on the basis of their “implicit or virtual” experience of it. Indeed, the French Revolution served as a road map for some, a model for others, and an incubus for still others. Unlike the Jacobins, who had looked back to ancient Rome for inspiration and guidance, as well as a legitimating pedigree, the Bolsheviks sought their historical referents in a more recent past. Indeed, they became fervent analogists, constantly weighing the resemblances and differences between themselves and the Jacobins. In making these comparisons they drew on the politically informed debates about the French Revolution within the Russian left during the decades before 1917.

The question of violence was central to this critical engagement with the paradigmatic Great Revolution, all the more so because of the repressive violence in its aftershocks in 1848 and 1871. Not only Marx and Engels theorized the role of violence in the unfolding Socialist project, but so did the action intellectuals of the Socialist movements of Central Europe and Russia. Indeed, unlike during the prelude to the French Revolution, violence became an ever more urgent issue during the pre-revolution of the Russian Revolution. In 1905 the tsarist government had not hesitated to crush the rebels and soviets of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and between 1907 and 1917 it had used bold physical and rhetorical violence to curb the reforms introduced with the October Manifesto. Many of the revolutionary leaders of 1917–18 were personally caught up in this repression, so that unlike their Jacobin forerunners, they experienced the state’s repressive force at first hand. Indeed, ever so many leading members of the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, meeting in July 1917, and all fifteen members of the first Council of People’s Commissars had spent years in prison, in Siberia, and in exile. Five of the latter had also been jailed by Kerensky’s Provisional Government.3

The would-be revolutionaries of 1917, compared to those of 1789, were conditioned, not to say hardened, for the exercise of violence. They came upon the political scene steeped in the theory, ideology, and history of its practice. The unprecedented slaughter of the Very Great War merely reinforced them in their conceptual and existential engagement with naked violence, especially since they considered Europe’s governors to have unleashed this monstrous conflict as a diversion to unnerve and divide the rising and restive forces of reform and revolution. Besides, of late, throughout Europe, including Russia, the reason of violence had become at least as central to the idées-forces of the far right as the far left.

Be that as it may, in the quagmire of 1917–18 there was no governing without recourse to violence. Abroad Russia faced a catastrophic situation, compounded by centrifugal pulls in its non-Russian peripheries, while at home polity, economy, judiciary, police, and army were in headlong decomposition. This external predicament and internal entropy reinforced each other, and the result was an exceptionally grave “time of troubles.” These troubles would be all the more furious, and consequently harder to curb, because of the peculiar features of Russia’s human geography. Most strikingly, Russia’s size was staggering: forty times the land area of France, with eleven time zones. In early 1918, cornered by the Central Powers, at Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks were able to cede territories one and a half times the size of Germany without crippling the nascent Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. Even in normal times, let alone in a time of troubles, Russia defied governance as a single unit—a single sovereignty—by virtue not only of its sheer expanse but also its bewildering diversity of cultures, its uneven levels of development, its primitive state of transport, and its encumbrance by a torpid peasant world. This rich but refractory endowment of vastness, diversity, and unsimultaneity was at least as burdensome as the enduring deficit of democratic thought and praxis.

Considering this extreme situation, and especially allowing for Russia’s ingrained historical-political traditions, the choice was never really between democracy and despotism, but between different forms of authoritarian rule. Any Russian government was bound to be a severe emergency government prone and indeed obliged to resort to violence as a provisional instrument of rule, and a Bolshevik government would merely be more inclined to do so than a government formed by leaders with a different historical understanding, doctrinal conception, and personal experience of revolution.4

This background conditioned the nature and practice of the Bolsheviks’ founding violence and enforcement terror of 1917–21, including of its chief executive agency: the Cheka. At the outset, the Cheka was conceived as part of a stopgap for the broken armor—bureaucracy, judiciary, police, army—of the Russian state. Cities and towns experienced the equivalent of the wild land seizures and attacks on notables in the countryside. There was a wildfire of looting of the property of the wealthy classes as well as an explosion of avenging violence against members of the old power elite, especially former government officials and army officers. Further, with prisons and courts crippled, society was overrun by criminals and blackmarketeers who, in turn, provoked wild justice.⁵ This rampant lawlessness called for the prompt establishment of a new legal, penal, and police system. In many respects the Cheka was as much an improvisation as War Communism, which was designed less to recast the economy than to reclaim it to provide daily rations and the sinews for political and military survival. Both the Cheka and War Communism were driven by a combination of panic, fear, and pragmatism mixed with hubris, ideology, and iron will.

The development of the Cheka’s mission and organization was closely correlated with the spread and aggravation of the civil war, and so was the growth of its ideological furor. With time, and without relenting in its battle against runaway speculation, hoarding, and ordinary crime, the Cheka gave first priority to enforcing security to the rear of the fast changing battle lines of the civil war as well as to deploying special security units among the fighting forces of the Red Army and along vital rail lines and roadways.

Without any deliberate plan but simply in response to all these imperatives, the manpower of the Cheka expanded from some 2,000 men in mid-1918 to over 35,000 six months later and to about 140,000 by the end of the civil war, not counting some 100,000 frontier troops. The central headquarters, first in Petrograd and then in Moscow, eventually established and partially controlled a sprawling network of provincial, district, and local Chekas. As of March 1919 Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s national chairman, also served as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, giving him direct and privileged access to Sovnarkom, which presumably defined and oversaw internal security. Gradually, with the civil war raging and calling for instant decisions and resolute actions, at all levels the Cheka tended to stretch and exceed its powers, which were typically ill-defined. Rather than turn criminals and political suspects over to what were intended to be separate revolutionary tribunals for prosecution and sentencing, the Cheka ignored and fended off outside judicial and political controls.

It is hardly surprising that “the Cheka’s original mandate… [should have been] modeled on the tsarist security police” whose practices were rooted in Russia’s authoritarian past.6 The Bolsheviks, like the Jacobins, brought back the old methods of criminal and political control, though both foreswore recourse to the old forms of torture. To be sure, there were significant differences between the respective precedents: on the one hand, the religiously fired sack of Béziers and massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day; on the other, the ungodly exile system in Siberia and the repressive praxis of the Okhranka. These peculiarities in turn made for distinct differences in the configuration of the two terrors, the one having the guillotine as its most distinctive emblem, the other concentration and labor camps. Nonetheless, one might say that in both cases, in Quinet’s words, “the weapons of the past … were taken out of the old arsenal … and used in the defense of the present,” with the result that “by way of the terror today’s men suddenly and unwittingly reverted to once again become the men of yesterday.”7

Almost from the beginning, concentration and labor camps were part of the Bolshevik regime’s internal security system, and they were grafted onto Russia’s age-old internal exile system, a legacy for which there was no equivalent in France. Through the centuries, the experience and memory of religious persecution and prosecution, backed by the Inquisition, left a deep imprint on France’s ways and means to “discipline and punish.” Russia’s methods, for their part, were impregnated with the profane practice of bureaucratic and arbitrary justice, closely overseen by the tsars. The Siberian exile system, dating from the later sixteenth century, was the hub of the Romanov empire’s wheel of justice. It was inaugurated by Ivan the Terrible (1533–84), who also initiated Russia’s eastward continental expansion.⁸ Even if unintentionally, newly opened territories became the entryway to a vast and distant “roofless prison” for “outlaws” sentenced to ssylka, or banishment and exile. Ironically, almost from the start exile to Siberia was conceived as a clement alternative to capital punishment.

During the seventeenth century, with the acquisition of huge and sparsely peopled lands in Trans-Uralia, including Siberia, ssylka rapidly became “the central and most characteristic feature of the tsarist penal system.”⁹ The Law Code of 1649 designated several regions in Siberia as places of “external exile” for a sweeping range of lawbreakers, including fugitive serfs and religious dissenters. By now the tsars began to realize the advantage of using ssylka along with conscription to populate and develop the empty but economically valuable Siberian spaces, which soon attracted an ever larger flow of more or less voluntary settlers as well. As early as 1662 exiles accounted for 8,000 or over ten percent of Siberia’s settler population of 70,000. It was now, too, that torments began to be inflicted on prisoners before they set out on their via dolorosa: besides being flogged with the knout, many of them suffered the mutilation of a hand, foot, ear, or nose, as well as the humiliation of being branded. Following this ordeal, many prisoners walked a full year, in leg irons, to reach their destinations, until Tsar Alexander III (1881–94) put an end to these interminable forced marches in favor of transport by ship, and later by train.¹⁰

Peter the Great updated the Siberian archipelago’s “prisons without doors” by supplementing and then surpassing ssylka with katorga, or forced labor.11 The moving eastern frontier was to be exploited for the benefit of the imperial regime. More and more convicts were put to work mining silver, gold, and salt as well as, in due course, building roads and railways. Katorga became the harshest of tsarist Russia’s six categories of penal servitude. Having survived the dual ordeal of the post-conviction torment and the wretched passage eastward, the brutalized prisoners faced a forbidding environment of life and work near the mines of Nerdinsk and Kara, and at many other sites, most of them fairly small: a population of several hundred was the norm, and several thousand the exception. Inadequate housing, clothing, and food made for a high rate of disease and mortality. Weighed down with ten-pound fetters and subject to arbitrary flogging, the convicts worked long hours. They had no time off, until 1885 when they were granted two days of rest per month. Wives were encouraged to accompany or follow their husbands, probably in the interest of colonization, since most convicts settled in the Far East upon completion of their sentences.

The long nineteenth century down through 1917 saw many changes in tsarism’s peculiar penal and political security system.¹² Following the Decembrist rising of 1825 Nicholas I established the Third Section, a special political office with a corps of policemen to protect the security of state and regime. In part because of its inadequacy in the face of growing opposition, in 1880 the Third Section was abolished and all security functions were concentrated in a single police department in the Interior Ministry. The next year Alexander III reinvigorated the Okhranka, the tsarist regime’s main security organization charged with uncovering, infiltrating, and repressing the political opposition, which was increasingly forced underground and prone to terrorism. Although it was overwhelmed by the great upheaval of 1905, the Okhranka more than recovered between 1906 and 1914, when Nicholas II resumed and intensified the war against the anti-tsarist opposition, which he quickened with his own unbending policies.

The flow of convicts to Asiatic Russia continued all this time, with between 10,000 to 20,000 yearly, unevenly divided between ssylka and katorga. Although in 1801 Alexander I had abrogated the most extreme forms of cruelty, prisoners continued to be subjected to preliminary branding and knouting for several more decades.¹³ There are no reliable figures on the number of political prisoners among them, but according to the best estimates they never made up more than one percent.14 Indeed, they may be said to have peopled the equivalent of no more than one of the many islands of imperial Russia’s penitentiary archipelago. The politicals were neither branded nor whipped. Though they benefited from a privileged status and regimen, they experienced the rigors of the exile system and were in many different ways scarred and marked by it, including by their close if limited contact with lowborn common-law convicts. The political prisoners left a greater mark than their limited numbers warranted by virtue of their notoriety and their role in excoriating the exile system in utterly stark and terrifying terms, which left a dark and haunting imprint on the Russian and European imagination, not unlike the Inquisition.

Dostoevsky was the first of several great Russian writers and political intellectuals to probe tsarism’s peculiar prison and exile universe.¹⁵ In his twenties in St. Petersburg Dostoevsky became involved with a half-secret discussion group of young and well-born critics of runaway autocracy. The Third Section being on the watch, Dostoevsky was arrested. He spent eight months in a prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress before, at Christmas 1849, beginning his journey to Omsk, mostly by sledge though weighted down by leg irons. His Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1861) is a searing autobiographical but also creatively imaginative telling of his four years of hard labor and military service in this western Siberian city. Dostoevsky’s account was followed by those of Chekov, Tolstoy, Bakunin, and Kropotkin.

Solzhenitsyn, too, stands very much in this tradition.¹⁶ In The Gulag Archipelago he briefly discusses the history of the exile system, with particular attention to the privileged place of the political prisoners in it. His main concern is to extenuate the evils of the tsarist penal and exile system in comparison with those of the Soviet Gulag. In fact, he means to demonstrate a fundamental discontinuity between the one and the other, making the Gulag exclusively the product of the Communist ideology and the villainy of Lenin and Stalin, without significant roots and parallels in Russia’s past. Even so, by describing, however synoptically, the “somber power of exile” and the “miserably clothed, branded, and starving” victims of ssylka and katorga under the tsars, Solzhenitsyn concedes elements of historical persistence at the same time that he tells the story in the dire and bitter accents of Dostoevsky.

The Bolsheviks themselves were influenced by Russia’s prison and exile literature, all the more so because for some of them, as for not a few Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, it spoke to their own personal experiences. While as of the late nineteenth century the Romanov regime willfully used ssylka to deter and intimidate radical critics and revolutionaries, these, for their part, held it up as one of tsarism’s basest badges of infamy. Even if Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Bukharin knew the penal and exile system from the inside—albeit under tolerable conditions—they certainly took it for granted that it would be eliminated with the birth of a new Russia. And, in fact, the first Provisional Government abolished it, along with the tsarist police and Okhranka. Eventually the exigencies of the struggle against criminals as well as enemies at home and abroad prompted the Bolsheviks to reach back, selectively, into Russia’s storehouse of political strategies and weapons of judicial and political control, and ssylka and katorga were reshaped to serve the pressing needs of the moment. Presently Paul Miliukov, perhaps the savviest Constitutional Democrat, noted that Bolshevism was a hybrid of “very advanced European theory … [and] genuinely as well as deeply rooted Russian” praxis which rather than “break with the ‘ancien régime,’ reasserts Russia’s past in the present.” In an evocative simile, Miliukov suggested that just “as geological upheavals bring the lower strata of the earth to the surface as evidence of the early ages of our planet, so Russian Bolshevism, by discarding the thin upper social layer, has laid bare the uncultured and unorganized substratum of Russian historical life.”17

To come to terms with the Cheka-run concentration and labor camps during the first terror of the Russian Revolution, it is of course important not to go too far in tracing their genealogy and etiology backward into the past. It is equally important, however, not to read their early history in terms of subsequent developments, notably of the Soviet Gulag after 1929 and of the Nazi concentration camps after 1933 and extermination camps after 1941. The term “concentration camp” originated with the colonial wars of the fin de siècle: Spain set up concentration camps to hold enemy prisoners and civilians in Cuba, the United States in the Philippines, and England in South Africa.18 In all three cases the internment camps were established in wartime, overseas, and as a concomitant of military operations. None of the outside armies faced politically organized ideological enemies to the rear of their lines, which meant that their prisoners, both military and civilian, suffered the miseries of emergency detention rather than institutionalized and willful mistreatment or forced labor. With victory the camps were closed, also because what little there was of insurgent resistance came to an end.

Later on, the concentration camps of post-1929 Soviet Russia and post-1933 Nazi Germany were initially political camps started in peace time and in the absence of active civil war at home. Whereas from the outset the Gulag had the dual mission of enforcing political control and of driving economic growth through the exploitation of the forced labor of its inmates, the concentration camps of the Third Reich did not assume an economic role—nor a genocidal turn—until well after the outbreak of war in 1939.

For their part the camps of the Russian Revolution’s first terror were set up in the midst of combined foreign and civil war. Both the external and internal conflicts were highly ideologized, with the result that unlike during the Spanish-American and Boer wars, some of the enemies who were imprisoned in camps were seen as being distinctly political. As for their impressment for forced labor, it was related to the fighting of essentially defensive domestic and foreign struggles rather than to a project of either economic mastery or foreign territorial conquest. But it would seem that the Bolsheviks’ readiness to use the labor of camp inmates in the emergency of 1917 to 1921 was conditioned by Russia’s past experience with katorga, just as the harsh living and working conditions in these camps were due to the extreme rigors of war and civil war rather than to a blueprint for systematic punishment or exploitation, let alone extermination, “there being no Soviet Treblinka.”¹⁹

The aristocratic reaction in France, reflected in Louis XVI’s repeal of the Maupeau reform in the early 1770s, was mild compared to that in Russia during the decade before 1917. Those were the years in which Nicholas II rescinded many of the liberalizing concessions he had grudgingly made in 1905. By the outbreak of war in 1914 the constitutional experiment had been diluted, the tsar and his acolytes having severely restricted the franchise and civil liberties, as well as broken the Duma. Significantly, this reversal coincided with the growth of a new right sworn to violence, which had the blessing of the Court. As noted, during the Very Great War military misfortune and futility, reckoned in millions of casualties and utter economic exhaustion, once again undermined the old order, and by early 1917 Russia’s political and civil society entered a time of unprecedented troubles.

Not surprisingly, the workers of Petrograd, including women textile workers, were in the forefront of the revolt of late February and early March.20 Clamoring for bread, peace, and the end of autocracy, their swelling strike movement was largely spontaneous. At first, the prospects were dim, as troops loyal to the tsar kept firing upon them, taking numerous lives. But the remonstrants stayed the course, some of them rushing such emblems of repressive state power as police stations, prisons, and court houses. Others wrought their vengeance on public officials, “hunting down, lynching, and brutally killing” policemen.²¹In Petrograd alone there were some 1,400 dead and wounded, about half of them military personnel.²² It was only with the mutiny of several local army garrisons, urged on by junior officers, that the insurgence stood fair to succeed: the muzhiks in military uniforms who defied the order to open fire on civilians rose against the conceit of their imperial officers, which they considered of a piece with the arrogance of the landed gentry. At any rate, workers and soldiers joined hands to occupy public buildings and seize arms for what quickly turned into a full-scale insurrection. Meanwhile the Octobrists and Kadets, who finally prevailed on Nicholas II to abdicate and Grand Duke Michael to renounce the throne, formed a provisional committee to restore order, composed of thirteen Duma members. Their aim was to fill the emergent political vacuum and prevent a runaway fragmentation of sovereignty. At the same time, the Menshevik Duma deputies, in the spirit of 1905, took the lead in forming a provisional Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers—in which peasant-soldiers greatly outnumbered proletarian workers—to organize and channel the rebellion. Even if their ultimate political and social objectives as well as their worldviews were very much at variance, Kadets and Mensheviks, one and all fervent westernizers, agreed on the instant establishment of a “bourgeois-liberal” government and the early election of a constituent assembly. Such was the origin and mission of the provisional governments headed first by Prince Lvov and then Kerensky.

But as mentioned before, the Kadets and Mensheviks, now joined by the Socialist Revolutionaries, had one other common, perhaps overriding aim: not unlike the bulk of Russia’s traditional power elite, they proposed to see the war through to victory on the side of the Allies. Admittedly, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries proceeded to exhort all the world to move toward a peace without annexations and indemnities, to be secured by timely negotiations. But pending this unlikely political and diplomatic reconfiguration, the grueling war continued, with devastating social and political consequences.

Under the circumstances the coalition cabinets headed by Lvov and Kerensky could be little more than emergency governments with a limited and hesitant reformist reach. Still, Russia’s new rulers promulgated essential freedoms: association, assembly, speech, press, and religion; as well as disestablishment, amnesty, and the end of capital punishment. But these bold steps, in the spirit of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, touched more sympathetic chords in urban than rural Russia, which had altogether different priorities, notably immediate peace and, above all, land reform. Indeed, especially the Kadets, but also many Mensheviks, dodged the land question, so that at this juncture Russia’s embryonic reformist regime produced nothing comparable to France’s dramatic night of August 4, 1789, which had brought the abrogation of the “feudal” rights and privileges of the nobility and clergy. Obsessed with the imperatives of war, the Lvov and Kerensky governments sought to restabilize rather than reform Russia’s political and civil society, thereby muting their millenarian promise. A certain reading of the dynamics of the French Revolution fortified the members of successive provisional governments in their resolve to prevent any further radicalization favorable to the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, even at the risk of fostering it with their own inordinate caution. Meanwhile the election of the projected Constituent Assembly remained in suspense.

Beginning with the resignation of A. I. Guchkov, leader of the Octobrists, and the removal of Miliukov on May 1, 1917, when Kerensky became war minister, the Kadets kept yielding cabinet positions to the non-Bolshevik left. At the same time that this faction-ridden left gained ground in the straitened state executive, in mid-June it found a home in the First All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, a potential rival or alternative to tomorrow’s Constituent Assembly. Except for the Bolsheviks, the members of this would-be people’s parliament endorsed the policies of the provisional governments. But the country’s skyrocketing economic distress and war weariness worked in favor of the dissident and far left, as did the fiasco of Kerensky’s politically inspired military offensive on the Galician front in mid-June. Urged upon Petrograd by the Allies, this bold stroke, which cost several hundred thousand lives, was a desperate gamble: an improbable military victory was to be used to consolidate the provisional regime, above all by redeeming the army, without which there was no restoring law and order.23

Partly fueled by indignation about the continuing military unreason, the violent anti-government demonstrations of July 3–5, 1917, in Petrograd were primarily carried by the left.²⁴ The furor was largely spontaneous: considering direct action premature, the leaders of the Bolshevik party and Petrograd Soviet followed rather than led the soldiers, sailors, factory workers, and city poor who took to the streets. Because the riotous crowds lacked discipline and leadership, the provisional government’s sparse police and military forces were sufficient to disperse them, with minimal casualties on both sides.

The sequel of these journées was mounting discord between the Kadets and the non-Bolshevik left over how to deal with the irrepressible crisis.²⁵ Lvov and four Kadet ministers resigned as Kerensky assumed the premiership to rule with a coalition in which non-Socialists were now in the minority. He vowed to push for a non-annexationist peace, a constituent assembly, and land reform. At the same time, Kerensky ordered the arrest of leading Bolsheviks, though Lenin and several of his closest associates managed to flee abroad or go underground. He also directed General Kornilov to steel the army. Even so, and as part of a conservative backlash, the Kadets served notice that they were more than ever opposed to a soft peace, social reform, and power-sharing with the Soviets. Indeed, in the wake of the failed June offensive and the portentous July days, the Kadets ceased to support reform as an antidote to further radicalization. Unlike Kerensky, they abandoned the search for a third way or force between the far left and far right.

Not a few prominent Kadets along with liberals and conservatives silently cheered when in late August General Kornilov, with broad backing by senior officers, ordered select regiments to march on Petrograd either to stiffen Kerensky’s resolve to stand fast or to establish a government of national salvation controlled by the military.26 Having tempted the devil, Kerensky dismissed Kornilov and summoned all the forces of movement to rise in defense of the Revolution. These forces rallied under the banner of a Committee for the Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, supported by the Soviet as well as the Bolsheviks, though Lenin stressed that the workers were mounting the barricades to protect the Revolution, not the government. In the meantime the cabinet had invested Kerensky with special, not to say dictatorial, powers to meet the emergency.

Once the challenge from the military was checked, there was yet another cabinet struggle. The third provisional government, headed by Kerensky, was dominated by moderate Mensheviks and right Socialist Revolutionaries. This cabinet was weaker than its predecessors, not least because of the explicit opposition of both the restless forces of order, including the Kadets, and the impatient Bolsheviks.

Unable or unwilling to extricate Russia from the ruinous war and to address the burning land problem, Kerensky simply could not find a social base for his phantasmagoric third way. Conditions were going from bad to worse on the front, in the major cities, and in the countryside, with the result that the disaffection of workers and peasants expanded and quickened. The Bolsheviks were the major beneficiaries of the Kornilov affair. Legitimated as a result of having been asked and armed to help in the defense of the Revolution, they redoubled their agitation and organizing efforts. In turn, the officers corps emerged as the vanguard and nerve center of the inevitable counterrevolution. With little political power, moral authority, and repressive force, the third coalition government was helpless. Here if ever was a situation to which the words of Yeats apply: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”²⁷

In late September and early October, when Lenin, seconded by Trotsky, convinced the inner circle of Bolsheviks to launch an armed uprising, he knew that famine, war weariness, and fear of another right-wing coup would translate into broad popular sympathy or backing for his wager. The Bolsheviks also assumed that few, if any, police and army detachments were likely to stand by Kerensky. Indeed, there were practically no protective forces when on October 25 Bolshevik activists rushed the Winter Palace to arrest the cabinet members, who were briefly held at the Peter and Paul Fortress before being released. While the Red Guards took control of Petrograd, Kerensky hastened off to Pskov, the headquarters of the northern front, expecting to rally loyal troops. But he found none, except for some l,000 badly armed Cossacks whom General Peter N. Krasnov agreed to rush in the direction of Petrograd. They reached Gatchina, a southern suburb, on October 27. Three days later, “a motley army [of approximately 10,000 men] made up of workers’ detachments, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, and Baltic sailors” defeated Krasnov’s forces at Pulkovo Heights, with casualties on both sides.28 Krasnov was captured, and Kerensky fled to England. It was a measure of the powerlessness of Kerensky’s government that during the “Ten Days That Shook the World” there were only several dozen casualties in the capital of the new Great Revolution. In Moscow, however, there was considerable resistance. For an entire week assorted officers, military cadets, and right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries shielded the provisional government, with the result that several hundred people were killed. Still, all things considered, the Bolshevik takeover was relatively bloodless, certainly compared to the February uprising.

It was now the turn of the Bolsheviks to set up yet another—a fourth—provisional government. But theirs was to be a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,” to be run by a Council of People’s Commissars chaired by Lenin, with Trotsky serving as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. They dropped any pretense of practicing the reason of state and of standing above class or interest. The Bolsheviks had pressed for an early meeting of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and it opened on October 25–26, in the midst of their bid for power. In addition to looking to avoid the strains of dual power, they sought ratification of their immediate and short-term program: make peace; distribute land; eliminate food shortages; and elect a constituent assembly. This last point was equivocal in that it implied that ultimately power would be vested in a constituent assembly, which clashed with the Bolsheviks’ cry for “all power to the soviets.”

In any case, the Congress of Soviets approved Lenin’s sweeping Decree On Peace calling for an instant negotiated end of the war “without annexations and indemnities.” There followed an equally radical decree expropriating the land of the landlords, imperial family, Orthodox Church, and state. The land was transferred to latter-day mirs (village communes) or new-model soviets for distribution, equally, to peasants pledged to work their small plots without hired labor. On January 18 the Decree Socializing the Land confirmed this vast redistribution, without compensation, and reiterated that “the right to use the land belongs to him who cultivates it with his own labor.” With these rescripts, which appropriated the platform of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks meant to broaden their social and political base beyond the urban proletariat. But no less important, they gave evidence of their practical reason: countless peasants having long since seized the land they had now and forever considered their own, the Bolsheviks legitimated the revolution in the countryside which had not been of their doing. Indeed, by recognizing the wild land seizures, the Congress of Soviets and Bolshevik leaders grounded the Russian Revolution much as the National Assembly, moved by the grande peur, had grounded the French Revolution in August 1789.29 Both times the city took the first step, but in countries that were over 85 percent peasant, there was no continuing without the village.

Having spoken on peace and land, the Congress of Soviets elected a Bolshevik-dominated executive committee and approved the new provisional government. In so doing it ratified Lenin’s opening programmatic declaration addressed to “All Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants,” whose interests now moved to the top of the revolutionary agenda.³⁰ Except for “ensuring the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set,” the new emphasis was—pace Hannah Arendt—squarely on the social question, with priority for “the transfer of all land without compensation” to peasants and “the establishment of control over industry by workers.” This new course was contingent on securing an immediate and non-annexationist peace, just as the previous course had been tied to staying in the war for war aims fixed before 1917. Indeed, the issue of war and peace remained altogether crucial. The exigencies of war were certain to seriously impede the embryonic Bolshevik regime’s efforts to implement its far-reaching program: on the one hand, the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People of January 16, 1918, signaled a radical break with the past and a headlong rush into a new future, giving Lenin’s provisional government the millenarian urge which the preceding provisional governments had lacked or abjured; on the other, in face of an ever more refractory time of troubles there was no dispensing with a dictature de détresse. The switches were set for a governance severely torn between contingency and ideology, with the new decision makers mindful of the perils of both pressing emergencies and overweening innovations.

With the world collapsing about them, none of Russia’s provisional governments gave the Constituent Assembly top priority. Both the Kadets and the Mensheviks were wary of elections by universal manhood suffrage, in which they knew they could not fare well.31 At first set for September 17, 1917, the elections were postponed to November 12. By then, eight months after the fall of the Romanovs, the Bolsheviks were in power. But, as noted, they had pledged to allow the elections to go forward.

About 40 million votes were cast, the rate of participation being between 50 and 60 percent.³² With about 16 million votes, or 40 percent of the total, the Socialist Revolutionaries secured some 400 seats. The Bolsheviks were second, with about 10 million votes, or 24 percent, which gave them 170 deputies. The outcome confirmed the worst fears of the liberal and social democrats: the Kadets captured only about 2 million votes and 17 seats; the Mensheviks received 1.5 million votes—half of them in Georgia—and 16 seats. The two parties combined accounted for less than 10 percent of the popular vote and 4 percent of the seats.

Perhaps most significantly, the throne and altar, as well as the landlords, were left high and dry, the peasants having voted massively for the Socialist Revolutionaries. While the latter were strongly carried by the countryside, they won only limited support in the cities, taking no more than 8 percent of the vote in Moscow and 16 percent in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, for their part, scored well in urban Russia, gaining close to 50 percent of the vote in the “two capitals.” Having played on war weariness, they also polled about half the votes in the army garrisons to the rear. As things turned out, the Bolsheviks had a stronger social base than their overall electoral score suggests, especially in 1917–18, when the Revolution’s commanding political heights were in urban Russia. Even so, although they showed unexpected strength, they would have been in no position to govern democratically, assuming they had wanted to. They did, however, shore up their cramped position by prevailing on the left Socialist Revolutionaries to be their coalition partners, which brought them the support of 40 additional deputies and opened them to the peasantry, in keeping with their land policy.

By the time the Constituent Assembly convened on January 5, 1918, the civil war was getting under way. While the Bolsheviks were not really surprised by the incipient resistance of the White Guards, they were outraged that the Kadets should so fully side with them. Indeed, the Kadets, unlike the Mensheviks, made common cause with the greatest losers of the elections, the Whites, who saw no contradiction between abjuring electoral politics, which put them at a disadvantage, and championing the cause of a free Constituent Assembly. In any case, on December 1, 1917, Lenin called for the outlawing of the Kadets, insisting that they wanted “to simultaneously sit in the Constituent Assembly and organize civil war.” His Socialist Revolutionary partners instantly urged the Bolsheviks to “free themselves from their nightmare about the Kadets,” particularly since there were no hard and fast criteria for “identifying” them. Instead of hammering away at the Kadets’ spurious constitutionalism, the government should challenge the Constituent Assembly to vote “on questions of peace, land, and workers’ control,” with a view to turning it into a “revolutionary Convention.” Blithely ignoring this advice, the all-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets adopted a resolution denouncing the Kadets for “heading” the counterrevolution, after Lenin stressed that in “bringing forward a direct political charge against [an entire] political party” the Bolsheviks were merely following in the footsteps of “the French revolutionaries.”33

The socialists were very much divided on the eve of the opening of the Constituent Assembly in which they would occupy some 85 percent of the seats. The Bolsheviks charged that the slogan “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” embraced by the Mensheviks and moderate Socialist Revolutionaries was really intended to be read as “Down with the Soviets.”34 Clearly, Lenin meant to “counterpose the Congress of Soviets to the Constituent Assembly.” Having benefited from their campaign for the soviets, the Bolsheviks valued their symbolic force and expected to have the ascendancy in them. According to Zinoviev, “the duel between the Constituent Assembly and the Congress of Soviets … [was] a historical struggle between two revolutions, the one bourgeois and the other socialist, … the elections to the Constituent Assembly [being] a reflection of the first [i.e., the] February revolution.”³⁵

This unseasonable Constituent Assembly convened on January 5, 1918 in Taurida Palace, with Victor Chernov, a leading Socialist Revolutionary, in the chair. In the name of the provisional minority government, Iakov Sverdlov stepped forward to move that the deputies make this government’s founding project, as put forward in the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, their working agenda. Sverdlov emphasized that just as the French Revolution had “issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which … [sanctioned] the free exploitation of those not possessing the tools and means of production … [so] the Russian Revolution had to issue a declaration of rights thundering forth its own project.” When his motion was defeated by about 235 over about 145 votes in favor of a proposal to “discuss current questions of policy,” the Bolsheviks, as if according to plan, stormed out of the hall, followed by the left Socialist Revolutionaries, signaling the closing and dissolution of the Assembly.³⁶ Not unlike Stolypin’s “coup d’état” of June 3, 1907, which had devitalized the fledgling Imperial Duma, this arrogation aroused little, if any, protest or outrage: once again there was only meager popular support for democratic principles and institutions. In particular the peasants were impervious to democratic chants, all the more so now that they were repossessing “their” land by direct action rather than legislative enactment. As for the industrial workers, who shared the peasants’ cruel disappointment with the pre-war Duma, they pinned their faith to the soviets and the factory councils. In effect, the champions of the Constituent Assembly were in no position either to raise volunteers for its defense or to mobilize the streets, the partisans of constitutional democracy being found among the classes, not the masses.37

On January 10, 1918 the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets became the presumptive heir of the Constituent Assembly. The delegates sang the International before an orchestra struck up the Marseillaise, “to bring to recollection the historical path traversed” since 1789. This Congress promptly adopted a variant of the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples which the Constituent Assembly had voted down. It proclaimed, urbi et orbi, that the Russian Revolution was sworn to “end … the exploitation of man by man … and the division of society into classes”; to make “all land … public property” for transfer “to the working masses without payment … and on the basis of equal land tenure”; to establish “workers’ control”; and to promote the “right to self-determination.” This would-be ecumenical manifesto, which superseded the battle cry “peace, bread, and land,” was not without a contingent fighting agenda, in that it vowed to “crush exploiters mercilessly,” to raise an “army of working men,” and to “put an end to all secret treaties.”³⁸

We have seen, then, that civil and political liberties were not high on the reformist agenda in the early dawn of the revolution in Russia. No less striking, the founding violence of the year 1917 was relatively limited, largely because the military was not about to keep repressing it. Indeed, to the extent that the February upheaval culminated in a “revolution from above,” the army’s senior officers were among its chief sponsors and mainstays. They sacrificed the crown to an accommodation with a legal opposition and Duma which they expected to be moderate and tractable. In any case, if there was no counterrevolutionary resistance and civil war immediately following the February days it was largely because until late August the high command supported the provisional governments, the prosecution of the war being their joint and absolute priority. First Kornilov’s defiance and then Krasnov’s military drive prefigured the unexceptional counterrevolutionary turn of the ranking generals and their political collaborators. Certainly these hard-liners were not about to rally to a government seeking an early and humiliating exit from the Very Great War as part of a strategy to consolidate and drive on the revolution. In addition to facing the trials and tribulations of Russia’s time of troubles, the Bolshevik provisional government had to confront an ominous counterrevolutionary resistance aided from abroad.

Petrograd and Moscow were not promising sites for military resistance. Probably for reasons of logistics as well as because of the prospect of Cossack recruits, the center of opposition moved from the army’s general headquarters at Mogilev, east of Minsk, to the Don territories in the south. It was also near Mogilev, in a monastery at Bykhov, that Kornilov was under house arrest along with the other generals who had supported his dare, among them Alexeev, Denikin, Lukomsky, and Romanovsky. Not unlike Kerensky, Lenin treated these star prisoners leniently. Along with the members of Kerensky’s cabinet, General Krasnov was released a few days after October 25. In exchange he gave “his ‘word of honor’ that he would not fight against the Soviet regime,” which he instantly broke. In any case, these were the senior officers who formed the original commanding core of the White Guards.39

General Mikhail Alexeev, the tsar’s chief of staff since 1915, left to go south in early November, and settled at Novocherkassk, northeast of Rostov on the Sea of Azov. By about December 10 he gathered a force of at least 600 men, most of them officers, who were prototypical of the future Volunteer Armies. After escaping from their prison-monastery, the other “Bykhov generals” arrived a few days later, each having made the journey on his own.⁴⁰

The chief of the general staff, General Dukhonin, decided not to take flight. From headquarters at Mogilev he “appealed to the army to remain loyal to the [ousted] Provisional Government and to put an end to Bolshevik violence.”⁴¹ He was taken in custody by a local soviet of soldiers before Nikolai Krylenko, with a company of men, came to arrest and take him to Petrograd. Apparently Krylenko failed to restrain an excited crowd, with the result that Dukhonin was shot and his body savagely mutilated. That was December 3, the day cease-fire negotiations with the Central Powers started at Brest-Litovsk. After a skeletal constabulary of Red Guards seized control of Rostov, on December 15 Alexeev’s embryonic Volunteer Army dislodged them in a “short but fierce bout of street fighting.” With this military action, which gave them their “baptism of fire,” the Whites fired the “first shots” in Russia’s civil war.⁴²

From the outset the generals and the many officers were divided into two factions: one rallied around General Kornilov, who was personally the most ambitious and militarily the most daring; the other around the more sober-minded General Alexeev. In turn, both were at odds with generals A. M. Kaledin and Krasnov, the two main Cossack chiefs. In particular Kaledin, as hetman of the Don Cossacks, was a jealous guardian of his people’s autonomy.

In the meantime these White and Cossack generals were joined at Novocherkassk by kindred political leaders, among them Fedorov, Miliukov, Rodzysenko, Struve, and Prince F. N. Trubetskoi. With the Kadets among them setting the tone, they pressed the squabbling officers to settle their differences, insisting that otherwise they could not win support either in Russia or abroad, among the Allies. Persuaded that their enemies’ enemies were their friends, on December 18, 1917, one and all agreed on a troika: Kornilov was to be in charge of all White military forces; Alexeev of civil government and relations with the Allies; and Kaledin of the administration of the Don territories as well as of Cossack military forces.43

Although there was incidental talk of civil liberties to spare the sensibilities of both liberals and Allies, there was no disguising that the project of this provisional political and military authority was autocratic and ultranationalist, and ultimately counterrevolutionary. Even so, leading Kadets rallied around the generals, who were anything but unpolitical, thereby raising the White Guards’ prestige, especially abroad.

Not surprisingly, and with good reason, the untried Bolshevik government forthwith concluded that the Cossack territories of the Don and the adjoining eastern Ukraine were likely to become a major staging ground of resistance. Indeed, within less than two months after the Bolshevik takeover White and Cossack forces were beginning to shoulder arms. Presently Lenin sent Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who had played an important military role in Petrograd during and immediately following Red October, to direct operations on the southern front.⁴⁴

This embryonic counterrevolutionary mobilization coincided with Sovnarkom’s initial steps toward the deliberate use of enforcement terror. Sensitized by the Jacobin experience, the Bolshevik leaders were predisposed to such terror, considering it immanent to revolutionary practice. Had there been no “evidence” of implacable resistance immediately following their takeover—which would have been contrary to the “logic” of the situation—the Bolsheviks most likely would have held back on terror. Under the circumstances, however, the issue, for them, was not so much “one of ‘principle’ ” as of “form” and “degree,” and hence of “expediency.”45 In any case, on November 28, a decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, signed by Lenin, outlawed the Kadet party. Designated “enemies of the people,” its members became “liable to arrest and trial by Revolutionary Tribunals.” Two days later, on November 30, another decree “declared that civil war had broken out under the direction of the liberal Kadet Party.”⁴⁶ Trotsky had good reason to charge the “central committee” of the Kadets with being “the political headquarters of the White Guards,” although it was gratuitous for him to add that they directed “the recruitment of officers for Kornilov and Kaledin.”⁴⁷ At any rate, Trotsky announced the arrest of their “chiefs” and the surveillance of “their followers in the provinces.” Claiming these steps to be “a modest beginning,” he recalled that “at the time of the French Revolution the Jacobins had guillotined more honest men than these for obstructing the people’s will.” He hastened to add, however, that “we have executed nobody and have no intention of doing so.”⁴⁸ Although the left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed that the Kadets had joined the enemy camp, they cautioned that “to condemn an entire category comprising countless innocent individuals was to create an all too convenient scapegoat for the sins of the bourgeoisie and a dangerous precedent for other hapless parties.”⁴⁹

It is worth stressing that throughout the civil war the bulk of the terror, and the worst of it, was closely correlated with the fighting between the Reds and the Whites. It was much more part of military operations than of political battles against real or perceived enemies and conspiracies. Clearly, the bloodletting of the first terror in the Russian Revolution, like that in the French Revolution, was civil war–related. Although this terror was not preprogrammed by the main contestants, their principal spokesmen proclaimed it nearly from the outset. To be sure, the Bolsheviks’ rhetoric of terror was impregnated with the language of class warfare. But their excoriation of the bourgeoisie, landowners, and rural petty bourgeoisie was inseparable from their denunciation of the commanders of the White Armies and their foreign backers. Trotsky called for measures to “wipe off the face of the earth the counterrevolution of the Cossack generals and the Kadet bourgeoisie.”50 But if, as Quinet suggests, the spiral of terror results from the “shock of two irreconcilable elements … and of two opposite electric currents,”⁵¹ then the terrorist rhetoric of the anti-Bolshevik camp cannot be ignored or minimized. As Antonov-Ovseenko took charge of the Red Guards in southeastern Russia, and before the Red Army was organized, Kornilov told his associates that “the greater the terror, the greater our victories.” Shortly thereafter he vowed that “[w]e must save Russia … even if we have to set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-fourths of all the Russians.”⁵² In March 1919 Admiral Kolchak ordered one of his generals “to follow the example of the Japanese who, in the Amur region, had exterminated the local population.”⁵³ No doubt a White colonel spoke not only for himself when he held that the biblical injunction “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was too mild for the Bolsheviks, who would yield to nothing less than “two eyes for one, and all teeth for one.”⁵⁴ Eventually even General Wrangel saw the White Guards wielding “the cruel sword of vengeance” rather than bringing “pardon and peace.”⁵⁵

As in the early fighting of the Vendée, in the first engagements of the civil war in southern and southeastern Russia both sides committed atrocities which were neither ordered nor reproved by their respective political or military superiors. Around mid-January 1918 in Taganrog, a small port about 45 miles west of Rostov, White forces “blinded and mutilated” a group of allegedly “Bolshevik factory workers … before burying them alive.”⁵⁶ When retaking the town, Antonov-Ovseenko’s Red Guards more than matched this ferocity: although they had negotiated a cease-fire “with [the] cadets of the [local] military academy …, [they] proceeded to execute them cruelly, … [throwing] a batch of fifty …, bound hand and foot, into the blast furnaces of a local factory.”⁵⁷ Denikin later remembered that around this time in this same region he had seen, first hand, “eight tortured bodies of volunteers … [who] had been beaten and cut up so badly, and their faces so disfigured, that their grief-stricken relatives could scarcely recognize them.”⁵⁸

It would seem that there were few, if any, links between this violence of the first hour, which was wild and inherent to civil war, and the incipient enforcement terror, which was intentional and inherent to revolution. To be sure, unlike Robespierre and Saint-Just before 1789, Lenin and Trotsky had weighed and “experienced” the role of revolutionary violence and terror before 1917, with the result that on this score they did not start their rule with a tabula rasa. For them it stood to reason that terror was immanent in the dialectics of revolution and counterrevolution. Haunted, above all, by the specter of a fierce backlash of the sort that had struck Russia after 1905, the Bolsheviks had few qualms about using terror to thwart this historical possibility, nay probability. This fear and resolve became obsessive once the socialist revolution miscarried in central and western Europe, since it foreshadowed greater foreign support for the Whites than the repressive tsarist regime had enjoyed between 1905 and 1917. Indeed, the bitter memory of Sergei Witte and Peter Stolypin explains, in large part, the Bolsheviks’ inordinate disquiet about Paul Miliukov and the Kadets.

In the summer of 1917 Lenin overconfidently anticipated a Europe-wide revolution, and hence a favorable international climate for the unfolding revolution in Russia. That was the time he averred that “the ‘Jacobins’ of the twentieth century would not guillotine the capitalists, because to imitate a worthy model was not to copy it.” Lenin seemed confident that in his time it would suffice “to arrest 50 or 100 magnates of banking capital for a few weeks … and to place the banks, the syndicate of bankers, and the businessmen ‘working’ for the state under the control of workers.”59 To be sure, the day following the Bolshevik takeover Lenin wondered how “one can make a revolution without firing squads,” since during the civil war, with each side determined to prevail, mere “imprisonment” would be futile.⁶⁰ But on November 4 he held, albeit cautiously, that “we have not resorted … to the terrorism of the French revolutionaries who guillotined unarmed men,” adding that he hoped not to have to “resort to [terror], because we have strength on our side.”⁶¹ Even as late as November 1918, when the friend-enemy dissociation was rampant, Lenin claimed, not unreasonably, that “[w]e are arresting but we are not resorting to terror,” notably against enemy brothers.⁶²

In the meantime, however, the rhetorical terror soared as the opposing sides anathematized and threatened each other, in addition to charging each other with casting the first stone. During the “first weeks of the revolution” it was Trotsky who made the “most militant pronouncements.”63 Immediately following the armed skirmishes attending the takeover in Petrograd, he served notice that for every Bolshevik worker or soldier captured by the enemy the new government would “demand five [of the military] cadets … we hold [as] prisoners and hostages.” Indeed, Trotsky was of the view that “we shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor.” When the new regime’s harsh security measures were challenged in the Soviet Executive, Trotsky rejoined that “demands to forgo all repression in time of civil war were demands to abandon the civil war.” He spoke in this same vein shortly after the proscription of the Kadets, which he characterized as a “mild terror … against our class enemies.” On this occasion Trotsky warned that this “terror [would] assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution,” within less than a month, when “not merely jail but the guillotine [will be] ready for our enemies.”⁶⁴ Lenin nodded with approval, charging that the “bourgeoisie, the landowners, and the rich classes, desperate … to undermine the Revolution, … were preparing to commit the most heinous crimes,” including the “sabotage of food distribution” threatening “millions of people with famine.”⁶⁵

This was the spirit in which Sovnarkom moved to establish the Cheka, or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage. It is characteristic of the history of the Cheka in the civil war that its creation was not a premeditated step. Rather, it was precipitated by a strike of state and banking employees. On December 19 Lenin asked Felix Dzerzhinsky “to establish a special commission to examine the possibility of combating such a strike by the most energetic revolutionary measures, and to determine methods of suppressing malicious sabotage.” Immediately before turning to Dzerzhinsky, Lenin had expressed his confidence that the revolution would find a “Fouquier-Tinville … of staunch proletarian Jacobin” temperament qualified “to tame the encroaching counterrevolution.”⁶⁶ Fouquier-Tinville had been the chief prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the French Revolution.

On December 20 the Council of People’s Commissars approved Dzerzhinsky’s draft proposal for a commission to “suppress and liquidate all attempts and acts of counterrevolution and sabotage; … to hand over for trial by revolutionary tribunals all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries; and to work out means of combating them.” The Cheka was “to devote prime attention to the press, to sabotage, to the Kadets, Right SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries], saboteurs, and strikers.” As for the “measures” to be used, the text specified “confiscation, expulsion from domicile, deprivation of ration cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc.”67 Dzerzhinsky was appointed chairman of the commission. Local soviets were urged to set up their own branches and to provide the center with information “about organizations and persons whose activities are harmful to the Revolution.” Presently Dzerzhinsky ordered that a system of revolutionary tribunals be set up “to investigate and try offenses which bear the character of sabotage and counterrevolution.”⁶⁸

It bears repeating that the Cheka was put in place at a time when “the Cossack enemies and other ‘White’ forces were already mustering in southeastern Russia; Ukraine … was in a state of all but open hostilities against the Soviet power; [and] the Germans, in spite of the armistice, were a standing threat in the west.”⁶⁹ In addition, the army and economy continued to fall to pieces.

Significantly, at the start the Cheka was less a political organ than a makeshift police and judiciary filling the vacuum resulting from the spontaneous decomposition and deliberate dismantlement of the old legal system. The pre-Bolshevik provisional governments, especially the first one, had released thousands of common-law criminals and political prisoners, and where “they acted slowly or released only political prisoners” the streets had forced the opening of jails. This emptying of prisons and break up of the tsarist police went hand in hand with the abolition of the death penalty, the Siberian exile system, and the Okhranka. It was, of course, much easier to liquidate the old legal and police establishment than to put in place a new one, in tune with the new dawn. With authority and law reduced to a skeleton, the successive provisional governments had to proceed on two fronts: to design and establish a new system of surveiller et punir; and to set up, overnight, a temporary judicial and police system—martial law writ large—to deal with the spiraling emergency. The paralysis of criminal justice continued even as Kerensky, starting in July, arrested first Bolsheviks and then the generals of the Kornilov affair.⁷⁰

It is not incidental that on the very first day of Bolshevik rule the Military Revolutionary Committee posted and distributed a handbill in Petrograd calling on the people to “detain hooligans and Black Hundred agitators and bring them to commissars of the Soviet in the nearest military unit.” This warrant included a warning that “criminals responsible” for causing “confusion, robbery, bloodshed, or shooting … would be wiped off the face of the earth.” On November 10 this same committee announced that it “would not tolerate any violation of revolutionary law and order,” a special military revolutionary court being primed to deal “mercilessly … with thievery, robbery, marauding, and attempts at pogroms.”71 The situation continued to go from bad to worse in both town and country. In Moscow in 1918 the rate of robbery and murder rose to between ten and fifteen times the prewar level. Not surprisingly, Lenin “reserved his fiercest anathemas for speculators and wreckers on the economic front.”⁷² Indeed, they were on a par with those directed against counterrevolutionaries, spies, and pogromists. By mid-April Lenin expressed a view widely shared in the Commissariat of Justice, directed by Socialist Revolutionaries, that to check “increases in crime, hooliganism, bribery, speculation, outrages of all kinds … we need time and we need an iron hand.”⁷³ In the beginning the Cheka’s security operatives and tribunals prosecuted robbers, black marketeers, and thugs, with the result that the “early death sentences of the Cheka were imposed on bandits and criminals.”⁷⁴ These executions, which apparently became a daily affair, disheartened Gorky, who wondered whether the Revolution, harbinger of a fresh start, would know how to “change the bestial Russian way of life,” of which he was a persistent but skeptical censor.⁷⁵

At this critical juncture the Bolsheviks’ “almost every step … was either a reaction to some pressing emergency or a reprisal for some action or threatened action against them.”⁷⁶ The incipient terror quickened and broadened its reach in correlation with the exigencies of both civil and foreign war, as well as diplomacy. On February 21, 1918, Sovnarkom issued a declaration warning of German invasion. Subsequently titled “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger,”⁷⁷ this notice recalled the French National Assembly’s decree of July 1792 declaring la patrie en danger. Within twenty-four hours the Cheka ordered all local soviets “to seek out, arrest, and shoot immediately all members … connected in one form or another with counterrevolutionary organizations …, enemy agents and spies, counterrevolutionary agitators, speculators, organizers of revolt … against the Soviet government, those going to the Don to join the … Kaledin-Kornilov band and the Polish counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.” The injunction was to execute on the spot anyone “caught red-handed, in the act.”78 Significantly, on February 21, the day preceding this sweeping ukase, Sovnarkom had decided to found the Red Army, in face of Germany’s renewed military offensive on the eastern front following Trotsky’s equivocation in the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk.

Brest-Litovsk was, without a doubt, a major hinge of the new epoch of world history. It was both cause and effect of the entanglement of revolution and war in 1917–18. In Trotsky’s graphic formulation, “the pulse of the internal relations of the revolution was not at all beating in time with the pulse of the development of its external relations.”⁷⁹ Needless to say, the inescapable choice between continuing the war and terminating it instantly, and cost what it may, was highly divisive among the Bolsheviks themselves as well as between them and the left Socialist Revolutionaries. But more important, whatever the road chosen, it could not help but have momentous and unforeseeable consequences for the course of the Revolution.

The Allied and Associated Powers would not hear of a separate Russian exit from the war, whose military and political outcome remained very much in the balance.⁸⁰ As for the Central Powers, notably Germany, they forced the fragile Bolshevik regime to steer between the Scylla of a ruinous dictated settlement and the Charybdis of a fierce terminal onslaught. Either way, the territorial cost to Russia would be enormous: the entire eastern and southern borderlands running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, as well as territories in the Caucasus, coveted by Turkey, were at risk.

Having signed a cease-fire with the Central Powers on December 5, 1917, which was repeatedly renewed, the Bolsheviks kept calling on the Western belligerents to join in a general negotiated peace without victory and annexations for either side. Since this insolent appeal continued to fall on deaf ears, the new rulers of Russia were left to face an impatient and imperious Germany alone, the peace negotiations to start December 22 at Brest-Litovsk.

The debate about war and peace drowned out the polemics about the dispersal of the National Assembly.⁸¹ Starting January 8, Trotsky, back from negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, pressed his “neither war nor peace” stratagem against both Lenin, who advocated an immediate peace on German terms, and Bukharin, chef-de-file of the champions of a revolutionary war against the Central Powers.

Past master of the new diplomacy of appealing directly to the peoples over the heads of their governments, Trotsky proposed to gain time for his cunning policy to work. For the long term he looked to revolution in Central Europe. For the short run he overconfidently summoned and expected German workers to pressure their government to agree to a moderate peace, and also nursed the illusion of a general strike in Austria.

Among the Bolsheviks the so-called Left Opposition to a separate peace with Berlin and Vienna very much shared Trotsky’s faith in world revolution. In addition to being optimistic about the prospects for revolution in the West, Bukharin, Uritsky, and Dzerzhinsky refused to concede that Russia was militarily spent. Probably swayed by their reading of the levée en masse in revolutionary France in 1793, they looked to a popular upsurge not only to resist a German onslaught but to support or carry revolution beyond Russia’s European borders. Ultimately Bukharin trusted revolutionary voluntarism to be as decisive in tomorrow’s critical junctures as it had been during the October days. Besides, he “regarded ‘peaceful coexistence … between the Soviet Republic and international capital’ as both impossible and inappropriate.”82

Admittedly, Lenin agreed with Trotsky and Bukharin that without kindred revolutions abroad, the revolution in Russia would be hard-pressed, disfigured, and cramped, also to the detriment of the world at large. But unlike them, he argued against throwing caution to the winds and risking everything on a single throw of the dice. Above all, he took the full measure of Russia’s chaos and impotence. Lenin was convinced that the army was hors de combat and that Russia’s peasants and workers were no longer willing to risk their lives for a nebulous and losing cause. Besides, the economy was wasted. In any event, Lenin was wary of the nostrum of a revolutionary war, not least because of his gnawing skepticism about near-term prospects for revolution in Europe, notably in Germany. He was supported by Sokolnikov, Stalin, and Zinoviev, who also shared his concern that to keep stalling was to risk the enemy setting even stiffer terms.

Respectful of his gainsayers in the Central Committee as well as heedful of the left Socialist Revolutionaries, who reproved any separate peace with the autocratic Central Powers, Lenin agreed that Trotsky be authorized, upon his return to Brest-Litovsk on February 10, to continue to play for time under the pretense of “neither war nor peace.” As he feared, the German High Command, eager to free troops for the western front, lost patience and within ten days Berlin ordered its armies to resume hostilities. In no time they advanced to within 100 miles of Petrograd in the north, captured Minsk and Mogilev in Belorussia, moved ever deeper into Ukraine, and occupied Kiev on March 2, the day before the Soviet delegation finally signed an inglorious dictated peace at Brest-Litovsk.

The harshness of the terms imposed on the ex-tsarist empire was unprecedented in the relations between great powers. In European Russia the Bolshevik government was forced to cede control, in the north, of Finland and the Baltic provinces; in the middle, of large parts of Belorussia; and further south, Ukraine and southern Transcaucasia. These territories covered about 800,000 square miles—about four times the area of France—and comprised one-third of imperial Russia’s population and agricultural land, over half of its industrial plants, and over three-quarters of its coal mines and oil wells. Between 1789 and 1794 revolutionary France never saw anything like this stinging diplomatic and military reverse. As Lenin told the Seventh Party Congress, the Revolution had been forced to pass “from the continuous triumphal march against … [the] counterrevolution … of October, November, December … on [the] internal front to an encounter with real international imperialism, … [making for] an extraordinarily difficult and painful situation.”83

All the same, the cessions of Brest-Litovsk brought major benefits, even if these were not as evident just then as they became later. Among others, the symbolically important citadel of the Russian Revolution was saved: at the time “the fall of Petrograd would … have meant a deathblow to the [revolutionary] proletariat … [whose] best forces were concentrated” in and around the capital.⁸⁴ Nonetheless, since the city had had a narrow escape and remained strategically vulnerable, on March 10 the Soviet government decided to move its seat to Moscow. The transfer also signaled that the Bolshevik leaders were now more fearful of hostile foreign intervention than they were hopeful of the revolution catching on abroad or the Red Army carrying it there on the point of bayonets. Although Zinoviev stressed the temporary nature of the move, insisting that “Berlin’s proletariat will help us move it back to Red Petrograd,” he granted that before this would happen the capital might even have to be moved “to the Volga or the Urals,” depending on “the course of the world revolution.”85

Above all, Brest-Litovsk secured Lenin’s primary goal which, in fact, one and all embraced: the raw Bolshevik regime won a desperately needed breathing spell to organize Sovdepia, the territories of European Russia that had been salvaged, and to steel itself for a difficult struggle for survival. The life chances of revolution being infinitely better in large than small countries, the Bolsheviks benefited from being left with a territory the size of all the warring countries of Europe combined and a population of 60 million, hence larger than that of any other belligerent, as well as containing most of the ex-empire’s war industries and military stores. In addition, most of the non-Russian lands to the west having been lost, Sovdepia was heavily Great Russian, sparing the Bolsheviks certain taxing nationality conflicts in their struggle to reestablish a single sovereignty.⁸⁶

During the time that the Bolshevik leadership was engaged in the political, diplomatic, and military battles of the Brest-Litovsk imbroglio, the civil war was practically in abeyance. At the very time that the Hohenzollern and Habsburg armies resumed their offensive in February 1918, General Kornilov started his so-called Ice March from around Rostov over the frozen steppes southward, toward the Kuban. His host was quite out of the ordinary, in that the best part of his estimated 4,000 men were commissioned and noncommissioned officers, including 36 generals and about 200 colonels.⁸⁷ The White officers were still looking for a strategically favorable staging area in which Cossacks would provide the rank and file for an army unlikely to find recruits among the rebellious peasantry.

One of the first engagements of this inchoate army took a dramatic turn. Between April 10 and 13, a chance artillery shell fired by the skeletal Red Guards of Ekaterinodar (Krasnodar), the capital of the Kuban region, struck and killed Kornilov. Eventually, when the revolutionaries found where he had been buried, they disinterred his body and “dragged it to the main square before burning it on a rubbish dump.”⁸⁸ The succession fell to General Denikin. He abandoned the siege of Ekaterinodar and regrouped his forces in and around Mechetinskaia.

By then the Allied intervention in Russia was underway.89 Although the British and French made instant contact with the Whites in the south, their feelers were of no great consequence. The main purpose of this intervention of the first hour was to harass the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, where their ascendancy enabled them to free forces for the Western Front and to tighten their control of the vital Ukrainian granary. As in the time of the French Revolution, at the outset the policies of the major powers were guided by interest, not ideology: Berlin bore hard upon Moscow to leave the war and to advance the Central Powers’ mastery throughout the eastern European rimland; the Western Allies, having failed to keep Russia fighting on their side, meant to establish a military presence sufficient to create a credible diversion on their enemies’ eastern flank. Geopolitically the Allies were at a great disadvantage: with no access by land, they were reduced to using their naval power, which necessarily was stretched to the limit. At any rate, they proceeded to seize some of Russia’s major ports: in March the British and the French put ashore small landing parties in Murmansk (on the Arctic Ocean); in April the Japanese and the British established a bridgehead at Vladivostok (on the Sea of Japan); and in early August the United States landed troops in Archangel (on the White Sea). The putative idea was to protect Allied stores and to prevent the transshipment of goods to the Central Powers. After the unhoped-for uprising, in late May, of the 30,000 to 40,000 men of the Czech Legion along the Trans-Siberian railway, there was the additional objective of getting stores to them, possibly to reopen the front against Germany and Austria in the east.

Compared to the intervention of the Central Powers, that of the Allies was negligible. There was no common measure between, on the one hand, the lands ceded under Brest-Litovsk, especially Ukraine, and, on the other, the remote maritime gateways and scant task forces. But the objective reality of the Allied intervention mattered less than the manner in which it was perceived and represented by the Bolsheviks. Besides, even if the intentions of the Allies were essentially “strategic” rather than “political,” their rhetoric was as stridently anti-Bolshevik as Lenin’s was anti-capitalist. No longer in a position to play the one belligerent coalition off against the other, the Bolsheviks were left without any leverage in an international system which they now considered wholly hostile to them. Lenin viewed and portrayed the intervention as the opening of a counterrevolutionary campaign orchestrated by the great imperialist-capitalist powers, led by Britain and France. By mid-1918 Sovnarkom was at daggers drawn with all the major powers at the same time that it confronted White armies in the south and in Siberia, rebellions by left Socialist Revolutionaries in central Russia, and several defiant political assassinations in the twin capitals. It was this conjuncture that provided the context, precondition, and warrant for the turn toward a more systematic terror of enforcement.

The civil war heated up considerably in the summer and fall of 1918, before the guns of the Great War fell silent on November 11. There were two major fronts: in the lands of the middle Volga and western Siberia, under the command of Admiral Kolchak; in the territories between the River Don and the Black Sea, under General Denikin.

In August Kolchak’s forces captured Kazan and Samara west of the Urals. Had they succeeded in advancing westward and taking Nizhny Novgorod, “they would have had a clear road to Moscow.”90 They also captured Omsk east of the Urals, a vital rail link to eastern Siberia and the Pacific. Rival counter-governments were set up in Samara and Omsk, further illustrating the runaway fragmentation of Russian sovereignty. Socialist Revolutionaries had considerable sway in Samara, while ultranationalist conservatives, not to say outright counterrevolutionaries, had the ascendancy in Omsk. Partly under Allied pressure, and starting September 8, representatives of the major opposition parties and assorted members of the suspended Constituent Assembly met for a full month in Ufa in an effort to establish a single and effective anti-Bolshevik government for all of Russia.

Kolchak, the most forceful of the White commanders, had originally gathered an army in northern Manchuria and adjoining Siberia, where some of the Socialist Revolutionaries had rallied to him. But just as the White officers’ armies in the south looked to the Cossacks to provide the bulk of their soldiers, so those of the center and east looked to the Czech Legion for theirs. Originally the 30,000 to 40,000 Czechs and Slovaks were to be redeployed via Vladivostok to France to resume fighting the Central Powers. But when they balked the Soviets’ demand to surrender their weapons in mid-May, Trotsky ordered that they be disarmed by force. By virtue of resisting successfully, the Czechs and Slovaks overnight became the largest as well as the best trained and best equipped military force fighting the revolutionary regime. Within about a month they were the controlling military force in and around Penza, Ufa, Omsk, and Tomsk, and before long they spread along much of the Trans-Siberian railway between Tomsk and Vladivostok, the essential port of entry for Allied aid to Kolchak’s forces. Because of their fairly liberal and democratic orientation, the Czechs also formed a praetorian guard for the Samara government.91

Indeed, starting in June Samara became the rallying point for the Socialist Revolutionary representatives of the ill-starred Constituent Assembly, who extended their fragile reach northwestward, to Simbirsk and Kazan. They meant to challenge the legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime by setting up a government of democrats and moderate socialists sworn to a progressive political and social program. But the Kadets and Mensheviks begged off: in particular the leaders of the Kadets threw their full weight behind Denikin in Ekaterinodar and Kolchak in Omsk. In addition, the Socialist Revolutionaries lacked significant popular support in the villages and towns of the central Volga. For all these reasons their political drive soon foundered, laying bare the limited historical possibility for a democratic resistance in a political field increasingly polarized between revolution and counterrevolution.

This preclusion of a third way was confirmed by the rising political primacy in the anti-Bolshevik camp of White officers whose illiberal worldviews were a mixture of conservatism, reaction, and counterrevolution, all the more so since the Cossack leaders shared their willful disregard of the land question. In the wake of military successes in western Siberia and southern Russia, the White officers and their political supporters not unreasonably pressed for a strong emergency government along with a moratorium on divisive debates about constitutional, social, and nationality issues until after victory over the Reds. They easily had the upper hand at the Ufa conference which on September 23 proclaimed the creation of a five-man Directory to act as a provisional government for all of Russia until a new Constituent Assembly could be convened.92

But the ambience changed radically before the conference closed on October 6. In mid-September the newly formed Red Army, under the command of Trotsky, recaptured Kazan and Simbirsk. Whereas this spectacular first victory fired the confidence of the Bolshevik leaders, it redoubled the resolve of the White generals to exercise power without constitutional restraints and political debate. At the same time, with Red troops closing in on Samara, the Czechs left the local Socialist Revolutionaries to fend for themselves, with the result that this nonauthoritarian outpost in the military resistance collapsed. Even before the end of the Great War Admiral Kolchak had imposed himself as the “Supreme Ruler” of the government at Omsk, and soon he presumed to speak for the resistance of all the Russias. This coup of November 18, 1918, ousting the Socialist Revolutionaries from his government, was merely the coup de grâce. Disdainful of limited rule, Kolchak and his ultraconservative supporters kept the backing of the Kadets, whom they humored with shadowy promises of an eventual re-convocation of the Constituent Assembly so as to leave them a semblance of dignity.⁹³

Meanwhile in the Don–Black Sea region, within two months of taking command in April 1918, Denikin had raised his army to a strength of about 9,000 men, not counting the cavalry he expected the Cossack hetmans to muster. He resolved to build a solid military base in the Kuban rather than risk his forces in a premature drive to link up with Kolchak and the Czech Legion or in an offensive in the direction of Moscow. In addition to being self-sufficient in grain and oil, the Kuban abutted upon several ports on the Black Sea which Denikin valued for providing access to foreign aid. Moving south he seized Ekaterinodar, the geopolitical hub of the Kuban, on August 16, and Novorossiysk, the Black Sea port, ten days later.⁹⁴

Along the way, in July, there was heavy fighting at Belaya Glina, Tikhoretskaya, and Stavropol which prefigured the peculiarities and Furies of the Russian civil war. Around the first two towns the Whites took large numbers of Red prisoners, who “were either shot or drafted into the ranks of the Volunteers,” with the result that Denikin now “had 20,000 under his command.” On entering Belaya Glina the Whites learned that after capture some of their men “had been brutally tortured and then killed,” with the result that “for the first time … they began to take reprisals.” Apparently they, in turn, proceeded to “arbitrarily shoot” their prisoners in small batches, “each batch … [being] compelled to first watch the execution of their comrades.”95

Stavropol experienced the terror of civil war twice. The first time occurred on July 21 when a self-appointed anti-Bolshevik guerrilla leader took the town, using singularly “simple and brutal” methods.⁹⁶ Several weeks later the Red Army seized it back, thereby inviting a second White assault in mid-November. This time the charge was led by General Wrangel, perhaps the most notable, even noble, of the ex-tsarist generals. After taking nearly 3,000 Bolshevik prisoners, and determined to make recruits, he had their 370 officers and non-commissioned officers parade under their eyes before having them shot. Immediately thereafter Wrangel gave the terrified rank and file the opportunity to join the Volunteer Army, thereby giving them “a chance to atone for their crime and prove their loyalty to their country.”⁹⁷

In the meantime Denikin had set up his military headquarters at Ekaterinodar. Following Alexeev’s death he also became the uncontested political master of the counterrevolution’s southeastern staging area, though his relations with the Cossack hetmans remained strained. Hereafter at Ekaterinodar the military and their conservative collaborators reigned supreme. Like their comrades at Omsk they invoked the need for absolute military primacy to justify deferring debate on fundamental political and social issues which would at once divide and embarrass them. With both Lenin and Wilson excoriating Europe’s old order, they could not publicly avow their unseasonable agenda.

Not that all Whites were counterrevolutionaries.⁹⁸ Many of them were instinctive reactionaries or calculating conservatives. Even so, there were few, if any, bona fide constitutional monarchists or liberal democrats among them. To be sure, the generalissimos counted several Kadets among their political advisors. But besides being of little consequence, except to provide a liberal façade for the benefit of the outside world, these ostensible junior partners were either right-wing or renegade members of their parent party. In addition to indiscriminately execrating the three main components of the socialist left—Bolsheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks—the Whites even damned the original Kadets for having been the chief gravediggers of tsarism. All in all the Whites were a microcosm of the ruling and governing classes of the ancien régime—military officers, landowners, bureaucrats, churchmen—with minimal popular support. Nor could their Kadet associates have provided them with a social base, since theirs was a party with very few adherents and followers. Indeed, without the engagement of Cossacks and impressment of enemy prisoners the Volunteer Armies would have been all but an officers’ army.

To all intents and purposes the main political generals—Kolchak, Denikin, Iudenich, Wrangel—were unreconstructed champions of the Russian empire. To the extent that they had an ideology, it was an all-embracing nationalism or patriotism of uncertain appeal to Great Russia’s masses, even if it resonated with its classes. One and all claimed to be fighting for “Russia Great, United, and Indivisible,” perhaps even for “Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland.” They called for the reestablishment of the borders of 1914 along with a far-reaching restoration. Needless to say, this die-hard posture offended the leaders of the minority nationalities, many of whom put breaking out of imperial Russia’s “prison of peoples” ahead of joining the war against the Bolsheviks. Their indignation was all the greater because such talk of empire flew in the face of the promise of national self-determination being held out by Wilson and Lenin. But the Whites could not have renounced their faith in Great Russia without denying themselves. Besides, they had no ideological precept other than one or another variation of muscular nationalism available to press into service. It would have been neither timely nor expedient for them to lay bare their frozen conservatism and reaction, including their fear-inspired condescension toward the lower orders, both peasant and proletarian.

Except for the outright counterrevolutionaries among them—and they were few in number—the Whites were discreet about the negations which animated their worldview and program. They were integral antimodernists as well as fierce adversaries of liberalism, democratic politics, and civil liberties. Their conspiratorial mind-set was of a piece with that of their counterparts in the French Revolution. The Whites of revolutionary France had attributed all the ills of their time to the corrosive force of Enlightenment ideas purveyed by Freemasons, Jansenists, and Protestants, allegedly the principal trailblazers and masterminds of Jacobinism. For their part, the Whites of revolutionary Russia laid the blame for their country’s troubles on materialist ideas and on the Jews, who were accused of inventing and manipulating these ideas for their own benefit. Characteristically, the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion imputing a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy gained a certain credibility among the leaders and backers of the Volunteer Armies.

All in all, the Whites of various persuasions were driven by a common sensibility, temper, and prepossession rather than by a coherent ideology or concrete program. The anti-cum-counterrevolution was less focalized in the Russian than the French Revolution. After 1789 both inside France and outside, in Koblenz, its champions had rallied around the reason and the representative of the Bourbon monarchy as well as the Catholic Church and religion: the “volunteer army” in the Vendée had marched by the name of armée catholique et royale, with officers unfurling the fleur-de-lis flags and the rank and file flaunting religious amulets. Of course, back then Europe was still intensely monarchist and offered a naturally supportive environment for the exiled successors to Louis XVI. In contrast, after 1917, with the great continental thrones collapsing, expatriate crowns had lost their aura and were out of season.

Although the Russian Whites achieved a certain military consistency, they remained politically inchoate, without coherent civil government and administration. This deficiency was due, in large part, to their reluctance to take a clear stand on the land issue. In a country of peasants in which the peasants had, on their own, revolutionized land ownership, notably in European Russia, the Whites equivocated on the agrarian question and allowed landlords to repossess their estates in areas “liberated” by them. Besides, during military operations the Volunteer Armies lived off the land, pillaged, and requisitioned supplies, so that on this score there was nothing to choose between them and the Red Army.

The problem of the non-Russian minorities was equally vexing to the Whites. Especially in cis-Uralian Russia these minorities were taking advantage of the breakdown of imperial controls to press for autonomy or outright separation. The Revolution and civil war broke into the non-Russian borderlands, intensifying not only national rebellions but above all ethnic, sociocultural, and religious cleavages and conflicts. Not that these peripheries were swept by full-scale national revolts. Indeed, the national awakenings were sparked and carried primarily by small elites of dissident intellectuals, students, and professionals of cities and towns with at best a weak hold on the vast peasantries and countrysides they claimed to represent and mobilize. Certainly they needed the support of outside powers to compensate for their lack of a social base. The appeals of nationalism competed with the trumpets of class warfare as well as with the incitement of age-old and territorially explosive ethnic and religious strife. But all the non-Russian nationalities, both townspeople and peasants, suspected the Whites’ great Russian nationalism and dubious land policies. This damaged the military fortunes of the Volunteer Armies at two critical points of the civil war: Ukrainians and Poles would not back Denikin’s campaign in the southwest and west; Finns and Estonians would not join Iudenich’s drive on Petrograd. Clearly, anti-Bolshevism, by itself, could not carry the day. Nevertheless, the Whites were the single most formidable threat that the Bolsheviks faced—one, moreover, that interacted with and magnified all the other crises to which the Bolsheviks responded with increasingly ruthless terror.

On Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks stood all but alone. The entire non-Bolshevik left, along with the liberal center and the conservative right, opposed them. Above all, the signing of the dictated peace strained relations with their closest not to say only political allies: the left Socialist Revolutionaries opposed the treaty and bolted the coalition government to step up their campaign against it. Thereafter their good faith became suspect, and their resumption of individual terror from below intensified the regime’s enforcement terror from above.

While they functioned as a would-be loyal opposition, the left Socialist Revolutionaries had been forthright in their criticism of the forcible procurement of grain, the reinstatement of the death penalty, and the persecution of political rivals. Brest-Litovsk was merely the last straw. After withdrawing from the Council of People’s Commissars on March 19, the left Socialist Revolutionaries went over to active resistance. All the time that they had inveighed against the incipient state terror, they had made a point of not abjuring their party’s tradition of political assassination, which some of its disabused adherents now proposed to renew and train upon the Bolsheviks. As if to serve notice of this impending turn, on June 20 a working-class member of a small Socialist Revolutionary direct action group assassinated Moisei Volodarsky, the People’s Commissar for the Press, Propaganda, and Agitation in Petrograd. When Lenin learned that the local Bolshevik authorities apparently “held back … workers [who] wanted to retaliate with mass terror,” he expostulated with Zinoviev, the local party chief, that although “our resolutions threaten mass terror, … when it comes to action, we slow down the entirely justified revolutionary initiative of the masses.” Lenin urged that a “decisive example” be set, lest the “terrorists” consider the Bolsheviks “milksops” in what was “an extreme war situation.”99

The cleavage between the Bolsheviks and the left Socialist Revolutionaries dominated the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met in Moscow from July 4 to 10, 1918. With less than one-third the Bolshevik delegates, who had a clear majority, the left Socialist Revolutionaries were confounded, all the more so since they had hoped against hope that thanks to their sway with the peasants, this revolutionary citadel would be theirs. At any rate, while the congress was in session, a group of left Socialist Revolutionaries, some of whom had stayed on to work for the Cheka after March 19, launched a terrorist campaign to destabilize Sovnarkom. The opening deed was by far the most daring and dramatic. Apparently inspired or encouraged by Marya Spiridonova, a herald of anarcho-terrorism, on July 6 Iakov Blumkin, one of the left SR Chekists, assassinated Count von Mirbach, the new German ambassador in Moscow. The idea was to provoke Berlin to cancel the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and resume its drive into Russia, thereby triggering a levée en masse. This murder was also expected to instantly spark an anti-Bolshevik but revolutionary rising in the capital, followed by insurrections in several provincial cities. Although the streets of Moscow remained calm, the conspirators occupied several public buildings, including the Central Telegraph Office, from which they aimed to rouse the rest of the country.

When Dzerzhinsky, on Lenin’s order, went to the German Embassy in an effort to blunt the diplomatic blow, he learned that the assassin had introduced himself with Cheka credentials. To continue his inquiry Dzerzhinsky went to Cheka headquarters, where he himself and Martyn Latsis were arrested by dissident Chekists. Obviously there was need for quick and forceful action to placate the German government and cut short the left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. Within twenty-four hours, and without bloodshed, Red guards freed Dzerzhinsky, reestablished control over all official buildings, including the Lubianka, and arrested most members of the left Socialist Revolutionary delegation to the All-Russian Soviet meeting in the Bolshoi Theater. Thirteen of the delegates were later executed by the Cheka—all of them Chekists. Strange to say, “the first recorded ‘political’ victims” of the Red Terror actually had themselves been its agents. All the other prisoners were released and amnestied, including Spiridonova. As for Blumkin, he made good his escape.100

As was to be expected, the Cheka was purged of all left Socialist Revolutionaries as Dzerzhinsky reiterated its crucial importance in the civil and foreign war facing the regime. Manifestly “organized terror … [was] an absolutely essential element in Revolution.” The Cheka was an instrument to defend the Revolution, “just like the Red Army,” and in fighting for “victory over the bourgeoisie” neither the one nor the other could afford to stop and ask whether particular individuals were being wronged, even if this meant that “the sword occasionally falls on innocent heads.”¹⁰¹

No doubt the turbulence in Moscow would have been less disturbing for the Bolshevik leadership had it not coincided, altogether fortuitously, with several uprisings along the upper Volga. Boris Savinkov, the mastermind of this enterprise, was a man of many seasons.¹⁰² As a young terrorist of Socialist Revolutionary temper, in 1904 he had had a hand in the assassination of Vyacheslov Plehve, Nicholas II’s ultrareactionary interior minister. In 1917 Savinkov was a deputy minister in Kerensky’s government, until he rallied to General Kornilov starting with his August defiance. Expelled from the Socialist Revolutionary party, he became involved with the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, which operated in the twin capitals. Recognizing no enemies to the right, the politicians and military officers of this clandestine organization were resolutely anti-Bolshevik and favored resuming the war against the Central Powers, which commended them to the Allies. In collaboration with members of the Union, Savinkov planned risings in Rybinsk, Murom, and Yaroslavl. He traveled to the region to complete preparations, arriving there in early July 1918. In the meantime he had made contact with Joseph Noulens and Bruce Lockhart, the French and British agents in Moscow, with a view to coordinating the risings with an Allied landing in Archangel. With this prospect of Allied support, in particular Yaroslavl, with its strategic location 180 miles north of Moscow, assumed critical importance.

Actually the Unionists failed to muster a critical mass of anti-Bolshevik volunteers, with the result that the sparse local Red forces mastered the insurrections in Rybinsk and Murom without difficulty. The showdown in Yaroslavl turned out to be altogether more serious. On July 6 an improvised volunteer militia, led by White officers, seized control of the city, and it took the Bolsheviks two weeks to gather sufficient forces, including Chekists, to retake it. Before starting their assault the Reds summoned “all who valued their lives … to evacuate the city within twenty-four hours.”103 The warning was far from empty: the assault was fierce and there were heavy battle casualties on both sides.

But of course the military fighting was accompanied and followed by a deadly terror and counter-terror, with the usual atrocities. During their occupation of Yaroslavl the Unionists summarily executed the three ranking Bolsheviks and “imprisoned as many as two hundred others on a death barge anchored in the Volga.”¹⁰⁴ In turn, following the liberation of the city, the new Bolshevik authority issued a fierce victory proclamation which asked, rhetorically, “[h]ow many hundreds of vermin and parasites … [local revolutionaries should] exterminate in retribution for the precious lives of our three friends” and gave warning that since “[p]riests, officers, bankers, industrialists, monks, merchants … [were] all the same, … neither cassock, nor uniform, nor diploma could protect them.” Referring to a resolution of the recent All-Russian Congress of Soviets to “reply to all criminal enemies of the people with mass terror against the bourgeoisie,” the proclamation vowed that “[n]o mercy [would be shown] to the White Guardists.”¹⁰⁵ In the event “fifty-seven of the captured insurgents, mostly officers, were shot on the spot.” In addition, a special commission, which included several Chekists, selected another 350 insurgents for execution.106 Very likely this “was the first mass execution by the Bolsheviks.”¹⁰⁷

The avenging fury following the uprisings in provincial cities during the summer of 1918 marked an intensification of the Red Terror. Since it was widely publicized, this terror was meant to “deter the others,” giving it at once a wild and functional cast. This was also the time that the local branches of the Cheka were ordered “to practice the government’s [new] policy of unrelenting mass terror,” with Izvestia carrying “almost daily” reports on their activities.¹⁰⁸ It appears that street crowds and their tribunes did not in any significant way press for this escalation.

Crowds and the “theater” of revolution were of no moment in another of the Cheka’s contingent but ideologically conditioned act of terror: at about the same time that the Cheka played a key role in the repression of the leftist Socialist Revolutionaries in Moscow and the rightist Unionists on the upper Volga, it was the chief agent in the execution of Nicholas II, his family, and his retinue.¹⁰⁹

Following the tsar’s abdication, the imperial family was confined to a wing of Tsarskoe Selo, the former imperial palace near Petrograd. At first the provisional governments were not concerned about the safety and future of Nicholas II, and even gave some thought to allowing if not urging him to seek asylum abroad. But then, with the capital ever more agitated and exile abroad increasingly problematic, in mid-August—between the July days and the Kornilov affair—Kerensky had the imperial family moved to Tobolsk, an out-of-the-way and sleepy Siberian town. They lived there with ease and dignity until the Bolshevik takeover.

For the Bolshevik leaders the question of the Romanovs was of considerable weight, both ideologically and politically. Standing on the shoulders of the revolutionaries of 1789, and bent on transcending them, they, along with many of Russia’s socialists, had long since taken the execution of Louis XVI as prefiguring the eventual fate of Nicholas II. The tsar’s central role in the subversion of the constitutional settlement of 1905 and in the rise of an anti-Semitically colored ultraconservatism intensified the left’s predisposition to regicide. In 1911, at the height of this “aristocratic reaction,” Lenin commended it, all the more so since this was merely the Romanovs’ latest access of repressive violence: “If in a country as cultured as England, which had known neither a Mongol yoke, nor bureaucratic oppression, nor the tyranny of a military caste, it was necessary to behead one crowned brigand in order to teach [subsequent] kings to be ‘constitutional’ monarchs, then in Russia it is necessary to behead at least one hundred Romanovs to teach their successors not to organize Black-Hundred murders and Jewish pogroms.”110 Several years later, after his arrival at the Finland Station in April 1917, Lenin drafted a resolution, passed by the party’s central committee, declaring that “William II [was] as much of a crowned bandit deserving of the death penalty as Nicholas II.”¹¹¹

Soon after taking the reins the Bolshevik leadership hesitated between bringing the ex-tsar to justice in Petrograd or executing him unceremoniously without a trial. While this debate followed its course, in late April 1918 Sovnarkom sent Iakov Yakovlev, along with a detachment of Red Guards, to Tobolsk with instructions to transfer the royal family to Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), capital of the Urals. Southeast of Tobolsk and about 900 miles east of Moscow, Ekaterinburg was a politically safe industrial city under Bolshevik control. The imperial party was assigned to forced residence in a mansion (Ipatev House) confiscated from a wealthy local merchant, in which the extsar’s everyday life was shorn of its royal nimbus.

It is unclear whether this mortifying secret internment was a calculated first step toward a trial and execution or a temporary expedient. In the meantime, the tsar’s jailers were under strict instructions not to allow any contact with Whites who, inspired by Louis XVI’s ill-fated flight to Varennes, might try to organize a rescue or escape with a view to giving the counterrevolution a potent symbolic banner and depriving the Revolution of the benefits of a possible trial. But the fortunes of civil war were about to complicate Yakovlev’s mission.

In early July, units of Kolchak’s volunteer forces and the Czech Legion were reported to be closing in on Ekaterinburg from the east and southwest. Yakovlev and local Bolshevik officials were disconcerted about what to do with the imperial family, should the enemy invest or capture the city. Presently the members of the Ural Regional Soviet, having voted to execute the tsar and his family, sent Philip Goleshchekin, a reliable Bolshevik, to Moscow to seek approval for their decision. In the capital he conferred with Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Committee of the Soviets, and this at a time when the Central Committee opted for the extsar’s trial. Apparently Goleshchekin returned to Ekaterinburg with the order to organize a public trial, to be held in Moscow, in which Trotsky would act as chief prosecutor but also with the understanding that should time run out, the local soviet could take whatever steps it considered appropriate. On July 12, after Red officers had notified the regional soviet that the fall of Ekaterinburg was just a matter of days, it voted to put the imperial family to death without a trial. Four days later, during the night of July 16–17, the tsar, the empress, their five children, the family physician, and three servants were summarily shot. The ten executioners acted under orders of Yakovlev and Iakov Yurovsky, the family’s chief jailer and a leading member of the regional Cheka. The killing was brutal, without ceremony and without last rites or honors. Unlike the nearly simultaneous repression in Yaroslavl, it was carried out in secret. The remains of the victims were thoroughly disfigured before being disposed of in a grave that was both profane and concealed.

The claim that the Whites were at the gates was neither sham nor pretext. When Ekaterinburg fell on July 25, “a detachment of monarchist officers raced … to free their Emperor.”112 Even so, there may have been other historical possibilities. The regional soviet might, in good time, have transferred the imperial family to a zone untouched by civil war, or the opposing sides might have negotiated its safe passage out of Russia. Probably the friend-enemy dissociation had gone too far for half-measures. But since Sverdlov presumably had given large discretion to the Ural Soviet, and in view of the impossibility of a public trial in Ekaterinburg, the local powers could certainly have executed Nicholas II but spared his family and retinue. It is hard to say what combination of impulses accounted for this excessive excess: ideology, fanaticism, vengeance, fear, bewilderment. Admittedly, the Bolshevik leaders may have wanted to consecrate the new order with an act of founding violence doubling as a major milestone of irreversibility. But for such an act to be effective, it would have had to be open, principled, and ritualized, on the order of Louis XVI’s calvary. As it was, the Central Soviet Executive Committee in Moscow simply announced that the tsar had been shot because Ekaterinburg was “seriously threatened” by the Czechs and “a new plot of counterrevolutionaries, which had as its objective to take the royal hangman out of the hands of the Soviet Government.” It stated, falsely, that “the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov were sent to a safe place,”113 since all the children were killed and so were prominent members of the extended Romanov family. Incidentally, not unlike the dispersion of the Constituent Assembly, in city and country the killing of the tsar aroused little overt indignation, let alone resistance.

As the civil war intensified and Sovnarkom became increasingly alarmed about the Volga and the Urals, it ordered the terror stepped up in those regions. On August 9 Lenin urged the Bolshevik leaders of Nizhny Novgorod, where “a whiteguardist rising was brewing, … instantly to introduce mass terror.” Local officials were told “to shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes who got soldiers drunk, ex-officers,” as well as “to make mass searches, … to execute for possession of weapons, … [and] to massively deport Mensheviks and unreliable elements.” That same day, in response to an alarming telegram about rural unrest around Perm, northwest of Ufa, Lenin ordered the organization, locally, of “a strengthened guard of reliable persons to carry out merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards as well as to lock up unreliable elements in a concentration camp outside the town.”¹¹⁴ Presently Latsis, who with Dzerzhinsky had been briefly detained in Moscow on July 6 and now headed the Cheka on the eastern front, expounded on the internal logic of this crescendo of terror. On August 23, in Izvestia, he asserted that civil war knows no “established customs … and written laws.” It calls not only for the “slaughter of those wounded fighting against you … [and] the destruction of the active forces of the enemy, but also the demonstration that anyone raising the sword against the existing order will perish by the sword.” According to Latsis, civil war knows “no courts of law,” since it is “a life and death struggle” in which, “if you do not kill, you will be killed [yourself].”¹¹⁵

The cumulative radicalization and politicization of the terror were given yet further impetus by the assassination of Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin’s life on August 30, 1918. Like the assassination of Marat in July 1793, these acts of bottom-up insurgent terror brought on a major change in the fragile regime’s top-down enforcement terror. Admittedly Marat’s murder was intended to undermine the revolution, while the assaults on Uritsky and Lenin were meant to check its betrayal. But notwithstanding their antipodal political purposes, these acts of gestural terror had a similar function in the intensification and institutionalization of both terrors, with vengeance an important ingredient.

Uritsky was chairman of the Petrograd Cheka. He was not a particularly conspicuous, controversial, or hard-line member of the new political class. His killer, Leonid Akimovich Kannegiser, who was close to the moderate Populist Socialist Party, acted alone and without a precise objective other than to lash out at the new regime.

When informed of Uritsky’s slaying, and no doubt recalling the recent assassination of Volodnarsky, Lenin instantly sent Dzerzhinsky to Petrograd to conduct an investigation. Upon his arrival there, however, the chief of the Cheka was informed that Lenin himself had just been struck by an assassin’s bullet. Dzerzhinsky rushed back to Moscow, no doubt convinced of a link between the two incidents. But they turned out to be as unrelated as July’s uprisings in the capital and the upper Volga. Needless to say, such coincidences do not exactly dampen the specious conspiratorial reasoning inherent to politics in revolutionary moments.

Lenin was shot and gravely wounded on leaving an armaments factory in a suburb of Moscow after a speech to workers on the dangers of counterrevolution, which he apparently closed with the coda that “there is only one issue, victory or death!”116 Fania Kaplan was among several suspects arrested on the spot and taken for interrogation first to the Lubianka and then the Kremlin. Almost immediately she was declared guilty, without a trial. Unlike Charlotte Corday, who hailed from respectable society, Kaplan had an anarchist background. She had met Spiridonova while serving a term of hard labor in Siberia for her subversive activities. Like Blumkin, von Mirbach’s assassin, Kaplan was swayed by Spiridonova’s anarcho-terrorist gospel. Apparently Kaplan’s eyesight was very poor, which suggests that she most likely did not act alone but in concert with a group of Socialist Revolutionaries, even though she seems not to have been a member of their party.

The assassination of Uritsky and the assault on Lenin could not help but fire the Bolsheviks’ righteous rage, suspicion, and rancor. The day after Uritsky’s murder Petrograd’s Krasnaia Gazeta thundered that the season of “namby-pambyism” had come to an end: “thousands of our enemies” will have to pay for the death, and the “surviving members of the bourgeoisie will have to be taught a bloody lesson by means of terror.” The next day this same paper vowed that “only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin and Uritsky.”117 In Moscow Pravda proclaimed that the time had come “to destroy the bourgeoisie, else it will destroy you,” and forewarned that “from now on the hymn of the working class will be a hymn of hatred and vengeance.”¹¹⁸ The daily of Nizhny Novgorod used language found in many provincial papers when it asserted that “the blood of the killed and wounded was crying out for revenge.”¹¹⁹ Although Petrograd’s Krasnaia gazeta carried a telegram from Bolshevik activists to Zinoviev suggesting that workers be urged to wreak “vengeance on … Right-SRs and White Guards,”¹²⁰ it remains unclear whether this call for avenging terror in the press was accompanied by a popular clamor for vengeance in the streets, reminiscent of July 1793.

The official reaction was very much in the same key. On September 2 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution warning that “all counterrevolutionaries and all those inspiring them will be held responsible” for attempts on the life of “Soviet leaders and champions of the ideals of the socialist revolution.” Hereafter the “White Terror” of the people’s enemies would be countered by “a Red Terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”¹²¹ The next day Izvestia carried a public notice by Iakov Peters, deputy chairman of the Cheka, claiming that “the criminal designs of the White Guards, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and other pseudo socialists” were forcing the working class to use its “avenging hand to break the chains of slavery … [and] to reply … with mass terror.”¹²² It served notice that anyone “arrested carrying arms and lacking the necessary identification papers [would] be subject to instant execution,” while whoever “agitated against Soviet authority would be seized immediately and confined to a concentration camp.” As for “plundering capitalists, marauders, and speculators,” they would be set to “forced labor … [while] individuals involved in counterrevolutionary plots will be destroyed and crushed by the heavy hammer of the revolutionary proletariat.”¹²³

On September 4, 1918, Izvestia printed one of two official decrees which put the terror of the Russian Revolution à l’ordre du jour. In the first decree, addressed to all the soviets, Grigory Petrovsky, the commissar for internal affairs, first justified and then spelled out a new set of repressive measures. He was almost defensive about abandoning Sovnarkom’s heretofore lenient treatment of the forces of resistance which, as he told it, were clearly the aggressor. On the enemy side there was “the killing of Volodarsky and Uritsky; the attempted killing and wounding of … Lenin; the execution of tens of thousands of our comrades in Finland and Ukraine, as well as in the territories of the Don and those seized by the Czechoslovaks; the endless conspiracies in the rear of our armies; and the open complicity of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries and other counterrevolutionary scoundrels” in these plots. By contrast, there were “markedly few serious repressions and mass shootings of White Guards and bourgeois by the Soviet authorities, [which] shows that notwithstanding the persistent allegations of mass terror against Socialist Revolutionaries, White Guards, and the bourgeoisie this terror does not, in fact, exist.” The time had come to “put a decisive end” to this “laxity and weakness.” Henceforth “all Right Socialist Revolutionaries known to local soviets must be arrested immediately … [and] a considerable number of hostages must be selected from among the bourgeoisie and the ex-officers.” Even the smallest attempt or sign of resistance among the White Guards “must instantly be met with mass executions” and, above all, “there must not be the slightest hesitation or indecision in using mass terror to once and for all eliminate them from the rear of our armies.”124

While Lenin was in his Kremlin apartment recovering, Sovnarkom discussed a special report on internal security by Dzerzhinsky that served as a basis for the formal decree “On the Red Terror,” which was issued on September 5 over the signatures of Grigory Petrovsky and Dmitry Kursky, the commissar for justice. Insisting that since it had become “absolutely essential to secure the rear areas by means of terror,” this decree declared that the Cheka needed to be reinforced “with as many reliable party comrades as possible.” To shield the Soviet Republic, the Cheka would have to “safeguard it from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps,” and it would have to “shoot all persons involved with White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and uprisings,” making sure to publish their names and “the grounds for their execution.”¹²⁵ Latsis claimed that “the right to execute,” heretofore severely criticized by “many party comrades, … was now legalized” by virtue of real life having “forced the Red Terror to reply to the White Terror.”126

Following the rebel terrorist assault on Uritsky and especially on Lenin, “the terror, hitherto sporadic and unorganized, became a deliberate instrument of policy,” directed from above.¹²⁷ The executions of Kannegiser and Kaplan, which were only to be expected, were overshadowed by a string of wholesale retributive shootings, hostage takings, and arrests, in conformity with the letter and spirit of the new Cheka guidelines. Significantly, the primary victims of this crescendo of violence were members of the old governing and ruling classes who were guilty or suspected of collaboration with the Whites. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries were no less the target of this heightened enforcement terror, relatively few of them were actually killed or taken hostage. Indeed, the hardening terror cannot be said to have given priority to the struggle against ideological and political rivals over the death struggle with the genuine counterrevolution.

The worst reprisals took place in Petrograd. Gleb Boky, the new acting chairman of the local Cheka, published the decree “On the Red Terror” with a covering statement insisting that Uritsky’s assassination tragically demonstrated the laxity of past security measures. He announced the execution of “512 counterrevolutionaries and White Guards, including 10 Right-SRs, and the arrest of representatives of the bourgeoisie as hostages.”¹²⁸ Among the victims and hostages there figured high officials of the ancien régime and provisional governments, as well as military officers, bankers, merchants, and factory managers. Moscow counted over 100 victims, and several other cities between 10 and 40.¹²⁹

Judging by the announcements of the local Chekas, there was nothing mysterious or hidden about this repression. In the capital it was declared to be a reply “to the attempted assassination of the leader of the world proletariat,” and in Perm “to the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin’s life.”¹³⁰ By and large the rhetoric was that of vengeance, intended to both justify and intimidate. In Nizhny Novgorod, where about 40 persons were shot and an additional 700 held hostage, the local paper served notice that for “every real and threatened murder of a Communist,” several bourgeois hostages would be shot, because “the blood of our murdered and wounded comrades cries out for revenge.”¹³¹ The Cheka of Torzhok vowed that “for every head and life of our leaders, hundreds of heads of the bourgeoisie and their helpers will fall”; the Cheka of Penza announced that “for the murder … of one comrade … the Whites paid with 152 lives,” to be followed by “severer measures against them in the future.”132

The escalation of indeterminate and erratic terror into specifically and intentionally political terror was closely correlated with the escalation of the civil war, which became an increasingly commanding fact, in the rear as well as on its rapidly shifting battle fronts, all the more so because from the outset it was freighted with colossal international complications, condensed in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its aftermath. In the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks had to contend with the advancing armies of Kolchak and Denikin, at the same time that they had to decide the fate of the imperial family and cut short the resurgent politics of assassination. In addition, following the proclamation of a grain emergency in May 1918 and the introduction of War Communism, the chronic antipathy between city and country began to take a turn for the worse.

Between spring and autumn in 1918, not unlike in 1793, the revolution “became more defiant with every day” by virtue of being “threatened, provoked, and desperate,” and the Bolsheviks, much like the Jacobins, began to “turn what burst forth as a fit of anger and an impulse of despair into a principle of government.” In fact, “with heartless dispassion the revolutionaries converted … [this contingent] fury into a set of rules, thereby not only setting on fire such volatile impulses as indignation and fear, but also transforming rage into a ruthless instrument of governance and salvation.”¹³³ It was also in this mood of systematic ruthlessness, and at the high point of the crisis in the civil war during the summer of 1918, that the Bolsheviks took the first steps toward establishing a system of labor camps.

The Cheka’s camp system grew out of the Bolshevik response to the breakdown of the judicial and penal system which, as previously noted, nearly coincided with the collapse of political sovereignty. Gradually, by the summer of 1918, the regime put in place “three different organs to impose penalties for various kinds of crime.” There were, to begin with, “ordinary courts,” or people’s courts, which dealt with crimes that did not bear upon state security. As for the newly charted “revolutionary tribunals,” they were to judge and penalize crimes against the state, in particular counterrevolutionary activities, profiteering, and hoarding. The Cheka was the third branch. Unlike the two others, it was an administrative, not a judicial organ, “whose actions were not subject to any legal rules of procedure or limited in scope by any legal definition or restriction,” at least so far as its powers of arrest and incarceration were concerned; its power to carry out executions was, however, limited to cases of armed insurrection, counterrevolutionary activity, and banditry. Needless to say, the revolutionary tribunals and the Cheka were far more ruthless than the people’s courts, which “accounted for 97 percent of persons brought to trial” and were sparing of the death sentence and of long imprisonment.134

When and why was the idea for concentration camps first raised? Lenin himself had repeatedly invoked the use of forced social labor for penal purposes. As early as December 1917 he had envisaged it as a means of overcoming the resistance of the old elites to economic reforms. In mid-1918 on several occasions he also suggested limited terms of compulsory labor for bribery and black-marketeering.¹³⁵ But it was the acute perils of the summer of 1918 that turned general proposals into practice.

On June 4, 1918, faced with the revolt of the Czech Legion, Trotsky threatened internment in a concentration camp for all Czechs and Slovaks refusing to surrender their arms. Three weeks later, on June 26, he urged Sovnarkom “to establish a coercive regime” complete with “concentration camps” to force the “parasitic elements of the bourgeoisie to perform the most disagreeable work” and to pressure tsarist officers “refusing to join the Red Army.”¹³⁶ On July 23, 1918, the Cheka was in fact authorized to establish and administer “a different and independent penal system … for those whose activities or potential activities constituted a threat to security.”¹³⁷ Presently the Cheka started to run its own prisons as well as concentration and labor camps. But it was not the only agency empowered to do so at this time. On August 8, 1918, in the wake of the fall of Kazan to the Czech Legion and Kolchak, Trotsky announced that with “the Soviet Republic in danger” he had ordered the officer responsible for the security of the 500-mile rail line between Kazan and Moscow “to set up concentration camps near Murom, Arzamas, and Sviyazhsk for the imprisonment of suspicious agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators.”138 The next day, August 9, preoccupied by armed peasant risings near Penza on the vulnerable eastern front, Lenin wired instructions to the local soviet to organize reliable Red Guards to “exercise massive terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards [and] to lock up suspicious elements in a concentration camp outside the town.”¹³⁹ In early September, following the attempt on Lenin’s life, Cheka headquarters issued the previously mentioned declaration admonishing that “anyone daring to agitate against Soviet authority would be arrested immediately and confined in a concentration camp.” Two days later came the “Decree on the Red Terror” which, inter alia, declared it “essential to safeguard the Soviet Republic from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps” and charged the Cheka with this task.¹⁴⁰

The fall of 1918 saw a major shift in the balance of forces in Russia detrimental to the Bolsheviks, a shift due in large part to a change in the international balance of forces, as crystallized with the end of the Very Great War. As long as the Central Powers had dominated the Eastern Front, the Allies had confined themselves to occupying safe seaports through which to transship military and economic supplies to Kolchak and the Czechs. Immediately after the Armistice and following Germany’s withdrawal from Ukraine, the Allies rushed to also seize Russian ports on the Black, Caspian, and Baltic seas, with a view to supplying all three Volunteer Armies. The Allies left no doubt that they meant to transform their intervention from disquieting the Central Powers in the east to helping the Whites overthrow the Bolshevik regime. Compared to Sovdepia, the territories controlled by the Whites were barren of industry and manufacture. This particular handicap accounts for their utter dependence on foreign supplies of weapons, ammunition, and clothing. Although the Allies dispatched ground forces as well, these were of minor significance, except for the regiments securing the strategic ports. The Western powers also provided diplomatic support fashioned to bolster the Whites’ legitimacy. In addition they stood behind the governments of Rumania, Poland, and Finland. Among the chief beneficiaries of the decomposition of the tsarist empire, these three countries were primed to participate in the siege of the Bolshevik regime even if they refused military collaboration with the Whites for fear of their persistent Great Russian pretensions.

During the winter of 1918–19 Moscow made several proposals intended to defuse this ominous foreign intervention while at the same time looking for ways to capitalize on the Revolution’s appeal abroad, notably in central Europe.141 The Allies, including the United States, spurned all overtures. They were at once frightened of the specter of Communism hovering over the destabilized Continent and confident that Lenin’s weak and amateur regime would come apart in face of insuperable difficulties at home and containment from abroad. Of course, the governments of the major powers were as divided on the Russian as on the German question. As in the time of the French Revolution, each country reacted to the implosion of one of the international system’s great powers according to its own reason of state. But following 1917, unlike after 1789, the Allied governments were buffeted by domestic political pressures which, except in the United States and Japan, were fueled by strains of war. By reason of diplomatic rivalry, political prudence, and war weariness, the concert of powers decided for limited and indirect over full-scale and head-on intervention. The Big Four continued to send aid to the White armies, at the same time that they rebuffed Moscow’s diplomatic overtures and helped to quell an allegedly Bolshevik takeover in Hungary. When finally, in late May 1919, they conditionally recognized Kolchak as head of all the counterrevolutionary forces in Russia, his “Ufa offensive” was beginning to falter, foreshadowing his fall. Within a few months Denikin and Iudenich were defeated as well, followed by Wrangel.

Admittedly, Allied assistance was not nearly as systematic and extensive as it might have been and as, understandably, the Bolsheviks surmised and charged it to be. It was, in addition, as lacking in coordination as the military campaigns of the three major White armies. Still, without this material, including financial aid, the counterrevolution could not have persevered as long as it did. While Kolchak depended on foreign rifles, guns, and munitions from Vladivostok reaching him in western Siberia, Denikin relied on the ports of the Black and Caspian seas for supplies. The British contribution was considerably greater than the French, while the United States assumed the role of paymaster-in-chief. Apparently “the arms and equipment … sent to Kolchak … [were] roughly comparable to total Soviet production in 1919.”142 During that same year the British supplied Denikin with “198,000 rifles, 6,200 machine guns, 500,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition, and 1,121 artillery pieces.”¹⁴³ To be sure, this material aid could not offset the Whites’ manpower deficit: unlike the Bolsheviks, they failed to convince or coerce the peasants to answer their call to arms. But the Allied governments had political and economic reasons for not sending ground forces, notwithstanding the ultra-interventionist arguments of Winston Churchill and Marshal Foch. Portentously, as early as April 1919 even the French, though desperate to maintain an eastern counterweight to Germany, withdrew the combat detachments they had landed in Odessa some six months before.

It would appear that “had Allied aid to the Whites been stopped” after the Armistice “the Russian Civil War would almost certainly have ended much more quickly in a decisive [Soviet] victory.”¹⁴⁴ Any substantially shortened civil war most likely would have lessened the military and civilian bloodletting, the militarization of Bolshevik political society, the ravages of famine, and the economic and social woes of major cities. Besides, with a less protracted, ferocious, and taxing civil war, sustained from abroad, the Bolshevik leaders would have contracted neither their phobia about encirclement by a hostile outside world leagued with domestic enemies nor their hubris fed by their unexpected triumph over insuperable odds. But there is, of course, the other side of the picture: in case of a quick victory in the civil war, a “triumphant revolutionary Russia” would have been in a better position to generate sympathy and support in “a Europe fairly quivering with social unrest and upheaval.”¹⁴⁵

In one respect the heightened threat to the Revolution after the Armistice led to an easing of Bolshevik repression of the non-Bolshevik left, which now cautiously sided with the regime. At the outset the Cheka spied out and harassed active oppositionists among the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout most of 1918 the bulk of these enemy brothers, “convinced that the Bolsheviks would be unable to rule for long without their help,” adopted a would-be third or independent position expressed in the motto “neither Lenin nor Denikin [or Kolchak].” Of course, the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov, condemned the Bolshevik seizure of power and establishment of an authoritarian regime, particularly since they persisted in their view that backward Russia was not ready for a socialist transformation. At first the Mensheviks stayed clear of anti-Bolshevik subversion and conceived of themselves as a loyal opposition. The picture was not nearly so clear with the Socialist Revolutionaries. Once their militant left wing had spent itself in the abortive politics of assassination and insurgency in July 1918, for which they paid a considerable price, there remained two factions: one proposed to “follow the Menshevik strategy of dissenting neutrality”; the other “preferred to challenge the regime in the name of the Constituent Assembly” and, as we saw, collaborated with the White Guards in the fall of 1918.146

But following the Armistice, both the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries denounced the continuing Allied intervention, now that it shifted from countering the Central Powers to supporting the counterrevolution. In particular, with Kolchak’s overthrow of the SR-dominated Directory in favor of a military dictatorship at Omsk in November 1918, almost overnight the right Socialist Revolutionaries either began supporting the Bolsheviks, even if reluctantly and fitfully, or else disengaged or emigrated. Indeed nearly all the components of the non-Bolshevik left, both urban and rural, tended to “ignore the Red Terror … because, by and large, it did not affect them.” To be sure, the Cheka “fulminated against the socialist ‘traitors,’ ” and not always without reason. But the Cheka’s “victims were mainly officials of the old regime and well-to-do citizens.” At present the anti- and non-Bolshevik lefts therefore had much more reason to fear the White than the Red Terror. In the crunch, they definitely considered the Bolsheviks “the lesser evil,” afraid that should the Whites prevail, they “would liquidate [the Revolution] completely.” It was “this prospect [that] in late 1918 … [prompted] the Mensheviks, followed by the SRs, to move toward reconciliation with Lenin’s regime.”¹⁴⁷

This is not to say that mainstream Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries ceased to either criticize the Bolsheviks or press their own agendas. Although indecisive about the Constituent Assembly, they called for free elections, democratic control of the soviets, and respect for civil rights. In exchange for their eventually rallying support for the armed struggle against the Whites, the Bolsheviks decided to leave loyal Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries considerable political leeway: they could publish newspapers, hold public meetings, and speak out in the soviets. To be sure, this semi-legal and semi-loyal opposition, which was intensely disunited, was closely watched. The Cheka blew hot and cold, intermittently censoring or closing newspapers as well as arresting and then releasing known critics. Typically, in June 1919 Martov was placed under house arrest for five days. Even so, it is not to trivialize this repression to note that apparently very few left oppositionists were hounded, brutalized, executed.148

Likewise, although left Socialist Revolutionaries repeatedly engaged in active resistance, they were treated with “comparative leniency.” Many of them were imprisoned, and often for protracted terms, but “they suffered relatively few casualties”: by 1922 “26 LSRs had been executed, 4 had died in prison, and 51 were still in detention.”¹⁴⁹

Oddly enough, compared to the French terror of 1792–94, the Russian terror of 1918–21 permitted voluntary and forced exile for sectaries of the left. In the autumn of 1920 the Politburo allowed Martov, who was seriously ill, to leave Russia for Germany, enabling Lenin to claim that “we willingly let Martov go.” It is true that following Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks, who were ever nervous about potential popular resistance, imprisoned leading oppositionists. Eventually some of them were tried on charges of committing “terrorist” acts, receiving long prison terms as well as death sentences. But the death sentences were commuted, and other oppositionists were not tried at all, but released on condition of foreswearing all political activity. Still others were either “permitted to emigrate or sent into internal exile.” Characteristically the Soviet authorities granted the request of Fedor Dan, who had been arrested and sentenced to internal exile in connection with the Kronstadt mutiny in February 1921, to go abroad—a request that he had backed with a hunger strike.¹⁵⁰

Kolchak opened the second phase of the civil war in the spring of 1919 with a drive toward the central Volga, his ultimate objective being Moscow, 500 miles to the west. His army of some 125,000 men set out from around Perm, Ekaterinburg, and Cheliabinsk in early March and advanced swiftly, to take Ufa in mid-March and close in on Kazan, Simbirsk, and Samara by late April. The forces facing Kolchak were weak. The Red Army was as yet in the early stages of its transformation from a volunteer militia of workers to a conscript army of peasants. Conscious of the shortcomings of their troops, the Soviet field officers opted for a strategic retreat as the Kremlin, desperate to stem Kolchak’s advance, rushed tried and true volunteers and political commissars to the endangered front.

In early May the Red forces began to counterattack and within a month, after retaking Ufa, they had gained in self-confidence. By late August Kolchak’s armies had been driven back well beyond their starting points. Kolchak had rushed his offensive to take advantage of the rawness of the Red Army and to bid for stepped-up Allied support. But Kolchak also paid a price for his haste: by not working and waiting to coordinate his drive with Denikin’s, he drew all the enemy fire onto his own forces, which soon turned out to be overextended.

From the outset Kolchak resorted to terror both because he set much store by it and because he became caught up in the iron logic of civil war. On December 21–22, 1918, local Bolsheviks had seized a prison in Omsk, his capital, and had set free not a few left-wing political prisoners, most of them non-Bolshevik, even anti-Bolshevik. In the ensuing repression some 300 men were killed indiscriminately and about another 150 were executed following summary courts-martial. Ironically, most of the prisoners the Bolshevik rebels had freed voluntarily surrendered to the White authorities, confident of fair and legal treatment. Instead, a White officer arbitrarily selected fifteen to be shot on the banks of the Irtysh river. Spokesmen for the local radical and liberal intelligentsia cried out against the “uninterrupted spilling of human blood” and the extinction of “the feeling and consciousness of humanity, the value of life, and … the legal order in the state.” They held all the “contending political groups and parties” responsible for throwing Russia back to “prehistoric times,” in the process killing its “civilization and culture and … destroying the great [and timeless] cause of human progress.”151

Admittedly, violence was less controlled in Kolchak’s indeterminate territories than in the more structured and fixed Sovdepia. Much of it can be traced to the complete breakdown of political and legal sovereignty in large zones of Siberia in which self-appointed Cossack chiefs arrogated unlimited power to themselves, wreaking havoc to the rear of Kolchak’s lines. Grigory Semenov and Ivan Kalmykov were representative of these condottiere who during the spring and summer of 1919 plundered, took hostages, tortured, and killed on a large scale, with the Supreme Ruler at once unwilling and unable to restrain them.152 According to Roland Morris, the American ambassador to Japan, whose government supported several hetmans, “[a]ll over Siberia … there [was] an orgy of arrests without charges; of executions without even the pretense of trial; and of confiscations without color of authority.” In an atmosphere of “panic fear … [m]en suspected each other and lived in constant terror that some spy or enemy would cry ‘Bolshevik’ and condemn them to instant death.” William Graves, the commander of U. S. troops in Siberia, confirmed that in Siberia whoever failed to “support Kolchak and the autocratic class surrounding him” risked being denounced a “Bolshevik.”¹⁵³

With Kolchak’s failing military fortunes these chaotic conditions went from bad to worse. While anti-Jewish pogroms were one of the mainstays of counterrevolutionary violence and terror in the southwestern theater of the civil war,¹⁵⁴ they were very much the exception in the eastern regions, where Jewish communities were rare and small. It was in July, while Kolchak’s armies were in headlong retreat, that some of his “supporters launched a pogrom … in Ekaterinburg … that claimed some two thousand casualties which, in view of the city’s comparatively small Jewish population, counted as an appalling massacre.”¹⁵⁵ This pogrom was not, however, an isolated excess late in the second phase of White resistance beyond the Urals. In mid-November 1919, coincident with the Red Army’s capture of Omsk, representatives of the remaining Czechoslovak forces in Siberia notified the Allied governments that “under the protection of [their] bayonets the local Russian military authorities permit[ted] themselves activities at which the whole civilized world [was] horrified.” There was nothing uncommon, they said, about “the burning of villages, the beating of peaceful Russian citizens by the hundreds, the shooting without trial of representatives of democracy, on the mere suspicion of political unreliability.”¹⁵⁶

Kolchak kept retreating some 1,500 miles eastward along the Trans-Siberian railway from Omsk toward Irkutsk, just west of the southern tip of Lake Baikal. Encouraged by his imminent defeat, on January 5, 1920, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries backed by Czechoslovak legionnaires seized control of the city. It was a measure of their lack of realism that they represented themselves as a “Political Center” making a renewed bid for a third way. Presently Kolchak and his entourage reached Irkutsk under the patronage of the Allies. Instead of arranging for his flight or exile, General Maurice Janin, the chief Allied representative in Siberia, pressed the newly formed government to imprison and try him. Kolchak’s predicament worsened on January 21, when a committee of local Bolsheviks supplanted the “Political Center.” He was now in a situation comparable to that of Nicholas II in Ekaterinburg in mid-1918: the plan to put Kolchak on trial, supported by Lenin, was cut short when stray units of his decomposing army closed in on Irkutsk with the declared intention to liberate him. On February 7, 1920 an official of the local Cheka ordered several local Bolsheviks to shoot Kolchak and his chief political counselor. Their corpses were disposed of as unceremoniously as those of the imperial family, in that they were “cast into an icehole in the river Angara.”157

Whatever the vicissitudes of Kolchak’s campaign, it was the first to have held out the promise of successful counterrevolution not only to the resistance within Russia but to the Big Four in Paris as well. In the spring of 1919 this seemed a real historical possibility, in the brief moment when Kolchak’s offensive toward the central Volga fortuitously coincided with Denikin’s thrust toward the lower Dnieper.

Faced with this peril, Sovnarkom once again stepped up the terror. Starting in the spring and through the fall, hundreds of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were arrested on suspicion of disloyalty and complicity with the enemy in cities likely or about to be buffeted by the civil war. This was also the time when in several of these cities the Cheka was charged with reining in labor strikes in industries considered essential to the civil war effort. The workers were driven to remonstrate by sparse rations, runaway prices, and fear of starvation, even though they also clamored for self-rule and political decontrol. Here and there the strikers were joined by soldiers who mutinied when ordered to restrain or fire on them. In March–April 1919 Tula, 120 miles east of Moscow, in Kolchak’s reach, and Astrakhan, the Caspian port and mouth of the Volga, in Denikin’s, witnessed a terrifying repression. In Tula hundreds of strikers were arrested, and before work resumed 24 alleged “ringleaders” were executed. Infinitely worse, in Astrakhan, under the direction of Sergei Kirov, the political chief of the region, probably over a thousand workers and mutineers were arrested. With the prisons saturated, the local forces of law and order, including Cheka operatives, put the overflow on barges, with the result that scores of them drowned or were thrown into the Volga. All told, between 2,000 and 4,000 strikers and mutineers are estimated to have been killed, followed by the massacre of 600 to 1,000 class enemies, including members of the bourgeoisie.158

In mid-winter 1918–19 Denikin had moved south to drive the Soviets out of the northern Caucasus, including Piatigorsk and Grozny. He now prepared to move into the center of Russia. He had even fewer men than Kolchak, but had received timely and ample supplies of British arms and ammunition. In early May the Armed Forces of South Russia launched a three-pronged offensive: northward to take Kharkov and the Donets Basin; eastward to seize Tsaritsyn; and westward to capture Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk). By the end of June they had also occupied Odessa, Nikolaev, and Novorossiysk on the Black Sea.

Denikin made these stunning gains at the very time that Kolchak suffered his first reverses, and before long he supplanted the Supreme Ruler as the high hope of the anti-Bolshevik resistance—at home and abroad. Partly because the fledgling Red Army was heavily engaged in fighting Kolchak, it kept falling back on the southern front, and when it finally mounted an attack in August, Denikin managed to hold fast. In the meantime, heartened by his quick success, Denikin redefined his military objective: he would move on Moscow and link up with Kolchak, with a view to shoring up the Supreme Ruler’s weakening position. The main axes of his advance would be northward from Kharkov via Kursk and Orel to Tula and from the Don Basin to Voronezh. The drive started in mid-September 1919, and once again Denikin’s divisions advanced swiftly. By mid-October, having taken Chernigov and Voronezh on his western and eastern flanks, his main force reached Orel, 250 miles south of Moscow, and within a fortnight it drew near Tula.

But at this point, not unlike Kolchak at his apogee in May, Denikin found his armies to be overstretched, and for many of the same reasons. As a social conservative he, too, had continued to sidestep the land question, which was all the more detrimental in his case, since he had to divert some of his thinly deployed forces to parry an attack from Makhno’s peasant bands to his rear. Likewise, Denikin and his supporters were unfeigned champions of a great, indivisible, and centralized Russia, which meant he was not about to receive help from Ukrainians and Poles. To be sure, the White troops were still better trained, officered, and—thanks to the British—better equipped than the Red troops. But by now these advantages could no longer make up for the swelling ranks of the Soviet Army.159 As for the hope held out by General Iudenich’s drive toward Petrograd from the north, it was, as we shall see, short-lived.

As we saw, the Cheka stepped up its drive to uncover counterrevolutionary conspiracies and ferret out political enemies during the second half of 1918. The defiance of the left Socialist Revolutionaries, Kolchak’s first military moves, and the attempt on Lenin’s life were at once the reason and justification for this first escalation of terror, brought out in high relief with the Decree on the Red Terror. Although the Bolshevik leaders, including Dzerzhinsky, exaggerated the scope and conspiratorial nature of the not entirely separable left-populist and counterrevolutionary challenge, it most certainly was no mere phantasm. Just as there is no revolution without counterrevolution, so there is no counterrevolution without conspiracy.

The Cheka broke up a few embryonic cabals of White sympathizers during the fall and winter of 1918–19. But it was only in June 1919, during Denikin’s first offensive, that the counterrevolutionary underground again became threatening. In 1918, the Whites had organized the National Center, a clandestine network of members of the conservative elites sworn to help battle the Bolshevik regime behind the lines of the civil war. With branches in both Moscow and Petrograd, it gathered intelligence for the Volunteer forces and sought to stimulate unrest in the Red Army. While ex-tsarist officers ran the military side of this enterprise, the Kadets held the political reins. In 1919, the National Center set about organizing uprisings to coincide with Denikin’s advance on Moscow and Iudenich’s on Petrograd.¹⁶⁰

There were attempted risings in Petrograd in mid-June and again in mid-September, and in Moscow on September 18–19, 1919. In all instances the Cheka struck back fiercely. On June 16, following a misfired mutiny by the garrison of one of Kronstadt’s forts, the Cheka executed “every fifth man, for a total of 55 … in full view of [their] comrades.”161 This cruel and excessive punishment was followed by a massive search for arms and accomplices. In July some of the members of Petrograd’s National Center were arrested. Two months thereafter, in September, between 300 and 1,000 alleged conspirators were taken into custody in Moscow, most of them old-regime officers and Kadets, of whom about 65 were shot. In announcing the liquidation of the capital’s branch of the National Center, Dzerzhinsky claimed that it had planned to sow confusion, “if only for a few hours,” in which to “take over the radio and telegraph … and notify front-line troops of the collapse of the Soviet government, thereby provoking a panic and demoralizing the army.”¹⁶² In October and November, during Iudenich’s advance to the outskirts of Petrograd, what remained of the National Center in that city was reactivated, precipitating the arrest of “a further 300 suspects.”¹⁶³

This discovery of a not inconsiderable conspiracy near the center of power, compounded by Denikin’s advance toward Moscow, brought about a general broadening of the Cheka’s sway. Both the Reds and Whites had already resorted to terrorist violence in the battle zones, as the civil war became increasingly savage and merciless. Certainly on the Bolshevik side there were numerous arrests and executions as well as arbitrary requisitions and confiscations. But in addition to this terror at the front and to the rear, most of it spontaneous and wild, the Cheka now came into action on a larger scale than heretofore, as the embodiment of the regime’s institutionalized enforcement terror.

On June 20, Sovnarkom had issued a decree directing the Cheka to go on a full war footing in all “areas under martial law.” It was specifically authorized “to impose ‘summary justice (up to shooting)’ ” in dealing with a broad range of political enemies and suspects: individuals “belonging to counterrevolutionary organizations”; committing “treason”; engaging in “espionage”; harboring “traitors and spies”; concealing “weapons …, forging documents, … touching off explosions or fires for counterrevolutionary purposes”; “destroying or damaging” transportation and communication equipment as well as military and food supplies. Criminals engaging in “banditry, … armed robbery, … plunder, [and] illegal trade in cocaine” were mentioned last.¹⁶⁴

Dzerzhinsky instantly distributed this decree to all Cheka sections, insisting that they were now officially responsible for “purging … the Soviet Republic of all enemies of worker-peasant Russia.” In his covering circular he ordered all branches to turn themselves into “armed camps” primed to “secure the rear of our army, … to frustrate the plans of White Guard plotters,” and to punish “with a stern hand … [even the] slightest attempt to harm the revolution.”165

In the spirit of this circular, the political prisoners in the jails of some of Ukraine’s major cities became hostages to fate. The prisons and the concentration camp of Kharkov held several hundred such captives, many of them former military officers, alongside a cross-section of common-law criminals. As if to warn off the White Guards or exorcize their own fury mixed with fear, in June the local Chekists began to carry out random executions. During the night of June 22—two days before the Whites entered Kharkov—79 of the 350 prisoners of the Tchaikovsky Street jail were summarily sentenced to death and executed.¹⁶⁶ The same scenario unfolded in Kiev: on August 28, on the eve of the fall of Ukraine’s capital and largest city, the local terror culminated in several hundred executions.¹⁶⁷

As might be expected, much of this terror bore the marks of the furious brutality inherent to civil war. In both Kharkov and Kiev the mass killings immediately preceding capture by Denikin’s forces were in the nature of massacres, with batches of victims forced to undress and kneel along a ditch before being shot.¹⁶⁸ In Kharkov and other cities, moreover, numerous victims were lacerated and mutilated before being executed, and in Kiev and Ekaterinoslav several of them were “crucified.” In Odessa White officers were reported to have been “chain[ed] to planks and push[ed] … slowly into furnaces or boiling water.”¹⁶⁹

In addition to the raging civil war intensifying the repression in Moscow and Ukraine, it quickened the establishment of concentration camps. Even though eventually common criminals would be incarcerated in concentration and labor camps, in the beginning the camp population consisted largely of political enemies and suspects, in particular members of the old elite from among whom the Bolsheviks proposed to draw their stock of hostages. Intended as a determent, at this time the camps isolated and punished rather than reeducated or exploited inmates. They also immured members of rival political parties. As the civil war continued, the number of prisoners kept rising. By mid-1919 the Cheka is estimated to have held some 13,000 hostages.170

The policy of hostage taking had first been advocated by Lenin and Trotsky the year before, in the wake of the uprising of the left Socialist Revolutionaries, which had inspired the Decree on the Red Terror with its injunction to isolate class enemies in concentration camps. Soon thereafter Dzerzhinsky insisted that hostages would have to be individuals valued by the Whites and their supporters, who would set no store by “just any ordinary schoolteacher, forester, miller, or small shopkeeper, the less so should he be Jewish.” They would be more likely to “value high state officials, big landowners, manufacturers, prominent workers, scholars, relatives of persons known to be on their side.” But at that time, while local Chekas were urged to identify possible hostages in “these circles,” they were still not authorized to seize and put them in prisons or concentration camps “without permission” from headquarters in Moscow.¹⁷¹ At any rate, the number of hostages kept rising, and a few weeks after his June 1919 circular Dzerzhinsky forewarned that “even the most superficial” contacts with White Guards would bring on “the most severe punishment—execution, confiscation of property, and confinement of all adult members of families in concentration camps.”¹⁷²

In the meantime, the Bolsheviks began to envisage a role other than hostage for concentration camp inmates. At the start of 1919, when the situation seemed to take a turn for the better, Dzerzhinsky had proposed cutting back the Cheka’s powers of administrative repression in favor of the revolutionary tribunals. But he made a special point of insisting that he did not favor the Cheka surrendering control of the inmates of concentration camps. On February 17, 1919, at a session of the VTsIK (All Russian Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets), he urged that henceforth concentration camps should have the additional mission of harnessing the labor of inmates, particularly of “gentlemen without regular occupations and of those unable to work without a certain degree of coercion.” Dzerzhinsky suggested that Soviet administrators who were “indolent and negligent” should also be subjected to this labor discipline. All in all, the idea was that concentration camps, besides serving as a place of detention for political enemies and hostages, could serve as a “school of labor.”173 It was an idea that Lenin, too, had occasionally adumbrated, and indeed in May 1919, he “decreed the use of concentration camp inmates for military construction on the southern front.”¹⁷⁴

It was in the spring of 1919 that the Soviet government decided to go beyond mobilizing the labor of concentration camp inmates by setting up separate forced-labor camps. A decree of April 11 charged the provincial Chekas with organizing and running these camps, and a follow-up decree of May 12 called on them to establish a forced-labor camp to hold about 300 inmates in each province. Hereafter, despite considerable jurisdictional confusion, the Commissariat of Justice ran ordinary prisons; the Commissariat for Internal Affairs shared authority with the Cheka over the forced-labor camps; and the Cheka, by itself, controlled the concentration camps. Throughout this improvised and complex universe of preventive and punitive detention conditions of life and work were exceedingly harsh and often cruel. But this state of affairs seems to have been due to the dead hand of Russia’s past and the miseries of an unrelenting time of troubles rather than to a Bolshevik warrant for torture or decimation.¹⁷⁵

Not much is known about the earliest concentration and labor camps. They “were located in the heartland of Russia, not in remote regions of Siberia or the north.” Any number of these camps were set up in former monasteries and convents. Apparently their inmates were able to have “contact with the outside world” and were permitted to engage “in political activity,” and many of them “survived and regained their freedom.”¹⁷⁶ The logic of the situation suggests that many of the camps were set up by new men of power facing local problems and enemies, with little control from the center. Likewise, there is sparse information about the number of prisoners in each of the three types of detention centers, the crimes with which they were charged, and their pains and punishments. According to official accounts in 1919 throughout Russia, but excluding the heavily embattled Ukraine, the Cheka arrested about 80,000 persons—“for such offenses as counterrevolution (21,032), malfeasance (19,673), and speculation (8,367).” While about 3,500 prisoners were executed, some 27,000 were released.¹⁷⁷ In late 1920 the Soviet Union held a total of about 50,000 prisoners, of whom some 24,000 were civil war prisoners and 6,000 inmates in 84 concentration and forced-labor camps spread over 43 provinces. The number of camps rose to 120 in late 1921 and to 132 a year later, and the number of detainees to about 41,000 and 60,000, respectively. Between a fifth and a quarter of the camp population was imprisoned for counterrevolutionary activities, the others were held, in uncertain and changing proportions, for common law crimes, economic crimes, and military desertion. As for the social profile of the camp inmates, between seventy-five and eighty percent were peasants and workers.178

The second phase of the civil war began drawing to a close in the fall of 1919, with the Red Army’s counteroffensive against the overextended forces of Denikin.¹⁷⁹ By mid-November the Reds had driven Denikin’s northernmost armies back to Kursk, leaving both Orel and Voronezh behind them. They pushed ahead in two directions, southeastward into the Donets Basin and southwestward into Ukraine. In another month they took Kharkov and Kiev, which fell to them on December 16. The fate of Denikin and his original and last bastion on the lower Don and Kuban was sealed, not least because the fighting spirit of the Don and Kuban Cossacks was as broken as that of the southern army. Denikin still tried to make a last stand first at Rostov and then on the Crimea, but to no avail. Overcome by panic and fear—including fear of reprisals—some of his troops visited a fierce avenging fury upon the cities, towns, and villages along their line of retreat.¹⁸⁰ Both the “Volunteers” and the Cossacks finally fell back toward the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. In mid-March 1920 Denikin was among several thousand soldiers and civilians who were evacuated and exiled through this seaport. Many times their number were taken prisoner.

In the meantime, in late September 1919 General Iudenich stepped up his drive toward Petrograd.¹⁸¹ While Denikin’s forces were reeling near Orel, and partly to relieve them, on October 20 the Northwestern Army of some 20,000 men had unexpectedly penetrated to the outskirts of the capital of the Revolution. Although Iudenich seemed prepared to make concessions to the Finnish government in exchange for military support, he forfeited it by yielding to political pressure to embrace the cause of a “great, united, and undivided” Russia. Since Iudenich, like the other White leaders, also disregarded political and social reform, he deprived himself of support from behind enemy lines, and from within Petrograd as well. In any case, helped by special worker’s battalions, Trotsky’s troops managed to stem the advance and within three weeks drove Iudenich’s host back toward the Estonian border, where they fell to pieces.

Probably the autumn of 1919, specifically mid-October, marked one of the most perilous moments for the embattled Bolshevik regime: Denikin’s divisions had drawn close to Tula not far from Moscow and Iudenich’s troops stood less than 15 miles outside Petrograd. The fall of Petrograd would have been a severe psychological and symbolic blow for Lenin and his associates, all the more so had it coincided with, or shortly been followed by, the investment and fall of Moscow, which would have been a major, if not necessarily fatal, military setback. As it turned out, the Red Army weathered both storms, largely because by then it had grown to over 2 million men, 80 percent of them peasants, and reaped the benefits of improved organization and battle experience, partly thanks to ex-tsarist cadres. At the start of the new year, shortly after the second anniversary of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks stood tall, having all but vanquished the White Guards and reclaimed additional territory. In cold realism the great powers discontinued their active if mostly indirect intervention in favor of a policy of containment, focused on eastern and east central Europe.

Revolutionary Russia’s complex relations with Poland laid bare the grave perils and limitations of its peculiarly isolated position in the international system. Any Russian government, let alone Lenin’s, would have found it difficult to cushion the shocks of the Romanov empire’s decomposition. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave a foretaste of the tangled consequences of this breakup in the western marshes, notably in the territories lying between Germany and Russia and stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. When the armies of the fallen Hohenzollern empire evacuated these lands, they became the site for explosive rivalries over intensely contested frontiers among several successor or would-be successor states. These conflicts were magnified by the simultaneous downfall of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires. By virtue of its location, size, and population, renascent Poland was not only the strategically most crucial of the successor states but also the most ambitious and combative. It was, in addition, best prepared to reclaim its independence.

Under the leadership of Roman Dmowski and Jozef Pilsudski, the Poles capitalized on France’s desperate search for a replacement for Russia as a counterweight to Germany, as well as on the collapse of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary to recover imagined historic borders. Although the new-born Polish government had no difficulty raising troops, it could not do without the diplomatic and material support of the Allied powers. Warsaw played on the latter’s disharmony and irresolution at the same time that it made the most of the unsettled state of European Russia, where Reds and Whites were locked in battle.

Indeed, in the east Pilsudski proposed to restore the borders of 1772 before Russia should recover as a great power and reestablish its hegemony over eastern Galicia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania. In the euphoria of an improbable chain of favorable circumstances, Warsaw’s new political class even aspired to a Polish-dominated confederation of most of these lands. But should this vaulting ambition be thwarted, a renascent Poland would fight to hold as much of these fiercely disputed borderlands as possible. Indeed, this resolve to recreate a Greater Poland took absolute precedence over helping Denikin’s drive to Moscow, the Poles distrusting all Great Russians, be they Red or White.

In April 1919 the Polish forces seized Vilna.182 There followed the capture of eastern Galicia in June and of Minsk, Kovno, and Lvov in July. By late August Polish troops had penetrated to the Dvina river and past the Pripet Marshes to the Berezina river, just beyond the Curzon Line. Shortly before, on August 12, the Supreme Council of the Allies had proposed this ethnically sensitive boundary line running south from Grodno through Brest-Litovsk to Przemysl as a basis for negotiation between Poland and Lithuania, Belorussia, and Ukraine. Confident of the connivance of the Great Powers, Warsaw ignored their admonitions. Of course, Moscow understood the Polish design but was unable to react, the Red Army being stretched to the limit fighting the White Guards.

In their total isolation, the Bolsheviks could see only two chances for relief: one, a revolt of the Polish working class in the rear of Pilsudski’s armies, which never materialized; the other, the long-standing ethnic and cultural antagonisms dividing the peoples of the non-Russian borderlands. These historical enmities were far from negligible, but they were not sufficient to enable the Red Army to win against Poland. Above all, the at best proto-nationalist Ukraine, caught up in civil war and lacking seasoned political and military leaders, was no match for resurgent Poland any more than it was a match for either Denikin’s or Trotsky’s armies.

Pilsudski resumed his advance in early spring 1920, occupying Zhitomir on April 26 and Kiev on June 7. The fighting became increasingly furious on both sides. On May 10 Trotsky issued an order of the day (No. 217) from Gomel to be read to all fighting units. In it he charged that “unheard of atrocities … [were being] committed by Polish White-Guard forces upon captured and wounded Red Army men,” who were being “tortured, beaten, shot, and hanged.” Although he recognized that such atrocities “arouse justified fury and desire for vengeance,” Trotsky expostulated that it would “be wrong and unworthy of revolutionary fighters to take vengeance” on Polish prisoners and wounded, whom he ordered be “spared.” In a followup order of July 17 (No. 231) from Moscow, Trotsky conceded that “there may have been isolated cases [of misconduct] when more backward Red Army men … who were less filled with the liberating idea of communism tore out the hearts of captured Polish soldiers,” moved as they were by “thoughtless vengeance” for atrocities perpetrated by Polish White Guards in Kiev, Borisov, and Bobruisk. Referring back to his previous directive, he ordered that the humane treatment of Polish prisoners “be enforced with absolute strictness and without exception,” and to that end “the Red forces and, in particular, their new formations” should be given to understand that “Polish soldiers are themselves helpless victims of the Polish and Anglo-French bourgeoisies.” Trotsky called for the “thorough investigation of all rumors and reports” of atrocities against Polish soldiers or civilians. In closing, he “firmly reminded all commanders and commissars” that he held them personally responsible “for seeing that this present order is strictly obeyed.”183

With the Allies looking the other way, Pilsudski, their self-appointed proxy, continued to march east, determined to test the limits of the Bolsheviks’ presumably still overstrained military capabilities and political resolve. But having defeated the White armies, except for Wrangel’s as yet unsuspected residual forces, and before confronting Makhno and Antonov, the Red Army, near the top of its numerical strength, breathed somewhat easier. In mid-1920 several divisions under the command of generals Semën M. Budennyi and Mikhail Tukhachevsky struck back. The Polish forces almost immediately paid the price for being drawn too thin. Zhitomir was recaptured on June 7, 1920 and Kiev on June 12. In July the Red Army retook Minsk, Vilna, Grodno, and Bialystok. By August 1 it crossed the Bug river to seize Brest-Litovsk, thereby overstepping, in its turn, the Curzon Line.

As one may have expected, the Allies, having shifted to containment by way of a cordon sanitaire, were more alarmed by this transgression in the direction of Warsaw than they had been by the previous one in the direction of Moscow. When they hurriedly offered to mediate on the basis of the Curzon Line, Gregory Chicherin, the commissar of foreign affairs, curtly demurred. The Soviets were torn between, on the one hand, the dogged dream of a revolutionary upheaval in Poland as well as, following the abortive Kapp Putsch, in Germany, and, on the other, the panic fear of a hostile encirclement, of which Greater and hostile Poland would be the farthest outpost and bridgehead. Furthermore, by now General Wrangel was threatening to break out of the Crimea, perhaps with foreign help.

But there was also, of course, the force of ideology and mental disposition. Admittedly the Bolshevik creed did not call for spreading revolution on the point of bayonets. Although the Bolshevik leaders, like their enemy brothers, were inspired by the universalism of the French Revolution, they recognized themselves in neither the Republic’s Grande Nation nor Napoleon’s imperial pretense. Like the Jacobins of before the Year II, they gave a defensive rather than aggressively expansionist reading of the theory and practice of the nation-in-arms and levée en masse.

Whereas three years after 1789 the ultra-Jacobins took over an offensive ideological war from the Girondins, the Bolshevik regime was from birth enmeshed in defensive conflicts that were turned essentially inward, not outward. Even so, the Bolshevik leadership was forever torn between advocates of the primacy of domestic politics and champions of the primacy of international politics, with not a few waverers between them. At the time of Brest-Litovsk and until late 1918, Lenin, Bukharin, and Trotsky were, as we saw, emblematic of these three positions, with Lenin invariably bringing one and all around to his reason. Not unlike Robespierre he gave absolute priority to consolidating the regime and the gains of the Revolution, while Bukharin, like Brissot, espoused the not necessarily peaceful spread of the Revolution to Europe as the key to its future at home and abroad. At critical moments Trotsky reluctantly but decisively and steadfastly sided with Lenin. Meanwhile, no one could be found who did not hope against hope that a workers’ revolution further west—in Germany—would help to ease the Russian Revolution’s fateful isolation. On two occasions expectations ran high: in November 1918, with the collapse of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg thrones into republics severely pressed by labor risings; and in March–April 1919, with the establishment of rebel republics in Munich and Budapest. But these revolts were contained and reduced with the help of repressive violence.

Although the universalism of the Russian Revolution, including its tenet of national self-determination, made considerable inroads abroad, it did so as something to be invoked or condemned from afar, and not by means of subversion, let alone by force of arms. The Soviets were in no position to foment and help distant revolutions, except by the word, unaided by the sword or rifle. Even the most internationalist-minded Bolsheviks recognized the impossibility of the Red Army rushing to support the uprisings in Central Europe during the winter and early spring of 1918–19. In the meantime, set upon from all sides, and with the proletarian revolution stillborn abroad, Lenin felt more than ever justified in his strategy of momentarily putting revolution “in one country”—in Russia—ahead of world revolution. Ironically the foundation of the Third International, or Comintern, in Moscow in March 1919 coincided with this shift from an international to an internal perspective and strategy.

For well over a year events vindicated this course. But then, in mid-1920, with the Red Army unexpectedly rolling back Pilsudski’s legions and making a breach through which to advance to Warsaw, the internationalists reopened the debate they had lost at the time of Brest-Litovsk.184 Renewing their golden dreams, some Bolshevik leaders advocated seizing this opportunity to move westward to help spread revolution where, in the Marxist vision, it should have started in the first place. Others, moved by a deep-seated fear of counterrevolution, even after the defeat of the Whites, urged marching on Warsaw to abort or roll back the embryonic cordon sanitaire rather than to break through to Central Europe. Besides, after three years of total isolation and constant peril, some Bolsheviks were not about to pass up a chance to once again tempt fortune, as they had in October 1917.

In any case, having turned down the offer of Allied mediation, Sovnarkom authorized Tukhachevsky to press his advantage. By early August his troops reached the Vistula and stood a few miles east of the Polish capital. But contrary to the internationalists’ prophecy, the approach of the Red Army triggered not a workers’ revolt but a nationalist outburst in Warsaw. In mid-August Pilsudski, advised by General Maxime Weygand, Marshal Foch’s chief of staff, struck back. Following a chaotic “battle of the Vistula,” and with his lines overextended, Tukhachevsky was forced to beat a retreat. Within a matter of weeks, by mid-October, the Polish forces were back to nearly the same positions they had reached in the spring.

Their gamble having failed, the Soviets had to reconcile themselves to Russia’s military exhaustion and diplomatic isolation as well as to Poland’s emergence as the pivot of the cordon sanitaire to the west. Eager to avoid further damage, Moscow sought a negotiated settlement. Although Warsaw played for time to consolidate its position, Pilsudski knew that without substantial Allied help, which was now out of the question, he had gone the limit.

Negotiations started on September 21, 1920, in the Latvian capital, and an armistice coupled with preliminary peace terms was signed and went into effect a month later. The final terms were fixed in the Treaty of Riga signed on March 18, 1921. The Russo-Polish border now ran from Vilna in the north through Grodno and Rovno to Lvov in the south, or some 100 miles east of the original Curzon Line. With its conquest of a large swath of the late tsarist empire’s western borderlands, Poland acquired five million Ukrainians and one million Belorussians, making for a considerable irredentist vulnerability.

Although the Poles were the undisputed winners, the Soviets made some gains as well. For one thing, they prevailed on Warsaw to agree to a frontier 50 miles west of their farthest line of advance, thereby snatching Minsk from Poland’s jaws. Trotsky was not altogether wrong to proclaim that in March and April “the Polish Government could have had without a war a peace no less favorable than the one which has now been concluded with us.”185 Furthermore, and above all, the cessation of hostilities on the western frontier enabled the Bolsheviks to concentrate on bringing the civil war to a conclusion by facing down General Wrangel, Denikin’s successor, in the south.

When General Wrangel took over command of Denikin’s army on March 22, it counted some 100,000 to 150,000 men, of whom between 30,000 and 35,000 were thoroughly battle-worthy.¹⁸⁶ The army had withdrawn to the Crimean peninsula, which is almost an island unto itself, surrounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Not immediately threatened by the Red Army and in control of the remnants of the Black Sea fleet, Wrangel had both the time and space to prepare for battle. The Crimea had, however, one drawback: an insufficient food supply for a population of three million which included more civilian refugees than soldiers.

A hereditary nobleman of monarchist disposition, General Baron Peter Wrangel was a generation younger than the commanding White generals who had gone down to defeat. Probably he was also more open-minded than they, at any rate when it came to learning from their shortcomings, as he understood them. Wrangel took such ex-imperial conservative luminaries as A. V. Krivoshein and Peter Struve to advise him on domestic and foreign policy, respectively. With their counsel he issued a cautious land decree and reached out to Makhno; sought openings to the Poles and Ukrainians; and contemplated the establishment of local government and social services throughout his realm. He also proposed to rein in his soldiers’ spoliation of villages and mistreatment of prisoners. Wrangel’s policies, which were too little and too late, were designed to rally maximum support on all sides for what he knew would be an uphill struggle, as he said himself, “with anybody at all, but for Russia,” if need be “even with the devil.”¹⁸⁷ But ultimately he did not shed the friend-enemy rhetoric or perspective of civil war which had left its trace on his operation in Stavropol nearly two years before. When launching his major offensive in the summer of 1920, Wrangel told his associates that his “Russian Army … [was] march[ing] to liberate its native land from the Red vermin,” and a few months later, when the tide of battle turned against him, he spoke of “our brothers [suffering] in Red butchers’ dungeons.”¹⁸⁸

Taking advantage of the Red Army’s heavy engagement with Pilsudski, in early June some of Wrangel’s troops began to move out of the Crimea: several units established beachheads on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Azov; others moved northward overland in the direction of the Dnieper. Although the season of Allied aid was over, the French recognized and encouraged Wrangel in the hope of his drawing Red troops from the Polish front. While advanced regiments did manage to cross the Dnieper in early October, within a few days they were driven back across the river. Indeed, the beginning of the second withdrawal to the Crimea coincided with the end of the Russo-Polish war. From Kharkov Trotsky served notice that “all our attention is [now] concentrated on the front against Wrangel … [and] the whole country has turned its face to the south.”189 On October 20 the Red Army launched a major offensive to the south, forcing a string of engagements, including the decisive battle in the Crimea’s far northern isthmus connecting it to the mainland. The fighting took a heavy toll of casualties and prisoners, as well as of victims of atrocities, on both sides. Within three weeks, on November 11, General Michael Vasilev Frunze, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army’s southern front, offered Wrangel terms of surrender, including a broad amnesty coupled with the right to emigrate, which astonished Lenin for their “excessive leniency.”¹⁹⁰ Spurning the offer, Wrangel and his officers led an orderly fallback of their troops to the major Black Sea ports, for evacuation.

Every aspect of General Wrangel’s last stand confirmed, once again, the intrinsic weakness and dependency of the White counterrevolution. Just as his initial success was heavily contingent on the unintended help of the Poles, in the form of Pilsudski pinning down the Red Army, so the safe evacuation of the bulk of his soldiers who escaped capture turned upon the protection and assistance of the Allied powers. As was to be expected, Britain and France provided not a few of the 126 ships which took many thousands of White troops and civilians to safety in Constantinople, though Wrangel himself made a point of leaving Sevastopol for exile on board the Russian cruiser General Kornilov. Of course, an even larger number of Whites, both military and civilian, were left behind, along with sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and it was they who were about to suffer the full brunt of the victors’ retributive terror. Indeed, “one of the most sweeping outbursts of terrorism occurred in the Crimea after the defeat and evacuation of Wrangel.”191

The Furies in the Crimea in the aftermath of the civil war took the form of indiscriminate punitive expeditions against Wrangel’s collaborators. The number of summary executions in Sevastopol, Simferopol, Kerch, and Yalta ran into the thousands, but it is impossible to advance a close estimate of the total number of victims of this avenging fury which, according to the émigrés, turned the Crimea into an “All-Russian Cemetery.”¹⁹² In several towns “[i]mmense numbers of persons suspected of having had any connection with Wrangel’s regime were rounded up and shot.” Judging by an article in a local newspaper in December 1920, in this terrorist violence there was something of the avenging fury of Turreau’s infernal columns in the Vendée. The writer called for a “pitiless, unceasing, … [and] death-dealing struggle against the well-hidden snakes,” the snakes in question being White Guards, of whom “too many remained at large … waiting for the moment to throw themselves on us again.” But instead of leaving them “the possibility of attacking us,” the workers, wielding the “merciless sword of the Red Terror, … shall scour the Crimea and clear it of all the hangmen, enslavers, and tormentors of the working class.”¹⁹³ Characteristically, in the Crimea, not unlike in the Vendée, execution by shooting was not the only type of punishment. In Sevastopol Chekists “proceeded to hang suspected Whites,” while in Kerch they were said to have taken large numbers of victims “out to sea, and drowned them, and their terrorstricken wives and mothers flogged … or, in a few cases, shot along with their sons or husbands.”¹⁹⁴ The blend between orders from Moscow and local initiatives remains obscure, as does that between official approbation and censure of atrocities.

The civil war in the dawn of the Russian Revolution was a mixture of a class war, a war between Great Russians and non-Russians, and a war between city and country. Though these wars overlapped, they did not coincide. Above all, the class war between the Reds and Whites was over before the war between city and country—between Reds and Greens—began to rage full tilt. Even the war with Poland was fought at a time when the class war was over, except for the terminal battle with Wrangel. And both the non-Bolshevik left and the vigilant peasantry, terrified at the prospect of a restoration, gave higher priority to saving the Revolution than to defeating the Bolsheviks.

In most essential respects the Reds had an important advantage. They controlled Russia’s densely populated heartland, held together by the centripetal force of the twin capitals. Sovdepia benefited from an effective transportation network; the bulk of the ex-empire’s essential industries and military stockpiles; and the symbolic sway of Petrograd and Moscow, including the Kremlin. But above all, its relatively homogeneous population of 60 million provided an ample source of manpower for the old-new Red Army which from a “small volunteer force of proletarians” expanded to some 2 million in mid-1919, 3 million six months later, and 5 million at the end of the civil war. Essentially a peasant army, compared to their enemies the Bolsheviks had a “superior ability” to mobilize the muzhiks, and this despite a high level of resistance to conscription and of desertion.195 To boot, this mushrooming peasant army was increasingly trained, disciplined, and led by commissioned and noncommissioned officers from the tsarist army,¹⁹⁶ and these were backed by political commissars of non-peasant background. The latter were a link in the chain of command of a centralized government straining to set up and direct a civil administration as part of its overarching goal of reestablishing a single sovereignty. Besides, with their promise of radical social reform, the Bolsheviks touched a sympathetic chord with the younger generation, which disproportionately joined their military and political ranks.

By comparison, the territories controlled by the Whites were widely scattered and had a population of less than 10 million. In addition to being thinly settled, their “peripheral” regions lacked industry, and, in places, were populated by non-Russians. Their evasion, nay refusal of land reform and self-determination stood in the way of their making inroads among the peasants and minorities, all the more so since their call to rally around “Russia, One and Indivisible,” their chief ideological plank, had little purchase among ordinary people and non-Russians.

Ultimately the unpolitical pretense and patriotic self-complacency of the White resistance could not dissimulate its narrow restorative intentions. Its ideological poverty may have endured because, unlike its counterpart in the French Revolution, it never systematically turned to account the religious passion. Apparently none of the White generals ever considered calling his armed force an “Orthodox and Tsarist Army.” Russia’s imperial past was relatively barren of crusades, inquisitions, or religious wars, and, as we shall see, church and clergy were not nearly as ubiquitous as they were in France, the religion of everyday life being more home-centered. Nor was there a Vatican to issue anathemas urbi et orbi and to call to order a hierarchical clergy.197 Without religious agents and agencies, the White generals and politicians must have found it difficult to incite and rally the lower orders of country and town. Besides, they were the rearguard of nineteenth-century conservatism and reaction rather than the vanguard of twentieth-century counterrevolution. Although there were spokesmen for the Black Hundreds and the Union of the Russian People in Omsk and Ekaterinodar, they were neither numerous nor tone-setting. Overall the generals and their political acolytes felt uncomfortable reaching beyond the elites to out-of-doors publics. Apart from being suspicious of mass and populist politics in city and village, they were inept at it, and they never found an intelligentsia to act for them.

Still, even if, except in military affairs, the Whites were out of season, in the context of their time their temperament and worldview partook of the counterrevolutionary persuasion. They were both ultranationalists and intensely hostile to modernity, liberal and democratic politics, and social reform. At the same time they took a conspiratorial view of history and of those who had an agenda different from theirs. At bottom, unrestrained by the Allies, the Whites were driven by the friend-enemy dissociation, and as such in every respect as disinclined to compromise as the Bolsheviks.

It is as difficult, if not impossible, to get an accurate measure of the human costs of the first terror of the Russian Revolution as it is to determine those of the terror of the French Revolution. While the scale and incidence of the terror of the guillotine of 1793–94 have been closely reconstructed and admit no serious doubt, the same cannot be said of the bloodletting in the Vendée and its aftermath, which remains in dispute. Indeed, it is not easy to demarcate the casualties of the military battles from the victims of the terror in the main centers of the civil war in France. There is general agreement that the victims of the terror of the guillotine ran to between 35,000 and 40,000, which reckons in the victims of executions, drownings, and deadly conditions in overcrowded prisons. For the Vendée the estimates of battle and civilian casualties, including the victims of the attendant and after-war terror, range between 150,000 and 500,000.198

Calculations of the number of people who died at the hands of the Red Terror in Russia differ by similar orders of magnitude. Not surprisingly, in 1921 Soviet authorities published the lowest figure: they claimed that from 1917 through 1920 the Cheka had executed slightly over 12,700 individuals. Fifty years later (1971) it was estimated that 200,000 people had been executed between 1917 and 1923, while an additional 300,000 to 400,000 were said to either have died in prisons and camps or been killed in the suppression of peasant revolts, industrial strikes, and military mutinies. Other rough measures range between these two extremes, one (1935) setting the total for the civil war at 50,000, and another (1981) at 140,000. All these estimates are a mixture of incomplete or flawed data and informed conjectures. Such is likely to continue to be the case even after the surviving Cheka and other archives of the ex-Soviet Union become accessible. For certain, the toll in lives was very heavy, probably corresponding to that in the French Revolution in terms of the proportion of the total population. The contrary would be surprising given the intensity as well as the extent and duration of the Russian civil war.¹⁹⁹

In pondering the bloodletting in the civil war, which needs to be doubled to take account of the White Terror, it is worth noting that unlike the terror in the French Revolution, it was set in a time when violence was invading every European nation and every other home: in the Very Great War between 10 and 13 million men were killed and close to twice that number wounded. By 1917 Russia had suffered about three million casualties, nearly one-quarter of its fighting forces. There followed the millions of direct and indirect casualties of the civil and foreign war of the Revolution, many of them due to disease furthered by inadequate provisions and medical services. Indeed, the Red and White leaders fought the civil war to the death, coûte que coûte, as Europe seemed once again to be entering a “valley of the shadow of death.”

Evidently “the intensity of the Red Terror varied appreciably with time and circumstance.” Its first surge came in the fall of 1918, following the attempt on Lenin’s life, the British landings at Archangel and Baku, and the seizure of Kazan by Kolchak and the Czech Legion. It receded in November 1918, with the stabilization of the front on the Volga as well as the upheaval in Central Europe and the German withdrawal from Ukraine.200 The Red Terror rose to a second peak in 1919, in face of the difficult struggle with the armies of Kolchak, Denikin, and Iudenich. After their defeat there was another reflux, heralded by the decree of mid-January abrogating capital punishment. But in 1920–21, with the Russo-Polish war, the defiance of Wrangel, and various peasant insurgencies, the first Red Terror again worsened until after the end of the civil war.²⁰¹

Not only the menace of the White Armies spurred the Red Terror but so did the White Terror, which was an integral part of the counterrevolution’s military operations. It would appear that “by far the largest number of persons who met a violent end under the regime of the Whites seem to have come to their death not as a result of any regular trial, or even of a summary verdict by a drumhead court-martial, but were simply slaughtered by more or less irresponsible bands of soldiers whose leaders certainly kept no records of their actions.”²⁰² Clearly there is even less reliable data for the White than the Red Terror, in part because the Whites had neither fixed ministries nor the equivalent of a separate Cheka, although their armies had special “security units and punitive squads.”²⁰³ Apart from not theorizing terror as the Bolsheviks did, they practiced or condoned it without proclaiming or publicizing it. Accordingly the killings and atrocities of the Whites were widely perceived to be altogether more erratic and less organized or premeditated than those of the Reds.

In actual fact, whatever the degree of intention and control, judging simply by the scale and character of the anti-Jewish violence in White-controlled territories, notably Ukraine, it is safe to say that the two terrors, in addition to being interactive, were akin not only in their general order of magnitude but also in their inner nature. Certainly alone the victims of the White Terror ran into not the thousands but the tens of thousands. It goes without saying that when confronting the terror in the Russian civil war, “Red and White authors alike, with few exceptions, display a tendency greatly to exaggerate the numbers of persons killed by their opponents, while minimizing or glossing over the terrorist activities of their own side.”204 Sad to say, even academic historians, let alone les terribles simplificateurs, including the apostates among them, are not much more successful at taming their prepossessions.

It does not help the study and understanding of the terror to make the number of victims the ultimate measure of things by either exaggerating or minimizing them. Nor is anything gained by overdetermining the role of dogmatic ideas or demonic key leaders. The terror of 1917 to 1921 was, in the main, a fact of civil war fueled by the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution. The toll and torment of victims was greatest in areas caught up in the battles of the civil war, with the worst ravages before, during, and following the capture and recapture of cities. Besides, in both town and country it is important to distinguish between wild and intentional savagery. By nature without rules of engagement and retaliation, civil war is a cauldron of wanton and unpremeditated violence with little, if any, ideological leaven. There is, to boot, the calculated and coordinated violence which is ideologically driven and centrally directed.

Needless to say, the opposing sides charged each other with intentional and mandated terror. It is as difficult to estimate the balance between spontaneous and willful Furies as it is to estimate the balance between direct death by execution and drowning and indirect death by undernourishment, cold, and disease. Although the Bolsheviks minimized the ravages of the Red Terror, like the Jacobins they loudly justified them both theoretically and morally. Perhaps less openly, they also valued the terror for having been effective, considering their victory in the civil war. Unlike their enemy brothers, they did not entertain the possibility that the terror may have been, in Quinet’s terms, at once politically corrosive and counterproductive. Meanwhile, the Whites proclaimed their innocence. All but silent about their terror, they neither rationalized nor theorized it, except to insist that it was minimal, defensive, and à contre coeur. If anything, making a virtue of necessity, the Whites claimed to have lost the civil war because, unlike the Bolsheviks, they did not have the beast in them.

NOTES

1. See Moshe Lewin, “The Civil War: Dynamics and Legacy,” in Diana P. Koenker et al., eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 399–423, esp. p. 401. Until February 1918, dates are given according to the “Old Style” (Julian) calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Western calendar. Thereafter dates are given according to the “New Style” (Gregorian) calendar in use in the West, and adopted by the new regime.

2. Dmitry Shlapentokh, “The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, 1789–1922,” in Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 72–88; Shlapentokh, “The French Revolution in Russian Political Life: The Case of the Interaction Between History and Politics,” in Revue des Etudes Slaves 61 (1989): pp. 131–42; Tamara Kondratieva, “Le pouvoir du précédent dans l’histoire: L’impact de la Révolution française en Russie,” in ibid., pp. 201–15; Kondratieva, Bolcheviks et Jacobins: Itinéraire des analogies (Paris: Payot, 1989); John Keep, “1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd,” in Soviet Studies 20:1 (July 1968), pp. 22–35; Shlapentokh, “The Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik Revolutions,” in Russian History 16:1 (1989): pp. 31–54.

3. Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 18.

4. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 95 and p. 97.

5. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), esp. chs. 1–2; and Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Cape, 1996), p. 522, p. 525, and p. 533.

6. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 801.

7. Edgar Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), p. 505.

8. Ruslan G. Skryunwikow, Iwan der Schreckliche und seine Zeit (Munich: Beck, 1992); and Alan Wood, “Siberian Exile in Siberian Russia,” in History Today 30 (September 1980): pp. 19–24, esp. p. 20.

9. Wood, “Siberian Exile,” pp. 20–21; Wood, “Crime and Punishment in the House of the Dead,” in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 215–33, esp. pp. 218–20; Bruce W. Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 164.

10. Jocelyne Fenner, Le Goulag des tsars (Paris: Tallandier, 1986), pp. 145–46, 152–58.

11. Wood, “Siberian Exile,” pp. 21–24; and Lincoln, Conquest, pp. 163–65.

12. D.C.B. Lieven, “The Security Police, Civil Rights, and the Fate of the Russian Empire, 1855–1917,” in Crisp and Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights, pp. 235–62, esp. pp. 236–43; Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 96–97, 113; Fenner, Le Goulag, pp. 144–45, 164–65, 207–14.

13. Wood, “Crime,” pp. 221–22; and Abby M. Schrader, “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817–1845,” in Slavic Review 56:4 (1997): pp. 613–44.

14. Wood, “Siberian Exile,” p. 24; Wood, “Crime,” pp. 228–29, 233; Lincoln, Conquest, pp. 164–67; Fenner, Le Goulag, pp. 159–60, 216–17, 265–77.

15. Feodor Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See the introduction by Ronald Hingley. Also see Wood, “Crime,” p. 215.

16. Wood, “Solzhenitsyn on the Tsarist Exile System: A Historical Comment,” in Journal of Russian Studies 42 (1981): pp. 39–43. See also Tatyana Tolstaya, “In Cannibalistic Times,” in New York Review of Books, April 11, 1991, pp. 3–5.

17. Cited in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 503.

18. Andrzej J. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager: 1896 bis Heute (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), pp. 34–35.

19. Ibid., pp. 90–92. Apparently, concentration camps were also used by the Turkish government at the time of the Armenian massacre.

20. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), ch. 1; Pipes, Russian Revolution, ch. 8.

21. Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 317 and p. 322.

22. See I. N. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (New York: Rinehart, 1953), pp. 140–41; Leggett, Cheka, p. 53; Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 321.

23. See Max Weber, “Russlands Übergang zur Sozialdemokratie” (published April 26, 1917), in Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften (Munich: Drei Masken, 1921), pp. 107–25; and Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 137–38.

24. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, chs. 4–6; and Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York: Praeger, 1987). Cf. Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 419 ff.

25. William Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chs. 6–8; and Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: Norton, 1976).

26. Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (New York: Longman, 1996), ch. 1; Richard Luckett, The White Generals: An Account of the White Movement and the Russian Civil War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 79–86; Rosenberg, Liberals, pp. 229–32, 463–68; Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 130–32; Rabino-witch, Bolsheviks, pp. 124–33; Richard B. Spence, Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1991), pp. 139–48.

27. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (January 1919).

28. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks, p. 308.

29. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford, 1986), p. 43; Malia, Soviet Tragedy, p. 94; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford, 1994), p. 23; Lewis H. Spiegelbaum, Soviet State and Society: Between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 39–40.

30. The text of this manifesto is cited in Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks, pp. 303–4.

31. Rosenberg, Liberals, pp. 146–48 and 194–95; André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 72–73; Vladimir N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).

32. For the course and outcome of these elections, see Oliver H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917, updated ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

33. John Keep, trans. and ed., The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central Committee of Soviets, October 1917–January 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), pp. 173 ff.

34. Cited in Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 546–47.

35. Cited in Keep, trans. and ed., Debate, pp. 243–44.

36. Cited in E. H. Carr, A History of the Bolshevik Revolution: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 118–19.

37. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 120–21. See also Pipes, Russian Revolution, p. 553; and Malia, Soviet Tragedy, p. 114.

38. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 126–33.

39. Sergei Starikov and Roy Medvedev, Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 107; and Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 161.

40. Luckett, White Generals, pp. 95–96.

41. Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 162.

42. Luckett, White Generals, pp. 96–98; and Malia, Tragedy, p. 113.

43. Bruce W. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 80–81; and Luckett, White Generals, pp. 99–100.

44. Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 19; and Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 84–85.

45. See Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Summer 1920) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), esp. pp. 48–49 and 55–58.

46. Leggett, Cheka, p. 13.

47. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford, 1954), p. 338.

48. Cited in Deutscher, Prophet, p. 338.

49. Leggett, Cheka, p. 13. See also Steinberg, Workshop, ch. 4.

50. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 86.

51. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 497.

52. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 85–86.

53. Cited in Virginie Coulloudon, Illusions sibériennes: L’échec du gouvernement Koltchak, novembre 1918–janvier 1920 (Paris: [thèse] EHSS, 1997), pp. 267–68.

54. Cited in Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford, 1998), p. 71.

55. Cited in Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 564.

56. Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 86.

57. Leggett, Cheka, pp. 53–54.

58. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 86.

59. Cited in Kondratieva, Bolcheviks, p. 57.

60. Cited in Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), p. 133.

61. Cited in Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (London: Verso, 1990), p. 114.

62. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War as a Formative Experience,” in Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 57–76, esp. p. 67.

63. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 165.

64. Cited in ibid., pp. 165–66; and in Leggett, Cheka, p. 54.

65. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 134.

66. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 16 and p. 22.

67. Cited in ibid., p. 17.

68. Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 358.

69. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 168.

70. Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag, p. 3 and p. 16; and Peter H. Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in the USSR (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 18–19 and p. 22.

71. Cited in Juviler, Law and Order, p. 15.

72. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 168.

73. Cited in Juviler, Law and Order, p. 19.

74. Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, p. 358.

75. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 134. Also see Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

76. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 161.

77. Leggett, Cheka, p. 56.

78. Cited in Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, p. 358.

79. Trotsky, Terrorism, p. 43.

80. Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), chs. 5–9.

81. My discussion of this debate draws heavily on Deutscher, Prophet, pp. 373–92.

82. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973), p. 43.

83. Cited in Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 44.

84. Trotsky, Terrorism, p. 43.

85. Cited in Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 185.

86. Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 70 and p. 76; and Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 10–13.

87. Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 88–89.

88. Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 21; and Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, p. 21.

89. W. P. Coates and Zelda K. Coates, Armed Intervention in Russia, 1918–1922 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), chs. 7–9; and Richard H. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, vol. 1: Intervention and the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), chs. 8–10 and Epilogue.

90. Luckett, White Generals, p. 217.

91. Lincoln, Conquest, ch. 39; Mawdsley, Civil War, pp. 46–49 and passim; Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (New York: Longman, 1996).

92. N.G.O. Pereira, White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1996), ch. 4; and Jonathan D. Smele, Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 79–89.

93. Pereira, White Siberia, ch. 5; and Smele, Civil War, pp. 104–7 and ch. 2.

94. Luckett, White Generals, pp. 177–78 and 182–88.

95. Ibid., pp. 179–80.

96. Ibid., p. 184.

97. Wrangel cited in ibid., p. 192.

98. This discussion of the ideology and program of the Whites relies heavily, above all, on Peter Kenez, “The Ideology of the White Movement,” in Soviet Studies 32:1 (Jan. 1980): pp. 58–83; Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 293–313; Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920: The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). See also Moshe Lewin, “The Civil War,” in Koenker et al., eds., Party, State, and Society, pp. 399–423; William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1957), esp. ch. 27 and ch. 32; Mawdsley, Civil War, esp. pp. 278–85; Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, Die These von der Verschwörung, 1776–1945: Philosophen, Freimaurer, Juden, Liberale, und Sozialisten als Verschwörer gegen die Sozialordnung (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1976), pp. 199–209.

99. Cited in Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 236.

100. Leggett, Cheka, ch. 4; and Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 141–43. Eventually Blumkin “repented his deed, joined the Bolshevik party, won distinction in the civil war, and rejoined the Cheka.” Later “he was arrested and shot” for his contacts with Trotsky on Prinkipo Island. Deutscher, Prophet, p. 403, n. 2.

101. Cited in Boris Levytsky, The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret Police, 1917–1970 (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1972), p. 28; and Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 175.

102. Spence, Savinkov, passim; Leggett, Cheka, p. 280; Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 646–56.

103. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 147.

104. Spence, Savinkov, p. 211.

105. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 146.

106. Leggett, Cheka, p. 104.

107. Pipes, Russian Revolution, p. 652.

108. Leggett, Cheka, pp. 103–4.

109. Edward Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pt. 2; Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars (New York: Viking, 1991), chs. 3 and 4; Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 207 ff.; Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 146–55; Juri Buranow and Wladimir Chrustaljow, Die Zarenmörder: Vernichtung einer Dynastie (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Taschenbuch, 1994), esp. pp. 286–99.

110. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 66.

111. Cited in Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 208.

112. Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 154.

113. Cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 92.

114. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 103.

115. Cited in ibid., p. 104.

116. Cited in Semion Lyandres, “The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence,” in Slavic Review 8:3 (Fall 1989): pp. 432–48, esp. p. 432.

117. Cited in Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1926/1975 repr.), p. 33.

118. Cited in Steinberg, Workshop, p. 147; and Leggett, Cheka, pp. 113–14.

119. Cited in Melgounov, Red Terror, pp. 9–11 and pp. 33–34.

120. Cited in Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 382.

121. Cited in Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 176.

122. Cited in Gerson, Secret Police, pp. 131–32.

123. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 108.

124. Full text cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 66–67; and Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 818–19.

125. Full text cited in Leggett, Cheka, pp. 109–10.

126. Cited in ibid., p. 110.

127. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, p. 176.

128. McAuley, Bread and Justice, p. 382.

129. Ibid., pp. 382–83; Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 619–20; Steinberg, Workshop, p. 233.

130. Cited in Steinberg, Spiridonava: Revolutionary Terrorist (London: Methuen, 1935), p. 233; and Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 160.

131. Cited in Steinberg, Workshop, p. 149.

132. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 160.

133. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 498.

134. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1959), ch. 24, esp. pp. 448–53.

135. Leggett, Cheka, p. 176; and Michel Heller, Le monde concentrationnaire et la littérature soviétique (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1974), p. 22.

136. Heller, Le monde concentrationnaire, p. 36.

137. Carr, Socialism in One Country, p. 449.

138. Cited in Trotsky, The Military Writings and Speeches, 3 vols. (London: New Park Publications, 1979–81), vol. 1, pp. 310–11.

139. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 179. Cf. Gerson, Secret Police, p. 147.

140. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 179. See also Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1975), pp. 17–18.

141. See Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967), esp. parts 4 and 5.

142. Mawdsley, Civil War, pp. 143–44.

143. Ibid., p. 167.

144. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 171.

145. Ibid., p. 171.

146. Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 42–43.

147. Ibid., p. 43.

148. Ibid., pp. 43–45; Leggett, Cheka, pp. 319 ff.; Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 169–73; Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (London: Cambridge/Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 182 ff.; Liebich, Other Shore, pp. 82–95.

149. Leggett, Cheka, p. 114. See also Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 174–84.

150. Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 87. See also Liebich, Other Shore, pp. 88–95.

151. Cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 187–88. See also Fernand Grenard, La révolution russe (Paris: Colin, 1933), p. 328.

152. Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 254–60; and Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, p. 116.

153. Morris and Graves cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 258–59.

154. See chapter 13 below.

155. Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 263.

156. Cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 200.

157. Ibid., pp. 201–4. See also Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 265–89. Cf. Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 116–18.

158. Nicholas Werth, “Un état contre son peuple,” in Stéphane Courtois et al., Le livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: Laffont, 1997), pt. 1, pp. 97–101.

159. See Orlando Figes, “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920,” in Past and Present 129 (November 1990): pp. 168–211.

160. See Leggett, Cheka, pp. 283–87; Levytsky, Uses of Terror, pp. 31–33; Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 119–21.

161. McAuley, Bread and Justice, p. 388; and Farber, Before Stalinism, p. 120.

162. Cited in Gerson, Secret Police, p. 157.

163. McAuley, Bread and Justice, p. 389.

164. Cited in Gerson, Secret Police, p. 155.

165. Cited in ibid., p. 155.

166. Ibid., pp. 153–54.

167. Brovkin, Front Lines, p. 123.

168. See ibid., p. 124; and Gerson, Secret Police, p. 154.

169. Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 384.

170. Gerson, Secret Police, p. 152.

171. Cited in ibid., p. 152; and Heller, Le monde concentrationnaire, p. 41.

172. Cited in Gerson, Secret Police, p. 156.

173. Carr, Socialism in One Country, p. 451; Gerson, Secret Police, pp. 146–47; Heller, Le monde concentrationnaire, p. 42; Leggett, Cheka, p. 179.

174. Pipes, Russian Revolution, p. 836.

175. Cf. ibid., pp. 836–37.

176. Farber, Before Stalinism, p. 136.

177. Gerson, Secret Police, pp. 158–59.

178. Leggett, Cheka, p. 178.

179. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, vol. 2, ch. 33; Mawdsley, Civil War, ch. 15; Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 89 ff. and pp. 128 ff.

180. Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 229–30. See chapter 13 below.

181. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 271 ff.; Mawdsley, Civil War, pp. 196 ff.; Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 92–94 and pp. 123–25.

182. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972).

183. Cited in Trotsky, Military Writings, vol. 3, pp. 184–85 and pp. 212–13.

184. Thomas C. Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat from Poland, 1920: From Permanent Revolution to Peaceful Coexistence (London: Macmillan, 1990). See also chapter 15 below.

185. Cited in Trotsky, Military Writings, vol. 3, p. 241.

186. See Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920: The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), ch. 9.

187. Cited in Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 267.

188. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 434 and p. 441.

189. Cited in Trotsky, Military Writings, vol. 3, p. 243.

190. Cited in Brovkin, Front Lines, p. 345.

191. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 74.

192. Melgounov, Red Terror, pp. 75–81; and Leggett, Cheka, p. 465.

193. Cited in Chamberlin, Revolution, p. 495.

194. Melgounov, Red Terror, pp. 75–83, esp. p. 78.

195. Figes, “The Red Army,” esp. pp. 168–69, 183–84, 195, 207.

196. Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 591.

197. See chapter 6 above and chapter 12 below.

198. See chapter 9 below.

199. Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 71; Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 74–75; Mawdsley, Civil War, p. 286. Nothing justifies the judgment that “all one can say with any assurance is that if the victims of the Jacobin terror numbered in the thousands, Lenin’s terror claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives” (Pipes, Russian Revolution, p. 838). This reading does not seem to take account of the victims of the civil war in the Vendée and the repossession of the cities of the Midi whose number greatly exceeded those of the Great Terror of the guillotine. Besides, any such global comparison should perhaps also note that France’s population in 1789 was one-sixth of Russia’s in 1917, which makes the number of victims of the Jacobin terror proportionately higher than those of the first Red terror under Lenin.

200. Starikov and Medvedev, Philip Mironov, p. 109; and Spiegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, p. 53.

201. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 73.

202. Ibid., p. 80.

203. Lewin, “Civil War,” p. 406.

204. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 75.