Civil war had been a recurrent theme in statements by Lenin and Trotski before the October Revolution. Whenever workers’ rights were being infringed, the Bolshevik leaders sang out that the bourgeoisie had started a civil war. What others might dub industrial conflict acquired a broader connotation. After 1917, too, Lenin and Trotski used class struggle and civil war as interchangeable terms, treating expropriations of factories and landed estates as part of the same great process as the military suppression of counter-revolution.
Increasingly the Bolshevik Central Committee used the term in a more conventional way to signify a series of battles between two sets of armies. Yet the military challenge was still expected by Sovnarkom to be easily surmountable; Lenin and his Central Committee, remembering the rapid defeat of the Kornilov mutiny, assumed that they would quickly win any serious conflict. One substantial campaign had been waged when Bolshevik-led forces invaded Ukraine in December 1917; but otherwise the tale had been of scrappy engagements since the October Revolution. A skirmish with a Cossack contingent in the Don region in late January 1918 resulted in a Soviet victory that was celebrated by Lenin over the next four months as marking the end of civil war.1 The Bolsheviks began to build a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army from February; but their intention was not merely to fight internal armed enemies: Lenin wanted a vast force to be prepared in time to be sent to the aid of the anticipated uprising of the Berlin working class.2
As he discovered in May 1918, this assumption was erroneous. The Socialist-Revolutionary leadership fled to Samara on the river Volga to establish a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (or Komuch), which laid claim to be the legitimate government of Russia. A socialist Volga confronted socialist Moscow and Petrograd, and fighting could not permanently be forestalled. Komuch as yet had a weaker military capacity even than Sovnarkom. But this was not the case with other Russian opponents of the communists. Generals Alekseev and Kornilov had escaped to southern Russia where they were gathering a Volunteer Army for action against the Bolsheviks. In mid-Siberia a contingent of Imperial officers was being formed under Admiral Kolchak, who had commanded the Black Sea fleet. General Yudenich invited other volunteers to his banner in the north-west. The forces of Alekseev, Kornilov, Kolchak and Yudenich soon became known as the White armies.
The German forces remained the dominant military power in the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire, and were invited by Lenin to help the Bolsheviks in northern Russia (even though, ultimately, Sovnarkom’s declared eventual purpose was to overthrow Kaiser Wilhelm II).3 For the Brest-Litovsk Treaty angered the British into dispatching an expeditionary contingent to Archangel and Murmansk, purportedly to defend Allied military equipment on Russian soil. Other threats, too, were realized. The French landed a naval garrison in Odessa on the Black Sea. The Turks were on the move on the frontiers of the ‘Russian’ Transcaucasus. Japanese forces occupied territory in the Far East, and the American contingent was not far behind them. Russia had been reduced to a size roughly the same as medieval Muscovy. Seemingly it would not be long before a foreign power reached Moscow and overthrew the Bolsheviks.
In the capital the Bolshevik Central Committee members put on a brave face. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries agitated against them, continuing to put the case against official communist policies. Even leading supporters of Lenin in the Brest-Litovsk controversy began to ask whether the treaty with the Central Powers had brought any benefit. G. Sokolnikov, who had signed the treaty on Lenin’s behalf, declared that it was not worth the paper it was printed on.4
The military situation of the Bolsheviks deteriorated in the same weeks. A legion of Czech and Slovak prisoners-of-war was being conveyed along the Trans-Siberian railway to the Far East for further shipment to Europe in compliance with an earlier agreement with the Allies. These troops intended to join the struggle against the Central Powers on the Western front. But there had always been distrust between the Czechoslovak Legion’s leaders and the Bolsheviks. Trotski, who became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs in March 1918, dealt with them abrasively. Then the Chelyabinsk Soviet unilaterally tried to disarm the units of the Legion as their train passed through the town.5 The Legion resisted this action, and travelled back to the Urals and the Volga to pick up the rest of its units. By the end of May it had reached Samara, crushing the Bolshevik local administrations on the way. Komuch persuaded it to forget about the Western front and join in the common effort to overthrow Sovnarkom.
In central Russia there was panic. Although there were only fifteen thousand Czechs and Slovaks, they might well prove more than a match for the nascent Red Army. Sovnarkom and the Cheka could not guarantee security even in Moscow. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee was planning an insurrection against Bolshevism. Its other tactic was to wreck the relationship between the Soviet and German governments by assassinating Count Mirbach, Germany’s ambassador to Moscow. Yakov Blyumkin, a Left Socialist-Revolutionary member of the Cheka, procured documents sanctioning a visit to the embassy. On 6 July he met Mirbach in the embassy and killed him.
Lenin, fearing that Berlin might rip up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, visited the embassy to express his condolences. Having carried out this distasteful errand, he instructed the Latvian Riflemen to arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Their preliminary duty was to liberate Dzierżyński from the hands of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who had taken him hostage.6 The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic was clearly not yet a properly-functioning police state if this could happen to the Cheka’s chairman. The Latvians succeeded in releasing Dzierżyński and suppressing the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries; and the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which was taking place at the time, passed all the resolutions tendered by the Bolsheviks. Already on 9 May a Food-Supplies Dictatorship had been proclaimed, and armed requisitioning of grain was turned from an intermittent local practice into a general system. The removal of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Congress eliminated the last vestige of opposition to the new policy.
While Lenin, Sverdlov and a shaken Dzierżyński imposed their authority in Moscow, Trotski rushed to the Volga where the Czechoslovak Legion took Kazan on 7 August 1918. Komuch was poised to re-enter central Russia. Trotski’s adaptiveness to the role of People’s Commissar for Military Affairs was impressive. Not all the orators of 1917 had managed an effective transition to the wielding of power; but Trotski, having dazzled his diplomatic adversaries at Brest-Litovsk, was turning his talents with equal success towards the Red Army.
Temperamentally he was as hard as a diamond. Like Lenin, he came from a comfortable family and had been a brilliant student. Trotski’s real name was Lev Davydovich Bronshtein. He was a Jew from southern Ukraine, whose farming father sent him to secondary school in Odessa. His flair for writing and for foreign languages revealed itself early; but so, too, did a restlessness with the kind of society in which he had been brought up. He drew close to the clandestine populist groups which approved of terrorism. But by late adolescence he was a Marxist and by 1900 he was in Siberian exile. He made a dramatic escape by sleigh a couple of years later, joining Lenin in London and working with him on the émigré Marxist journal, Iskra. At the Second Party Congress in 1903, however, Trotski denounced Lenin for provoking the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
In organization, Trotski had agreed with Menshevik criticisms of Leninist organizational ideas, which he predicted would result in a dictator placing himself in authority over the Central Committee. He meant this satirically, and was not to know that Stalin would one day realize the prophecy; but his hostility to Bolshevik divisiveness was sincere at the time. Trotski was already a distinctive figure among Marxists. While opposing the Bolsheviks on organizational questions, he stood close to them on strategy. His theory of revolution in Russia squeezed the schedule for the introduction of socialism to a shorter span of time than even Lenin would accept: in 1905 Trotski was calling for the installation of a ‘workers’ government’.
It was in September of the same year that he distinguished himself as the firebrand deputy chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. Within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party he refused to show allegiance to either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks; and, after returning abroad in 1907, he tried to unify the factions. Unfortunately Trotski was arrogant even when doing his best to reunify the party. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks thought Trotski was a windbag whose personal ambition mattered more to him than his radical political strategy. Yet they could not deny his talents. Trotski was a master of Russian literary prose, being incapable of writing an inelegant paragraph. His knowledge of the history of European politics and diplomacy was extensive. In 1912 he had covered the war in the Balkans as a correspondent for the Kiev Thought newspaper and therefore had an early insight into military affairs.
Trotski returned from North America in May 1917 and was horrified to find the Mensheviks collaborating with the Provisional Government. Needing to belong to a party if he was to have any influence, he accepted Lenin’s invitation to join the Bolsheviks. His fluency of tongue and pen were a great asset. He was a handsome fellow, a few inches taller than the average Russian, and he had quick reflexes in dangerous situations. It was he who had saved the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, despite their political differences, from being torn apart by a mob in midsummer 1917.7 Trotski himself spent weeks in prison after the ‘July Days’, but turned his detention to effect by writing Pravda articles that coruscated with contempt for the Provisional Government. On his release in late August, he had revelled in being the Bolshevik party’s spokesman in the Petrograd Soviet.
His brilliance had been proved before 1918. What took everyone aback was his organizational capacity and ruthlessness as he transformed the Red Army into a fighting force. He ordered deserters to be shot on the spot, and did not give a damn if some of them were communist party activists; and in this fashion he endeared himself to Imperial Army officers whom he encouraged to join the Reds. He sped from unit to unit, rousing the troops with his revolutionary zeal. The hauteur of spirit which made him so annoying to his rival politicians was an asset in situations where hierarchical respect was crucial. His flair, too, paid dividends. He organized a competition to design a Red Army cap and tunic; he had his own railway carriage equipped with its own map room and printing press. He also had an eye for young talent, bringing on his protégés without regard for the length of time they had belonged to the Bolshevik party.
The Red Army’s first task was to retake Kazan. Lenin still suspected Trotski of being weak minded, and wrote urging him not to worry if historic buildings were damaged. Trotski needed no urging. On 10 September the city was recaptured for the communists. Trotski was the hero of the hour. Lenin was delighted, and turned his attention to Red Army commanders whom he suspected of reluctance to press home their advantage. From Moscow he sent telegrams emphasizing the need to clear the Volga region of the Komuch forces.8
The Red Army overran Komuch’s base in Samara on 7 October, and the Czechoslovak Legion retreated to the Urals and then to mid-Siberia before regrouping under the command of Admiral Kolchak, who initially recognized Komuch as Russia’s legitimate government. His loyalty lasted only a few days. On 17 November Kolchak’s officers organized a coup against the Socialist-Revolutionary administration, arresting several ministers. Kolchak was proclaimed ‘Supreme Ruler’ and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries never again played a leading role upon the Russian national stage. Kolchak’s blood was up. He moved westwards from Omsk into the Urals, capturing the provincial centre of Perm in late December. The Red Army, the soviets and the party crumbled in his path. The Reds briefly counter-attacked and succeeded in taking Ufa, to the south of Perm; but Kolchak’s central group of forces were not deflected from their drive on Moscow.
The last months of 1918 were momentous on the Western front in the Great War. The Allies had seen off the German summer offensive in France, and military disarray ensued for the Central Powers. On 9 November, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. The German army had been defeated; and, for the Russian Communist Party, this meant that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk could be disregarded as obsolete. First and foremost, Lenin sought links with German far-left socialists and gave encouragement to the formation of a German Communist Party. Revolutionary opportunities beckoned. Within days of the German military defeat, Red forces were aiding local Bolsheviks to set up Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.
In Russia, violence intensified not only on the war fronts but also in civilian politics as Lenin widened the Cheka’s scope to suppress rival political parties. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were excluded from the soviets in June 1918 on the grounds of being associated with ‘counter-revolutionary’ organizations, and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were arrested in large numbers. Many Kadets were already in prison. Lenin, Trotski and Dzierżyński believed that over-killing was better than running the risk of being overthrown. And so, as the anti-Bolshevik forces approached the Urals in the summer, the communist central leadership considered what to do with the Romanovs, who had been held in Yekaterinburg for some months. They opted to murder not only the former Emperor but also his entire family, including his son and daughters. On 17 July the deed was done. Lenin and Sverdlov claimed that the responsibility lay with the Bolsheviks of the Urals region, but the circumstantial evidence strongly points to the Central Committee having inspired the decision.9
On 30 August Lenin himself got it literally in the neck. As he addressed a meeting of workers at the Mikhelson Factory in Moscow, shots were fired at him. His chauffeur Stepan Gil bundled him into the official limousine and drove him away. A woman standing nearby, Fanya Kaplan, was arrested. It is doubtful that she carried out the shooting since she was almost blind;10 but she was a sympathizer with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and may well have been involved in the plot in some form or other. Be that as it may, she was executed as the principal malefactor while Lenin convalesced at the government’s new sanatorium at the Gorki estate, thirty-five kilometres from the capital.
The attempt on Lenin’s life was answered with the promulgation of a Red Terror. In some cities, prisoners were shot out of hand, including 1300 prisoners in Petrograd alone. Fire would be met by fire: Dzierżyński’s Cheka had previously killed on an informal basis and not very often; now their executions became a general phenomenon. Lenin, as he recovered from his wounds, wrote the booklet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade K. Kautsky, in which he advocated dictatorship and terror.11 His confidential telegram to Bolshevik leaders in Penza on 11 August had contained the instruction: ‘Hang no fewer than a hundred well-known kulaks, rich-bags and blood-suckers (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people).’12 Another such telegram went to Petrograd in October 1919 at the time of an offensive by General Yudenich: ‘If the attack is begun, is it impossible to mobilize another 20,000 Petrograd workers plus 10,000 workers of the bourgeoisie, set up cannons behind them, shoot a few hundred of them and obtain a real mass impact upon Yudenich?’13
Terror was to be based on the criterion of class. Martyn Latsis, a Cheka functionary, was in favour of exterminating the entire middle class; and even Lenin made remarks to this effect.14 The purpose was to terrify all hostile social groups. Lenin intended that even the regime’s supporters should be intimidated. His recommendation to the Penza communists had made this explicit: ‘Do it so that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, might tremble!’15 According to official records, 12,733 prisoners were killed by the Cheka in 1918–20; but other estimates put the figure as high as 300,000.16 Other prisoners were held either in prison or in the concentration camps that were sanctioned by official decrees in September 1918 and April 1919.17
The premisses of Bolshevik policy were worked out quickly. The Food-Supplies Dictatorship which had been established in May 1918 was consolidated. The territory under Soviet control was divided into provinces and sub-divided into districts, and quotas of grain were assigned to each of them for delivery to the government. This system of apportionment (or razvërstka) was based upon the statistical evidence available, but Sovnarkom admitted that much guesswork was involved; and in practice the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies grabbed grain wherever it could find it – and peasant households were often left starving. Sovnarkom had hoped to keep most peasants on its side. In June 1918 Lenin had decreed the establishment of ‘committees of the village poor’ (kombedy), which were meant to report the richer peasant families hoarding grain to the authorities;18 and in return they were to receive a hand-out from the requisitioned stocks. In reality the peasantry resented the entire scheme. Clashes with the urban squads were widespread and the kombedy fell into disrepute.
By December the kombedy had to be abolished by Lenin, who also strove to prevent his local party comrades from forcing peasants to give up the land they had taken since 1917 and enter collective farms.19 Upon re-conquering Ukraine, communist leaders accompanying the Red Army independently introduced a policy of collectivization which it took the Central Committee months to reverse.20 Yet peasants were battered even by Lenin; for the state procurement of grain nearly quadrupled between the fiscal years 1917–18 and 1918–19.
And yet the increase was never enough to feed the towns after the Red Army’s requirements had been met. Less than a third of the urban diet in the Civil War came from state-provided rations: the rest had to be obtained from the so-called sack-men who travelled from the villages and sold produce on street corners in defiance of the Cheka.21 The black market was an integral part of the wartime economy. So, too, was the determination of the workers to eke out their rations by selling hand-made or even stolen goods on the side. Monetary wages became virtually worthless as the currency depreciated to 0.006 per cent of its pre-war value by 1921.22 Sheer physical survival was everyone’s aim. Industrial production formally recorded in the official statistics declined precipitately: large-scale enterprises in 1921 produced a fifth of the total recorded for 1913.23 Key armaments plants and textile factories were the main enterprises kept going. Nevertheless the Reds took on the Whites primarily with inherited military supplies; and labour discipline in the factories and mines, despite the introduction of ever more severe legislation, was poor.
Meanwhile peasant households in the villages had to endure immense exactions of grain-stocks, conscripts and labour power. Villages tried to seal themselves off from the towns and hoard their stores. Wherever possible, peasants kept back their cereal and vegetable crops for trade with peasants from nearby villages or for wages in kind in return for work done by the many workers who were leaving the towns. The rural economic sector survived the Civil War in better shape than the urban sector;24 but the reason for this was not the government’s competence but the peasantry’s ability to frustrate the government’s intentions.
The Bolsheviks recognized the patchiness of their military, political and economic control over town and countryside. Their leaders in Moscow and the provinces aspired to a centralized party, a centralized government, a centralized army, a centralized security force. Discipline, hierarchy and decisive action were their common aims. Lenin, Trotski, Dzierżyński, Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin were generally in agreement: their disputes affected mainly matters of secondary importance. For instance, Bukharin and Kamenev disliked the licence given to the Cheka to execute in secret.25 Yet neither of them had a conscience about executions carried out after peremptory trials. What is more, no communist leader objected to the predominant economic orientation adopted since mid-1918. A strengthened campaign of industrial nationalization had occurred, and by 1919 all large factories and mines were owned by government. Grain requisitioning, too, was uncontroversial among the Bolsheviks. The Russian Communist Party became more militaristic in methods. Their members grew from about 300,000 in late 1917 to 625,000 in early 1921, and most of these Bolsheviks, old and new, fought in the Red Army.26
The intensification of military hostilities softened the disagreements between Lenin and the Left Communists. It is not hard to see why. There was a surge of measures to bring the entire economy into the state’s control in the early months of the Civil War, and little reason remained for the Left Communists to cavil at Lenin’s industrial and agricultural policy. The utopian spirit prevailed throughout the communist party. Russia, according to the party’s leaders, was on the verge of creating a socialist society. At such a time the need for political authoritarianism was an article of faith. Soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were instructed to reinforce centralism at the expense of electivity and consultation. Power in Moscow was the priority; and, as Sverdlov explained, this was unachievable unless a single institution controlled the state at each level. Everyone agreed that only the Russian Communist Party should and could fulfil this role. The party alone had the reliable personnel, the ideology and the esprit de corps.27
There was no objection to this at the party’s lower levels. Provincial communist leaders had always been centralizers in theory, and their present sense of political isolation and military danger in their localities convinced them in practice that a fundamental overhaul of the political and administrative machinery was essential: they wanted greater central intervention because they needed the help. In the economy, too, their inclination had always been to nationalize. Local practicality reinforced this inclination. Every province which had serious shortfalls in supplies, whether in grain or coal or oil or machinery, sought Moscow’s assistance.28 Lenin had always taken it for granted that the guidance of the party was vital to the October Revolution’s consolidation. Now he and his leading administrators, including Sverdlov, opted to give institutional form to this. The party was to become the supreme state institution in all but name.29
There was a reshuffling of arrangements in the capital. The Central Committee could meet only infrequently because most of its members were political commissars on the fronts or in cities outside Moscow. From January 1919 two inner subcommittees were introduced, the Politburo and the Orgburo. The Politburo was to decide the great questions of politics, economics, war and international relations; the Orgburo, serviced by an expanded Secretariat, was to handle internal party administration. Sovnarkom’s authority was permanently reduced in favour of the Politburo, which was chaired by Lenin and immediately began to give rulings on everything from military strategy against Kolchak to prices of shoes and eggs in Saratov. The Politburo became an unofficial government cabinet.
Its founding members were Lenin, Trotski, Stalin, Kamenev and Nikolai Krestinski. On the whole, this was an effective body even though Trotski and Stalin usually had to be consulted by telegram. Lenin was good at coaxing his team to co-operate with each other. In the case of Trotski and Stalin he had his hands full. Stalin bridled at having to take instructions from Trotski as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. They hated each other, but there was also a political edge to their clash. Stalin disliked the practice of employing Imperial Army officers, and he encouraged other Bolsheviks to complain about it. Thus was born a Military Opposition in the party. Trotski retorted that the Red Army could not function without experienced officers – and Lenin supported the policy at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919.30 Trotski was anyway not wholly traditional in his military preferences. He attached a political commissar to each officer; he also took the families of many officers hostage to ensure loyalty. Proud of his ruthlessness, he published a book in 1920, Terrorism and Communism, which eulogized mass terror.
Admiral Kolchak’s advance into the Urals in winter 1918–19 prevented Trotski from attending the Eighth Party Congress. Lenin had been so worried that he put out feelers to the Allies to see whether they might broker a halt to the Civil War if the communists forswore sovereignty over the parts of the country not presently occupied by the Reds.31 This was not defeatism but a temporary ploy. His thoughts were still directed at the ‘European socialist revolution’. A rising of far-left German socialists, the Spartakists, occurred in Berlin in January 1919; it was suppressed, but successful insurrections took place in March in Munich and Budapest. In the same month Lenin summoned communist and other far-left parties from around the world to the First Congress of the Communist International (or Comintern) in Moscow.
Kolchak was defeated by the Reds in April 1919. Perm was back in their hands in July, Omsk in November. Kolchak himself was captured and executed in the following year. The Volunteer Army in southern Russia which had been founded by the anti-Bolshevik Generals Alekseev and Kornilov was taken over by General Denikin, who moved his forces into Ukraine in summer. Denikin seized Kharkov in late June and Kiev and Odessa in August. Orël, only 350 kilometres from the capital, fell to him in mid-October. His strategy was expressed in a Moscow Directive ordering a rapid advance into central Russia. Yet the Red Army had been able to regroup after seeing off Kolchak. A devastating counter-attack against the Whites was organized which, by mid-December, resulted in the capture of Kiev and the re-establishment of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Luck was again on the side of the Reds; for it was only in October that General Yudenich had crossed the Estonian frontier in the direction of Petrograd. There was no co-ordination between him and Denikin. By the middle of November, Yudenich’s army was retreating in tatters to Estonia. The Civil War in Russia, including Siberia, and Ukraine had been won by the Reds.
This outcome of the war between the Reds and the Whites determined the result of most of the many armed conflicts elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. In the Transcaucasus, the Georgians contended against the Armenians; the Armenians also fought the Azeris. And each state in the region had internal strife. For example, battles and massacres occurred in Georgia between Georgians and Abkhazians.32 Consequently the armed struggle in the lands of the Romanov dynasty was never merely a ‘Russian’ Civil War. Indeed it was not just one Civil War at all: there were dozens of civil wars after 1917, wars in which the Red Army was able to intervene after its defeat of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich.
The communists aimed to make their task easier by offering various concessions to non-Russians. This policy had already been implemented in the RSFSR itself. Lenin established a People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), headed by Stalin, to realize the official commitment to native-language schools and to cultural autonomy. Stalin and his subordinates did not merely allow non-Russians to exercise their freedom: they actively propelled them in this direction. Politically-compliant representatives of these nationalities were introduced to Narkomnats. Propaganda was prepared in each of their languages. Enquiries were put in hand to ascertain the boundaries of the territories inhabited mainly by these nationalities.33 The Russian Communist Party bent over backwards to appease non-Russians – and towards the end of the Civil War the Russian Cossacks in the North Caucasus were ejected from their farms in favour of the local Chechens, whose land had been seized by the tsars and given to the Cossacks in the nineteenth century.
Both Lenin and Stalin, moreover, committed themselves to introducing a federal mode of rule once the Civil War had ended. From 1918, as proof of their intent, they started to set up internal ‘autonomous’ republics in the RSFSR wherever the Russians constituted a minority of the population. The first plan to set up a Tatar-Bashkir Republic within the RSFSR collapsed in some measure because Tatars and Bashkirs refused to collaborate with each other. There were also difficulties because ethnic Russians, too, lived among them, and the major towns had a Russian majority: not all Russians, by any means, felt that non-Russians should receive such apparent indulgence. Representations were made to Moscow that Russians were being done down. But the communists persisted and founded both a Tatar Republic and a Bashkir Republic.34 As Soviet-occupied territory was expanded, so the number of autonomous republics rose.
Certain outlying regions had experienced years of independent statehood in the course of the Civil War, a statehood that in most cases was unprecedented for them. It would therefore have been difficult to incorporate them without further ado into the RSFSR. Ukrainians in particular did not take kindly to their resubjugation to Russian rule. Consequently Ukraine, once reoccupied by the Red Army, was proclaimed as a Soviet republic in its own right. This device was repeated elsewhere. By the time of the completed conquest of the Transcaucasus in March 1921, Soviet republics had been founded also in Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. And the RSFSR had bilateral relations with each of them.
This had much cartographic importance. In January 1918, when the creation of the RSFSR had been announced, the assumption had been that each piece of land conquered by Soviet forces would be incorporated in the RSFSR through a federal arrangement of some kind. But the pressing need of the Bolsheviks to win support in the non-Russian borderlands had led to the creation of several Soviet republics. The RSFSR was easily the largest, the most powerful and the most prestigious; but formally it was only one Soviet republic among all the others. Quite what constitutional settlement there would be at the end of the Civil War had not yet been decided. But one thing had been resolved: namely that there was a place called ‘Russia’ which would occupy a defined territory on the map, a territory which was considerably smaller than the former Russian Empire. The RSFSR was the state that governed this Russia and the vast majority of its population consisted of Russians.
Yet a distinct ethnically-based sense of Russian statehood could not develop. For the boundaries of the RSFSR were not set exclusively by considerations of national and ethnic geography. In particular, there was no Soviet republic in central Asia on the model of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Instead the lands of the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Tajiks and Uzbeks belonged to ‘the Turkestani Region’ and were included in the RSFSR. A so-called ‘Kirgiz (Kazakh) Republic’ was at last established in 1920, but only as an autonomous republic within the RSFSR.35
At any rate, the fundamental reality was that the entire RSFSR was subjected to highly centralized authority and that both the RSFSR and all other Soviet republics were ruled by the Politburo. This was done in several ways. The most effective was the stipulation in the Party Rules drawn up in March 1919 that the communist organizations in the various Soviet republics were to be regarded merely as regional organizations of the Russian Communist Party.36 Thus the central party bodies of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks in Kiev were strictly subordinated to the Central Committee in Moscow. Party centralism was to prevail. Lenin and his colleagues also drew up a confidential instruction to republican governments to the effect that republican people’s commissariats were to act as mere regional branches of Sovnarkom.37 In addition, the new Soviet republics on the RSFSR’s borders were disallowed from having ties with any other republic except the RSFSR.38 The aim was not to reinforce the RSFSR but to consolidate the Politburo’s capacity to control all the republics, including the RSFSR, from Moscow.
Yet enough concessions were being made to the sensitivities of non-Russians to make the Civil War easier for the Reds than for the Whites in the non-Russian regions. Jews in particular were terrified by the anti-Semitic mayhem perpetrated by the Whites.39 Yet the advantage held by the Reds was helpful without being decisive. Invading troops misbehaved in all the armies. The Reds frequently committed butchery against religious leaders. Twenty-eight bishops and thousands of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were killed; and the other Christian sects as well as Islam and Judaism were also subjected to a campaign of terror. Lenin’s policy was to introduce atheism by persuasion; but he, too, instigated the mass murder of clerics.40 For most people, religious belief was entwined with their national or ethnic identity. The rampaging of the Red Army – and especially its cavalrymen – undid much of the good done for Sovnarkom’s cause by the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities.
Nevertheless the Whites had lost. The dispirited Denikin, as he retreated to Crimea, resigned his command to General Vrangel; Yudenich and his forces faded into inactivity. The Whites were in a hopeless position. Vrangel belatedly appreciated the damage done to their campaigns by their refusal to leave the peasants with the land taken by them since the October Revolution. Kolchak had given farms to landlords at the peasantry’s expense even in places where the landlords had not owned estates.41 By announcing their faith in ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, the Whites alienated those non-Russian nationalities who recognized the slogan as thinly disguised Russian imperialism. By hanging trade unionists, they made workers think twice before turning against the Russian Communist Party.
Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich had rested their hopes in a military knock-out blow, and refused to fight a ‘political’ war. They were contemptuous of the Kadets who organized the civilian administration for them.42 Lip service was given by the White commanders to the ultimate goal of re-convoking a representative assembly of some kind; but their officers were hostile to this: their fundamental aim was a right-wing military dictatorship. Kolchak and Denikin came within striking range of Moscow; Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss their calculations out of hand. But they had the odds stacked against them. The Reds always held an area with a hugely greater availability of conscripts and military equipment;43 they also were based at the heart of the country’s network of telegraph, railways and administration. The Reds had high morale and felt certain that they were making a new, better world and that science and social justice were on their side.
Indisputably, luck was with them. The Germans lost the Great War and stopped interfering in Russian affairs; the Allies donated money and guns to the Whites, but never seriously undertook the conquest of Russia themselves. The peoples of the West were in any event ill-disposed to fighting in eastern Europe once Germany had been defeated. Many Western socialists argued that the Bolshevik party should be given the chance to soften its dictatorial rule, and there were plenty of industrialists, especially in the United Kingdom, who wished to resume commercial links with Russia.44 In January 1920 the Supreme Allied Council lifted the economic blockade on the RSFSR. The Whites were left to fend for themselves.
The Bolsheviks had won, and felt that their ideas had helped them to this end. They had become comfortable with the one-party, one-ideology state as the basis of their power. They legalized and reinforced arbitrary rule and had no intention of holding free elections. Dictatorship and terror appealed to them as modes of solving problems. They were convinced that Bolshevism was the sole authentic form of socialism. This internal party consensus contained its own disagreements. A group known as the Democratic Centralists sprang up in 1919 and contended that too few officials were taking too many decisions at both central and local levels of the party, that the party was run inefficiently, that the central party bodies too rarely consulted opinion in the local committees. Another Bolshevik group, the Workers’ Opposition, emerged in 1920; its complaint was that the aspirations of the factory labourers were being flouted. Workers’ Oppositionist leader Alexander Shlyapnikov urged that power should be shared among the party, the soviets and the trade unions and that ordinary workers and peasants should have influence over decisions on economic affairs.
Neither the Democratic Centralists nor the Workers’ Opposition wished to stop the harassment of the other political parties or to end the requisitioning of grain. Their factional disagreements with the Central Committee took second place in their minds to the need for loyalty to the party. While they may have thought of themselves as the conscience of the Revolution, they, too, had given up part of the more idealistic heritage of 1917. At any rate their factions were numerically tiny: they could not hope to beat the Central Committee for votes at the yearly Party Congresses.
A military-style approach to party organization and to politics in general had become customary in the Civil War. Orders replaced consultation. Having served in the Red Army, most Bolshevik officials had acquired the habits of command. Another novelty was the ‘cleansing’ of the party. The Russian word for this, chistka, is usually translated as purge; and the first purge in May 1918 was confined to the expulsion of ‘idlers, hooligans, adventurers, drunkards and thieves’ from the party’s ranks. By mid-1919 there were 150,000 party members: half the total claimed twelve months previously. The willingness to exclude people in order to maintain purity of membership can be traced back to Lenin’s wrangles with the Mensheviks in 1903. But practicality as well as ideology was at work; for the one-party state was attracting recruits to the party who were not even committed socialists. Periodic cleansings of the ranks were vital to raise the degree of political dependability.
The political leadership at central and local levels distrusted the various state institutions, and repeatedly called for ‘the most severe discipline’. In 1920 a Central Control Commission was established to eradicate abuses in the party. But the party was not the only institution presenting problems of control. The People’s Commissariats gave even greater cause of concern to the Kremlin leadership, and a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was established in the same year to investigate the reliability and efficiency of the various civilian state bodies in their day-to-day work.
Of all bodies, it was the party that underwent the largest change. Yet the habit of criticizing the leadership remained; and, while the official who counted for most in local party committees was the committee secretary,45 discussion with other committee members was still the norm. Furthermore, the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat lacked the accurate, up-to-date information which would have enabled them to intervene with confidence in local disputes. The Red Army, too, was resistant at its lower levels to tight detailed control. Ill-discipline among soldiers was notorious. There are thought to have been a million deserters and conscription defaulters by the end of 1919.46 Indisputably the Soviet state as a whole increased its internal co-ordination in the Civil War; but chaos remained in all institutions. And the proliferation of bodies such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate had the effect of enlarging the bureaucracy without increasing its efficiency.
This sprawling state ruled a disgruntled society, and there was much to give rise to resentment. The food rations were poor. Disease and malnutrition killed eight million people in 1918–20.47 Political parties other than the Bolsheviks were persecuted or suppressed. ‘Barrier detachments’ were arresting persons carrying food for the black market.48 The workers were angry about such conditions and called for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly of political power. Strikes took place in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula and elsewhere during the Civil War; they became especially intense once the danger from the Whites had been eliminated. The women, girls, boys and residual skilled men in the Russian work-force had just enough energy left to make protest. Mutinies broke out in army garrisons, and by mid-1920 there were hints that the loyalty of the pro-Bolshevik sailors of the Kronstadt naval garrison might be fading.
Peasants clashed with the food-supplies commissars across the country. According to official figures, 344 rebellions are reported as having broken out by mid-1919.49 In 1920, severe trouble was reported from the Volga provinces, especially Tambov, from Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus. The villages were in revolt. They hated the conscription of their menfolk, the requisitioning of foodstuffs, the infringements of customary peasant law, the ban on private trade with the towns and the compulsion of households to supply free labour to the authorities for the felling of timber and the clearing of roads.50 The Bolshevik party assumed that the answer was to intensify repression. Industry and agriculture, too, were to be brought more firmly under the state’s control. Trotski proposed that Red Army soldiers, instead of being demobilized, should be transferred into labour armies; Lenin was firmly attached to the policy of requisitioning foodstuffs through a centrally-assigned set of quotas: the economic programme of the Civil War was to be maintained in peacetime.
The other way out of the emergency for the Russian Communist Party was socialist revolution in Europe. During 1919 they had continued to probe opportunities to link up with the Hungarian Soviet Republic until its collapse in August. The Bavarian Soviet Republic had been overturned in May. Yet the cities of northern Italy, too, were in ferment: as one door closed, another was thought to be opening. The party’s optimism was all the more striking since Red rule in the borderlands of Russia remained under threat. Conflicts with the Poles took place in the course of the year, and erupted into full-scale war when Józef Piłsudski invaded Ukraine and took Kiev in May 1920. The Red Army gathered support at this conjuncture from Russians in general. The arthritic former Imperial commander Alexander Brusilov came out of retirement to urge his former subordinates to fulfil their patriotic duty by seeing off the Poles; and, by July, Piłsudski’s army was fleeing westwards.
Lenin spotted his chance to carry revolution into central Europe. The Red Army was instructed to plunge into Poland and then into Germany. To his colleagues Lenin confided: ‘My personal opinion is that for this purpose it is necessary to sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too.’51 Italian communists in Moscow for the Second Congress of Comintern were told to pack their bags and go home to help organize a revolution. In fact the other Politburo members were doubtful about Lenin’s judgement; they especially questioned whether the Polish working class would rise to welcome the Red Army as its liberator. But Lenin had his way and the Reds hastened across eastern Poland. A pitched battle occurred by the river Vistula, short of Warsaw, in mid-August. The Reds were defeated. The dream of taking revolution to other countries on the point of a bayonet was dispelled.
The débâcle in Poland concentrated minds upon the difficulties at home. Even before the Polish-Soviet War there had been attempts to modify economic policies. The most notable was Trotski’s proposal to the Central Committee in February 1920 that, in certain provinces and with certain restrictions, grain requisitioning should be replaced with a tax-in-kind that would be fixed at a lower level of procurement. He was turned down after a heated debate in which Lenin denounced him as an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism.52
Such disputes demonstrated how hard it was to promote any change of policy; for Trotski’s proposal seemed bold only within a milieu which viscerally detested capitalism. Lenin, too, suffered as he had made Trotski suffer. When a Soviet republic was set up in Azerbaijan in April 1920, Lenin proposed that foreign concessionnaires should be invited to restore the Baku oilfields to production. Since 1918 he had seen ‘concessions’ as vital to economic recovery, but his suggestion now caused outrage among Bolshevik leaders in the Transcaucasus. If Baku oil were to be exploited again by the Alfred Nobel Company, hardly any non-private industry would be left in Baku.53 Lenin also urged, at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, that richer peasant households should be materially rewarded for any additional gains in agricultural productivity rather than be persecuted as kulaks. The Congress was horrified and most of Lenin’s scheme was rejected.54 The party leadership at the centre and the localities was determined to maintain existing economic policy.
And so it came about that the great controversy in the Bolshevik party in the winter of 1920–21 was not about grain requisitioning or about the return of foreign companies but about the trade unions. In November, Trotski had proposed that the unions should be turned into agencies of the state. Strikes would be banned; wage increases would be forgone. The Workers’ Opposition criticized this as yet another sign of the bureaucratization of the October Revolution. Others in the party, including Lenin, simply felt that Trotski’s project was unrealizable at a time of turmoil in the country. Ferocious debate broke out within the party. But as Bolshevik leaders haggled over Marxist doctrine on the labour movement, the Soviet economy moved towards catastrophe and a growing number of peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors rebelled against the victors of the Civil War.