The Russian Revolution (13 page)

No other way out is possible, otherwise these brutes [the Bolsheviks] will wipe up the Ukrainians, the Finns and the Balts, and then quietly get together a new revolutionary army and turn the whole of Europe into a pig-sty ... The whole of Russia is no more than a vast heap of maggots-a squalid, swarming mass.8

During the peace negotiations at Brest in January, Trotsky had refused the terms offered by the Germans and attempted a strategy of `No war, no peace', meaning that the Russians would neither continue the war nor sign a peace on unacceptable terms. This was pure bravado, since the Russian Army at the front was melting away, while the German Army, despite Bolshevik appeals to workingclass brotherhood, was not. The Germans called Trotsky's bluff and advanced, occupying large areas of Ukraine.

Lenin regarded it as imperative that a peace should be concluded. This was very rational, given the state of Russia's fighting forces and the likelihood that the Bolsheviks would soon be fighting a civil war; and, in addition, the Bolsheviks had repeatedly stated before the October Revolution that Russia should withdraw immediately from the European imperialist war. However, it would be rather misleading to see the Bolsheviks as a `peace party' in any meaningful sense by October. The Petrograd workers who had been ready to fight for the Bolsheviks against Kerensky in October had also been ready to fight for Petrograd against the Germans. This belligerent mood was strongly reflected in the Bolshevik Party in the early months of 1918, and was subsequently to be a great asset to the new regime in fighting the Civil War. At the time of the Brest negotiations, Lenin had the greatest difficulty in persuading even the Bolshevik Central Committee of the need to sign a peace with Germany. The Party's `left Communists'-a group which included the young Nikolai Bukharin, later to earn a place in history as Stalin's last major opponent in the leadership-advocated a revolutionary war of guerrilla resistance to the German invaders; and the left SRs, who were currently in alliance with the Bolsheviks, took a similar position. Lenin finally forced the decision through the Bolshevik Central Committee by threatening to resign, but it was a hardfought battle. The terms which the Germans imposed after their successful offensive were considerably harsher than those they had offered in January. (But the Bolsheviks were lucky: Germany subsequently lost the European war, and as a result lost its conquests in the East.)

The Peace of Brest-Litovsk provided only a brief respite from military threat. Officers of the old Russian Army were gathering forces in the south, in the Cossack territory of the Don and the Kuban, while Admiral Kolchak was establishing an anti-Bolshevik government in Siberia. The British had landed troops at Russia's two northern ports, Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, ostensibly to fight the Germans but in fact also with the intention of supporting local opposition to the new Soviet regime.

By a strange fluke of war, there were even non-Russian troops passing through Russian territory-the Czech Legion, numbering about 30,000 men, which was hoping to get to the Western Front before the European war ended, so that they could reinforce their claim to national independency by fighting on the Allied side against their old Austrian masters. Unable to cross the battlelines from the Russian side, the Czechs were making an improbable journey east on the Trans-Siberian Railway, planning to reach Vladivostok and return to Europe by ship. The Bolsheviks had sanctioned the trip, but this did not prevent local soviets from reacting with hostility to the arrival of contingents of armed foreigners at railway stations along the way. In May 1918, the Czechs had their first clash with a Bolshevik-dominated soviet in the Urals town of Chelyabinsk. Other Czech units supported Russian SRs in Samara when they rose up against the Bolsheviks to establish a short-lived Volga Republic. The Czechs ended up more or less fighting their way out of Russia, and it was only after many months that they were all evacuated from Vladivostok and shipped back to Europe.

The Civil War proper-Bolshevik `Reds' against Russian antiBolshevik `Whites'-began in the summer of 1918. At that time, the Bolsheviks moved their capital to Moscow, since Petrograd had escaped the threat of capture by the Germans only to come under attack by a White Army under General Yudenich. But large areas of the country were not effectively under Moscow's control (these included Siberia, southern Russia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and even much of the Urals and Volga region, where local Bolsheviks intermittently dominated many of the urban soviets), and White Armies threatened the Soviet Republic from the east, the north-west, and the south. Of the Allied Powers, Britain and France were extremely hostile to the new regime in Russia and supported the Whites, though their direct military involvement was on a fairly small scale. Both the USA and Japan sent troops to Siberia-the Japanese hoping for territorial gains, the Americans in a muddled effort to restrain the Japanese, police the Trans-Siberian Railway, and perhaps support Kolchak's Siberian government if it measured up to American democratic standards.

Although the Bolsheviks' situation seemed desperate indeed in 1919, when the territory firmly under their control was roughly that of Muscovite Russia in the sixteenth century, their opponents also had formidable problems. In the first place, the White Armies operated largely independently of each other, without central direction or coordination. In the second place, the Whites' control over their territorial bases was even more tenuous than the Bolsheviks'. Where they set up regional governments, the administrative machinery had to be created almost from scratch, and the results were extremely unsatisfactory. Russia's transport and communications systems, historically highly centralized on Moscow and Petersburg, did not facilitate White operations around the periphery. The White forces were harassed not only by the Reds but also the so-called `Green Armies'-peasant and Cossack bands that gave allegiance to neither side but were most active in the outlying areas in which the Whites were based. The White Armies, well supplied with officers from the old Tsarist Army, had difficulty keeping up the numbers of recruits and conscripts for them to command.

The Bolsheviks' fighting force was the Red Army, organized under the direction of Trotsky, who became Commissar for War in the spring of 1918. The Red Army had to be built up from the beginning, since the disintegration of the old Russian Army had gone too far to be halted (the Bolsheviks announced its total demobilization shortly after taking power). The nucleus of the Red Army, formed at the beginning of 1918, consisted of Red Guards from the factories and pro-Bolshevik units from the old Army and Fleet. This was expanded by voluntary recruitment and, from the summer of 1918, selective conscription. Workers and Communists were the first to be drafted, and throughout the Civil War provided a high proportion of the combat troops. But by the end of the Civil War, the Red Army was a massive institution with an enlistment of over five million, mainly peasant conscripts. Only about a tenth of these were fighting troops (the forces deployed by either Reds or Whites on a given front rarely exceeded ioo,ooo), while the rest were in supply, transport, or administrative work. To a considerable extent, the Red Army had to fill the gap left by the breakdown of civilian administration: it was the largest and best-functioning bureaucracy the Soviet regime possessed in the early years, with first claim on all available resources.

Although many Bolsheviks had an ideological preference for militia-type units like the Red Guards, the Red Army was organized from the first on regular army lines, with the soldiers subject to military discipline and the officers appointed and not elected. Because of the shortage of trained military professionals, Trotsky and Lenin insisted on using officers from the old Tsarist Army, although this policy was much criticized in the Bolshevik Party, and the Military Opposition faction tried to get it reversed at two successive party congresses. By the end of the Civil War, the Red Army had over 50,000 former Tsarist officers, most of them conscripted; and the great majority of its senior military commanders came from this group. To ensure that the old officers remained loyal, they were paired with political commissars, usually Communists, who had to countersign all orders and shared final responsibility with the military commanders.

In addition to its military forces, the Soviet regime quickly created a security force-the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation, known as the Cheka. When this institution was founded in December 1917, its immediate task was to control the outbreak of banditry, looting, and raiding of liquor stores that followed the October seizure of power. But it soon assumed the broader functions of a security police, dealing with anti-regime conspiracies and keeping watch on groups whose loyalty was suspect, including bourgeois `class enemies', officials of the old regime and Provisional Government, and members of the opposition political parties. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the Cheka became an organ of terror, dispensing summary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under White control or were suspected of leaning towards the Whites. According to Bolshevik figures for twenty provinces of European Russia in 1918 and the first half of i9i9, at least 8,389 persons were shot without trial by the Cheka, and 87,000 arrested.'

The Bolsheviks' Red terror had its equivalent in the White terror practised by the anti-Bolshevik forces in the areas under their control, and the same kind of atrocities were attributed to each side by the other. However, the Bolsheviks were forthright about their own use of terror (which implies not only summary justice but also random punishment, unrelated to individual guilt, whose purpose is the intimidation of a specific group or the population as a whole); and they took pride in being tough-minded about violence, avoiding the mealy mouthed hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and admitting that the rule of any class, including the proletariat, involves coercion of other classes. Lenin and Trotsky expressed contempt for socialists who could not understand the necessity of terror. `If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?' Lenin admonished his colleagues in the new government."

When the Bolsheviks looked for historical parallels for the activities of the Cheka, they normally referred to the revolutionary terror of 1794 in France. They did not see any parallel to the Tsarist secret police, though Western historians have often drawn one. The Cheka, in fact, operated much more openly and violently than the old police: its style had more in common with the `class vengeance' of Baltic sailors dealing with their officers in 1917, on the one hand, or Stolypin's armed pacification of the countryside in 1906-7, on the other. The parallel with the Tsarist secret police became more appropriate after the Civil War, when the Cheka was replaced by the GPU (Chief Political Administration)-a move associated with the abandonment of terror and the extension of legality-and the security organs became more routine, bureaucratic, and discreet in their methods of operation. In this longer perspective, there clearly were strong elements of continuity (though apparently not continuity of personnel) between the Tsarist and Soviet secret police; and the clearer they became, the more evasive and hypocritical were Soviet discussions of the security function.

The Red Army and the Cheka both made important contributions to the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. However, it would be inadequate to explain that victory simply in terms of military strength and terror, especially as no one has yet found a way of measuring the balance of force between Reds and Whites. Active support and passive acceptance by the society must also be taken into account, and indeed these factors were probably crucial. The Reds had active support from the urban working class, with the Bolshevik Party providing an organizational nucleus. The Whites had active support from the old middle and upper classes, with part of the Tsarist officer corps serving as the main organizing agent. But it was surely the peasantry, constituting the great majority of the population, that tipped the balance.

Both the Red Army and the White Armies conscripted peasants in the territories they controlled, and both had a substantial desertion rate. As the Civil War progressed, however, the Whites' difficulties with the peasant conscripts became markedly greater than the Reds'. The peasants resented the Bolsheviks' policy of grain requisitioning (see below, p. 81), but the Whites were no different in this respect. The peasants also had no great enthusiasm for serving in anyone's army, as the experience of the Russian Army in 1917 had amply demonstrated. However, the mass desertions of peasants in 1917 had been closely related to the land seizures and redistribution by the villages. This process was largely completed by the end of 1918 (which greatly reduced the peasants' objection to army service), and the Bolsheviks had approved it. The Whites, on the other hand, did not approve of land seizures and supported the former landowners' claims. Thus on the crucial issue of land, the Bolsheviks were the lesser evil.l i

War Communism

The Bolsheviks took over a war economy in a state of near collapse, and their first and overwhelming problem was to keep it running.12 This was the pragmatic context of the economic policies of the Civil War that were later labelled `War Communism'. But there was also an ideological context. In the long term, the Bolsheviks aimed to abolish private property and the free market and distribute products according to need, and in the short term, they might be expected to choose policies that would bring these ideals closer to fulfilment. The balance between pragmatism and ideology in War Communism has long been a subject of debate,13 the problem being that policies like nationalization and state distribution can plausibly be explained either as a pragmatic response to the exigencies of war or as an ideological imperative of communism. It is a debate in which scholars on both sides can quote the pronouncements of Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks, since the Bolsheviks themselves were not sure of the answer. From a Bolshevik perspective of 1921, when War Communism was jettisoned in favour of the New Economic Policy, the pragmatic interpretation was clearly preferable: once War Communism had failed, the less said about its ideological underpinnings the better. But from an earlier Bolshevik perspective-for example, that of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in their classic ABC of Communism (1919)-the opposite was true. While War Communism policies were in force, it was natural for Bolsheviks to give them an ideological justification-to assert that the party, armed with the scientific ideology of Marxism, was in full control of events rather than simply struggling to keep up.