Revolution Under Siege: Conclusion (Part 1 of 2)

‘Ideas which enter the mind under fire remain there securely and forever.’

Lev Trotsky, quoted in Trudell, Megan, The Russian Civil War: A Marxist Analysis, International Socialism, Spring 2000

This is the Conclusion to Revolution Under Siege, a series about the Russian Civil War. In this first part of the Conclusion, we will ask: How did the Red Army win the war? What was the nature of Allied intervention? Were the White Guards fascist?

How the Red Army triumphed

The Soviet victory in the Russian Civil War has been summed up in all kinds of dramatic ways: ‘A People’s Tragedy’ or ‘the Death of Hope’ (no less!). Whatever picture you have of the Civil War in your own mind, the vanishing point, ‘the place where all the rays meet’ (as Tolstoy is supposed to have said) is October. If the October Revolution was legitimate and justified, then the struggle to defend it was inspiring. If the Revolution was a coup by conspirators bent on mass murder and insane social experiments, then each battle to defend it was just one more atrocity.

But since I am switching from narrative mode to conclusion mode, let’s not agree to disagree. The Allied intervention forces at first believed that the Bolsheviks were an isolated group who were out of their depth. If this had been true, the Whites would have had little difficulty in winning the war. If October really was an undemocratic coup, if the political programme of Lenin and Trotsky was a wild social experiment, then the outcome of the Civil War would make no sense.

The fact that the Reds controlled the part of Russia with the largest population, best transport links, most industry and largest military stockpiles was an important reason for their victory. But this fact was not an accident. The Whites and Reds did not draw cards at random for territory. In this logistically ‘central’ and majority working-class area of Russia, the Bolsheviks received large majority votes not only in the Soviet but in the Constituent Assembly elections.

Their support among the working class was very strong, and remained very strong through incredible hardships. Working from this powerful base, the Soviet regime drew into its orbit large swathes of the farming population along with the national minorities. Hence it was able to build an army which vastly outnumbered that of the Whites.

In 1918-9 the Whites secured base areas and foreign aid, and built large armies. If the Soviet leaders were only adventurers, and if the Red Army was only a mass of conscripts subjected to terror and crude propaganda, Kolchak and Denikin would have steamrolled them. But the Soviets’ internal collapse, on which every White general counted, never took place.

Western historians have approached this war in the footsteps of the interventionists of their own country. Like their grandads, they refer to the Red Army as ‘the Bolsheviks’ as if to fool themselves into thinking that they are only speaking about a crew of cranks. But they often come away with a wary respect for the Soviets:

‘Yet these despised creatures [the ‘Bolsheviks’], these subhumans, who according to the casualty figures were all but annihilated time and again in various sectors – for some unaccountable reason continued to appear in strength. Not only that; they fought back hard, and as time went by they developed an unmistakable military prowess…’ [1]

The interventionists and the Whites had to learn this wary respect too, but the hard way.

There is a perception that the Reds won through violence and propaganda. [2] But the Whites were not shy when it came to violence and, because many of them were military officers, they were much better at it. When the Civil War broke out, the Soviets had only very feeble military and security institutions. Besides, violence often backfired, as in the Don country in early 1919.

They did manage to turn a movement of factory militias into an army – under-supplied, wearing a motley collection of uniforms and with barely a single steel helmet between the five million of them; and leaking deserters like a sieve, especially at harvest time – but nonetheless an army capable of winning this war. 50,000-70,000 women served in it. It had no officers, no ranks – ‘company commander’, for example, was a job title held by a qualified soldier who wore the same uniform as the rank-and-file soldier. Corporal punishment was banned. The army was truly multinational in character: primarily Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian, but also Finnish, Latvian, Chinese, Hungarian, Uzbek… Among them was the Senegalese Kador Ben-Salim, who came to Russia with a travelling circus, joined the Red Army, and later became a Soviet movie star. Education and political discussion were central in this new type of army – and they were sorely needed, since even many commanders had only three years of schooling and didn’t know arithmetic. But ‘by the end of 1920 there were 3,000 Red Army schools, 60 amateur theatres, and libraries with reading rooms in every soldiers’ club.’ [3]

Yes, the Reds were good at inflicting violence – in the sense that they were able to build a cohesive and large military force using democratic and socialist methods.

As for propaganda, the Whites had no qualms about churning out lurid anti-Semitic propaganda posters and forgeries like the ‘Zunder Document’ and the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.’ But the Reds probably had more industrial printing facilities and paper stocks at their disposal. More importantly, they had an appealing political programme which enthused both the artists who created the propaganda and the people who consumed it. This propaganda had the great benefit of usually being positive and sincere.

The Allies put Wrangel in a cannon to shoot him at the Soviets. Like I said, *usually* positive and sincere

So in these limited senses, it was true that violence and propaganda were important.

But crucial to the Red victory were the innate qualities of the working class of the former Russian Empire: their capacity for self-sacrifice; their creative and technical skills; their courage and resourcefulness, for example in organizing a partisan movement in Siberia. Their social skills and political sophistication made a huge difference – they found ways to work with specialists from the former privileged classes, without handing power back to them; ways to neutralize or win over enemies like the Cossacks; ways to fraternize with interventionist troops such as the French and the Germans; ways to make friends of national groups who had been foes, such as the Bashkirs. On top of these innate qualities, they learned quickly and we can see the Red Army growing from a partisan and militia movement to an army with systematic workings. Ideas learned under fire, as Trotsky remarked, are learned for good.

These qualities would not have found expression without the channel provided by the programme and method of the Bolshevik Party. Without the latter leading the Soviets to power in October 1917, this revolutionary energy would have dissipated. But the Bolshevik Party itself would not have existed without a working-class support base and cadre. It was a product of its class.

‘Bolshevik’ prisoners being fed by Allied troops in North Russia

Were the Whites fascist?

The leading cadre of the Whites also showed courage, resourcefulness, endurance, military skill and valour. But by contrast with the Reds, the White movement was anti-democratic and unpopular. The White leaders openly despised the popular masses. Their contempt for ‘politics’ was in fact contempt for the burning demands of the people – silly political questions like land can be settled after the important business of flogging and hanging the revolutionaries.

Their harshness, fury and inclination to violence werr no surprise. They were gestated in the Tsarist military, an institution which was far harsher and more hierarchical than its peers in other European countries.

General Sakharov, a right-hand man of Kolchak, refused to serve in a particular military unit because it was associated with the ‘democratic spirit’ of the Komuch government. [4] Other White leaders challenged one another to duels or even assassinated one another over accusations of pandering to ‘the democracy.’ The White leaders never accepted the Constituent Assembly results, which they dismissed as popular madness and anarchy.

‘[They] aspired to re-establish ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, which meant suppressing ‘anarchy’ and restoring a strong state and the values of the Orthodox Church. What united them emotionally was a passionate detestation of Bolshevism, which they saw as a ‘German-Jewish’ conspiracy […] In White propaganda, the words ‘Jew’ (zhid) and ‘Communist’ were interchangeable. Naturally, they detested class conflict, and they feared and hated the revolutionary masses (that ‘wild beast’ […].’ [5]

The partner of the White officer was the Cossack. The Cossack, in contrast to the officer, was often mobilised by a popular demand for the autonomy of his particular host. Other motivating factors were a fear of the ‘aliens,’ their tenants; the desire of wealthier Cossacks to hold onto power; and the Cossack tradition of military service. The Cossacks were indispensable to the White war effort, and tens of thousands of them stuck out the Civil War to the end. But by mid-1920, Wrangel found that the Don and Kuban Cossacks did not have another rebellion in them. They too had learned certain ideas under fire.

Only episodically, and with disappointing results, did the Whites attempt to mobilize the population at large. In the words of Mawdsley, ‘their social and political programme was not one that bred spontaneous popular support.’

Many White leaders later embraced fascism. Around the time Mussolini marched on Rome, Sakharov claimed with pride that ‘the White movement was in essence the first manifestation of fascism.’ But Mawdsley scorns this claim – because ‘the Whites lacked the mobilization skills and relatively wide social base of the Italian or German radical Right’ [6].

Just to underline that point: the best argument for regarding them as not fascist is simply that they couldn’t mobilise mass support – not that they weren’t reactionary, or that they weren’t violent. To quote The Simpsons (and to paraphrase Mawdsley), they were never popular.

The Whites were a movement of the middle and upper classes which was pulled together over the course of the year 1917. Its origins lay soon after the February Revolution, when Denikin, Kornilov and their milieu reached a firm decision: in the words of Denikin’s memoirs, ‘Military power must be seized.’ The Kornilov Affair was the first attempt. After the October Revolution the same people created the White Armies, to fight the Soviet regime openly. They embarked on a civil war without popular support, in fact consciously ranging themselves against the will of the population. At first (October 1917 to April 1918) they failed miserably, though in the process they caused much destruction and suffering. Their failure (and the initial failures of Dutov, Semyonov etc) was due to the fact that massive numbers of workers and poor peasants mobilised against them whenever they raised their heads. But from Spring 1918, Allied and German help arrived in earnest, the Don Cossacks revolted, and the Civil War proper began.

Comparisons with Spain

Beevor compares the Whites to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War because, like the Republicans, they suffered from internal divisions. [7] But to my mind the White Russians far more closely resemble the camp of Franco. Hitler and Mussolini drew popular support from the middle layers of society. Franco was called a fascist and called himself one, but unlike Hitler or Mussolini he was part of the establishment. The actual fascists (Falange and JONS) were only one component of his coalition. With their alliance of clerical, aristocratic, bourgeois and military elements, the Francoists and the White Russians were remarkably similar.

There are differemces. The Whites presented a ‘democratic’ face to preserve the Allies from embarrassment while Franco, having plentiful aid from fascist countries, had no need to hide. Another contrast is that Francoist terror was systematic, top-down and clearly aimed at extermination [8]. Maybe the Whites killed roughly as many people as Franco did (nobody knows), but in terror as in most things, they were not systematic.

In short, the Whites can be called proto-fascist, but only in the broad sense that the term ‘fascist’ would apply to Franco.

The key difference between the Spanish and the Russian civil wars lies in the position occupied by the professional middle classes (sometimes called the petty bourgeoisie or, in Russian terms, the ‘Intelligentsia’). In Spain, the workers and poor farmers generously permitted the professional middle classes to lead them (to defeat) in an alliance known as the Popular Front. In Russia, assertive workers’ representatives, in the form of the Bolsheviks, did not permit the intelligentsia to assume leadership of the Revolution. So the intelligentsia fled to the White camp where they strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage before they were overthrown by forces to their right.

If the Bolsheviks had gone into coalition with the Mensheviks and Right SRs on the terms demanded of them in coalition talks in November 1917, I think it’s likely the Russian ‘Pan-Socialist Coalition’ would have met the same fate as the Spanish Popular Front.

Intervention

The ugly things the early Soviet regime did (of which, more in Part 2) could only have happened in the context created by the military onslaught of the old ruling classes backed by the whole ‘civilised’ world. Nye Bevan, architect of Britain’s National Health Service, believed that the later development of Stalinism could be traced back in large part to the brutality inflicted on the early Soviet Union by the Allies:

I remember so well what happened when the Russian revolution occurred. I remember the miners, when they heard that the Czarist tyranny had been overthrown, rushing to meet each other in the streets with tears streaming down their cheeks, shaking hands and saying: ‘At last it has happened.’ Let us remember in 1951 that the revolution of 1917 came to the working class of Great Britain, not as social disaster, but as one of the most emancipating events in the history of mankind. Let us also remember that the Soviet revolution would not have been so distorted, would not have ended in a tyranny, would not have resulted in a dictatorship, would not now be threatening the peace of mankind, had it not been for the behaviour of Churchill, and the Tories at that time. [9]

‘At last it has happened’: Bevan, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union

To this day, writers in the English-speaking world write of their countries’ invasion of Soviet Russia as a silly farce. They dismiss the idea that intervention was a serious matter at all. The whole thing, we are assured, was blown out of proportion by Soviet historians.

But all I hear is, ‘Why are the Russians so angry about it? We only invaded them a little bit.’

Allied intervention was desperately sought and deeply appreciated by the Whites. When a White leader recieved the blessing of world empires and regional powers, it was a great boost to his prestige. But that was only a part of the package. It also included supplies – food, bedding, clothes, fuel – and vast quantities of weapons, enough to arm and equip every White soldier several times over (see the graphic below). The White leader had stable, well-trained Allied forces garrisoning his rear and guarding his railways. He had advisers at his side. He had financial credits. He had, at his back, the most powerful navies in the world waiting to evacuate him, his soldiers and their wives and children, just in case he still somehow managed to lose. The Whites had all that and the Reds had none of it.

And they tell us foreign intervention was a myth…

The interventionists also outright invaded. The Japanese government had 70,000 troops in Siberia at one point, engaged in full-scale war with Soviet partisans. Germany occupied a vast territory with a vast army in 1918. The French and Greeks sent in a force of 65,000 in 1919. The Czechoslovak Legion numbered around 50,000. All that is to say nothing of Poland in 1920. Other interventionists sent in troops by the thousand and not by multiple tens of thousands. However, the prospect of a full-scale Allied invasion no doubt helped encourage many young lads to enlist in the Whites who might otherwise have stayed home. The French invasion of Ukraine in 1919 was inhibited not by the qualms of the French government but by the mutiny of the French soldiers and sailors.

In North Russia, the interventionists had around 15,000 soldiers by summer 1918 – British, US, French, Italian, Serbs, Czechs and Poles. The local Whites could only muster 5 infantry companies, one cavalry squadron and one battery. [10] On this front it was not a question of intervention in war – the Allies were the war. Here more than elsewhere they fought directly with Soviet forces.

More galling still is the accusation that the Soviet regime was responsible for all deaths by famine and disease in these terrible years. [11] The country was hungry for years before the Revolution, ever since the economic demands of the First World War upset the delicate food supply system. The Tsarist army engaged in forced requisitioning. The German government looted Ukraine of foodstuffs. The Allies blockaded Russia, a repeat of a policy of artificial famine that was employed against the German people in the First World War. All the interventionists knew that in supporting the Whites they were disrupting exchange and production in an already half-starving country. When famine struck in 1921-2, no foreign government contributed to famine relief. The non-government American Relief Administration saved countless lives before future president Hoover withdrew it for political reasons. [12]

A Soviet poster giving public health advice to the population about the cholera epidemic

Trudell writes that ‘Foreign intervention also played a devastating role in the containment of the Revolution within Russia’s borders.’ Quoting Chamberlin, she adds that if Allied aid had ceased in November 1918, ‘the Russian civil war would almost certainly have ended much more quickly in a decisive victory of the Soviets. There a triumphant revolutionary Russia would have faced a Europe that was fairly quivering with social unrest and upheaval.’

The British leaders knew that the Soviet regime was popular and were well aware of the bigotry and corruption of the White forces. According to a July 1919 British government memo, ‘No terrorism, not even long suffering acquiescence, but something approaching enthusiasm’ could explain how the Soviet regime had held onto power. ‘We must admit then that the present Russian government is accepted by the bulk of the Russian people.’ [13] But the British government did not cease supporting the Whites until almost a year later.

Readers may find the vacillations of the Allies confusing. The explanation is this: there was a logic to supporting the Whites even if their defeat was certain; the war would weaken and contain the Soviet Union. In order to contain revolution, the Allied leaders prolonged this war by at least two years, condemning countless innocent people to death by starvation and epidemics.

‘We workers blamed our hunger on the counterrevolution, not on our regime,’ wrote Eduard Dune. [14] They were right.

My impression of the role of the interventionists is very far from the picture of well-intentioned bumbling that is often presented to us. I’m reminded of the words F Scott Fitzgerald would write a few years later in The Great Gatsby about a bourgeois couple in the United States: ‘They were careless people […] —they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….’

Ironies

The vast numbers of poor and working-class people who supported the Soviet regime were denounced at the time as ignorant, savage, criminal and even animal. The people who were responsible for the First World War called them violent and irrational. But these supposed ‘illiterates’ were fighting for progressive and modern causes: against domination by kings, priests and landlords, against racism and empire, for women’s liberation, for workers’ rights, for the extension of democracy into the workplace. They legalised abortion and same-sex relationships many decades ahead of other countries.

Another irony: they entered upon this struggle with the perspective that they only had to hold out until other revolutions in more developed countries would come to their aid. But as things turned out, they had to fight not only their own ruling class, but the whole world. The early years of the new regime were spent in battle: fighting to stave off the bloody fate that had met the Paris Commune and the Finnish Soviet; fighting against hunger and disease; ultimately fighting, due to these great pressures, against the threat of social collapse and political and moral degeneration.

Soviet victory in the Civil War was remarkable. ‘It was amazing, given the massive forces – both internal, and those of Allied intervention ranged against them – that the Soviets managed to ride out such compressed storms of horror and emerge victorious.’ [15]

The regime that emerged, limping and traumatized, from the horror of the war fell far short of what the masses had set out to fight for in 1917. But this, at least, was neither ironic nor remarkable. The Soviet leaders had predicted that far worse would come to pass if the revolution did not spread westward. It was also the entirely predictable result of the devastation caused by the war. Speak with caution about the results of this ‘socialist experiment’ – the lab was set on fire by arsonists.

Next week we will look further into these issues. Stay tuned for Part Two of this conclusion.

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[1] Jackson, At War With the Bolsheviks, p 235

[2] See the introduction to Engelstein, Russia in Flames

[3] Trudell, Megan, The Russian Civil War: A Marxist Analysis

[4] Smele 117

[5] Smith, S. A.. Russia in Revolution, p. 171

[6] Mawdsley, 389

[7] Beevor, Russia, ‘Conclusion: The Devil’s Apprentice’

[8] See Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust

[9] Quoted in Nye Davies, ‘At Last it has happened’: Bevan the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.’ Published on 31 Oct 2017 by Cardiff University: https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/thinking-wales

[10] Khvostov, White Armies, p 8

[11] Again, see Beevor, Russia, ‘Conclusion: The Devil’s Apprentice’ – but really this accusation, implicit and explicit, is everywhere.

[12] Trudell

[13] Ibid

[14] Dune, p 123

[15] Bainton, Roy. A brief history of 917, Russia’s year of Revolution. Robinson 2005, p 206

Appendix: The Russian Civil War in popular memory (Premium)

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Appendix: When did the Civil War end?

It is May 1920, and the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov is on the deck of the destroyer Karl Liebkencht, watching as 1,500 Red sailors land on the coast of Iran. Black plumes of shellfire erupt on the shore as the guns of the Red fleet bombard the British Empire’s elite Ghurka soldiers.

It is 1921, and the ‘mad Baron’ Ungern-Sternberg, having seized Mongolia’s capital and received the blessing of its priest-king, is setting out for war against the Soviet regime.

It is 1922, and the last White Guard regime still clings to power in Vladivostok in the Far East. General Horvath has given up all pretenses and pretensions at democracy, and rules over an openly monarchist regime, backed by the Japanese military.

It is 1923, and the last White Army, now abandoned by the Japanese, still clings to existence in remote and barely-habitable reaches of the Pacific coast.

It is 1926, and the Red Army is once again fighting the Basmachi in Central Asia.

The conclusions of the Russian Civil War were even messier and more manifold than its beginnings. As with the question of when it started, it’s helpful to think of two civil wars – a broad period of violence in the Tsarist Empire and its successor states lasting from 1916 to 1926 or from 1917 to 1923, and a narrow and more defined struggle between the Red Army and the White movement initiated by Generals Kornilov and Alexeev.

Revolution Under Siege never set out to be a comprehensive history of the ‘broad’ Russian Civil War, but I’m glad I paused the main story to write four or five posts about Central Asia and the Basmachi. This was a way of paying indirect homage to all the theatres of war which my main narrative has been obliged to neglect, such as North Russia, the partisan war in Siberia, the Caucasus and the Baltic States. To this we must now add the Russian Far East and Mongolia, which were very significant after 1920.

Rather than write another three or four seasons of Revolution Under Siege dealing with a period when the Revolution was, in fact, no longer under siege, I’m going to sum up as much of it as I can in one post. These are all things I’d write whole episodes about, if I had infinite time and if the scope of this project were just a few degrees wider.

North Russia

In the Arctic Circle Red forces battled with British and American troops directly from 1918 through to 1920. This was a small and slow war fought in extremely harsh conditions. Each side proved capable of landing heavy blows on the other, but by 1920 the Reds had the upper hand on the frozen battlefields and the tide of political opinion in the Allied nations was turning decisively against the Russian adventure. The Allies pulled out at last, and the Reds retook Murmansk and Archangel’sk in early 1920.

Coat of arms of the Far Eastern Republic. Not the corn, anchor and tool representing peasants, fishers and workers.

Siberia & the Far East

The Reds led an uprising in Vladivostok in January 1920 – a time when the ground was splitting under the feet of Kolchak’s regime. But this uprising was put down by the Cossacks of Semyonov, assisted by the Japanese military. Its leaders, including the noble-born Bolshevik Sergey Lazo, disappeared to an unknown fate.

A few months later the Reds took Irkutsk and set up the Far Eastern Republic in coalition with Mensheviks and SRs. The Far Eastern Republic had its own Red Army and its own emblem. For the next few years it made slow and steady advances against Semyonov’s Trans-Baikal fiefdom and finally, after the Japanese withdrawal, took Vladivostok from General Horvath in 1922. The last major city in the hands of the Whites was now in Red hands.

Territory of the Far Eastern Republic at its height

Mongolia

The Russian Civil War spilled over organically into Mongolia: White Russians fled there, some to settle peacefully, others to raid over the border.

When Baron Ungern moved his forces from the Trans-Baikal into Mongolia, terror seized the Chinese forces occupying the country. According to the White soldier Dmitri Alioshin, the Chinese set about slaughtering every White Russian they could find. The White Russians, who despised the Chinese with intense racism, responded in kind. The White Russians were mostly skeptical of the unhinged Baron and would have avoided him in the normal course of events, but they were driven into his arms by the actions of the Chinese military.

Ungern and his forces endured the steppe winter of 1920-21, and in February they marched on the Mongolian capital city (known variously as Urga, Ikh Khuree, Ulan Baatar). They seized it from superior numbers of Chinese soldiers and began several days of intense slaughter and looting.

Meanwhile the Reds had made an alliance with Sukhbaatar and Chaibalsan, two more left-wing Mongolian leaders who opposed Ungern. A joint Soviet and Red Mongolian army crossed the border. Ungern hastened to meet it. His luck ran out. After defeats, he fled with small numbers, who turned against him and abandoned him in the wild. A Soviet Mongolia was established, and Ungern was captured, tried and executed in Russia.

The Caucasus and Persia

Victory in South Russia spilled over into a string of major gains in the Caucasus. In Azerbaijan the local communists overthrew the Musavatists, the nationalist forces supported first by Turkey and then by Britain. Neighbouring Armenia also contained many pro-Soviet elements and like Azerbaijan it was soon its own Soviet Republic. So secure were the Caucasus that Baku, which had been in enemy hands mere months before, was chosen as the venue for the September 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East.

Meanwhile the Whites had withdrawn their Caspian Fleet, consisting of 17 ships along with 50 guns, to the British-occupied port of Enzeli in Persia (Iran). Raskolnikov led a Red striking force on a surprise raid, took and held the town for days, and returned the ships, munitions and materiel to Soviet Azerbaijan and Soviet Russia. In Persia itself, the Russian Revolution produced its shockwaves in the form of popular guerrilla leaders. The Enzeli raid, meanwhile, embarrassed the British so badly the Persian parliament rejected a proposed treaty that would have utterly subordinated the country to London.

The Daghestanis had troubled Denikin’s rear at a key moment. In 1920 some Daghestanis revolted against the Soviet power, though as many remained neutral and as many again were pro-Soviet. The Red Army suffered around 5,000 fatalities in tough battles over mountains, defiles and villages perched over sheer cliffs.

Georgia did not come into the Soviet orbit until 1923. The manner in which this was achieved was extremely controversial. It was the subject of Lenin’s final political struggle before his death. Though in extremely poor health, he waged a campaign against Stalin and his ally Ordzhonikidze. The latter pair were guilty of the premature entry of the Red Army into a Georgia that was not quite ready to accept it, and for the heavy-handed manner in which they dealt with the Georgian communists.

Makhno

Makhno and his Anarchist Black Army had been making open warfare against the Soviet power. But during the campaign against Wrangel the Anarchists agreed to a truce, sent some forces to help deal with Wrangel and, more importantly, stopped raiding in the rear of the Red Army.

Even taking into account how deep the hostility was between the Red Army and the Black, and how shallow their cooperation was, there’s something shocking about the Michael Corleone-like speed and ruthlessness with which the Anarchists were dealt as soon as Wrangel was out of the way. The commander of the Anarchist detachment which had fought in Crimea was summoned to Red Army HQ, but it appears it was a trap. He didn’t make it out alive.

After this, Makhno’s fortunes spiraled. He ended up with a couple of dozen companions fleeing across the Romanian border with the Red Cavalry hot on his heels. A humble life as an exile in Paris awaited him.

Internal Revolts

We have traced the fronts of the Civil War clockwise from Murmansk to the Black Sea. Now we return to the heart of European Russia. In late 1920 and into 1921, Tambov Province saw a rural revolt against Soviet power which far exceeded any peasant unrest during the Civil War. Soviet officials and their families were slaughtered out by furious insurgents, who organized into an army along regular lines.

Early 1921 saw a general strike of workers in Petrograd demanding better rations and fewer restrictions on political rights and economic activity. After the end of the strike, in March, the Kronstadt sailors revolted with a mix of similar demands and more far-reaching demands. Suppressing the Tambov and Kronstadt Revolts required serious military operations.

Smele says ‘it has been estimated that’ 2000 sailors were executed after the suppression of the revolt. If so, the scale of the reprisal was truly shocking. On the other hand Marcus Hesse, drawing on Paul Avrich, paints a different picture:

Of those who didn’t flee, several hundred were sentenced to death, although most were then amnestied. Others were imprisoned in camps intended for prisoners of war — some later ended up in the Solovetsky prison, which opened in June 1923 and later became part of the notorious ‘GULAG’. Several years later they were released under a general amnesty.

Leftists have been arguing about Kronstadt for a hundred years, and rather than wade in here I will just make one observation. Each year of the Civil War began, for the Soviets, with a promise of peace that was soon dashed. Spring would invariably bring with it new White and interventionist offensives. The familiar cycles of revolt and foreign intervention would repeat themselves with what must have become a dreadful and crushing sense of inevitability. The Kronstadt Revolt took place only a few months after the defeat of Wrangel, and precisely on the cusp of the Spring campaigning season. Sure, the Kronstadt sailors were raising democratic demands; the Don Cossacks and Right SRs, too, had raised democratic demands but had ended up spilling their blood for the White militarists. With the benefit of hindsight we know that the war, in European Russia at least, was over. The Communists did not have that benefit. We can hardly understand Kronstadt without an appreciation of the fear they had, a fear based on lessons learned in blood, of another year of war.

These revolts would not have taken place during the struggle against the White Armies, because neither the Tambov peasants nor the Kronstadters wanted to see a return of the landlords. But once Wrangel was defeated, the floodgates were opened for many serious grievances to find expression in armed revolt. The horrific conditions endured by both civilians and military during the Civil War meant there was widespread anger. Much of this was directed at the Soviet power and the Communist Party, as they were the regulators and arbiters in this austere armed camp. From both the factories and the naval base of Kronstadt, the leading elements from 1917 were absent: dead like Markin at Kazan, commanding fleets like Raskolnikov, or serving in the state apparatus.

The Kronstadt Revolt in particular, which took place during the Party Congress, served as a warning to the Soviet government that the Spartan wartime regime had been maintained for far too long, and must be dismantled as a matter of urgency.

So, when did the Civil War end? One answer would be 1922, with the conquest of Vladivostok from the Whites. Another would be 1926, with the defeat of the Basmachi. Antony Beevor ends with sailors being shot after the Kronstadt Revolt – a suitably depressing scene for his narrative purposes. But in these three cases we are losing sight of the big picture.

So I’m going to say November 1920.

The former Russian Empire was at war between Spring 1918 (the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the Cossacks) and Autumn 1920 (the treaty with Poland and the defeat of Wrangel). This was an all-out war with profound geopolitical importance, fought between irreconcilable and defined adversaries, with clear criteria for the victory or defeat of each side.

This war was the most important of a complex of armed struggles which engulfed the collapsing Russian Empire in what we could call a ‘Time of Troubles’ lasting from 1916 to 1926 in Central Asia and from 1917 to 1923 in Russia itself. It is the narrow Civil War rather than the broad ‘Time of Troubles’ which has been the focus of Revolution Under Siege. But the two are of course not neatly separable.

29: The Storming of Fortress Crimea (Premium)

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28: The Black Baron

This is Episode 28 of Revolution Under Siege, my series on the Russian Civil War. In this post, we look at the invasion of Ukraine by the ‘Black Baron’ Wrangel.

By the time the Soviets signed a ceasefire with Poland, another serious war had been raging for months in the south of Ukraine: the struggle with the forces of Baron Wrangel.

White Crimea

Wrangel’s Crimea, to which the survivors of Denikin’s army had fled, was a strange place. The only parallel would be Taiwan soon after the Chinese Revolution. Imagine if the top politicians, billionaires and military officers got chased out of the mainland United States and washed up in the hotels and resorts of Hawaii or in Puerto Rico. People today talk about a ‘refugee crisis’ when a few hundred thousand people seek refuge on a continent home to hundreds of millions. Imagine being Crimean – one of fewer than a million – and seeing tens of thousands of Russian counter-revolutionaries and their dependents descending on your little peninsula. To people from that part of the world, Crimea was and is associated with holidays, beaches, cypress trees and nightingales, the mosques and masjids of the Tatar villages.

In 1920 this idyllic holiday destination was a refuge for Don Cossacks still mourning the horses they shot at Novorossisyk; women who had married conservative and strong-willed army officers, only to see them humbled by soldiers’ committees; children cast out of the homes they grew up in; business owners and aristocrats who have nightmares about the sailors and the Cheka; famous ministers under the Tsar; the agents of half-a-dozen foreign powers, selling information; speculators turned refugees turned speculators again; former bloodhounds of the Tsarist secret police who have found a new employer in Wrangel; people who cheered on February but saw October as a kind of apocalypse; people who saw February as an apocalypse; infants of the Civil War who have known crowded billets, refuges and train carriages during headlong typhus-haunted flights; elderly dependents; girlfriends. Between the price of bread and the low pay of a soldier (even of a junior officer) most of these people must have lived in a state of desperation.

The father, husband, or son, the ally, pawn or constituent who stands at the centre of all these figures, whom they all have in common, is the White officer. This character has changed little since we first introduced him back in Episode 2, in spite of ordeals, triumphs, humiliations, allies gained and lost along the way.

Many of the White officers remember the Russo-Japanese War, and most the Great War. Some go back to the very start of the White movement: the Kornilov Affair, imprisonment in Bykhov Monastery, Rostov and the Kuban Ice March; some rode across the seething Ukraine of 1919, drunk and high under wolf talismans.

Some of these individuals crack under the pressure of the war. General Slashchev was fired after the stern Wrangel found him passed out from drugs and alcohol, dressed in a gold-trimmed Turkish robe, surrounded by his collection of birds. [1] But let’s speak of them as a collective. The White officer will fight on to the end, because to accept the egalitarian order promised by communism would be, to his mind, to accept the downfall of civilisation and the obliteration of his personal dignity.

Today’s cover image is a detail from the above, a poster from 1920 whose theme is how the forces of the Revolution in 1917 compare with three years later. Note the slender figure of Wrangel, near bottom right.

Circumstances dictate an offensive

Speaking with journalists, Wrangel outlined a cautious strategy. ‘I don’t make big plans. I think I need to gain time.’ Here in Crimea, he explained, one can live, free of hunger and terror; more will join us, and we will expand gradually at the expense of the Soviet territory [2]. But circumstances dictated a bolder strategy.

First, there was the Polish-Soviet War. The Whites had hardly settled in Crimea when Piłsudski marched into Kyiv. A better opportunity for a breakout would not come along. Immediately they began to make plans for an attack on the mainland.

Second, there was the crowded Crimea and the looming winter. Wrangel’s people would not have enough food to stay alive, let alone provide an instructive contrast to the hungry Soviet territory. The price of food in Crimea rose at least 16-fold between April and October 1920. [3] The Allies might be so kind as to keep them all alive for a while, but now less than ever before could the White officer take foreign aid for granted. Nutrition, never mind strategy, dictated that they must seize the harvests from other parts of Ukraine and Russia.

It was necessary to make a move.

The British government heard of plans for the coming offensive and tried to dissuade Wrangel. They had been through all this before with Denikin and Kolchak. But they could not dissuade Wrangel: in June the ‘Russian Army’ broke out in all directions.

History is being helpful for once: the main frontline of that war is very similar to one of the main frontlines in today’s war in Ukraine, following the course of the Dnipro River. Like Putin’s in 2022, Wrangel’s forces burst out of Crimea in April 1920 and seized the neighbouring chunk of the mainland, an area known as the Northern Tauride. It was the ‘colourful’ units, named after dead White generals like Markov and Kornilov and composed of the most professional, determined and experienced soldiers, which broke out from Crimea to the river Dnipro in just one week. His forces numbered somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000, an imposing number concentrated in such a small area. They advanced westward as far as the Dnipro and east as far as Mariupol (site of a terrible battle in 2022). They also landed forces by sea in the Don and Kuban regions in Russia.

The Allies draw back

Now something unprecedented happened: the British really did cut them off. It turned out there was after all a limit to the number of rifles they were willing to pour into the Soviet Union (That limit was somewhere in the millions, but it did exist). British trade unionists had protested and gone on strike under the slogan ‘Hands off Russia,’ and this was a key part of the context in which the sceptical Prime Minister Lloyd George at last won out over the pro-war Churchill.

The French government, on the other hand, gave massive aid to Wrangel. This mostly arrived from Romania in August and September [4]. Other foreign aid included from Poland and from the Menshevik government in Georgia; Whites who had been interned in those countries were sent to further boost Wrangel’s numbers. But the French took the opportunity to wring heavy economic concessions out of Wrangel, and in the French agenda, Wrangel was only a distraction to help the Polish war effort.

But…

Here are two qualifiers: first, this White Army would not have come into existence, and would not have escaped destruction in the Kuban, without Allied aid. So Wrangel’s regime was a legacy of intervention. Second, if Wrangel were to defeat a few Red Armies, were to take over large parts of Ukraine, were to ignite the Kuban and the Don in revolt again, the British and the French would surely get over their scepticism and part with another few million rifles. It would be 1919 all over again: ‘To Moscow!’

But as it stood, the Whites were on their own – or as close to ‘on their own’ as they had ever been. The British had cut them off, and the French were obviously using them toward limited ends.

The Cossacks draw back

The Allied spigot had waned to a trickle. So had the Cossack spigot.

There was still a large Don Cossack contingent in Wrangel’s ‘Russian Army.’ And there was a White guerrilla army, independent of Wrangel, surviving in the remote parts of the Kuban. Wrangel made strenuous efforts to raise the Don and Kuban in revolt again, through landing his forces in those regions by ship. But the population failed to rise. In the Kuban, the beachhead was surrounded by an amphibious counter-strike by the Red Army.

The Cossacks had seen war, revolution and counter-revolution pass over them so many times they were sick of it. This, along with a ‘more conciliatory Bolshevik policy’ and a ‘more effective occupation force’ meant they would not be enlisted in another adventure this time. [5]

The peasants draw back

With his old friends abandoning him, the White officer had to find new ones. He tried to win over the peasants. Wrangel’s government, as it advanced in June, announced a new land law. The estates of the nobility would be given to the peasants, and the nobility compensated. A more direct hearts-and-minds campaign was waged by General Dragomirov. He would roll into a Crimean village and (instead of embarking on a pogrom as he had done in Kyiv) would set up some tables, roast a few lambs, share out barrels of booze, and raise a toast: ‘the day will soon come when we will hear the bells of Moscow.’ [6]

But the land law was more than a day late and more than a rouble short. The Soviets had already shared out the land – without compensation. So there was no popular upsurge for Wrangel on account of this land law.

A Red poster from 1920. ‘Wrangel is coming to us […] What we earned with blood, we will defend with blood.’

Reds on the back foot

Their list of friends was not getting any longer. But the White officers held the Northern Tauride all through the summer and into autumn despite determined counter-attacks. One time a whole Red Cavalry unit was surrounded and ‘practically wiped out.’ Communists and commissars would have been executed on the spot; [7] others would have been propositioned for recruitment. Thousands of horses would have been captured – to the delight of every Don Cossack who found himself back in the saddle.

Things went badly for the Reds here for a long time. The war with Poland was the biggest and most intense campaign of the Civil War, and large parts of Ukraine were still unfriendly. The Anarchists wished to retake Dnipo, which had served for some weeks in 1919 as the centre of their utopian experiment. Beevor describes how they entered the town in the guise of farmers with carts piled high with hay. Once in the city, they revealed machine-guns under the hay and started blasting. They were driven out of the city, but they left ten captive Red soldiers behind, their guts torn out and grain stuffed into the cavities.

Bridgehead

Despite these setbacks and troubles, the Reds managed to make headway even before the end of the Polish-Soviet War.

Like today, the river Dnipro formed the most important front line. Here the Reds forced a few bridgeheads in the face of stiff White resistance; the high right bank commands the low left bank. Most of the bridgeheads were lost again, but at the town of Khakovka they held out. (Today Kakhovka is in Russian hands. Nova Kakhovka, ten kilometres down the river, was where that dam got blown up in June 2023.) Around Khakovka there was an intense, dug-in battle lasting months. Contrary to Beevor’s claim that Wrangel ‘never presented a serious threat to the Red Army’s rear,’ (p 479) this seems to have been one of the most intense battles Red and White ever fought.

The White general Slashchev (soon to be dismissed after the Turkish robe incident) sent repeated cavalry charges against Red trenches and barbed wire. The Whites also sent in twelve British Mark V tanks. They had a dozen aircraft, 60 artillery pieces and 14 armoured cars. These would seem like pathetic numbers today but this represented a concentration of machine force not hitherto seen in the Civil War [8]. Each tank was named, like a ship, after some general of the White cause or of the old empire.

But soon the Whites could feel keenly the effects of the withdrawal of Allied support. At the height of the battle they were down to twenty artillery shells a day. [9] When Poland and the Soviet Union signed a peace treaty in October, the tide turned instantly against the Whites. Their isolation was now as complete as it had ever been. With the war in the west over, there began a vast concentration of forces against Wrangel.

Meanwhile on October 14^ththe Whites made a great assault on the Khakovka bridgehead. The Reds defended the small town with three lines of trenches and barbed wire. There wasn’t enough time to dig the tank traps, and White scouts spotted where the Reds put their mines, so it looked like the Reds would have no effective counter to the tanks. 6,000 Whites went into the attack against 10,000 dug-in Reds. The Whites were confident in spite of their smaller numbers; they had beaten far worse odds in 1918 and 1919.

But the great White attack ran into a level of Red resistance the Whites had never seen before. The tank ‘Generalissimo Suvorov’ was destroyed by a Red armoured car bearing the name ‘Antichrist.’ Another tank (‘Ataman Ermak’) ended up crashing into a regimental bathhouse, where it kept up fire until a Red cannon blasted six shells into it from a distance of ninety metres. A White horse battery ran into the shock troops of the veterans from Siberia, who showed them an unexpected and terrible weapon: two volleys from flamethrowers, which sent them fleeing in panic, dropping their weapons. [10]

The Red Worker

The White officer has changed little, but he has just discovered that his opponent, the Red worker, is almost unrecognisable. When the Red Guards first came down to the Don Country in pursuit of Kornilov at the start of 1918, they patrolled trains and verbally asked the passengers to give up any concealed weapoms – basically operating on the honour system. In that, there was as much nervousness as humanity. In summer 1918 some Red units would abandon the front line en masse to have a nap. The unit from one town would refuse to share its horses with that from the next.

See them now massing for the attack on the Northern Tauride. They are in long overcoats with red trimming and spiked bogatyrka hats which give them a distinctive appearance redolent of the steppe. They have rifles and are well-accustomed to using them. The lads at Khakovka have 200 rounds each. Amphibious landings, bridgeheads, cavalry assaults, digging and holding trenches, knocking out tanks and aircraft, fighting on when outflanked – none are beyond them.

But first, try to make out the familiar figure of the Red Guard of 1917-18 amid 133,000 armed and uniformed fighters, amid the tachanki, armoured cars and armoured trains, their old allies the Latvian Rifles, and the mass of conscripts from the farming population. Budennyi’s Red Cavalry are here. There is even a detachment of long-haired Anarchists with their black banners; in August, the Soviets and Makhno signed up to a temporary alliance against Wrangel.

This description of the aspect of the Red soldiers in the neighbouring Kuban region probably applies to the Reds in Ukraine:

In every battalion now there were as many Communists as used to be found in a whole regiment. The political section of the division grew into a huge institution with dozens of organizers, agitators, and instructors. We published our own newspaper, we had our own printing press. For illiterates or those who could barely read we organized schools in the regiments with a corps of teachers. [11]

Communists make up 8% of this massed force, probably a higher proportion than you would have seen at Kazan, Perm or Petrograd [12]. Many of the Red Guards of the 1917-18 vintage have been promoted or died in battle or from epidemics. Still there is a politicised core of working-class recruits which holds the army together: many would have joined from the great wave of communist, worker and trade unionist volunteers that signed up around the time of Kazan in the summer of 1918; or those called up to resist Kolchak; or the wave recruited to resist the Polish invasion.

This picture of the Red Army in 1920 is significant for our assessment of the whole war and the whole revolution. Smith and others argue that the Soviet power basically lost its support base in the first half of 1918. I don’t subscribe to this view. Laura Engelstein, who is far more critical of the Reds than I am, would also be sceptical. [13] Historians recognise an implicit popular endorsement of the Polish government in the massive upsurge of volunteers during the Red advance on Warsaw. It’s long past time to see the significance of these successive waves that entered the Red Army. Even this late, after the dissolution of a large part of the working class, the defeat of revolutions abroad, and the emergence of a Soviet state which, under pressure of war, showed increasingly its severe aspects, another wave of genuine enthusiasm was conjured in response to Wrangel. Where did they keep coming from?

And that army was increasingly professional and formidable. The White General Dostovalov would later write that the Reds had developed even since Novorossiysk earlier that year. There were now ‘excellent Russian divisions’ alongside the stereotypical image of Latvians and Chinese. ‘The Kakhovka bridgehead was fortified in an exemplary manner’ with well-built trenches, marked firing distances and consideration given to crossfire. ‘The Red Army grew before our eyes and surpassed us in its growth.’ [14]

Breakthrough

The challenge facing this army was an unusual one. Their aim was not to make Wrangel retreat, but to trap and destroy his army. If Wrangel managed to withdraw to Crimea, it would be extremely difficult to follow him. The peninsula was a natural fortress.

After the defence of Khakovka, the Reds attacked from several directions. From Khakovka the Red Cavalry raced southward to try and cut off retreat to Crimea.

The Red commander Frunze was impressed by the Whites: ‘I am amazed at the enormous energy of the enemy’s resistance.’ [15] Wrangel’s men had tried to hold on until they could grab the harvest and bring it back to Crimea. But a large part of the harvest had to be left in the fields. Wrangel saw the writing on the wall for the Northern Tauride, and given the natural fortress behind him he had an incentive to retreat. At the end of October his fighters fell back to Crimea. 20,000 of them had to surrender to the Reds with 100 artillery pieces and 7 armoured trains. Another 20,000 – the hardcore ‘colourful’ units and the Don Cossacks – made it back to Crimea.

The stage was set for the last struggle between Red and White in European Russia. The Reds had an overwhelming superiority in numbers, but the Whites had a great advantage in geography. The Revolution was no longer a besieged fortress. Now the remnants of the besieging forces were making a stand in a fortress of their own.

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References

[1] Beevor, 479

[2] Beevor,444

[3] Smith, Russia in Revolution, 177

[4] Jackson, 188-9

[5] Mawdsley, 367

[6] Mawdsley, 363; Beevor,444

[7] Smith, 200; Mawdsley, 371

[8] Smele, 169

[9] Beevor, 480

[10] Belash, Evganiy. ‘Defence of the Khakovka Bridgehead,’ https://warspot.ru/4163-oborona-kahovskogo-platsdarma, translated by Google. Written October 14^th 2015. Accessed Feb 29 2024 10pm GMT

[11] Dune, 207-208

[12] Smele, 169

[13] Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames, Oxford University Press, 2017. P 592. Writing of examples of worker protest against the Soviet state she says: ‘The fact that workers resisted the regime acting in their name did not, however, mean that most or all of them wished to overthrow it, that the Bolsheviks had “lost their base.” It was a sign above all that laboring people needed to survive no matter who was in power.’ I have not yet read much of this book but I am interested in delving further into it. I think its author is very much against the Reds but she appears to be more conscientious and basically more serious than, say, Beevor.

[14] Belash

[15] Mawdsley, 377

Dune: Part Two – a bold, brilliant adaptation

(Don’t worry, no spoilers)

We live in an age of excess – excess of consumer products, of information, of outrageous and unbearable things happening in the world. Maybe that’s why Denis Villeneuve and co, in Dune: Part Two, endeavour to overload the brains of the audience with images grotesque and surreal but also solid and tangible, and on occasion, too, to contrast this excess with stark desert simplicity.

I’ve been blogging about adaptations of Dune. What is this movie like as an adaptation of the latter part of Frank Herbert’s Dune?

Most of the major landmarks in the story are there, such as Jessica, then later Paul, taking the water of life; Paul riding a sandworm; Feyd-Rautha in the arena; and the final climactic battle (the family atomics, ‘a great-grandmother of a storm’…) The film interprets these landmark moments with extraordinary technique and inspiration. When Paul mounts a worm for the first time it’s truly scary and intense. I’ve seen this moment on film twice before, but I never got anything close to a sense of how viscerally terrifying it would be to really do this. The Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime is not just ugly, but an unsettling, distressing place to spend 20-30 minutes. The filmmakers have taken the time to show us how the spice drug is taken from a drowned worm, how moisture is sucked out of the dead (and sometimes the still-living!), and what a palanquin mounted on a worm looks like.

The landmarks are there, and rendered with power and intensity. But the routes between them are changed. It’s that type of adaptation.

For example, the first action scene is completely new; mst of Paul and Chani’s dialogue is not from the book (though it fits right in); Paul learns to ride a sandworm a lot earlier; Paul receiving the name ‘Mu’ad Dib’ comes a lot later.

(By the way, a line uttered by Paul when he comes face to face with Baron Vladimir Harkonnen suggests that this adaptation is set in one of the alternate timelines foreseen by Paul in the novel.)

But it goes beyond that. Things are not changed only for the sake of economy or clarity. The biggest changes are in the service of tackling the defects of the book – the stress placed on bloodlines and eugenics; the white saviour enlisting the credulous natives; Chani, the most obliging of this very obliging bunch of natives, consenting to being Don Paul’s goomah while he marries someone else. In the novel the Fremen, for all their pride and ferocity, never call bullshit on the ridiculous aristocratic institutions to which Paul expects them to bow down, or on the Bene Gesserit’s shameless manipulation of faith in the service of their insane agenda.

In the movie, each major character (Stilgar, Jessica, Chani, Gurney) is aligned to an agenda, and exerts an influence on Paul; it’s a laser focus as regards character that pares things right down, renders conflicts more extreme and dramatic.

This film rejects space feudalism and eugenics; look at Chani’s reaction when Gurney Halleck speaks of Paul’s ‘bloodline,’ in the context of her earlier statement about how all Fremen are equal.

If you’ve seen the film, you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t I won’t spoil it. But in this movie the Fremen are not extras who wandered off the set of The Life of Brian ready to fall for the first messiah who climbs up on a soap box. In this movie Chani’s pride and self-respect do not allow her to be such a pushover as she is in the novel (‘History will call us wives’). Paul’s political choices have consequences for him and others. He really hurts Chani.

1984’s Dune ended on a note of triumph; 2000’s TV version is true to the novel in that it mostly leaves you with good feelings. This movie takes the book’s undercurrent of tragedy and drags it to centre stage. The jihad is not a foggy prediction; it’s kicking off right before our eyes. Paul’s victory has come at a terrible cost, personified in a specific character who, in this adaptation, serves as his conscience.

This ending meant that I left the cinema not with a sense of ‘all’s well that ends well’ but with a strange feeling, something rich and contradictory between triumph, relief and sadness.

High praise so far. What do I not like about the adaptation?

I felt that the script relied too heavily on named Harkonnen characters brutally assaulting and killing their underlings; it’s repetitive, ugly and unsubtle.

There was one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind. Every time I saw Jessica after the first hour or so my reaction was, ‘Jesus, is she still pregnant?’ Speaking of Jesus, it’s written that he was three years preaching before his crucifixion. Now imagine a movie where Jesus dethrones Tiberius Caesar just three months after he begins his ministry. Just ask anyone who has ever been involved in a pregnancy or, I assume, in a jihad: a guerrilla war takes longer than a trimester. In the book we cut away for two years, then return to find Paul at last ready to ride a sandworm. Even two years was cutting it fine. How do Paul and Jessica get millions of Fremen eating out of their hands in just six months? The movie works hard to get us away from the white saviour narrative stuff, but this telescoping of the timeline sends us back a large part of the way.

Linked to this, I missed a certain omniscient syringe-wielding toddler who didn’t make the cut.

[Edit, 8 mar 2024.] Here’s another problem. Would it kill Hollywood directors to give speaking roles to actors from the Middle East? What’s the terrible thing that would happen if you gave roles to people from the country you filmed in (or countries where they speak the same language, or practise the same religion)? I didn’t want to raise it at first, because with Dune it’s always going to be a fine line between accusing authors of erasure and accusing them of appropriation. But it occurs to me that just hiring some Arab or Muslim talent is neither erasure nor appropriation. Ridley Scott hired Ghassan Massoud to play Salah ad-Din (Saladin) in Kingdom of Heaven – and the sky did not fall on our heads. Dune borrows so heavily from the Muslim world. It should start paying back.

To see this movie on the big screen was to be put through a succession of intense and unexpected experiences. Sometimes you’ll see a movie that has some great moments, images or scenes, but just isn’t great overall. But in Dune: Part Two, it all adds up to something powerful and brilliant. And as an adaptation, it favours the things I like in Frank Herbert’s novel, and militates against the things I find embarrassing. In particular it leans hard into the tragedy and dread that make the ending of the novel Dune so different.

Screen Adaptations of Dune

The new Dune is phenomenal. Two-plus years ago Dune: Part One got me out to the cinema for the first time since Covid and it was exhilerating. Part Two is reported to be even better. But Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune has been adapted for the screen before, more than once. I have seen all these adaptations, because I have a strange fascination with Dune which is part nostalgia because I first read it aged 14, part a mature realisation that the things we enjoy don’t have to coincide with the things we believe in, and part, no doubt, reasons that could be best explained by Freud (sandworms), Marx (family retainers) and Edward Said (white saviour complex).

Freudian beasts, their hour come round at last, slouching toward Arrakeen. From the 2000 TV version, dir. John Harrison.

Enough deprecation. I also like this story because it’s exciting, intelligent and haunting. The author takes politics, economics and ecology seriously while telling a great story. How well has that translated to the screen?

This review will take a look at David Lynch’s 1984 movie, the Sci Fi Channel’s 2000 miniseries, and Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of the first half of the novel.

Villeneuve is talking about adapting the Dune sequels. In a bit of a sequel to this post, we will look at the 2003 adaptation of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

Three different versions of the ornithopter from, top to bottom, 1984, 2000 and 2021.

Harkonnen Horror Picture Show

God created 1984’s Dune to train the faithful. For every good thing I can say about it, there’s a bad thing too, and vice versa.

To begin with, something bothers me about the interiors. The Atreides live in surroundings of Victorian frumpiness, gaudy but flat, like the decor in Boris Johnson’s house; the Harkonnens in a green-lit space slaughterhouse. For all the implicit homophobia in the way the Baron is portrayed, something about the campiness of the whole set-up makes me think the whole evil cabal might jump out of their chairs and start singing ‘Time Warp’ at any moment. But other elements of the visual design are brilliant – the guild spice navigator and his cohorts, who prefigure the fascinating visual excess of Warhammer 40,000; the tonsured Bene Gesserit; the faceless rubber menace of the Harkonnen troops.

The spaceships look cool; but the visual sequence in which the guild navigator bends time is slow, unclear and not necessary.

I like the weirding modules. These are invented out of whole cloth for the movie: in short the Atreides have a special weapon that can kill with the utterance of a sharp syllable. This idea fits pretty well in the world of Dune and helps the story along. For example, it explains what’s so special about Paul from the point of view of the Fremen: he brings a powerful new weapon to the table. But the shields, personal force-fields used by combatants in the universe of Dune, look silly.

Top to bottom: Kenneth McMillan, Ian McNiece, and Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Top to bottom, the colour pallettes of a 1980s movie, a TV show from 2000 and a 2020s movie

The movie is rushed and incoherent. It might have gotten away with telling such a huge story in just over two hours, but it goes out of its way to be confusing and to trip us up on irrelevant things. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who hasn’t read the books being able to follow what’s going on. But the final half-hour strides along with a formidable momentum and plenty of cool imagery.

At the very end of the movie it suddenly rains on Arrakis – a development that makes no sense in the logic of the world, but which is absolute magic on a simple storytelling and thematic level. I can see why they couldn’t resist.

It’s a movie I could talk about, back and forth, is it good or is it bad, for a long time.

The guild spice navigator, from the 1984 Dune, dir David Lynch

A very delicate time

The opening of 1984 Dune is problematic in ways that are thrown into sharp relief by the quality of the 2021 Dune’s opening. In 1984 Dune, we begin with Princess Irulan, a very formal narrator who stares straight into the camera and explains things, followed by a scene in the imperial throne room. In 2021 Dune we begin with Chani narrating over a striking visual sequence.

The 2021 approach is more democratic and materialist, centring the indigenous Fremen and the key resource they control rather than the galactic aristocracy. But it is also much better from a storytelling point of view: it is rooted in real and tangible things, while narrators and the high politics of throne rooms are distant and abstract. Chani is narrating but also participating in a sequence that conveys visually the importance of the spice, the oppression of the Fremen by the Harkonnen, and the transfer of power from the Harkonnens to another noble house.

The guild spice navigator in the 1984 Dune is a top-tier movie monster. In the books we don’t see him until Dune Messiah, but here he makes his grand entrance in the opening sequence. Unfortunately that is a big problem. Although he is cool, he is one of several big things that we don’t need to know about this universe right away, or at all. But the movie goes out of its way to foreground him.

From the 2021 Dune, dir Denis Villeneuve. Murky.

Comedians of Dune

The Harkonnen scenes in the 1984 Dune leave me with a vague impression of grotesque-looking people bellowing and jabbering monstrous things at one another, punctuated with maniacal cackling. The 2021 Dune is a bit humourless by comparison. There is an early moment in which Paul and Duncan Idaho share a chuckle. But that is an oasis in a desert of dourness.

There is, to be fair, one other joke in the movie:

‘Smile, Gurney,’ says Duke Leto.

Scowling, Gurney replies: ‘I am smiling.’

Someone has decided to make Gurney ‘the grumpy one.’ It’s a good joke, delivered well by the actors. Is the movie taking a dig at its own serious tone? Or is it opening itself up to the retort: ‘Which grumpy one?’

Still, the 2021 Dune is better in almost every way. The storytelling and worldbuilding are far more skilful, conscious, economical; the screenwriters treat words as the Fremen treat water. The visuals play with light and shade, convey weight, grit, thirst, scale. It does not lack that essential quality: weirdness, accident, quirkiness (Who thought of giving the Atreides bagpipes? Give them a medal) but it doesn’t allow that element, either, to get in the way of the story.

In any adaptation, fidelity to the original is not crucial for me. Things have to change in the move from one medium to another. A change for the better, or a change necessary for the medium, justifies itself. But for what it’s worth, the 2021 Dune is much more faithful to the original. Both other adaptations resort to arming their extras with projectile firearms. But in the book and the 2021 version, shields have rendered firearms obsolete, and combat is primarily a hand-to-hand affair.

Budgets of Dune

An even smaller point against the 2021 Dune is its portrayal of the city of Arrakeen. In a movie that cost $165 million to make, this key location appears to be nothing more than a scale model, entirely devoid of human life. The 2000 TV adaptation, working with a budget of $20 million, manages to convey a lively and bustling place. (In case you’re wondering, the 1984 Dune cost about $40 million.)

The same moment in three different versions: fleeing by ornithopter as a sandworm eats a spice factory. Top to bottom, 1984, 2000 and 2021.

Now we come to the most obscure adaptation, Frank Herbert’s Dune, a three-part miniseries for the Sci Fi Channel written and directed by John Harrison.

(It was one of three very fine miniseries released by the Sci Fi Channel around that time, along with Steven Spielberg’s UFO epic Taken and Battlestar Galactica. The latter ended up running to the proverbial six seasons. It was an underappreciated moment in the history of ‘prestige TV’.)

I’ll level with you up front: Frank Herbert’s Dune is not visually spectacular – the CGI is dated and some of the costumes look tacky.

But the actors are impressive. It is long not because it is bloated, but because it has made a conscious decision to tell the story more fully and faithfully, without unseemly haste. Everything about this adaptation is confident and assured, as if having a smaller budget gave it much more freedom.

And about that CGI: on a technical level, it would not pass muster today. (Though nostalgia or irony might induce people to deliberately copy this style in the future – stranger things have happened). The images are well-composed and are shot and edited in such a way that, interspersed with live-action footage, they tell a compelling and comprehensible story. A lot of today’s filmmakers could learn a lot from how the CGI is used here, how John Harrison does so much with relatively little. The result is that a CGI-heavy action scene, such as when the spice factory is eaten by a worm, is a genuinely tense experience.

In a fantastic scene, the ‘Beast Rabban’ gets a personal comeuppance he never gets in the novel when he is killed by a mob in the streets of Arrakeen. I guess budget dictates that some additional scenes must happen in this set, to justify the expense of building it; but budgetary needs can coincide with storytelling needs. It is satisfying to see this showdown happen in this familiar place. In the novel, by contrast, we are told in the most perfunctory Shakespearian way that ‘Rabban, too, is dead’ – offscreen somewhere.

I don’t want to over-praise something that, after all, will have dated poorly, especially measured against the new big-budget spectacle. But here’s one last piece of praise: Frank Herbert’s Dune is the only adaptation to leave in the crucial banquet scene (into which it inserts the Princess Irulan and a bodyguard of Sardaukar. It’s important later that we know who these people are, so it makes sense to feature them here).

It was shot in Czechia, and you can decide for yourself whether that (a) results in lamentable whitewashing of the Middle Eastern elements or (b) to your great relief, distances the adaptation from the wild orientalism of the novel.

Paul in stillsuit watches a sandworm’s back cresting the sand. From the 2000 version.

Recommendations of Dune

If you want a spectacular modern science fiction epic, well-conceived and well-executed, with current stars and big budget, you should watch the Denis Villeneuve Dune.

If, like me, you are really into Dune and also interested in the process of storytelling and adaptation, these versions are all deeply intriguing.

If, like me, you are interested in things that are good but also kind of bad, you should watch David Lynch’s Dune. The highs and lows are equally bold and striking.

If you liked the 2021 Dune and want to know more, but aren’t much of a reader or can’t get into the books, the 2000 miniseries is a good place to go to delve deeper into the story. It would be a good option for someone who prefers the pacing and serial form of TV shows. It also has the great advantage that it has a direct sequel to introduce you to the later books in the series.

Next week I’ll talk about that sequel: the novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, along with the TV miniseries Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (2003). Stay tuned for that if you want to hear about how a low-budget TV adaptation can be better than the source material. Until then, enjoy Dune: Part Two.

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How Dune gets away with it

‘AI’ clogs the internet with meaningless crap

This is a post about how the internet is getting worse. It’s about so-called ‘AI’, chatbots and plagiarism, and how they are churning out utterly useless rubbish for the sole purpose of getting your eyes onto their ads and their cookies onto your device.

Today it emerged that a local authority in the middle of Ireland was cheated out of half a million euros. Here is a report from the Irish Independent, published earlier today, reporting on the revelations of fraud.

I saw the Irish Independent article less than an hour after it was published. Less than an hour later, a website called ‘BNN, The People’s Network’ had an article up on the same topic. I will not link to this article, because if you go there you will have to spend 3-5 minutes manually opting out of various ‘legitimate interest’ cookie options.

The sub-heading invites us to ‘Explore the high-stakes drama at Westmeath County Council.’ The article begins: ‘In the heart of Ireland, a story unfolds that reads more like a thriller novel than a report from the municipal offices.’

But what follows is neither thrilling nor dramatic. We don’t explore or discover anything. There is no story. It is the exact same items of information that are in the Irish Independent article, but strewn around and hidden in ridiculous overwritten paragraphs:

‘The digital age brings with it incredible opportunities, but also unfathomable risks. The road to recovery for Westmeath County Council will be paved with lessons learned the hard way. It’s a testament to the resilience of the community and the individuals determined to restore what was lost […] While the investigation continues, and the council rebuilds, the story […] underscores the importance of vigilance, transparency, and the unbreakable spirit of community in the face of adversity.’

You’d think Westmeath had been struck by a terrorist or a decent-sized meteor.

There is nothing in the ‘People’s Network’ article that is not in the Independent article – except for one thing (or, the same thing repeated again and again, because everything is said at least three times): references to cybersecurity. No public statement has made any reference to cyber crime, or indicated that this was digital fraud.

At first I thought this was written by a human, content-mill crap, a step above plagiarism. But pretty soon I figured it was a chatbot.

How could I tell it was a bot?

1: Plagiarism. It was obvious to me because I’d just read the Indo article: there was nothing new here. Someone took the Indo article and fed it into a programme, which spat out this.

2: No sense of proportion. This thing was composed by an entity that has no inkling of what Westmeath is or what fraud is or what a euro is. It’s a trained predictive typing trick that arranges words in a plausible order. ‘The Chief Executive of Westmeath County Council is poised to make an official statement, a move that many await with bated breath.’ I live in Westmeath, and no, my breath is not bated.

3: Good grammar, terrible prose. I like to believe that a human, even the worst hack, would get nauseous writing such a cascade of clichés (‘reads more like a thriller’…’at the center of a high-stakes drama’…’a cornerstone of its relationship’…’this incident is a wake-up call’…’it serves as a poignant reminder’… ‘it’s a stark reminder of’…’underscores the importance of’…’underscores the critical need for’… A writer who takes some else’s writing and, within two hours, has it cannibalised and regurgitated, might be expected to make some mistakes on the spelling and grammar. If this writer, in addition, writes not in words but in stock phrases, they are likely to have problems with word order and sentence construction. But even that bad human writer would be more interesting. They would not be determined to say that everything is a reminder, a wake-up call or an underscore. They would get bored with the constant resort to bland linking phrases.

4: Repetition and needless elaboration. Most of the word count of the article is totally unnecessary. For example, the chatbot tells us the same thing four times: ‘[1] The details of this fraud have been kept under wraps, not out of secrecy, but to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation. [2] Elected members of the council, though informed, have remained tight-lipped, respecting the delicate nature of the situation. [3] The Mayor of Athlone-Moate Municipal District, when approached for comment, respectfully declined, citing the active probe into the matter. […] [4] As the Gardaí delve deeper into the investigation, there’s a palpable tension between wanting to know more and the need to maintain a veil of confidentiality for the sake of justice.’

5: Obvious mistakes. The bot somehow got the wrong end of the stick. For some reason it thought this was a story about cyber crime.

6: Blandness. The story is scattered with phrases like ‘a breach of trust’ and words like ‘shockwaves’ that suggest the author is pretty excited, and that you should be too. But there is no criticism of anyone. ‘The council’s response, swift and thorough, reflects a commitment to accountability and a resolve to strengthen its defenses against future threats.’ A human would either stick to the facts (the Indo reporter presents all the information concisely) or present an opinion. This chatbot gives the impression that it has an opinion, but it’s the most boring opinion you could possibly imagine: the moral of the story is ‘fraud is bad.’ There is no meaning behind this. No feelings or ideas animate these words.

This story of content mills and chatbots is as a stark reminder of, serves as a poignant reminder of, underscores the importance of, and is a wake-up call about the attention economy and how the profit motive is spreading rot throughout the internet. I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t actually kind of fun to play spot the bot. But the article you have just read (which, I hope you agree, reads more like a thriller than a blog post) will age poorly, because I predict that soon most of us will be dismally accustomed to chatbot-generated meaningless content, to having to navigate this crap in order to use the internet.

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Tradition ain’t what it used to be

Vinculum in Vita, my brothers

The social media algorithms, in their infinite wisdom, have been pushing posts from ‘trad’ groups at me lately. Where I come from, a trad group means fiddles and bodhráns in the corner of a firelit pub. But on the internet, various pages with names like Trad West have hijacked the word as short for something vague called ‘traditionalism.’

One of their slogans is ‘Reject Modernity – Embrace Tradition.’ But these page’s authors don’t seem to have any clear idea of what they mean by ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition.’

Tradition is a moving target. Sometimes it’s ancient Rome, sometimes the Renaissance, sometimes the 18th Century, sometimes the Victorian period, sometimes the mid-20th century. Now and then it is even the 2000s. If you think you are beginning to grasp what they mean by ‘tradition,’ suddenly they drop a phrase like ‘Men used to hunt mammoths,’ and you realise that ‘tradition’ is also supposed to include the Stone Age.

Might it be that ‘tradition’ is the sum of all the positive contributions of previous generations? But that’s without substance. That’s just ‘tradition is stuff I like from the past, but also from now, and not the stuff I don’t like from the past. Or from now.’ It can’t be that shallow and stupid, can it? They must have thought it through a bit better than that.

Modernity is just as hard to pin down. I have gathered that it is a phenomenon which includes, but is not limited to, vaping, pornography and photos of ugly mid-century buildings.

Modernity is Enlightenment ideas. But Tradition is Enlightenment architecture.

Modernity is buildings from the middle of the 20th century. But Tradition is men wearing suits in the middle of the 20th century.

Modernity and tradition, for these people, are not actual definable historical phenomena. They are like the Byzantium imagined by WB Yeats. They are a vibe. They are playdough objects that live entirely in the imagination

Buildings

A lot of the posts are about buildings. My favourite one was a post which compared a Victorian painting of Ancient Rome with a photograph of a run-down tower block in a modern city. Buildings used to look like this, and now they look like this! Do they really believe that every person in the whole Roman Empire lived in a palace or a temple? Ancient Rome had squalid tower blocks – they were called insulae (I learned that when I was 12, ffs).

There’s a lack of self-awareness in the choice of images. The admins assume we agree that certain types of buildings were just objectively beautiful. They assume we, like them, get all sweaty and excited at the sight of a couple of doric columns and a cupola. Because liking a particular type of building means you are a more virtuous and more cultured person.

Anatomy of a post

The same basic post, found by a quick Google Search

Let’s take a moment to look at one particular building-related post. It’s a colour photograph of a large thatched building. The caption claims that this is a ‘literal peasant’s house’ from 1890s Germany. It is contrasted with an image of miserable commuters on a subway. The implication is that German peasants back in traditional times (whenever they were) had it better than modern people.

There are so many things wrong with this, it’s easiest to respond in bullet points.

The 1890s were known as the fin-de-siécle, famously a time when a lot of people were anxious about modernity, worried that civilisation and technological advance were leading to ‘decadence.’ The 1890s were modern.
The Industrial Revolution had long since taken place by the 1890s. In fact, the Second Industrial Revolution had taken place. There were trains, telegraphs, trams, motor cars, power plants… and, obviously, photography.
And Germany was one of the foremost industrial powers in the world. It had a parliament, a colonial empire and cutting-edge technology and industry.
So, taking the caption at face value, this is not a ‘traditional’ house. It is a house from an advanced capitalist country in modern times.
Peasant classes are extremely heterogeneous. It is to be expected, even if this were the Middle Ages or the classical period (not the heart of modern Europe), that a minority of peasants would have large houses.
That house – how do I put this politely? – it doesn’t exactly correspond to the trad taste in architecture.

I guess they see this photograph and think that most peasants for most of medieval history lived in massive houses. Thanks to traditionalism (which is to say, thanks to god, but also the Romans, and also the men who hunted mammoths).

I hate to break it to you, but that house doesn’t have Wifi. It might not even have an indoor toilet. And you don’t know how to do farming. You have lived in a suburb your entire life and work in an office. You would absolutely hate it if you got dropped into the 1890s, or a neolithic mammoth hunt (apparently those two things belong in the same category).

An intelligent trad might make a legitimate reply along the following lines: ‘I would be ill-equipped to live in, say, Ancient Rome. But that is because modernity has ruined me. That’s why I hate modernity and am trying to get away from it.’

I too am alienated from and critical of today’s capitalist civilisation. But any kernel of sympathy I might have for these guys evaporates whenever they utter anything. They want to move backwards, to a miserable and oppressive past where they imagine they would be top dogs.

To finish up, I want to give the reader a flavour of what it’s like to scroll through these pages, as best I can sum it up with the written word.

That Nordic Chad meme guy puts in an appearance in about 90% of all posts. These trad memesmiths don’t realise there are diminishing returns on this. Nordic Chad has become a sock puppet for whatever the trads want to say.

There’s posts about how women should stay at home and not get jobs, and how your wife should come to live on your farm in financial dependence and isolation. If the Nordic Chad meme guy mistreats his isolated and dependent wife, don’t worry – he will pray to God for forgiveness and improve himself by pretending to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (You know Marcus Aurelius is traditional and based because his name has a lot of ‘us’es in it).

Next, a picture of Nordic Chad explaining traditionalism over the histrionic objections of a crying soy-face pink-haired opponent (A lot of the memes are just drawings of people flying into a rage at the trads, unable to handle how based they are).

Next, a picture with the caption, ‘Why do buildings look like this now? [picture of some tasteless modern building] when they used to look like this?’ [picture of an equally tasteless Victorian building]

Or worse, that meme above, only instead of a tasteless Victorian building, it’s a not-real painting of a fictional building.

Next, an ad for merch. Naturally there’s a store. Because nothing says traditionalism and stoicism like the words ‘Half price while stocks last! Link in bio.’ Glad they have the merch, just in case the isolated family homestead thing falls through. Which, as a historical phenomenon, it did.

I just ran ‘link in bio’ through Google Translate into Latin to see how it would have sounded if Marcus Aurelius had written it at the end of every chapter of Meditations. If you change ‘bio’ to ‘biography’, it actually sounds good: Vinculum in Vita. The trads can have that one for free, as a motto that accurately sums up their whole deal.

Appendix: Defeat in Poland – Stalin’s fault?

Before reading this post, you should read Revolution Under Siege Episode 27: The Devil’s Wake.

Stalin served as chief political commissar for the Soviets’ South-West Front, commanded by Egorov. During the decisive weeks of the war, the Red Army’s commander-in-chief Kamenev ordered Egorov and Stalin to move their forces north; instead of concentrating on Lviv, they were to help Tukhachevskii take Warsaw. Stalin and Egorov ignored these orders and carried on with the failed attack on Lviv. For this, Stalin was removed from his post and he was never again let anywhere near frontline command. There were commanders during the Civil War who were shot for less.

The appearance of the Red Cavalry somewhere to the south of Warsaw would have prevented the Polish striking force from driving into Tukhachevskii’s left flank. Davies elaborates: ‘The real puzzle is why Stalin ordered the [Red Cavalry] to besiege [Lviv] on 12^th August, knowing full well that it was due to be transferred to [Tukhachevskii’s front].’ Perhaps Stalin wanted to foil these plans for regroupment by presenting them with a fait accompli.’ ‘Look- we’re already attacking Lviv. Can’t pull back now! What a shame!’ Trotsky would later allege that Stalin wanted to take Lviv to enhance his own prestige. If Tukhachevskii would soon conquer Warsaw, Stalin thought hedeserved to conquer Lviv. Davies asks, ‘Was it to spite Tukhachevsky, as Trotksy said?’

So far, so damning.

But Lviv and Warsaw are over 300 kilometres apart. It is not certain that anything Stalin or Egorov could have done would have made a difference at Warsaw; on top of the irresponsibility of abandoning the Galician campaign, it is doubtful Budennyi, for all his ability, could have even covered the ground with sufficient speed. It was too late in the game. The key strategic mistakes – crossing the Curzon Line, advancing full-speed on Warsaw – had been made long before, and they had been made by people other than Stalin.

[Davies, 216-218]

But if you read Wollenberg (and you should), you will find an argument, backed up by copious reference to Pilsudski’s and Tukhachevksii’s memoirs, that had Stalin and co acted differently it would have made a huge difference. The Red Cavalry didn’t have to gallop all the way to Warsaw, only advance far enough into Poland so as to threaten Pilsudski’s right flank. Then the hammer-blow of the counter-offensive might have had to stall before breaking the Red Army, or might have not fallen at all.

I think Stalin’s actions did contribute to the defeat. But that is not to say they prevented a certain victory. Had the Red Cavalry gone to the aid of Tukhachevskii, they would have prevented Pilsudski’s counter-offensive but they would not have fixed the extremely challenging strategic situation in which the Red Army found itself in August 1920.

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Vinculum in Vita, my brothers

Buildings

Anatomy of a post