History

04: Cossack Revolt in the South

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On a sunny day in early June 1918 the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov, who had a habit of being present when history was unfolding, received a telephone call from Lenin. He hurried to the Kremlin where he met Lenin in a well-lit office lined with bookcases and a map of Russia.

‘I sent for you because things are going badly at Novorossiisk,’ said Lenin. ‘The plan to scuttle the Black Sea Fleet is meeting with a lot of resistance from a section of the crews and from all the White-Guard-minded officers. […]  It is necessary, at all costs, to scuttle the fleet: otherwise, it will fall into the hands of the Germans.’

Their conversation would have been incomprehensible to themselves just two or three months earlier. To destroy their own fleet would have seemed like madness. But things had changed radically in a short time.

Raskolnikov writes: ‘Vladimir Ilyich got to his feet and, sticking both his thumbs under the armpits of his waistcoat, went up to the map on the wall. I followed him.’

‘You must leave today for Novorossiisk,’ Lenin continued. ‘Be certain to take with you a couple of carriages manned by sailors, with a machine-gun. Between Kozlov and Tsaritsyn there is a dangerous situation. The Don Cossacks have cut the railway line. They’ve taken Aleksikovo. . .’

You will recall that barely six weeks before, Lenin had declared the civil war over. But now the Don Cossacks were in revolt again.

‘And on the Volga there’s a regular Vendée,’ added Lenin. ‘I know the Volga countryside well. There are some tough kulaks there.’

Lenin had just referred to the two fronts that had opened up in May 1918: the south and the east. Next week we’re going to look at the eastern front, the Vendée (revolt) on the Volga. This week we’re going to look at the south, where the Cossacks and the Volunteer Army had risen from the ashes.

Detail from Russian Civil War Pictorial Wall Map, titled “The Entente Plan to Suffocate Soviet Power”. The map on Lenin’s wall would have shown, in less graphic and colourful terms, this situation. In this map, however, Novorossiysk and Ekaterinodar have already fallen. The lower left-hand corner of the map shows the area between the Black and Caspian seas. The black-green stain is the Volunteer Army, while the black-blue stain are the Don Cossacks. The Blues are the Germans and the Green figures are the Czechoslovaks and their Russian Allies. Note British and Allied intervention in the north, in green. The artists show thus how the Volunteers were Allied-oriented and the Don Cossacks were German allies.

See how dramatically the territory of the Soviets has shrunk and how the southern front is a long, awkward, vulnerable shape. If you zoom in on the Black Sea coast you can see a red arrow that shows the line of march of the Taman Red Army (protagonists of The Iron Flood).

Finally, see if you can spot the killing of the royal family, shown by a symbol on the map. It occurred around this time at Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountains.

*

Raskolnikov set out from Kazan station that evening. The sunshine had given way to rain and the station smelled of wet clothes and cheap tobacco. The fresh evening air contended with the fumes from the locomotive.

Next morning he awoke on a carriage rolling through the warzone of South Russia. It was a struggle of horses and railways, and the frontlines shifted every day. Rumours of battles agitated him at every stop. There were delays; at the next station he might find a battle raging, or Whites ready to shoot him. And every hour’s delay might result in the Black Sea Fleet being handed over to the Germans.

How had this situation come about?

The Bolsheviks had come to power promising to end the war. That meant signing a treaty with Germany. But the German and Austrian governments had demanded the most humiliating concessions. In the first few months of 1918 debates had raged both within the Bolshevik Party and between the various parties of the Soviet over whether to accept these terms. Finally the German government forced the point by going on the offensive. The Red Guards were no match for the advancing German forces. The only way to stop them was to accept even worse terms. The Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3rd, which in essence ceded the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine to the German Empire. It was a gamble, based entirely on the hope that a workers’ revolution in Germany would render the treaty null and void.

In the meantime, there was hell to pay.

Three Bolshevik delegates (Trotsky, Kamanev and Joffe) surrounded by spiky German helmets at Brest-Litovsk

The strength of the German armies combined with the weakness of the fledgling Red Army meant that the Germans might seize any pretext to grab more territory, even to crush the revolution. The situation was so serious that Lenin had a contingency plan for the Soviet government to abandon the big cities and hold out in the Ural Mountains and the Kuznets Basin.

The Brest-Litovsk Peace (US Army)

Three months after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the peace was being violated by all parties without matters yet escalating to all-out war. Now the German government was demanding that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet be handed over to them. They were in a position to seize it anyway. Moscow was determined to defy this order and sink the fleet instead. But the sailors and officers were refusing to carry out this command. That’s where Raskolnikov came in. 

Raskolnikov made it through the war-torn Don and Kuban lands in one piece. Along the way he passed through Ekaterinodar, where Kornilov had been killed two months earlier. Now it was under siege once again. He arrived at the port of Novorossiisk at long last, taking in the view of the sunlit harbour full of destroyers and dreadnoughts.

Map from last week’s post, useful for our purposes here too. Note Rostov (limit of German advance) Novorossiisk (where the fleet was scuttled), Krasnodar/ Ekaterinodar (where the Volunteers failed in April), Tuapse (where the Taman Red Army broke through a Georgian fortress)

On decks and on the shore a fierce debate was raging over whether to obey Moscow’s order.

Raskolnikov addressed a group of sailors: ‘In order that the fleet may not fall into the hands of German imperialism and may not become a weapon of counterrevolution, we must scuttle it today.’

A young sailor demanded: ‘But why can’t we put up a fight, seeing that we have such splendid ships and such long-range guns?’

The young sailor knew well that such a fight would mean certain death. This did not deter him.

As well as those who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, there was a hidden agenda, especially among the officers. Many of them wanted to hand the fleet over to the Germans, in the hope that it would then be used against the Bolsheviks.

Novorossiysk, June 1918. The vessel in the middle distance is setting off for Sebatopol to surrender to the German military, in defiance of orders from Moscow. The crew of the vessel in the foreground watch, no doubt debating whether to follow.
The cover image shows the dreadnought HMS Lord Nelson, anchored at Novorossiysk in 1919

But after long debates, Raskolnikov convinced the sailors to destroy their own fleet. It was a bitter victory. If you have ever wondered what it looks like when a massive war ship is blown up and sunk, you are about to find out. Here is Raskolnikov’s description of the death of a dreadnought named Free Russia.

When the smoke dispersed, the vessel was unrecognisable: the thick armour covering her sides had been torn off in several places, and huge holes, with twisted leaves of iron and steel, gaped like lacerated wounds. […] the ship slowly heeled over to starboard. Then she began to turn upside down, with a deafening clang and roar. The steam-launches and lifeboats fell, smashed, rolled across the deck and, like so many nutshells dropped off the high ship’s side into the water. The heavy round turrets, with their three 12-inch guns, broke from the deck and slid, making a frightful din, across the smooth wooden planking, sweeping away everything in their path and at last, with a deafening splash, fell into the sea, throwing up a gigantic column of water, like a waterspout. In a few moments the ship had turned right over. Lifting in the air her ugly keel, all covered with green slime, seaweed and mussels, she still floated for another half-hour on the grey-green water, like a dead whale. […] the oblong, misshapen floating object shrank in size and at last, with a gurgling and a bubbling, was hidden beneath the waves, dragging with it into the deep great clouds of foam, and forming a deep, engulfing crater amid a violently seething whirlpool.

[…] the sailors, tense-faced and silent, as though at a funeral, bared their heads. Broken sighs and suppressed sobs could be heard.[i]

The Russian Revolution had secured peace at a terrible price. The dreadnought Free Russia was the least of it. In this and in future posts we’re going to see the consequences playing out.

THE DON COSSACK REVOLT

This episode’s cover image: a still from Quiet Don, dir Sergei Gerasimov, 1958

We saw in Part 2 how many of the Cossacks went over to the Reds. Ataman Kaledin shot himself. 18,000 Red Guards held Ekaterinodar, killed General Kornilov, and threw the Volunteer Army back out onto the steppe.

For a few weeks there were Soviet governments on both the Don and Kuban. The Don Soviet Republic had a president, Podtelkov, who was both a Cossack and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary party. But under the surface, things were changing. Most Cossacks never warmed to the Soviet government. They saw it as a government of the ‘aliens’ – their poor, despised tenants – and of the mouzhiks and khokols (insulting terms, respectively, for peasants and Ukrainians). The former frontline soldiers who had supported the Reds now settled back into village and family life, and many fell back under the influence of their elders.

In April the German forces advanced through Ukraine. The Red Guards made a stand in the Donbass. In a moment that was later celebrated in paintings and novels, Kliment Voroshilov led the courageous defence of a bridge, allowing many to escape capture or death.

The survivors fled east on a long march to Tsaritsyn on the Volga. The Don Cossacks must have watched these events with keen interest; the Donbass was in German hands, and its Red Guards were out of the picture.

More immediately, thousands of ill-disciplined and armed soldiers wearing red armbands were now streaming across Don Cossack lands. Some looted, killed perceived enemies, or assaulted women. Down in the Kuban region there was a similar crisis with soldiers returning from the Turkish front. The same Cossacks who had shunned Kaledin earlier in the year now took up arms against these intruders.

On May 8th the Germans took Rostov-on-Don; two days earlier, right-wing Don Cossacks had already risen up and seized Novocherkassk. On May 11th Podtelkov was captured on an expedition. They hanged him and shot the seventy-plus Cossacks who were with him. From there, the revolt snowballed.

The victories of the Red Guards were undone at a stroke. In April it had seemed that Civil War was over. But by mid-June the Don Cossacks had seized a vast territory and mustered an army of 40,000, with 56 artillery pieces. The resistance of the Reds was feeble; they were deprived of their base in the Donbass and distracted by the Volga revolt and the German threat.

BACK IN THE SADDLE

In earlier episodes we saw how the Volunteer Army was formed in the Cossack lands from officers who were determined to stop the revolution.

At the start of May 1918 the Volunteer Army was becalmed in the Kuban Country to the south. In February they had broken with the Don Cossacks and gone out on the Ice March; in April they had been defeated at Ekaterinodar. Now their leader Kornilov was dead and they were encircled in the wilderness.

The German advance and the Don Cossack uprising changed the situation utterly. The Germans and the Cossacks now held all the north-south railways, forming a great wall protecting the Volunteer Army from the revolutionary power that resided in Moscow.

Volunteer Army members, all officers. January 1918

The Volunteers at this point numbered just 9,000. The original 3-4,000 had been bolstered first by Kuban Cossacks and second by General Drozhdovtskii and his troops, who had marched all the way from Romania. We have noted the extraordinary number of generals that were in this small army; but these generals were not afraid of combat or hardship, and they dropped like flies (Markov, Drozhdovskii, Alexeev, and of course Kornilov). General Anton Denikin, bald-headed and white-bearded, the author of the memoirs we quoted in Episode 2, succeeded Kornilov as leader. Under Denikin, the Volunteers exploited the new situation.

Although the Kuban was now cut off from Moscow, the Volunteer Army still faced an enemy numbering 80-100,000 – the two Red Armies of the Caucasus and the Taman Red Army. Denikin was outnumbered ten to one. But these early ‘Red Armies’ were in fact loose coagulations of ‘detachments,’ undisciplined and untrained. Their only link to Red territory was by the Caspian Sea. Later, when ice made the sea impassable, their lifeline was a long camel train through wilderness. They were connected to Moscow by a long, thin line, via Astrakhan and then Tsaritsyn – an outpost of an outpost of an outpost. Bands of Terek Cossacks and guerrillas from Dagestan operated in their rear. Typhus raged in the ranks. And just across the Caucasus Mountains were the Turks, the British, the French, Menshevik Georgia and the forces of various nationalist parties.

And now the Kuban Cossacks rose up against the Soviet power, and flooded into the Volunteer Army. Generals who had been commanding platoons soon had companies, regiments and divisions under them again. A massacre of ‘aliens’ and ‘Bolsheviks’ began. This massacre is recorded in the novel The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich.[ii] The ‘aliens’ were like survivors of a sudden apocalypse stricken with terror at the pace and fury of the revolt, as seen in this reputedly accurate account:

Slavyanskaya village has revolted, and so too have Poltavskaya, Petrovskaya and Stiblievskaya villages. They have built gallows in the squares before the churches, and they hang everybody they can catch. Cadets have come to Slavyanskaya village, stabbing, shooting, hanging, drowning men in the Kuban […] They’ve run amuck. All of Kuban is in flames. They torture those of us who are in the army, hang us on trees. Some of our detachments are fighting their way through to Ekaterinodar, or to Rostov, but they are all hacked down by Cossack swords…’[iii]

Red Guards and their families from the Kuban Country gather to hear news of the Cossack revolt. A. Kokorin, one of the very fine illustrations from The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich, 1973 edition

The Volunteer Army grew to at least 35,000 by September. A long and brutal struggle began. The Reds were usually on the defensive and unable to bring their numbers to bear. Still they fought hard.

The courage of these early Red formations was extraordinary. They fought for Soviet power even though it seemed they were on a sinking ship. They were poor people, each revolting against a lifetime of humiliation and toil, fighting for a better world. They had gone too far now to go back. They had to fight on through or die.

WHITE VICTORY IN THE SOUTH

Because of the numbers and dogged resistance of the Reds, the Volunteers and Kuban Cossacks were stuck fighting them for the second half of 1918 and into 1919. The rest of Season One will deal with events from May to the end of 1918 in other parts of Russia. The reader should bear in mind that this struggle at the feet of the Caucasus Mountains was grinding on relentlessly in the distance. By the time this bitter struggle finally came to an end, most White units had suffered at least 50% casualties. One cavalry unit had suffered 100%.

Volunteer Army recruitment poster (1919)

In a series of terrible battles Denikin and his Volunteers seized town after town. In August they seized Ekaterinodar. What was left of the Red Kuban government fled to Piatigorsk. In the autumn Novorossiisk, the bed of its harbour still strewn with the corpses of dreadnoughts and destroyers, fell to the White Guards.

In January-February 1919 a cavalry unit – the same one that suffered 100% casualties over the course of the campaign – broke through the Red lines. After that, the White forces overran the Caucasus pocket so quickly that many of them caught typhus from the Reds.

Not a whole Red Army but a whole Red Army Group was destroyed: the two vast Caucasus armies, and the smaller but brilliant Taman army – in all, 100,000-150,000 soldiers. The Whites took 50,000 prisoners, 150 artillery pieces, 350 machine-guns. Fewer than one in ten of the Reds escaped. They crossed steppe and desert in winter to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, where commissars traded recriminations over the catastrophe.[iv]

I have jumped ahead of the main narrative. Let’s return to the summer of 1918.

DENIKIN’S KUBAN STATE

General Anton Denikin had been campaigning for a military dictatorship since the summer of 1917. Now, probably to his great surprise, he found himself in charge of one. The Volunteer Army set up a militarised state in the Kuban Cossack lands. They were just to the south of the new Don Cossack Republic, though relations were not neighbourly.

General Anton Denikin

Denikin’s politics were close to Kornilov’s. After the Reds were defeated, he promised, elections to a National Assembly would be held and the military dictatorship would end.

For Denikin there could be no question of restoring power to the Constituent Assembly. It ‘arose in the days of popular insanity, was half made up of anarchist elements.’ My impression is that Denikin and the officers would not have considered any election legitimate unless a knout-wielding Cossack glowered over every ballot box.

Denikin did not like to admit he was a reactionary. On occasion he spoke of self-determination, but he spoke far more often of ‘Russia, One and Indivisible.’[v] Jonathan Smele makes the fair point that Denikin and Kolchak (Kolchak was another key White leader) were ‘far from the clichéd caricatures of pince-nez-adorned, sadistic fops’ of Red propaganda. Kolchak, Denikin, Kornilov and Alexeev were not aristocrats. Denikin’s father had been born a serf.

But a few lines later Smele concedes that the camps of these generals were heavily-populated with nobles and the wealthy (and many of them, in accordance with the values of Tsarist military discipline, would absolutely have been sadistic fops wearing pince-nez). As stated in Part One, a fifth of the Volunteer Army’s personnel came from noble families. British officers, invited to a great banquet in Denikin’s territory, were embarrassed when the orchestra began to play ‘God Save the Tsar.’ The request had come from a member of the royal family who was present.[vi]

The non-military sphere of Denikin’s government was limited – war was ‘not the right time for solving social problems’ – but it was dominated by members of the Constitutional Democrats, a party with a wealthy support base. Perhaps Denikin was chosen as leader partly because of his humble background and the sympathetic, ‘democratic’ face he could show to the world. But as we saw in Part 2, he was as determined a counter-revolutionary as any officer in Russia.

The Volunteer Army was composed of men for whom war was a vocation. They expressed this in an elaborate system of uniforms and badges. The ‘colourful’ regiments were named after dead generals and wore distinctive uniforms. The Kornilovtsii, for example, wore black tunics with red caps, and wore a shoulder badge with a skull, crossed bones and crossed swords. Veterans of the Ice March wore a badge with a crown of thorns on it.[vii]

The Kornilovtsii: an officer, a cavalry soldier

In 1919 Denikin’s army would go on a huge offensive against Moscow. By then it had grown so much that the Kornilovtsii had turned from a regiment into an entire division. The terrible struggles of 1919 will have to wait until Season Two of this series. For now, the reader only has to keep in mind that for the rest of 1918 and into the early part of the following year, Denikin and his army were engaged in a merciless and brutal struggle in the South.

KALEDIN TO KRASNOV

Can a single individual change the course of history?

In the years before the revolution the socialists of Russia had meditated on just this question. ‘The role of the individual in history’ (1898) was a pamphlet by George Plekhanov, a founder of Russian Marxism. This text argued that leaders and supposed ‘great men’ were in fact mere conduits for the great impersonal forces of history.

Plekhanov himself had, by 1918, long since broken with his past politics and was firmly on the right of the Menshevik party. He cursed the Bolsheviks and the revolution as ‘a revolting mixture of Utopian idealists, imbeciles, traitors and anarchist provocateurs.’ ‘We must not only crush this vermin, but drown it in blood.’ ‘If a rising does not come spontaneously it must be provoked.’[viii]

Meanwhile a Bolshevik artillery piece in Ekaterinodar had proved the point he had argued in his pamphlet twenty years before. The shell that killed Kornilov showed the limits of the role of the individual in history. The movement Kornilov led survived in spite of his death, produced a new leader in the form of Denikin, and carried on from strength to strength.

The same thing happened in the Don Cossack country. Kaledin had committed suicide in February. By May his supporters had returned to power, and they produced a new leader in the form of General Piotr Krasnov.

This Krasnov had tried to seize Petrograd in November 1917 but was defeated and captured. These were the magnanimous early days of the revolution, so he was not put up against a wall and shot, or even locked up. He was released on his word of honour that he would never again raise a hand against the Soviet power. July found Krasnov leading an army of 40,000 Don Cossacks against the Soviet power.

Krasnov did not just break his word to the Reds. He betrayed the cause he had served during the World War. During the war against Germany he had commanded a brigade, then a division, then a corps. I don’t know how many lives he spent on the frontlines in the struggle against the Kaiser. Now his Don Cossack Republic owed its existence to the German army, received arms and aid from it, and paid it back with loyalty. Krasnov even became pen-pals with the Kaiser.

Denikin remarked, ‘The Don Host is a prostitute, selling herself off to whoever will pay.’

The Don Cossack officer Denisov retorted: ‘If the Don Host is a prostitute, then the Volunteer Army is a pimp living off her earnings.’

It was easy for those posh officers to act all high-and-mighty, but they owed their survival to the German intervention. The Volunteer Army even got weapons from Germany, via the Don Cossacks.

The Cossacks knew that the Volunteer Army saw them as petty and provincial, as diminutive Kazachki. For their part, Denisov spoke for the Don Cossacks when he called the Volunteer Army ‘travelling musicians.’ This obscure remark seems to mean that the Volunteers were not an army of the people, rooted in the soil as the Cossacks were, but an army of the intelligentsia and upper classes.

Badge of the Kornilovtsii

But for now each of these forces was busy in its own backyard, and there was no cause for them to clash. While the Volunteers were grinding the hundred thousand Reds of the Caucasus to dust, the Don Cossacks were on the offensive eastward to Tsaritsyn, and northward to Voronezh.

The Reds could only watch from a great distance as the Red Armies of the Caucasus went down fighting. On the Voronezh and Tsaritsyn fronts, they could only react, not take the initiative. They were distracted by the fighting on the Volga, by the German threat, and finally by a revolt at the very heart of Soviet power. These events, respectively, will be the focus of the next two parts in this series.

Audio credits: Music from Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky

Clip from Blackadder Goes Forth, e3 ‘Major Star’, dir Richard Boden

Opening clip from Tsar to Lenin, 1937, dir. Herman Axelbank

[i] Raskolnikov, FF. Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin, 1934 (New Park, 1982), ‘The Fate of the Black Sea Fleet’ https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1918/raskolnikov/ilyin/index.htm

[ii] Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War, 1987 (2017), Birlinn Limited, 129

[iii] Serafimovich, Aleksander. The Iron Flood, 3rd Edition. Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut. 1973 (1924), p 13

[iv] These commissars included Shlyapnikov, whom we met in Part One. He was based at Astrakhan and held responsible for the disaster. He replied that the Soviet government had neglected the Red Army Group in the Caucasus, which was true.

[v] Mawdsley, p 132

[vi] Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, Hurst & Company, 2015, pp 106, 302

[vii] Khvostov, Mikhail. Illustrated by Karachtchouk, Andrei. The Russian Civil War (2) White Armies, Osprey 1997 (2007), pp 12, 14-15

[viii] It has become routine to call Plekhanov and his party ‘moderate socialists’ even though they were as violent as any other force in the Civil War. Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, p 98

02: White Guards

‘My heart is heavy. My feelings seem to be split in two: I hate and despise the savage, cruel, senseless mob, but still I feel the old pity for the soldier: an ignorant, illiterate man, who has been led astray, and is capable both of abominable crimes and of lofty sacrifices!’

Anton Denikin, The Russian Turmoil; Memoirs: Military, Social and Political, 1920, Chapter xxxii

January 1918. Four thousand armed men had gathered by the Don River to begin a counter-revolution that would shake Russia for years to come. This week we’re going to take a closer look at the White Guards, those who rose up in arms against the October Revolution. Then we will examine how things went down when they had to face the Red Guards for the first time.

Anton Denikin first met Lavr Kornilov on the plains of Galicia at the start of the World War. The two Tsarist generals served side-by-side on the same front in what Denikin called ‘incessant, glorious and heavy battles’ as their thousands of soldiers fought their way over the Carpathian Mountains and down into Hungary. Denikin was impressed by Kornilov’s ability to train up ‘second-rate’ units into ‘excellent’ condition, by his scrupulousness and by his personal prowess. Later in the war Kornilov became a celebrity after he broke out of an Austrian prison.Denikin was big and avuncular and Kornilov thin and severe, but both came from humble backgrounds and both were utterly dedicated to the army as an institution, and these facts helped them to see eye-to-eye.

Military officers saw themselves as a caste removed and above society. Around 1898 a cavalry lieutenant had explained his perspective on the world: at the centre, highest in his regard, were his own regiment. Next came other cavalry units, then the rest of the army. Beyond – the ‘wretched’ civilians. First came the relatively ‘decent’ civilians, then ‘the Jews’, then ‘the lower classes’ and last of all the socialists, communists and revolutionaries. In regard to the last group, ‘Why these exist nobody knows, and the emperor really is too kind. One ought to be able to shoot them on sight.’ A lieutenant in 1898 might be a colonel or general by 1918.

Back in the old days, Russian military officers were generally noble or at least bourgeois in origin. Each generation of officers dated the ‘good old days’ to a decade or two earlier, but already by the 1870s a third of officers hadn’t even finished primary school.

But in these latter days, according to Denikin, the gates of the officer training schools had been flung open to ‘people of low extraction,’ with the result that the officer corps had ‘completely lost its character as a class and as a caste.’[1] (Denikin apparently subscribed to the principle of Groucho Marx: ‘I don’t want to be part of any club that would have me as a member.’) The old bonds that had held the army together – the church, the monarchy – grew weak. What was to blame for this weakening – the decay of the moral fabric of society? The corrupting influence of city life? Workers were now motivated by base material desires rather than spiritual riches; the ikon in the corner of the workshop no longer satisfied them.

Russian soldiers in World War One

The war with Japan in 1905 and its attendant revolution were disasters for the prestige of the Russian state. It appeared few lessons were learned for the Great War. In 1914-15 the old army – what was left of it ‘as a class and as a caste’ – was broken under the German, Austrian and Turkish guns. There were crippling shortages of rifles, uniforms and shells. Over two million soldiers of the Russian army perished in the war. The civilian deaths, the wounded, prisoners of war – each of these categories also numbered in the millions.

Many officers fought with great courage. But they saw their gains thrown away through incompetence, corruption, stupidity and shortages. They grew angry with the government.

According to General Denikin, ‘It is hardly necessary to prove that the enormous majority of the Commanding Officers were thoroughly loyal to the monarchist idea and to the Tsar himself.’[2] Accordingly, they blamed the Tsar’s German wife, and they obsessed about Rasputin, blamed everything on his ‘corrupting influence.’

General Denikin (the guy in the middle with the beard) during World War One.

Mutiny

The February Revolution came. The high-ranking officers, blindsided, suffered a tumult of emotions. They were disappointed in themselves – they should have engineered a ‘palace coup’ in order to head off this movement. They were angry at the moderate politicians who had stepped into the void – these scoundrels had abolished the monarchy. They were mortally afraid of the tidal wave of workers and of the mutinies in army and navy. The peoples of Finland, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Central Asia and the Caucusus were ‘Russian in spirit and in blood’[3] – but now, for some reason, they wanted self-determination. This amounted, in the eyes of the officers, to the dismemberment of holy Russia.

Something good might yet come out of the Revolution, and it was no use in any case trying to swim against the stream. It could perhaps be guided into safer channels. Denikin would carefully distinguish between ‘the real Democracy,’ by which he meant ‘the bourgeoisie and the civil service’ and the ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ – the socialist parties, whose supporters were ‘semi-cultured’ and ‘illiterate.’ If the ‘real Democracy’ could get the upper hand over the ‘Revolutionary Democracy,’ things might yet be salvaged.

But the portents were not good. Chapter VII of Denikin’s memoirs describes his reunion with his old comrade-in-arms Kornilov at a dinner in the house of the War Minister in late March. Denikin found him tired, morose and pessimistic. The condition of the Petrograd garrison was beyond comprehension to Kornilov: they were holding political meetings, engaging in petty trade, hiring themselves out as private guards. He spoke of ‘the inevitability of a fierce cleansing of Petrograd.’ Already the highest-ranking officers were contemplating coups and civil war. During the street demonstrations of April, Kornilov proposed to disperse the crowds with artillery and cavalry – and even though the government rejected this idea, he made practical preparations to do so.[4]

Soon, thanks to a Soviet decree, officers had to answer to elected committees of the rank-and-file. This was an incredible humiliation for men born and raised and trained to value rigid hierarchy. The death penalty was abolished; the officer no longer held power of life and death over the men. The men, it appeared, now held that power over the officers. This was confirmed when sailors massacred over forty officers in one incident.

The officer corps hated the new Provisional Government for pandering to the Soviet, and they loathed the Soviet itself. The soldiers’ delegates were, they complained, a bunch of clerks and shiftless rear garrison men. The proceedings of the Soviet were a display of ignorance and coarseness that embarrassed Russia before the whole world. 

And there were too many ‘foreigners.’ Pointedly, Denikin in his memoirs listed by nationality the personnel of the Presidium of the Soviet Central Committee:

1 Georgian

5 Jews

1 Armenian

1 Pole

1 Russian (if his name was not an assumed one)

To him, this was proof that the Soviet was dominated by an ‘alien element, foreign to the Russian national idea.’[5]

This quote from Denikin gives us a good insight into how the White Guard officer saw the world. When members of the minority groups held high office, they were suddenly no longer ‘Russian in spirit in blood,’ but ‘foreign,’ ‘alien.’

When the officers spoke of the socialist leader Trotsky, they always called him ‘Bronstein’ or ‘Bronstein-Trotsky,’ as if they were thereby making an important point.

Kornilov

The Constitutional Democrat party was a bastion of Denikin’s ‘real Democracy:’ it was a party of business-owners and bureaucrats. After the July Days, a near-revolution in Petrograd, the Constitutional Democrats and the top brass of the military deepened their collaboration.

The figurehead of this movement was General Lavr Kornilov. At a conference in August 1917 the Constitutional Democrats carried him on their shoulders and cheered him to the rafters.

General Lavr Kornilov

General Kornilov made his move in August. But the attempted coup was not just a failure; it backfired and strengthened the Bolsheviks (China Miéville’sOctober, published by Verso Books in 2017, contains a lively account of this episode).

Denikin was one of Kornilov’s co-conspirators. After the failed coup, Denikin ended up in a cell seven foot square. In early mornings, soldiers would cling to the bars of the window to curse and threaten him:

Wanted to open the Front […]’

‘[…] sold himself to the Germans […]’

‘[…] wanted to deprive us of land and freedom.’

‘You have drunk our blood, ordered us about, kept us stewing in prison; now we are free and you can sit behind the bars yourself. You pampered yourself, drove about in motor-cars; now you can try what lying on a wooden bench is, you ——. You have not much time left. We shan’t wait till you run away—we will strangle you with our own hands.

Denikin covered himself with his cloak. In that moment all he could think was: ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

He thought back over his life – humble origins, promotion on his own merits, valour in combat. By the standards of the institution he served, he had always been relatively kind to the men under his command, in that he declined to beat them up.

As he thought over it all, his rage mounted. He rose, throwing aside his cloak.

‘You lie, soldier! It is not your own words that you are speaking. If you are not a coward, hiding in the rear, if you have been in action, you have seen how your officers could die.’

His tormentors, awed by his words and unable to contradict them, retreated.

Not all the soldiers were hostile. ‘On the first cold night, when we had none of our things, a guard brought [General] Markov, who had forgotten his overcoat, a soldier’s overcoat, but half an hour later—whether he had grown ashamed of his good action, or whether his comrades had shamed him—he took it back.’

But Kornilov was not daunted. The attempted coup and its aftermath represent the germinating seeds of the White Armies. He and all his co-conspirators ended up imprisoned at Bykhov monastery. Bykhov was just down the road from the general staff HQ. There Generals Alexeev and Dukhonin kept in close contact with him. So Kornilov, through proxies, was able to carry on his work and to build an underground league of officers and cadets. Another co-conspirator, the Don Cossack General Kaledin, was along with Alexeev preparing a base for counter-revolution in the Don Country in the South.

Kornilov and friends. Still from the documentary Tsar to Lenin.
Red Guards rally to resist the Kornilov coup. Still from the documentary Tsar to Lenin.

The Politics of the Kornilov Movement

Kornilov and his supporters opposed the Soviet, but what was their own vision for the future of Russia and its Empire? They were in favour of a military dictatorship, but it would not remain in power forever. Its task would be to ‘restore order.’ Once order was restored – in other words, once all the working-class leaders were dead or imprisoned and their parties crushed, once the Soviet was liquidated and all weapons taken out of the hands of workers, once the soldiers had been forced back into the trenches, and all the national minorities induced to temper their demands – then, and not until then, the power would be handed to a legitimate government. Perhaps it would be led by another absolute monarch like Nicholas. But some of the officers were for a constitutional monarchy, and some even for a republic. There could be elections once order was restored. As soon as the masses were put back in their place and there was no chance of the socialists winning, it would be safe to have an election.

It is sometimes said that the White movement embraced the full spectrum of political opinion from monarchist to social-democrat. There were in reality no leftists among the Kornilovite officers; the entry of ‘moderate socialists’ into the White camp was a later (and a brief and unhappy) development, which we will deal with in later chapters.

But the White officers themselves placed very little stock in all these political questions. They uttered the ‘p’ word with the distaste they otherwise reserved for ‘Bronstein.’ The political questions could be settled after order was restored. They were mere soldiers and not politicians – thank God! They had neither the right nor the desire to pre-determine the results of some future election.

From Denikin’s memoirs, the reader can see that what really mattered was not the form of government that was to follow; what mattered was the ‘fierce cleansing.’

But these plans were left bobbing in the wake of history. The October Revolution struck. The Provisional Government and its few defenders were, as we have seen, hapless. The Kornilov movement took belated action.

The cadets, officers and Cossacks rose up in Moscow and in Petrograd in a bloody series of episodes over several days. It was in Moscow that the counter-revolutionaries first received the nickname ‘White Guards’ from their enemies. It was a reference to the French Revolution; white was the colour of the Bourbon monarchy. If it was supposed to be an insult, it backfired. The White Guards wore the name with pride. But in both cities they were defeated. In Petrograd their leader, General Krasnov, was released on parole. In Moscow the surrendered White Guards were all allowed to walk away, some still carrying their arms. Even Antony Beevor, whose book Russia: Revolution and Civil War paints an ugly picture of the revolutionaries, acknowledges the magnanimity of the Reds on this occasion.

After defeat in the two great cities, Generals Kornilov and Alexeev decided to play a longer game. They gave the order to rendezvous in the far south of Russia by the river Don, where they had reportedly stockpiled 22,000 rifles.[6]

Thousands of individual officers began the journey south. Peasants and soldiers did not show the same clemency as the authorities in Petrograd and Moscow. ‘The fugitive officer en route for the south became an outlaw figure for the soldiers, to be killed on sight.’[7] But they persevered. Many survived the journey by throwing aside the red shoulder-boards that marked them out as officers. Others disposed of their uniforms entirely, and went on to fight in civilian clothes.

Kornilov simply rode out of his prison and set off for the Don. His ‘guards’ had joined him. They fought their way across the land. When Kornilov reached Novocherkassk by the Don he found General Alexeev and four hundred volunteers already mustered. The weeks passed and four hundred grew to four thousand as more officers, cadets and students arrived.

THE COSSACKS

These southern lands, north of the Caucusus mountains and between the Black Sea and the Caspian, had in living memory borne witness to a war more fierce and total than the Civil War. In the Nineteenth Century the Russian Empire had massacred and exiled the Muslim Circassian people. The Cossacks settled on rich black soil stolen from the Circassians. They adopted the style of the vanquished: long narrow-waisted coats and silver-inlaid daggers. Non-Cossack immigrants flooded in later, and they were despised by the Cossacks and called ‘aliens.’

Painting by Mitrophan Grekov. A lone rider, probably a Cossack, returns to his homestead in winter.

The Cossacks fought on horseback with swords and lances and carbines. Again and again the state had sent them in to crush protests. Now, true to form, the Don Cossack leaders had given a safe haven to the Volunteer Army.

But the Cossack lands were not a single conservative block. For many the supposed privileges were a burden. One-third of the Cossacks were poor, and equipping themselves for war put them in permanent debt. The Cossacks were outnumbered by their poor tenants – the so-called aliens – and oppressed by the big landlords. In the cities and towns there were artisans and workers influenced by the left-wing parties.

For the young Cossacks, the experience of the World War was shattering. For three years, ‘Russian soldiers were sent into battle without rifles or were deliberately shelled by their own when, in their trenches, they were understandably reluctant to go over the top.’[8] The young Cossacks witnessed all this, and they shared trenches and bivouacs with town folk who talked of revolution. By 1917 the refrain of the young Cossacks was: ‘We must saddle our horses and go to the Don; the war is pointless.’[9]

So they made the long journey home through lands teeming with revolution. At the frontlines, officers had kept order by beating and killing the rank-and-file soldiers. Now, as an army of nine million men collapsed, many an officer was shot by the railway stations and roadsides. When the Cossacks came riding back into their villages, the old men called them cowards and traitors, and said they had been bought off by the Reds or by ‘the Jews.’ But the young Cossacks had met and talked with these Reds, these Bolsheviks. The Revolution promised them an end to this war and to the military obligations, and a settlement of the land question. The young frontline veterans, the frontoviki, were uneasy at the presence of the Volunteer Army, at the sight of officers in their distinctive shoulder-boards mustering in the Don country for counter-revolution.

THE STRUGGLES ON THE DON AND KUBAN

Even before the October Revolution, local Soviets had taken power in eighty different towns. After October, the dam burst. Workers and peasants rose up in town after town, village after village, and bands of Red Guards took to the railways to spread Soviet power to wherever the old regime held on.

There were workers’ uprisings in Rostov and Taganrog, two towns by the Don. Counter-revolution soon followed: Volunteers and Cossacks crushed the risings ‘and [shot] the captured Bolshevist members of the Rostov Soviet.’[10]

The leader of the Don Cossacks was Ataman Kaledin, a cavalry general who had commanded an entire army in the Great War. He had been part of Kornilov’s coup attempt, though the Provisional Government had never dared to come after him for fear of kicking the Cossack beehive.

In spite of their common struggles and their successes in Rostov and Taganrog, Kornilov found Kaledin less than welcoming. The Volunteers were forbidden to carry arms in the Cossack capital Novocherkassk. Kaledin must have known that his Cossacks were not all of one mind, and that too open an allegiance to the White Guards could provoke a reaction. He declined to deepen the collaboration, and the Volunteer Army were packed off to the nearby town of Rostov.

Kaledin and Kornilov faced a favourable situation. To the east the Orenburg Cossacks had risen up. To the west a Rada or parliament had taken power in Ukraine. This was a nationalist movement which opposed the Bolsheviks. The Volunteer Army would make uneasy bedfellows with Ukrainian nationalists, whose claims to autonomy they rejected, but the Rada had given the officers free passage over their territory while arresting Red Guards. The task, therefore, was to strike out over Ukraine and link up with the Rada in Kyiv and form a solid front of counter-revolution in the south.

Kaledin led his Cossacks in an invasion of the Donbass region of Ukraine. This was, as we mentioned in Part One, the area where Kliment Voroshilov had worked as a miner, farm labourer, shepherd and metalworker before his sixteenth birthday.

Rodzianko, a representative of the ‘real [bourgeois] Democracy’, with Kaledin and Kornilov. Still from the documentary Tsar to Lenin.

Now workers like Voroshilov took up arms and barred the path of the Cossacks. There was no shortage of arms: rifles and machine-guns poured into the region from Moscow and Petrograd, and in every mining and factory town Red Guard units sprang up – here a few hundred fighters, there a few thousand. Armoured trains thundered in bearing Siberians, Latvians, sailors and Red Guards from the big cities. The Cossacks fled back to the Don.

We have now reached the moment at which we began, with thousands of Red Guards taking the railways south to the Don Country as 1917 turned to 1918. When they reached the Donbass, the Reds divided their forces. Most rolled on to Kyiv to overthrow the Rada, led by a former Tsarist officer named Muraviev who had reinvented himself as a revolutionary and was most likely an adventurer. The battle in Kyiv was bloody, with atrocities on both sides and Muraviev indulging in an early excess of terror, driven by ugly prejudices against Ukrainians.

Meanwhile about 16,000 went south to the Don to face Kornilov and the Volunteer Army.

A 1920s poster showing the economic importance of the Donbass region, in red. I think it says ‘Donbass: Heart of Russia’ – which would obviously be a controversial, even chauvinistic thing to say today

Detail from a pictoral map of the Caucusus issued by a USSR tourism agency in the 1930s. The names I have added ae underlined in red. Places to note here are the Don and Kuban rivers, Taganrog, Rostov and Novocherkassk, and finally Ekaterinodar.

The Cossacks decide

In a movie or a videogame, the Red Guards would no doubt have met the White Guards in a field somewhere and fought a single decisive clear-cut battle. In that situation the Whites would have won. The four thousand Volunteers knew how to fight, and the Cossacks were numerous and fierce. The Reds were far from home, poorly-organised and barely trained.

White Guards (as depicted by a Red artist)

But there was no straight fight. These were not extras or NPCs, but human beings with doubts and fears. Each side met the other in a halting, hesitating way, one small detachment blundering into another; one outflanking and the other retreating, each unsure of the ground it stood on politically and tactically, with frequent ceasefires and negotiations. The fight would jump back and forth from one railway junction or small town to the next.

The Red Guards were more in their element behind enemy lines. Small numbers were sent ahead into the Cossack lands armed not with rifles but with documents such as the Soviet government’s December 1917 appeal to toiling Cossacks, promising a settlement of the land question but guaranteeing that they would not touch ‘simple soldier Cossacks,’ and declaring them free of the old military obligations that had put the poorest into permanent debt.[xi]

All this work paid off. On January 10th a Congress of Cossacks met at Kamenskaya. It was the birth of a movement of Red Cossacks. Enraged, Ataman Kaledin sent troops to arrest the delegates. But these troops went over to the Soviets. From this point on, Kaledin lost more and more soldiers every day – not to shells or bullets but to political arguments. The Don Cossacks had suffered a decisive split between rich and poor, old and young, village and frontline.

The Volunteer Army was still superior in discipline and training. On January 15th near Matveyev Kurgan, the burial mound of a legendary outlaw, a Red force of 10,000 suffered a bad defeat. But Matveyev Kurgan is a few hours’ walk from the town of Taganrog. The workers there had risen up before and been crushed by Volunteers and Cossacks. Now they struck again as soon as they heard the Reds were nearby. There followed two days of street fighting that ended on January 19th when the Whites were chased out. Reportedly, fifty captured cadets were brutally massacred by the workers. The revolution had returned to Taganrog, a day’s march from Rostov. Meanwhile a second Red force of 6,000 was advancing on Novocherkassk. Kaledin’s loyalists were not numerous enough to stop them. All they could do was retreat, burning railway stations and tearing up tracks as they went.

Reds triumph over Whites (from the same poster as above)

Kornilov could see that the game was up for Ataman Kaledin and his Don Cossacks. On paper, the Don Host numbered tens of thousands. But politics had intruded into military calculations. Many had gone over to the Reds, and of those who had not, most would not answer when Kaledin called.

But to the south across the steppe was the country of the Kuban Cossacks. The Whites hoped that the Kuban Cossacks might prove more solid. Kornilov and his Volunteer Army packed their bags, shouldered their rifles and marched out onto the steppe. The Don Cossacks were incensed at this betrayal. There were shots fired at the White Guards as they fled the Don Country.

The Volunteers had escaped out of the reach of the Red Guards from Moscow and Petrograd. But, as we will see below, wherever they went the revolution was close behind, or even lying in wait.

Ice March

Kornilov could see that the game was up for Ataman Kaledin and his Don Cossacks. On paper, the Don Host numbered tens of thousands. But politics had intruded into military calculations. Many had gone over to the Reds, and of those who had not, most would not answer when Kaledin called.

But to the south across the steppe was the country of the Kuban Cossacks. The Whites hoped that the Kuban Cossacks might prove more solid. Kornilov and his Volunteer Army packed their bags, shouldered their rifles and marched out onto the steppe. The Don Cossacks were incensed at this betrayal. There were shots fired at the White Guards as they fled the Don Country.

The Volunteers had escaped out of the reach of the Red Guards from Moscow and Petrograd. But, as we will see below, wherever they went the revolution was close behind, or even lying in wait.

ICE MARCH

The time was out of joint. In February, the Soviet government changed the calendar so that it was in step with the rest of the world. Overnight Russia leapt ahead by two weeks. In South Russia, time was passing quickly in more ways than one. Ataman Kaledin, who had commanded a whole army under the Tsars, could now call on only 100-140 men.

He blamed Kornilov.

‘How can one find words for this shameful disaster?’ he said in a speech before the Cossack assembly. ‘We have been betrayed by the vilest kind of egotism. Instead of defending their native soil against the enemy, Russia’s best sons, its officers, flee shamefully before a handful of usurpers. There is no more sense of honour or love of country, or even simple morality.’[xii]

After this speech, Kaledin retired to his rooms in the Ataman’s Palace and shot himself in the heart.

By the end of February Novocherkassk and Rostov had fallen to the Reds. A Don Soviet Republic was founded, with an SR Cossack named Podtelkov as its president. The last supporters of the late Kaledin galloped out into the wilderness, praying for better days.

General Kornilov and his Volunteer Army, meanwhile, had marched out onto the Kuban Steppe, several thousand officers and civilians burdened with heavy artillery and carts full of the sick and wounded. Their journey went down in history as the First Ice March.

…a long column of soldiers wound its way out of Rostov, marching heavily over the half-melted snow. The majority were wearing officers’ uniforms […] Behind the numerous wagons of the baggage train came crowds of refugees: elderly, well-dressed men in overcoats and galoshes, and women wearing high-heeled shoes. […]

‘Have you anything to smoke?’ a lieutenant asked Listnitsky. The man took the cigarette Eugene offered, thanked him, and blew his nose on his hand soldier-fashion, afterwards wiping his fingers on his coat.

‘You’re acquiring democratic habits, lieutenant,’ a lieutenant-colonel smiled sarcastically.

‘One has to, willy-nilly. What do you do? Have you managed to salvage a dozen handkerchiefs?’

The lieutenant-colonel made no reply. Tiny green icicles were clinging to his reddish-grey moustache.

From And Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, 1929; trans Stephen Garry 1934, Penguin Classics 2016, pp 495-496

The officers were facing this bleak expedition in the hope that they could link up with the Kuban Cossack Host.

But the Revolution made its way to the banks of the Kuban river while the Volunteers were still toiling over the steppe. When they reached the Kuban Cossacks, they found the same thing they had left behind: a Cossack host that had mostly gone over to the Reds. And beyond lay the Caucusus Front, where hundreds of thousands of veterans had mutinied and were coming north to join the revolution.

February turned to March and spring did not come. Rain gave way to snow and cold winds, and the Volunteers’ clothes were crusted with ice. Under pursuit, forced to avoid railways and settlements, they fought forty battles in fifty days.

‘Take no prisoners. The greater the terror, the greater will be our victory.’[xiii] To judge by these words of Kornilov, the suffering only made them more determined.

In April their fortunes seemed to turn. They joined up with a force of White Kuban Cossacks, bringing their total fighting strength to 6,000 and adding two more generals to their already impressive collection. They decided to march on the Kuban capital, Ekaterinodar (now Krasnodar), a city of 100,000 people.

They had escaped from the Red Guards of Petrograd and Moscow. They needed the resources of a city; but where there were cities there were workers, and where there were workers there were Red Guards.  

From April 10th to 13th the Volunteer Army attacked Ekaterinodar. But 18,000 Red Guards were waiting for them. The vast numbers of people who flooded into the Red Guards whenever the Whites raised their head was a sign of the popularity of the Revolution. The fact that the Whites could at first only muster a few thousand is a reflection of their narrow – though very determined – support base.

Hundreds of Whites were killed the fighting. Kornilov had made his HQ in a farmhouse on the edge of town; on the morning of the 13th a shell scored a direct hit on the roof. Kornilov was killed. The Volunteer Army gave up the fight and once again fled out onto the steppe.

The End of the First Wave of Civil War

Another one of those pictorial maps showing the flame of revolution spreading outward from the central cities.
In finer detail. Clockwise from top: The Finnish Civil War begins. The Yellow flag shows the rising of Dutov at Orenburg. The blue line shows the front with Turkey and the soldiers returning radicalised from that front. The Green and Yellow flag is planted in T’blisi and probably represents the Georgian independence movement. Lots of pointy arrows, flames and contrasting dark and fiery colours around Ekaterinodar and Rostov. Flames too in the Donbass and further into Ukraine. The Green arrow is the rising of the Polish Corps. The blue arrows represent German attacks – of which more next week.

On April 23rd the Soviet leader Lenin declared victory: ‘It can be said with certainty that, in the main, the civil war has ended… on the internal front reaction has been irretrievably smashed by the efforts of the insurgent people.’

Even before the Volunteer Army’s defeat at Ekaterinodar, Lenin had sounded a similar note: ‘A wave of civil war swept over all of Russia, and everywhere we won victory with extraordinary ease.’[xiv]

There had been serious fighting on every point of the compass. A Tsarist army corps made up of Polish soldiers revolted in Belarus. A street battle erupted in Irkutsk in Siberia. A warlord named Semyonov raided and rampaged beyond Lake Baikal. Cossacks in the south of the Ural Mountains rose up and seized Orenburg.

Everywhere the result was the same. In response to these challenges, local workers and poor peasants volunteered for Red Guard units, usually in their thousands or tens of thousands. There was no Red Army yet. This was the time of the otryad, the informal ‘detachment’, some formed on local initiative, others sent out from Moscow or Petrograd; numbering anything from a few dozen to thousands; armed with anything from a few rifles to an armoured train (or even, in the case of Irkutsk, bows and arrows[xv]). Just like on the Don, everywhere political appeals were decisive. The Red Guards knew how to disarm the enemy with class politics. When that failed, they had their rifles.

Victor Serge, a communist who later criticised his own side for excessive use of violence, wrote that this wave of struggle was won ‘with neither excesses nor terror.’[xvi] It’s clear that he means terror directed and sanctioned by the Soviets; elsewhere he makes no secret of the fact that rogue bands of sailors and soldiers were killing officers and carrying out massacres like in Sebastopol. Important outliers in Kyiv and Kokand, both in February 1918, should be noted. But when two right-wing figures were murdered in their hospital beds by sailors in January 1918, the Soviet press condemned this atrocity. In general the noises from key Bolshevik leaders indicated that they believed the Russian revolution, unlike the French, could avoid terror and mass executions.

At this point the Soviet regime was still a democratic one. The government was a coalition between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs. The Third Congress of Soviets met on January 15th, around the time the Don Cossacks split. At this congress we see not just Bolsheviks and Left SRs but also Right SRs, Menshevik-Internationalists and Anarchists. It’s striking that the Right SRs were tolerated even though they had taken part in the uprisings in Moscow and Petrograd.

This was how things stood in the military situation and the political regime in early Spring 1918. The violence appeared to be over.

That spring, a renewal of the war with Germany seemed far more likely than a new wave of civil war. At the end of April the forces of the White Guards consisted of several thousand men, encircled and leaderless, on a blasted steppe on the very edge of Russia. At that moment the first Red army units had been formed, but they did not face the Don or the Volga; they faced the German armies to the west.

But with hindsight we know that the real Civil War had not even begun. Starting in May, a chain of catastrophes would fan the dying embers of armed struggle to an inferno that would not die down until the end of 1920, and that would still be blazing in parts of Russia as late as 1923. What the Red Guards had just endured was nothing compared to what was coming down the line. A bloody summer lay in wait. The war of irregular ‘detachments’ that had triumphed by the Don and Kuban rivers would fall far short of the challenges. To survive, the Soviet republic would need to build a regular professional army.

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The cover image for this post is by A. Kokorin, one of the very fine illustrations from The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich, 1973 edition.

Transitions, sound effects, music and dialogue on the video and audio versions of these podcasts are not my property but are included under fair use. Credits for the audio version of this post are as follows:

Music from Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Prokofiev.

Intro from Anastasia (1997, dir Don Bluth and Gary Goldman)

Dialogue from Fall of Eagles, Episode 12 (1974, Elliot & Burge, BBC)

Transitions from Battlefield 1: In the Name of the Tsar (2017, Dev. Dice)

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43680/43680-h/43680-h.htm Chapter VII

[1] Denikin, Anton. The Russian Turmoil. Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political, 1920. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43680/43680-h/43680-h.htm. p 17

The cavalry lieutenant is quoted in Reese, Roger, Red Commanders, Press of the University of Kansas (2015), p 15 and the detail about primary school completion among officers in the 1870s comes from the same source.

In addition to the sources listed here as direct citations, I have constructed the narrative drawing heavily from Smele (The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars), Mawdsley (The Russian Civil War), Smith (Russia in Revolution) and Serge (Year One of the Russian Revolution).

[2] Denikin, p 16

[3] Denikin, p 21

[4] Trotsky, LD, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume I, Gollancz, 1932, Chapter XVII, p 353-358

[5] Denikin, 91

[6] Kirienko Yu. K. KrachKaledinshchyna. Accessed and translated at Leninism.su. Another document from the same website to which I have referred is AM Konev, Red Guard on the Defense of October [sic; Google translate] https://leninism.su/revolution-and-civil-war/4142-krasnaya-gvardiya-na-zashhite-oktyabrya50.html. The documents on this site are extracts from works by Soviet scholars, but they are abridged and edited in suspicious ways – ellipses cover the defeat at Matveyev Kurgan, for example. Accordingly I have relied on these documents only for secondary matters, for the odd detail or quote, not for major questions.

[7] Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, p 123

[8] Carleton, Gregory. Russia: The Story of War, Harvard University Press, 2017, p 146

[9] Kirienko

[10] Serge says the Cossacks refused to take part, but Kirienko names the Cossack leader Nazarov as the one who crushed the Rostov uprising. The detail about the Rostov Soviet members being shot comes from a timeline at the end of Wollenberg’s book The Red Army: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1937/wollenberg-red-army/append02.htm

[xi] Carr, EH. The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 1, Pelican Books, 1950. p 300-301

[xii] Serge, 125

[xiii] SA Smith, Russia in Revolution, ‘Violence and Terror,’ beginning p 196

[xiv] Mawdlsey, The Russian Civil War, (Birlinn, 1982, 2017) p 29, 38

[xv] According to AM Konev, the Reds took out White machine-gunners using ‘well-aimed arrows from among the indigenous Siberian hunters’.

[xvi] Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin, Pioneer Publishers, trans Ralph Manheim, 1937. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1937/FromLeninToStalin-BW-T144.pdf.&nbsp; p 28.

01: Red Guards

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In November 1917, three hundred factory workers gathered in the village of Tushino near Moscow. One of them later recalled: ‘We faced a struggle against the Cossacks, and we workers had scores to settle.’[1] They held the rifles with which, one month earlier, they had fought for Soviet power. In Moscow they were given olive-khaki army gear and sent on by rail, with thousands of other armed workers, to Kharkiv. Of these thousands of armed passengers, many were in civilian clothes, others army jackets that had known Galician mud and German shrapnel. The closest thing to a common uniform was a red armband. Some wore a metal cap badge in the shape of a red star, some with a hammer-and-plough device. The hammer-and-sickle, which would become the symbol of communism in the 20th Century, had not yet caught on. The red star was, for some reason, worn upside-down. They wore ammunition belts criss-crossed over their chests. Bullets were scarce, and they wanted to keep them jealously in arm’s reach.

At Kharkiv, a city that was solid for Soviet power, they mustered before setting off for the southern extremity of European Russia. These were the Red Guards, the closest thing the Russian Revolution of October 1917 had to an army, and they were going to the country of the Don Cossacks and into battle.  

One observer recalls the aspect of the Red Guards in these early months: ‘they still had a poor command of the rifle, and there was nothing to say about the bearing of a soldier [sic]. But on the other hand, fire sparkled in everyone’s eyes, everyone was full of courage.’

Another source describes the Red column under the former Tsarist officer Muraviev: ‘They were oddly dressed, totally undisciplined people, covered from head to toe with every kind of weapon – from rifles to sabres to hand-guns and grenades. Arguments and fights constantly flared up among their commanders.’[2]

A member of the Red Guards

These commanders were elected by the rank-and-file. Some of them were sergeants and corporals of the old army. Others were members of the radical left parties, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks. Key decisions were taken at mass meetings.

The Red Guards, rising from the slums and shop floors, were going south to fight an army that was their opposite in every way. A force called the Volunteer Army, three or four thousand strong, had gathered by the Don River for one purpose: to crush the October Revolution. It was made up mostly of officers and cadets. Over one in five of these men were members of the hereditary nobility – who made up only 1.3% of the population at the time. It’s entirely possible that the Volunteer Army contained as many generals as privates.[3] They were known by a nickname that was just a few weeks old – the White Guards.

The Red Army as such did not yet exist, and the Volunteers were only the first and the smallest of the White Armies. But this campaign in the Cossack lands at the start of 1918 was like a caricature of the Civil War – an army without officers, squaring up to an army made up primarily of officers.

The cover image is from D. Bisti, ‘Lenin and Red Guards,’ USSR, 1967

The Reds had a decisive edge in numbers, the Whites in expertise and discipline. But there was a third force which was native to those lands, and whose leaders were allied to the White cause. That third force was the Don Cossack Host.

In this chapter we’re going to look at the origin of the Red Guards, at how these armed factory workers ended up travelling far from home to fight the officers and Cossacks. In the next chapter we’re going to examine the origin of the White Guards, before telling the story of what happened when these two forces met.

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The Reds

We will begin by looking at three revolutionaries. Taken together they provide a portrait of the Red Guards and of the revolutionary milieu from which this army emerged.

Kliment Voroshilov was typical of the Red Guards. His dad was a railway worker. He began his working life at age seven as a miner, then as a farm labourer under a ‘kulak’ (a wealthy peasant), then as a shepherd – all this before age 12, when he got a place in a village school. But by age fifteen he was toiling again, this time in a metal works. At seventeen he was under arrest for striking. In 1903, as a metal worker in the Hartmann Factory in Lugansk, eastern Ukraine, he came into contact with socialists. By 1918 he was a well-known workers’ leader in the Donbass region.

Vasily Chuikov was the eighth of twelve children of a peasant family, his mother a devout Christian on the staff of the local church, his father a bare-knuckle boxer. Chuikov finished his education at the age of twelve and moved to Saint Petersburg, where he worked in a factory that made spurs for cavalry officers.

Maria Spiridonova came from a well-off family. In 1906 she was enraged by the violence and sadism of a local official. So, she walked up to him one day and shot him dead. Police and Cossacks arrested her. There followed a notorious case which made headlines around the world: Spiridonova suffered torture, sexual assault, and finally a sentence of death commuted to life imprisonment. But with the Revolution came amnesty, and Spiridonova emerged as the leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary party.

These individuals will feature again from time to time in the narrative that follows, but their main importance lies in the information about late imperial Russia and its revolution that can be gleaned from these biographical sketches.

In Western Europe the first generations of the working class were made up, by and large, of the children of artisans; the workers of Russia were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of serfs. As late as 1917 a staggering number of them still owned land in some distant village.

There were illiterate oral poets of admirable genius who found machine work intolerable and who drifted from unskilled job to unskilled job; village youths stunted by malnutrition; commuters who, after their 10-14-hour day, got only a few hours in which to sleep; women who earned 15 kopeks a day before the war but 1.5 roubles during it; seasonal workers leaving behind their crafts or fields, barely understanding how wages and piece-work operated; foremen who were part of the worker-collective; white-collar workers who were outside it. During the First World War there were conscripted labourers from Central Asia, and Chinese workers brought in en masse by gangster-like contractors.

 There were settled, established workers and recent migrants from the village. There were the workers of Petersburg, where gigantic metaland textile works employed thousands or tens of thousands, and there were the smaller workshops of the other cities. Even within the Petersburg steelworks, the fitters looked down on those in the foundry, the rolling-mill and the forge, whose faces ‘through the deep tan of the furnace’ appeared coarse.As late as the eve of revolution most workers still contributed their kopeks to buy oil for the religious ikon lamps that they kept in the corners of their workplaces.

The greatest concentration of workers was in Petersburg. (Saint Petersburg was later called Petrograd, then Leningrad). Working-class people lived three, four or five to a single-room apartment or to a cellar, paying high rents. Workers on different shifts would share a single bunk. Outside Petersburg it was common to sleep in a company-owned barracks. Shifts were ten, eleven, twelve hours. Overcrowding and overwork constituted mass and merciless social violence: 100,000 died in a cholera epidemic in 1900. One in four children died before they were a year old.[4]

Of course, there were things in modern city life that one could enjoy, even on low pay and long hours. Workers consumed the daily newspapers and illustrated periodicals with their ads and sensational stories. They read fiction about detectives and explorers and romance. Single working women spent one-fifth of their income on clothing, often employing seamstresses to copy fashionable styles. The young male metal worker, unless the strains of working life drove him into the trap of vodka addiction, would save up for a smart suit, a watch, a straw hat, and go out walking on a Sunday afternoon.

And there were, of course, political parties which offered solutions to the desperate conditions in which workers lived. There were the Social Democrats, a socialist party which split into the moderate, loosely-organised Mensheviks and the militant, tight-knit Bolsheviks (this split began in 1903 and culminated in 1912). Others looked to the peasant majority instead of the workers, or were inclined to a romantic rather than a scientific outlook. These would join the Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs, a broad party with roots in the terrorist movement of the 19th Century. There were also Tolstoyans and Anarchists.

Three-quarters of people in the Russian Empire were illiterate, but a majority of workers could certainly read. ‘Every morning on the works train it was rare for someone not to read a newspaper or book, rare if you lived only for your wage and your family.’ They read Sherlock Holmes and Karl Marx and plenty in between. For some, ‘tales of Cossacks, of arrests and torture by the [secret police], of people hanged, and others forced to flee to some unknown destination became more interesting than adventure stories.’ [5] In the smoke and grime of factory and mining districts or in the noise and disorder of overcrowded housing, they would tackle the dense legion of words printed on thin paper under titles like Iskra, The Spark, Novaya Zhizn, New Life and RabocheyeDyelo, the Workers’ Cause. After political meetings, meditating on what they had learned, or on whatever fierce controversy had been aired, they would walk home along the unpaved, barely-lit streets of the working-class districts. In winter this would mean trudging in darkness through a river of mud.

 The police, if they had reason to believe that a young man was a member of the Social Democrats, would arrest him and then play a simple trick that played on the psychology of party loyalty:

A prisoner’s mother, for example, would call on the colonel of gendarmerie and ask to be allowed a meeting with her son.

‘Well, you know, your son is accused of belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party,’ the gendarme would say to her in a categorical tone.

‘Oh, come, Colonel,’ the mother would reply, in amazement: ‘my son has always been a convinced Social-Democrat.’

The gendarme would rub his hands with glee. That was all he needed.[5]

They risked it, because what was said in those meetings and what was printed on that cheap paper struck a chord with their own experiences, and offered a way forward. The bounty of nature and the great power of modern industry should not be in the hands of a wealthy few; they should be the collective property of the whole people. But the bosses and the state worked hand-in-hand to crush any strikes and protests. How to overcome the violent power of the state? The Social Democrats had an answer: the working class, through its decisive numbers in the big cities, through its control of production and transport, would bring down Tsarism.

But was it possible to build socialism in a country where two-thirds of the population were small property owners? Aid must come from advanced industrial countries, such as Germany. Germany was home to the most developed and impressive socialist movement in the world. On whom the Russian Mensheviks and Bolsheviks tried to model themselves. The revolution must be international, must embrace the industrialised countries of the West, or it would fail. But surely those advanced countries like Germany would have a revolution long before Russia ever got around to it.

Thoughts along these lines would have run through the head of the socialist worker as they negotiated the mud and open cesspits of the unlit streets. They would have wondered whether the working class could really defeat the system; whether the toiling people could really run and govern a country.

Scene from Dr Zhivago (Dir David Lean, 1965) showing a workers’ demonstration coming up against the forces of the Tsarist autocracy

Revolution & Reaction

1905 was a year in which these questions were posed in real life. The workers of fifty towns and cities established councils directly elected from each workplace. These workers’ councils were known as Soviets, and in places they became parallel revolutionary governments. Workers formed defence groups to protect the Soviets, and these groups became known as Red Guards.

But the Russian army stayed loyal to the Tsar. 100,000 Cossacks were mobilised to crush the revolution by a charter that confirmed their privileges. Affluent liberals supported the revolution at first, but by the end of the year they were frightened and weary. They met the Tsar a lot less than half-way. There were disorders in the countryside, but by and large the cities were isolated.

The Tsarist government hanged 3,000 revolutionaries and killed more in various pogroms and repressions. There was street fighting in Łódź and Moscow; the Polish and Russian Red Guards fought bravely but it wasn’t enough to overcome a professional army.

Years of reaction followed. There were 410,000 members of state-sponsored ultra-right organisations and they were on a rampage. Jewish people were targeted for arson, looting and massacres; 600 anti-Semitic rampages took place.[7] Millions fled to Western Europe or North America. It was in this context that the above-mentioned Maria Spiridonova shot dead a Tsarist official.

The revolutionary parties were beaten down, disarmed and wracked with internal division. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks made their split final. The SRs polarised into Left and Right but remained in one party. Their subsequent painful history proves that there are worse things in political life than splits.

The first Red Guards – workers at the barricades in 1905

But Tsarism had been forced to make some concessions on trade unions and elections. And the 1905 revolution had filled out abstract theory with concrete experience. The Soviets showed how the workers could form their own alternative government, their own participatory democracy, their own councils. On the other hand, the Red Guards had been no match for the army. The revolutionary worker had new questions to ponder, often from exile or a prison cell: could the insurgent people wage a successful civil war, or would the next revolution also be drowned in blood?

WAR

The First World War began in the summer of 1914. The horrors of modern warfare – machine-guns and apocalyptic artillery bombardments – were compounded by all the worst kinds of waste, incompetence, shortages and harsh discipline. The worker drafted into the army or navy found himself under an autocrat worse than the factory boss: the Russian officer, who was entitled to punch a soldier in the face, to humiliate him publicly, to spit on him. The Tsar’s regime was vicious both in defeat (Over a million people were banished from the borderlands as the Germans advanced) and in victory (A repressive anti-Semitic regime was installed in Lviv when it was briefly conquered).

The first tremor of revolution came in Central Asia. An attempt to impose conscription in 1916 triggered a rebellion. The army went in, killed an estimated 88,000 rebels and civilians, and sent 2,500,000 fleeing into China. According to Jonathan Smele, that was 20% of the population of Central Asia at the time.

In the big cities of European Russia, events in Central Asia were not at the forefront of the minds of working-class people. That place was occupied by the food crisis. The burden of feeding the army made an absolute mess of the food supply system, and the price of bread kept rising.

At first the war produced an atmosphere of patriotism that smothered all dissent. The Bolshevik Party, riding high in 1912-1914, had been reduced to 12,000 members by 1917. But the same patriotism fuelled indignation at the criminally poor leadership.

Nobody expected the Revolution of February 1917. Women workers in Petrograd triggered a decisive battle which drew in hundreds of thousands of participants and raged for five days. Each night the insurgent people would retire across the bridges to the working-class suburbs. Each morning they marched out again and resumed the struggle. They had few weapons so they used stones and even sheets of ice. They burned and looted police stations, beat and killed the police. Regiment by regiment, the soldiers of the garrison joined the revolution. This mutiny was decisive. The Tsar abdicated his throne and was imprisoned.

Tsar and people – the February Revolution depicted in a contemporary illustrated paper. This and the others in the slideshow above come from this great source.

The key leaders of this movement ‘on the ground’ were the members of local committees of the various socialist parties, the workers who had trudged home after meetings and pored over Iskra sitting on their shared bunks in their overcrowded flats and cellars. They had torn down a 300-year-old dynasty in five days.

The power vacuum was filled by elements of the old regime and its tame opposition. They formed a self-appointed Provisional Government, and most people were inclined at least to give them a chance.

At the same time the Soviets, the great workers’ councils of 1905, re-emerged. They spread from Petrograd to every city and even to the regiments and villages, forming a brilliant system of participatory democracy – rough and ready, not yet embracing the entire population, but sensitive to the moods of the masses, reflecting the popular will at every turn. The delegates were subject to recall and re-election. In this honeymoon of the February Revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks had a decisive majority in the Soviet. Both supported the Provisional Government.

The key leaders of this movement on the ground were the members of local committees of the various socialist parties, the workers who had trudged home after meetings and pored over Iskra sitting on their shared bunks in their overcrowded flats and cellars. They had led their workmates and neighbours in tearing down a 300-year-old dynasty in five days.

The power vacuum was filled by elements of the old regime and its tame opposition. They formed a self-appointed Provisional Government, and most people were inclined at least to give them a chance.

At the same time the Soviets, the great workers’ councils of 1905, re-emerged. They spread from Petrograd to every city and even to the regiments and villages, forming a brilliant system of participatory democracy – rough and ready, not yet embracing the entire population, but sensitive to the changing moods of the masses. The delegates were subject to recall and re-election.

A local example can stand in for what was happening in many places: at the Provodnik works in Tushino near Moscow, a few dozen workers disarmed the factory guard. A mass meeting of workers and their families elected them as the new factory guard, the workers’ committee and the factory fire brigade, and sent delegates to the Moscow Soviet. Management soon found that the quickest way to procure supplies was via these workers and the Soviet system.[8]

In this honeymoon of the February Revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks had a decisive majority in the Soviet. Both supported the Provisional Government.

Hopes ran high at first and there was a mood of euphoria and national unity. But as the months passed the mood hardened. The Provisional Government was determined to continue the war. It was punishing those who dared to touch the property of the wealthy landowners. At factories whose workers were less vigilant than those at Tushino, bosses began lockouts, sabotage and threats of closure. The food situation got worse. Over the summer, the economy fell into crisis.

From April on, the Bolsheviks put forward a tough and clear position calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and for a socialist revolution. At first this was not a popular position, but as the summer wore on, those who had supported the Mensheviks and SRs switched to the Bolsheviks. Their slogans – ‘Peace, Bread and Land’ – ‘All Power to the Soviets’ – at first anticipated and then expressed the growing popular clamour.

The membership of the Bolsheviks rocketed from 12,000 to 350,000. In September, they won a decisive majority in the Soviet.

What had changed since 1905? This time, a mass movement of the rural toilers was sweeping the countryside, seizing the estates of the nobility, and the army was crumbling under the weight of desertions and mutinies.

What was Bolshevism? The name now carries all kinds of connotations, some very bad. But if we return to the factory in Tushino we get a different picture. This factory of five thousand had five hundred Bolsheviks as early as April and one thousand by September.

Staff at this factory organised a clubhouse on factory grounds where they had a library and a temperance society, an orchestra, amateur theatre, dancing, poetry and prose readings. Chekhov and Nekrasov were staples.

There was an entrance charge to all our social events, with the proceeds going either to victims of the old regime or to the library and other club facilities. It was always difficult to accommodate everyone who wished to visit the club. Artistic hand-drawn posters were put up in railway stations, workshops, villages, and hamlets a long way from the factory […] The whitecollar staff[…], who had formerly kept their distance from the workers, also came along to the theater, so the barrier between them and us began to break down spontaneously.

The working day was reduced to eight hours and all overtime was abolished, but the factory continued to operate and to produce as before the Revolution. [9]

The Red Guards

Vasily Chuikov, the son of the church secretary and the bare-knuckle fighter, found himself unemployed in Petrograd in 1917. But through one of his numerous brothers, he found something to occupy his time: he joined the Red Guards. In a few months’ time he would be shooting at cavalry officers, rather than making spurs for them.

Red Guards in Autumn 1917

The Red Guards had been re-founded by Bolsheviks, but they answered to the multi-party Soviet. They were armed with weapons seized from the burning police stations or factory security guards, or donated by workers in the war industries. Many had no weapons at all, and drilled with wooden sticks. Soon there were units in every ward of the city, some formed on a factory-by-factory basis and patrolling on company time. By July there were 10,000 members in Petrograd. After the failed coup by the right-wing General Kornilov in August-September the workers’ army numbered 20,000 in 79 factories. By November there were 200,000 nationally. They had pistols, rifles, the odd machine gun, even a few armoured cars. On duty, many Red Guards wore their Sunday best: their shirts, ties and waistcoats, watch-chains and fedoras or straw hats.[10]

Many soldiers and sailors supported the Red Guards. Kronstadt, home of the Baltic Sea fleet, was a rock-solid bastion of Bolshevik, anarchist and Left SR sailors.

Recruitment to the workers’ militia was as strict as to any other organization. The candidacy of each prospective member was discussed at a session of the factory committee, and applicants were often turned down on the grounds that they were regularly drunk or engaged in hooliganism or had behaved coarsely with women. [11]

By autumn, anxiety had settled on the Red Guards. Winter was coming. The economic crisis was getting worse, and famine was already a reality. Maybe the Bolshevik leaders were just like the other party leaders – all talk. Maybe the opportunity for revolution would pass. Maybe this movement would fall apart, and there would be hell to pay – a defeat bloodier and more total than that of 1905.

But on the night of October 24th-25th the Petrograd Red Guards were called out onto the streets.[12] The Provisional Government was attempting to shut down the Bolshevik newspaper. In response the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet went on a long-planned offensive. The Red Guards and their soldier and sailor allies occupied the city. Rifles, machine-guns and cannon could be heard firing, but there was no real battle.

The Provisional Government waited in the Winter Palace as the Reds occupied the streets outside. The defenders of the Winter Palace consisted of cadets and the Women’s Battalion.[13]At first the cadets and women vowed to commit suicide sooner than surrender. But hours later, confused and demoralised, they let the Red Guards in with a shrug of the shoulders. It was less a ‘storming’ of the Winter Palace than a long confused siege merging with a gradual infiltration.

At last the defenders laid down their weapons. The Red Guards and soldiers, these children of serfs who had lived three to a cellar, ‘broke into the Palace and after rushing up the 117 staircases, through 1,786 doors and 1,057 rooms at last, at ten past two in the morning, entered the room where the ministers of the bourgeois Provisional Government were and arrested them.’[14]

The Reds inflicted no fatalities. Apparently they suffered six, two by friendly fire.[15]

Red Guard unit from the Vulcan factory

The journalist Louise Bryant, following up a rumour, interviewed another casualty of that night, a young woman who was injured. 

Well, that night when the Bolsheviki took the Winter Palace and told us to go home, a few of us were very angry and we got into an argument,’ she said. ‘We were arguing with soldiers of the Pavlovsk regiment. A very big soldier and I had a terrible fight. We screamed at each other and finally he got so mad that he pushed me and I fell out of the window. Then he ran downstairs and all the other soldiers ran downstairs…. The big soldier cried like a baby because he had hurt me and he carried me all the way to the hospital and came to see me every day.[16]

This is a human portrait, but not a very flattering one, of the soldiers of the revolution. The wider world was told a very different story: that the women were raped en masse. As late as 1989, western sources were still embellishing the original lie. We read (in Anthony Livesey, Great Battles of World War One, Marshall, London, 1989) that ‘The Bolsheviks, who hated them for wanting to fight to the end, raped, mutilated and killed any who fell into their hands.’ The second part is so outrageously false that it almost feels redundant to point out that the first part is wrong too; they didn’t fight to the end. In fact, they were ambivalent about the government they were defending.

After the Revolution

Who will govern us then?’ demanded one daily newspaper which appeared on the day of the October Revolution. ‘The cooks, perhaps […] or maybe the fishermen? The stable boys, the chauffeurs? Or perhaps the nursemaids will rush off to meetings of the Council of State between the diaper-washing sessions. Who then? Where are the statesmen? Perhaps the mechanics will run the theatres, the plumbers foreign affairs, the carpenters the post office. Who will it be?[17]

As if in answer, the Congress of Soviets was meeting at the Smolny Institute. The vast majority of the delegates approved of the insurrection. The Mensheviks and SRs, who had once commanded a majority, were now reduced to a rump. The Congress without delay passed decrees taking Russia out of the war, transferring the noble and church estates to tens of millions of peasants, and declaring the right of self-determination for nationalities. The new regime did in a few days what the Provisional Government had dragged its feet on for nine months.

In those days, Red Guards and sailors patrolling in the streets were harangued by well-dressed citizens who accused them of madness, anarchy, bloodthirsty violence, etc. The revolutionaries listened, sometimes puzzled, sometimes keenly interested, to their heated arguments and fabricated atrocity stories.

Red Guards on sentry duty

Before the year was out the revolution had spread to most cities and towns. The local Soviet would simply form a Military-Revolutionary Committee and take over. That’s not to say it was straightforward or peaceful. There was street fighting in Moscow and in Irkutsk, and a Cossack-cadet rising in Petrograd. The Red Guards won in each case. But already in October a counter-revolutionary army was gathering by the Don River. It was one thing to defend your own familiar streets. It was quite another to travel a thousand kilometres to the edge of Russia, the home turf of the notorious Don Cossacks, to fight a legion of officers. But there was nothing else for it. The Red Guards took up arms and went south to the Don.

In the next chapter we will look at the White Guards and the Cossacks and try to understand why they took up arms against the Revolution. Finally, we will look at what happened when Red and White met in South Russia at the start of 1918 in the first front of the Russian Civil War.

<Back to Contents

On the audio version, the music and transitions are as follows:

Music: From Alexander Nevskyby Sergei Prokofiev – ‘Battle on the Ice’

Battle sounds: From All Quiet on the Western Front, 1979, Dir. Delbert Mann. Youtube.com

Speech: From Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Roger Sloman as Lenin. Youtube.com

[1]Dune, p 96

[2] The first quote is from AM Konev, The Red Guard in the Defence of October, available on the website Leninism.ru, describing Red Guards in Irkutsk. The second is from Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-1926, Hurst & Company, London, 2015 p 56, describing Red forces in Ukraine.

[3] There were ‘very, very few’ rank-and-file soldiers in the Volunteer Army – Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, (1930; Haymarket, 2015) p 123. We can make a list of 15 generals who were in the VoljnteerAmry in 1918: Pokrovsky, Erdeli, Ulagay, Shkuro, Kazanovich, Kutepov, Wrangel, Borovsky, Shilling, Lyakhov, Promtov, Slushov, Yuzefovitch, Bredov. From Khvostov, Mikhail and Karachtchouk, Andrei. The Russian Civil War (2) White Armies. Osprey Publishing, 1997 (2008) p 13-14

[4] Smith, SA. The Russian Revolution and the Factories of Petrograd, February 1917 to June 1918. Unpublished dissertation, 1980. University of Birmingham Research Archive, etheses depository. Pp 22, 53;

Smith, SA, Russia in Revolution, Oxford University Press, 2017, Chapter 2: From Reform to War;

Dune, pp 11-12

[5] Dune, pp 15, 19

[6] Raskolnikov, FF. Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin, 1934 (New Park, 1982), ‘DPZ’, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1918/raskolnikov/ilyin/index.htm

[7] Foley, Michael. History of Terror: The Russian Civil War, Pen and Sword, 2018

[8] Dune, pp 36-7. 47

[9] Dune, 38, 40-41, 47

[10] Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, pp 68-70

[11] Dune, 51

[12] This date is going by the Julian calendar – the date by the Gregorian calendar was 6/7 November. In early 1918 the Soviet regime changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

[13] The Women’s Battalion was a unit of several hundred enthusiastic women volunteers for the war against Germany. To their frustration, they had been used for propaganda purposes and not sent into battle – until now.

[14] The USSR: A Short History, Novosti Press Agency PublishingHouse, 1975 p 109. This book is an interesting souvenir whose account of Soviet history is riddled with omissions.

[15] Taylor, AJP, The First World War: An Illustrated History. Penguin, 1963. (1982) p 200

[16]Bryant, Louise, Six Red Months in Russia, George H Doran Company, 1918. Available online athttps://www.marxists.org/archive/bryant/works/russia/index.htm

[17] Faulkner, Neil. A People’s History of the Russian Revolution, Pluto, 2017, p 209

00: Introduction

Revolution Under Siege: Civil War in & Beyond Russia, 1918-1920

In October 1917 the working class of the Russian Empire was the driving force behind the first socialist revolution in history. They overthrew a centuries-old empire in February 1917. After a nine-month interregnum during which a liberal-democratic regime failed to deliver on their most pressing demands, they took power through democratic councils known as Soviets. The new Soviet power hardly had a chance to draw breath, much less to build socialism, before it was plunged into a war of terrible scope and fury. Those who had made the revolution were now drawn in their millions into the armed struggle to defend it. They were the essential core around which the new Red Army was built.

Before the war many workers in the Russian Empire would have worked their ten-hour days with the heat of a blast furnace on their skin. Now they carried its promethean fire to the Arctic Circle and the deserts of Central Asia. They fought from the streets of Moscow to the Siberian taiga and the Mongolian steppe. In the north they were supplied by sleds, in the south by camel caravans. It far from a merely Russian affair – but we call this struggle, for want of a better name, the Russian Civil War.

One relatively small episode in this war was dealt with in The Iron Flood, a 1924 novel by the Soviet writer Alexander Serafimovich. In the summer following the Revolution, the Cossacks rise in revolt against the Soviet power. The flood of the title is a vast mass of men, women and children, supporters of the Soviet regime, whose home villages become enemy territory overnight. They must break out and join up with the Red Army.

South Russia is like a furnace under the summer heat. Behind them, their brothers and sisters are hanging from gallows. Cossacks on horseback pursue them. Some sailors join the column; they are revolutionary but hot-headed. Twice they attempt to lynch the commander of the column. The Iron Flood must keep moving, up mountains and across wastelands. It is bombarded by the guns of several nations, from land and sea. The children die from shrapnel, thirst and hunger. The Iron Flood breaks through an enemy fortress, surviving against terrible odds. But in the moment of victory the author forces us to confront the fact that these enemies were human beings too.[1]

The specific story told in The Iron Flood – the march of the Taman Red Army – is true.[2] More than that, it sums up in an authentic way the chaos, cruelty and heroism of the Civil War. The molten-metal flood of humanity cools, solidifies and triumphs under the column commander, “whose face, jaws, eyes and voice are repeatedly described as being made of iron and steel.”[3] The potent metaphor of flesh turning to metal describes the transformation wrought on the Revolution and the people who made it – for better and for worse – by the furnace of war.

Civil War-era weapons and posters, from a museum in Taganrog, Russia

This is Revolution Under Siege, a new series from The 1919 Review that tells the story of the Russian Civil War. The dramatic events of the year 1918 are the focus of Series One, which adds up to ten parts. Series Two will deal with 1919, and a third Series will explore the events of 1920 and later dates. Podcasts based on these posts will go up on Spotify, Youtube, Google Podcasts and other platforms. Soon the existing podcasts will be updated so as to have a human voice.

So you don’t miss any of it, make sure to put your email address in the subscriber box below. Visit us on 1919review.wordpress.com.

*

Under the name “Russian Civil War” we neatly file away a range of conflicts that encompassed one-sixth of the land surface of the earth. Only 44% of the people living in this collapsing empire were Russian in the strict sense. There are over fifteen states in Eastern Europe, in Central Asia and in the Caucusus which include this war as a chapter in their national histories; a Civil War-era flag became a symbol of protest in Belarus in 2020. When, in Series 2, we come to deal with events in Ukraine, the place names will echo the news reports from the current war.This and the involvement of other countries made it “a world war condensed.”[4] Japan, Britain, France, the United States and Germany were some of the countries which invaded Russian lands on every point of the compass. In 1918 the most effective units in the Red and White forces, respectively, were Latvian and Czech. Often, Reds fought directly with Allied soldiers; in 1920, Russian sailors skirmished with the Ghurkhas of the British military on the coast of Iran.

Rather than say that the Russian Revolution spilled over into other countries, it’s more accurate to say that Russia was the most advanced front in a global revolutionary offensive by the labour movement and its allies. Italy had its biennio rosso, “two red years,” Spain its triennioBolshevico, “three Bolshevik years,” Ireland its “Soviet” movement. In Germany and Hungary, there were Soviet Republics in 1919. It’s impossible to draw lines on the map to mark the limits of this war. The title of this series says 1918-1920, but it will be impossible to avoid dealing with events from earlier and later.

In all this complexity there is nonetheless a key and central axis of the war: the struggle between the Red Army and the White Armies. In October, having chosen the Bolshevik Party as their political instrument and flooded into it in their hundreds of thousands, and into the Soviets in their millions, the working class took power. The White Armies came together to destroy this new order. The Red Army was forged in the heat of the struggle to defend it.

This was fundamentally a struggle between classes.

Industrial workers formed the core support base of the Reds. White-collar workers, poor peasants and artisans were drawn to their banner.

On the other side, under the White banner, were big business owners, landlords and the church. The core of the White fighting strength was made up of officers of the old army, cadets and students – the sons of the middle and wealthy classes.

In the Russian empire in 1917 there were 3.6 million factory and mine workers, among 18.5 million wage workers of all kinds. This was a vast and diverse mass of people. But the Russian Empire contained between 150 million and 180 million people. So the working class made up a large minority.[5] The wealthy made up another minority, obviously a much smaller one. Most of the population fell into neither category, but different elements were magnetically attracted to the Red or White poles. Let’s take a brief look at thee of these intermediate social forces: the peasants, the Cossacks and the intelligentsia.

A map from the late 1920s attempting to explain the Russian Civil War. If you find the complexity daunting, I’ve got something to tell you: this is only one map from a series of ten. Available on Wikimedia Commons and Library of Congress.

Peasants, those who worked in agriculture, made up two-thirds of the population. 80% of the total population of the Russian Empire lived in the countryside. The peasants were a diverse category – very different income levels, nationalities and social forms existed. Over the course of the war, peasant attitudes toward the Reds embraced two extremes of enthusiasm and hostility, and everything in between. But there was a consistent attitude of sullen hostility to the Whites, the faction of the hated landlords.

The Cossacks were a privileged military caste, several million people settled on the borders of Russia. Without them, the White Armies would simply not have been viable. Only one-fifth of those who fought did so under the Red flag. But from the point of view of the White leaders, they could be unreliable.

The professional middle classes made up another large minority. These were doctors, lawyers, etc, known in Russia as the intelligentsia. They had always seen themselves as the leaders of the revolution. But when the revolution happened, they were afraid of the factory workers and soldiers who had taken control. Some of the intelligentsia were Red, more tended toward the Whites early on; some changed sides as the war went on.

One of the repeating themes in the Civil War is that these intermediate forces again and again attempt to organise some third force, and to break the bipolar struggle of White and Red. All these attempts ended in failure. Early on, they tended to be subsumed into the White camp, later into the Red. The various ‘third forces’ generally ended up acting as transmission belts into Red or White.

There is a reason why some of the most well-known novels to come out of the Civil War focused on the intelligentsia (Doctor Zhivago) and the Cossacks (Quiet Don). These were the social layers caught in the middle of the Civil War, tortured by their split loyalties. However painful such conflict is for human beings, literature thrives on it.

This fact hints at why, in spite of the complexity, most scholars continue to regard this as a single war. It is because a single overriding question was at issue: whether the October Revolution would stand or fall.

An Armenian woman in the Red Army, stationed in a frontline trench in 1918.

*

The Russian Civil War doesn’t look anything like the First or Second World War. We usually don’t get to see clear frontlines, or two sides neatly differentiated by crisp mass-produced uniforms. Usually in popular military history, officers and politicians are making all the decisions –human agency is a monopoly of the top brass. Barring the catastrophic defeat of such-and-such a corps or such-and-such a division, we expect it to remain qualitatively the same from month to month and even from year to year.

In this war, none of this could be taken for granted. A White general wrote of

‘those real moral and material coefficients, which alone determine the combat value of any unit, its stability, reliability and effectiveness. [These coefficients are] determined by the sum of the qualities of superiors and cadres […] and the conditions of service of the unit, its fatigue, lack of supplies, etc., etc. Before the revolution, these coefficients were on average more even and were less subject to various fluctuations; now absolutely – they have gone deep down, and relatively – they have become very diverse and capricious.’

Diary of General Budbreg, June 10th 1919

It was not rare for a regiment to decimate itself overnight in a bloody mutiny, and go over to the other side. The bold coloured arrows on maps were frustrated, on both sides, by train cars falling apart, fuel shortages, mutinies, mass desertion and guerrilla warfare.

We expect revolutionary war to be unconventional. But the Russian Civil War also defies what we expect to see in an unconventional war. Those who have read about the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions are primed to think that revolutionary war is guerrilla war. But long before Mao and Che, it was the White Guards who retreated to remote areas, carried out raids, sent agents into the enemy rear, and perished in terrible numbers on heroic ‘Long Marches.’

So did the Reds, at times, as The Iron Flood will attest. But the Reds won the war by building a regular and professional army, albeit an army of a kind never seen before or since.

This war is unique in history. Unlike in Cuba, China or Vietnam, the revolutionary war in the former Russian Empire was worker-based and not a rural guerrilla struggle. Unlike in Eastern Europe after 1945, it was a mass popular movement and not largely a bureaucratic ‘revolution from above.’ And unlike the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War, this working-class, popular revolutionary war was victorious.

*

By the end of summer 1918 it was total war, desperate and cruel. But it was fought in the wake of the First World War, against a backdrop of exhaustion and collapse. In World War One the Tsarist army had placed 300,000 cavalry in the field; by 1920, the Reds were proud to have a First Cavalry Army numbering just 16,000.[6] The Civil War was fought with the improvised human and material leftovers of the World War, and there was something post-apocalyptic in its aspect.

The Russian Revolution was a belated rupture between medieval and modern. This fault line is visible in the striking image of the tachanka, a type of weapon used by the Reds and the Anarchists: a horse-drawn cart with a Maxim machine gun bolted onto it. Reds and Whites alike tallied up their armouries not just in rifles but in swords. Armoured trains with naval guns dominated the railways. In some places, metalworkers forged pikes when no rifles were to hand.[7] Men and women fought for a classless, stateless, high-tech future society, while wearing boots made from the bark of a birch-tree. 

Painting of a Civil War-era tachanka by Mitrofan Grekov

A greater number of Russians died in combat in World War One than in the Civil War. But years of Civil War compounded the famine and epidemics that had already come to the boil during the World War. In 1917 factory owners began on a huge scale to close down, lock up or sabotage their premises and equipment; from the end of that year White Armies blocked Russia’s internal supply lines. The harsh winters of 1918, 1919 and 1920 were hell in the cities, and Saint Petersburg was literally half-deserted. Millions perished in rural areas during the famine of 1921-2. This mass mortality consumed the people with every day that the Civil War ground on. By the end, it added up to a yawning demographic gulf. Terror, practised by all the contending forces, made its contribution to the death toll, and it was not a small contribution.

*

On the eve of the October Revolution, writes a worker who would soon be marching in the Red Army, ‘We certainly did not understand the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. Quite the contrary. We were looking for allies, for other parties willing to go with us along the path of building soviet power […] NovaiaZhizn’, the newspaper of the Menshevik-Internationalists, enjoyed even greater success at our factory than Pravda. So we were by no means pure sectarians, for whom party truth was higher than the truth of reality.’ [8]

This account will trace how the conflict ground down this democratic attitude. The Civil War created several necessary conditions for the rise of Stalinism – that is, for the establishmentof a dictatorship which, two decades later, claimed the lives of most of the political and military leaders of the Revolution.But for Stalinism to arise, other vital conditions were necessary too. An account of the Civil War which works backwards from Stalinism, or worse, which recognises no essential difference between the Lenin and Stalin eras, will have huge blind spots. Supporters of the Reds were fighting for control of the land they tilled, for their rights as women or members of minority groups, for socialism or for democracy. They accepted the need for emergency wartime measures – which included violence and the curtailing of democratic rights, as in the belligerent countries during the World Wars. But if they had been asked to fight for a repressive one-party state they would not have done so. To portray them as dupes of the Bolsheviks is to do a disservice to them – and to the Bolsheviks.

On the other hand, the promise of a better future helped the workers and poor to endure the horrors of war and hunger in the short term. This was not a false promise. The conquests of World War One were to be Istanbul or parts of Poland. The conquests of the Russian Civil War were:

The promise of a better future helped people to endure the horrors of war and hunger in the short term. And it was not a false promise. The conquests of World War One were to be Istanbul or parts of Poland. The conquests of the Russian Civil War included:the eight-hour working day;free healthcare and social insurance;vastly expanded access to education; housing costs reduced to a pittance; the redistribution of noble and church land in favour of tens of millions of people; the right to divorce, abortion and contraception; the de-criminalisation of homosexuality; and language rights and autonomy for ethnic and national minorities.

It is only possible to dismiss these gains if one first dismisses the interests of working-class people, poor peasants, women and minorities as beneath consideration. Of course, we would be naive to think that no historian has ever implicitly made this dismissal. Hence we have many ‘doom and gloom’ accounts of the Revolution and Civil War which withhold any hint of vindication from the protagonists. Hence, even, accounts which explicitly place the Russian Revolution side-by-side with the Nazi holocaust (See the relevant chapter in Rayfield, Stalin’s Hangmen, Viking, 2004).

The massive hunger and violence were not a necessary sacrifice or a means to an end. There was nothing necessary about it. Violence and suffering accompany all wars and revolutions, but in this case the worst of it could have been averted.The Civil War could have ended in April 1918, or in January 1919, if the Whites and the interventionists had been willing to take that course. On the other side, Soviet leaders admitted to serious mistakes, such as clinging to food policies which, certainly by 1920, were doing more harm than good. Mass mortality was not in any sense necessary. It damaged the Revolution, placed limits on its gains, and, along with other factors, helped lay the foundations for Stalinism with all its calamities and crimes.

*

I see in the Russian Civil War a pressing relevance for the 21st-century.The war in Ukraine is the most obvious example. It is of course a fundamentally different war. It has stable frontlines, and neither Kyiv nor the Kremlin have any interest in the labour movement or social revolution. But the echoes are insistent. Belarussian railway workers delayed and diverted Russian soldiers in the first days of the war. Putin in 2005 spoke at the re-interment of the remains of the White general Denikin, attended by thousands; Putin in 2022 levelled cities in the name of the same ‘Russia, One and Indivisible’ for which Denikin waged war. When the Russian armed forcesfailed in early 2022 despite their numbers and equipment, one is reminded ofBudbergand his ‘coefficients.’Kolchak’s big mobilisation, like Putin’s, failed to translate into reliable units. When mass graves were discovered in liberated areas, the disturbing details seemed straight out of the history books. With Azov and Wagner and Kadyrov, and when the Ukrainian government armed Russian fascists and sent them on a raid into Russia, we saw something like the array of irregular and dangerous forces, generously fed by state sponsors, which sprouted during the Civil War. Like the White Guards, YevgenyPrigozhin had Rostov-on-Don and South Russia as his base; like so many unstable and inscrutable atamans of the Russian Civil War, like Kornilov, Gajda, Muraviev and Hrihoriiv, he blazed a searing trail across the world before burning up rapidly.[9]

But the relevance of the Civil war to our time goes deeper. Twenty-five years ago liberal capitalism seemed like the only show in town. But now with pandemics, polarisation, climate change, economic crises and war, the bourgeois liberal utopia seems a lot further away than it did a quarter-century ago. Revolution, reactionand civil war are realities of our time.

No adult with political opinions can read about the Russian Civil War and remain un-invested and dispassionate. I won’t pretend to be neutral. But my sympathy for the workers and poor does not preclude criticism, or a sincere attempt to understand the other side. You know where I’m coming from, and these events are rich and complex enough that, provided I do them justice, different people will take away different things.

M Lenihan

August 2021

Updated September 2023

< Back to Contents

The cover image for this post is by A. Kokorin, one of the very fine illustrations from The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich, 1973 edition.

The cover image for the series is a painting by M. Plinzner, “Kosaken auf der Wacht an der Mandschureibahn,” from Wikimedia Commons.

[1] Serafimovich, Aleksander. The Iron Flood, 3rd Edition. Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut. 1973 (1924)

[2] Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930 (Haymarket, 2015), p 343

[3] Hellebust, Rolf. “AlekseiGastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body.” Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1997, pp. 500–518. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500927. Accessed 18 June 2021.

[4] Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-1926, Hurst & Company, London, 2015

[5] Smith, SA, Russia In Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890 to 1928, Oxford University Press, 2017, p 39

[6] Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920, Orbis, 1983. P 120

[7] Serge, Year One, p 343

[8] Dune, Eduard, Memoirs of a Red Guard, University of Illinois Press, 1993, eds Koenker, Diane and Smith, SA.,p 56

[9] Prigozhin’s ‘March of Justice’ followed the line of march of General Sidorin and the Don Cossacks in 1919, but further, and got about as close to Moscow as Denikin.

Celtic Communism? Appendix 1: James Connolly

At the start of our four-part series ‘Celtic Communism?’ we asked whether the claims of James Connolly with regard to Gaelic Ireland were ‘just one of those unfortunate examples of Connolly giving ground to romantic nationalism.’ It’s time to answer that question.

In the late 19th century in Ireland there was a revival of old Irish sports, language, history, music and legends. This movement rose up in defiance of British imperialism and fed into the 1916 Rising and War of Independence in the early 20th Century.

Most of the prominent Irish nationalists were bourgeois figures, including ruthless strike-breaking bosses like William Martin Murphy. There were Irish nationalists who felt aggrieved that poor old Ireland did not have any colonies in Africa. The first party which bore the name ‘Sinn Féin,’ founded in 1905, had the exceptionally cranky idea of ‘dual monarchy’ at the heart of its programme.

There were authors on both sides of the Irish Sea who read Anglo-Irish history as a struggle between “Saxon and Celt” – the Saxon coldly logical, the Celt emotional (An idea brutally satirised by Shaw in his play John Bull’s Other Island). To Connolly’s endless chagrin, certain authors liked to claim that one of the essential, eternal features of the ‘Celtic race’ was ‘veneration for aristocracy.’ 

The masses of Ireland wanted to fight British imperialism, and that aspiration was bound up with a desire not only to champion their suppressed culture but to seize the land, to end poverty, to unionise and struggle for a ‘Workers’ Republic.’ There was a gap, to put it mildly, between this and the programme of the bourgeois nationalists. This gap was papered over with nationalist and religious phrases that dripped with sentimentality and chauvinism.

In this context James Connolly was a breath of fresh air:

Ireland as distinct from her people, is nothing to me: and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for Ireland, and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and the suffering, the shame and the degradation brought upon the people of Ireland – aye, brought by Irishmen upon Irishmen and women, without burning to end it, is in my opinion, a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements he is pleased to call Ireland.

It’s unfair that he’s remembered by many as a garden variety Irish nationalist when in fact he spent most of his life skewering bourgeois nationalism without mercy.

It would be unfortunate but not incredible if in these struggles Connolly succumbed from time to time to some of the ideas and assumptions of his opponents.

What is romantic nationalism?

The Gaelic cultural revival was part of a global phenomenon in the 19th Century. In any country in Europe a cadre of town intellectuals could be found trying to convince several million peasants and industrial workers that they were all united in a common imagined community, intimately related down to the very fibre of their being with this or that 8th century steppe nomad people or Iron Age confederation of clans. A lot of our ‘knowledge’ of history even today is influenced by these assumptions and agendas.

In many cases this represented, as in Ireland, an oppressed people asserting themselves after centuries of oppression. But it was abused to give the poor a spurious common cause with the rich – and against the poor of other countries. The 19th Century obsession with race came from a desire to justify slavery and imperialism. But it found many other evil uses in the hands of the wealthy: it provided a convenient way to divert people from the fight against wealth inequality or for women’s rights. 

James Connolly’s agenda was the opposite. He wanted to combine the struggle for liberation with the struggle for socialism. He always insisted that socio-economic and class conflicts were the true driving force behind uprisings for Irish freedom.

His key point about Gaelic Ireland was that it possessed a social order incompatible with feudalism and capitalism. The English conquest of Ireland was foremost a social struggle, not a racial one.

However he went too far and made claims that he didn’t need to make in order to prove this point. The language and tone were too strong and have aged poorly. See if you can read this without cringing: ‘It is a system evolved through centuries of development out of the genius of the Irish race, safeguarded by the swords of Irishmen, and treasured in the domestic affections of Irish women.’

Those who read Connolly often got the wrong impression about Gaelic Ireland. Aodh De Blácam was a fascinating and eclectic writer of the time who, in his book Towards the Republic, combined Bolshevism with Catholicism and the most romantic Irish nationalism imaginable. He appears to have taken Connolly at his word and believed that Gaelic Ireland was communist, no ifs or buts. I think De Blácam got the opposite impression to what Connolly intended – instead of providing an argument for seeing the Anglo-Irish question as a social rather than a racial one, Connolly had inadvertently provided the ingredients for an eclectic synthesis.

But De Blácam’s synthesis was a short-lived piece of accidental cultural wildlife. It could not have really come into being or thrived outside the years 1917-1923 or so, when ‘Soviet’ was a word to conjure with in Ireland. Just as you can’t hold Connolly responsible for those who obtusely read him as a Catholic and nationalist or as merely a left-leaning Republican, you can’t blame him for everyone who gives him a one-sided reading.

There is nuance and specificity in Connolly’s treatment of the Gaelic Irish. In The Re-Conquest of Ireland he writes of them

shaping their castes and conventions to permit of the closest approximation to their ideals of justice […] all were members having their definite place, and in which the highest could not infringe upon the rights of the lowest – those rights being as firmly fixed and assured as the powers of the highest, and fixed and assured by the same legal code and social convention.

Here Connolly acknowledges the existence of inequality – of people of ‘high’ and ‘low’ status with fixed rights. He even uses the term ‘caste.’ When he writes of ‘their ideals of justice’ he hints at the fact that ‘their’ ideals and ‘ours’ are not the same. This is a gesture of recognition toward the strange and alien nature of Gaelic Ireland to modern eyes.

He includes important qualifiers in Erin’s Hope:

They did not, indeed, regard all forms of productive property as rightfully belonging to the community; but when we remember that the land alone was at that time of importance, all other forms of property being insignificant by comparison […]

The chief, as Mill has justly observed, was but the managing member of the tribal association, although in the stress of constant warfare they usually limited their choice to the members of one or two families […]

In Labour in Irish History, regarding the destruction of the Irish social order by Cromwell and co, he says:

Such an event was, of course, inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would undoubtedly have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independent country, but coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of armed force from without, instead of by the operation of economic forces within, the change has been bitterly and justly resented by the vast mass of the Irish people, many of whom still mix with their dreams of liberty [with] longings for a return to the ancient system of land tenure – now organically impossible.

That hard-headed passage is very far from national romanticism.

So Connolly was not surrendering to romantic nationalism. He’s not giving them ground. He’s giving them hell. He’s taking Gaelic Ireland away from them and saying, in effect, ‘You don’t get to make political hay from this. You don’t get to laud ancient Ireland in one breath and condemn socialism in the next.’ Or to use his own memorable phrase: Capitalism is the most foreign thing in Ireland.

Overall, many of his comments don’t really stand up to scrutiny. For example, it was not warfare which limited the pool of candidates in Gaelic Ireland, but the laws themselves. It was de jure not de facto. The essential political point he’s making is entirely correct, but he goes too far.

In the sense of ‘Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster,’ ie, in the sense that romantic nationalism may have rubbed off on Connolly in the course of his struggles against it, you could say that he gave ground to it. If we return to the question with which we began, we come to a different answer. Overall, this is not an example of Connolly surrendering to nationalism but of Connolly fighting nationalism on its home turf and, against the odds, coming out of the scrap with his honour intact.

Review – Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed by Michael K Jones

The Battle of Stalingrad was the most decisive and bloody confrontation in the Second World War. So the question which this book addresses, ‘How the Red Army Triumphed’ at Stalingrad, is important.

Many in the English-speaking world would answer that question along the following lines: that Russian officers threw masses of unarmed conscripts at enemy positions; that commissars trained machine-guns on the backs of their own soldiers and mowed down anyone who tried to retreat; in short, that this victory was gained primarily by terror. Michael K Jones provides a very different answer – one which is not only much more plausible but even inspiring.

Stalingrad from the air, during the battle. At the bottom of the picture is the wide Volga river. Red Army soldiers fought with their backs to the river. Supplies and reinforcements had to cross it, and they were sitting ducks for German planes.

He focuses on the 62nd Army, the force which held the city itself. This is a narrower scope than that of, for example, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad which describes the whole campaign, but I found this focus made it compelling.

No land beyond the Volga

One of the key insights is that on at least three occasions the outcome of the battle really hung by a thread. Only truly superhuman resistance allowed the Soviets to hold out. For example the Germans, after conquering this or that area of the city, would be unable to consolidate their gains because their new territory would be riddled with surviving Red Army soldiers carrying on the fight in tiny groups, sometimes literally two or three holding out from a house or basement or factory. They fought on to the death. There was no commissar holding a gun to their heads; they were cut off from their own army. They were motivated by determination to resist, summed up in the slogan ‘For us there is no land beyond the Volga.’

This kind of unimaginable self-sacrifice dovetailed with sound tactics. The cautious German commander Von Paulus did not allow his forces to advance until all resistance was mopped up. The heroism of those small groups which held out took full advantage of this approach. In the single hour or day gained by a knot of doomed fighters battling on to the end, fresh forces or supplies could cross the river Volga and arrive in the city.

Jones explores many other examples of clever tactical improvisation – such as the decision to keep as close to the enemy as possible to frustrate their artillery – and of the self-sacrifice which made it possible. The nuts and bolts of how the city was defended – storm groups, the ‘sniperism’ movement, the use of fortified bulwarks such as ‘Pavlov’s House’ – all emerge in this narrative as a brilliant union of morale and tactics. Just as the small groups who held up the Nazi advance for an hour or a day could buy time for reinforcements, ultimately the resistance of the 62nd Army in the city bought time for Operation Uranus, a Soviet counter-offensive which surrounded Von Paulus’ army and destroyed it.

The Stalingrad grain elevator. As you can see, it was fought over with some ferocity. In September a small force held out there against the odds for two days. ‘…the grain was on fire, the water in the machine-guns evaporated, the wounded were thirsty…’ Later: ‘Explosions were shattering the concrete; the grain was in flames. We could not see each other for dust and smoke…’ (p 117-118)

Not one step backward

I recently read Beevor’s book Stalingrad in which he points out the horrifying fact that the Red Army shot 13,000 of its own soldiers during the battle. Jones does not dispute this number, but he challenges the way it’s framed (one of several digs at Beevor). 13,000 were executed across the whole Stalingrad front – which included not just the 62nd Army in the city, but a whole number of armies along the trench lines to the north and south of the city. In the city itself, around 1,000 were shot by their own side. We should put these numbers into perspective: 612 soldiers charged with desertion were shot by the Red Army in the second half of 1919 during the Russian Civil War (out of a total of 1.4 million desertions). The British Army in the First World War shot 278 out of 2,093 charged with desertion (Trudell, 2000). So 1,000 executed in the city and 13,000 across the whole front is still a really shocking number. Only someone immune to quantitative evidence would insist that there’s no difference between 1,000 and 13,000. But what we see in a movie like Enemy at the Gates is pure fiction: there were critical shortages at various times, but there was no practice of ‘every second man gets a rifle.’ There were no machine-guns trained from behind on troops without weapons advancing on entrenched positions. Even allowing for exaggeration, with such an approach the Red Army simply could not have won.

Via Youtube.com. Still from Enemy at the Gates (Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001). A few seconds later we see these guys gunning down the rank-and-file soldiers as they try to retreat. I suppose this is a very loose interpretation of what a ‘blocking detachment’ was. Thankfully it is pure fiction.

I don’t doubt that there were terrible injustices among the thousand shot by their own side. But Jones forces us to rethink slightly by telling us the story of one of those thousand: an officer who faked an injury and tried to bully his way to the front of the queue for a hospital boat. A nurse shot him dead on the spot.

The Red Army soldiers knew they were fighting the good fight. They were not like Americans in Vietnam or Iraq, wondering what they hell they were doing there. The German armed forces were not just waging a war but carrying out genocide against Jewish and Slavic people. Meanwhile the Red Army had been retreating for over a year, surrendering thousands of miles and millions of human lives to the enemy. The famous slogan ‘Not a step backwards’ was not a threat that anyone who literally stepped back would be shot (obviously the Red Army could not have won without retreats) – it was a signal that the period of general retreat was over. This decision made Stalingrad a hostage to fortune: if the city fell, the blow to morale would be terrible. But it also gave the soldier what they wanted: an opportunity to stand and fight, knowing that the whole weight of the military apparatus was behind them, knowing that this was it.

The disregard for human life of the Stalinist regime can be seen in, to give just one example, the Great Terror of the late 1930s. But the key insight I got from How the Red Army Triumphed was that the 1937 formula of paranoia, top-down rule and mass terror was temporarily thrown out the window at Stalingrad. The battle was won through Stalinism blunting its worst excesses and allowing the troops on the ground to practise initiative and an egalitarian ethos. Thus in the 45th Division ‘the commander ate with his men, swapped jokes and even chopped wood with them. “All of us were on the same level,” remembered Mark Slavin. “The commanders mingled with the soldiers. Everyone counted.”’ (p 239) Jones has a particular soft spot for General Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the 62nd Army, who emerges as a flawed but brilliant hero of the narrative.

From the US propaganda film Why We Fight (Dir. Frank Capra, 1942) showing how much territory the German military had conquered. By August 1942 that chunk was even bigger.

The ‘old’ Red Army and the new

Jones conveys these points well, but he has blind spots.

The Soviet soldier knew that they were defending the gains of the October Revolution, of which Stalingrad itself was a symbol: the city had grown nearly tenfold in population under the social and economic transformations of the 1920s and 1930s. While Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate shows how the repressed traumas of forced collectivization and the Great Terror lay just beneath the surface of wartime consciousness, the predecessor of Life and Fate, simply titled Stalingrad and recently published in English for the first time, shows with equal sincerity how the positive aspects of the revolution motivated the fight. The Stalinist political regime had made the Nazi-Soviet Pact and massacred the generals, thus walking right into the terrible disasters of 1941-2; of itself it did not inspire confidence. But the revolutionary social and economic regime had transformed tens of millions of lives for the better. It was worth defending, worth dying for.

But for Jones, ‘communism’ means simply rhetoric and hypocrisy. For him, it can’t be something genuine and inspiring. Instead he talks about how religion and Russian nationalism inspired the soldiers. Talk about missing the point!

Jones describes how an egalitarian ethos emerged in the 62nd Army during the battle. But this was a revival of an older phenomenon. Erich Wollenberg’s The Red Army shows that an ethos of initiative, equality and internationalism was key to the Red Army in the Civil War and the NEP period. While respecting their military-technical expertise, the new Red Army abolished all the pomp and prestige associated with officers and reduced them to ‘commanders’ or ‘specialists.’

During forced collectivisation and the famine that followed, the morale of the Red Army was utterly destroyed. After this, officers’ ranks and privileges were restored. National chauvinism was made the new basis of morale. Commissars were first abolished, then brought back in the form of Stalinist enforcers.

Chuikov (the general of the 62nd Army whom Jones admires) was in the Red Guards in 1918 and made his military reputation during the Civil War. He would have known the ‘old’ Red Army very well. I imagine that to him it would have been a relief to return to it.

Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad

Based on what I read in How the Red Army Triumphed, it seems to me that like in Madrid six years earlier, at Stalingrad the communists had to make revolutionary concessions to the masses to inspire the will to fight. Instead of really understanding this development, Jones describes some features of it but then turns around and actually praises the way Stalinism championed national chauvinism and inequality between the ranks.

How the Steel was Tempered

The most glaring example of this blind spot in the book unfortunately comes in one of the most moving incidents.

Two nurses, Sima Merzelyakova and Olga Vlaseva, lived through the hell of the battle and sacrificed their lives to rescue a wounded officer. ‘German machine-gunners opened fire. They died sheltering him with their bodies.’ (p 240)

Later a novel was found in the kitbag of the late Sima: How the Steel was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky (Jones gives an alternative translation of the tile: How Steel is Formed). The novel was one of the most popular of its time. It is about a Red Army soldier named Korchagin and his experiences of the Revolution and Civil War, and afterwards as he copes with an injury. It is an inspiring story of overcoming the most terrible conditions in the struggle for revolution and socialism. The most famous quote is:

The dearest possession of any person is life. It is given only once, and it must be lived so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying you had a right to say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world—the fight for the Liberation of Humankind.

The two nurses had underlined such key passages, passing the book back and forth between them. At the end Sima had written:

Olga and I have read this book through to the very last page. Now we feel that there are three of us – us two and Korchagin, who is helping us through these difficult times. We have decided to behave like Korchagin – and we’ll make it.

After the nurses’ deaths, their copy of How the Steel was Tempered was passed from soldier to soldier, treasured, autographed with inspiring slogans, and in the end carried by the Red Army all the way to Berlin.

This is such a moving moment in Jones’ narrative. It is a real shame that he goes out of his way to distort the true meaning of it. Jones does not mention that How the Steel was Tempered had anything to do with the Revolution, the Civil War or the struggle for socialism; he gives a bizarrely distorted summary of the book, telling us little more than that Korchagin was a construction worker who had an injury. The theme: in difficult conditions, ‘one had to draw sustenance from a higher cause. Korchagin’s was a deeply felt love for the motherland’! In other words Jones goes a long distance out of his way to take the politics out of the novel. Why does he do this? My guess is, to avoid admitting that heroes like Sima Merzelyakova and Olga Vlaseva were most likely motivated by a genuine belief in communism. This does a disservice to them.

How the Red Army Triumphed is a study of the different factors influencing the morale of the 62nd Army – so this dismissal of the role of communism is a real problem. The Russian Army in World War One had no shortage of nationalist and religious propaganda, and no shortage of tyrannical officers beating and shooting the rank-and-file. So why did it collapse in an avalanche of mutiny and desertion, while the Red Army advanced over half of Europe?  

I don’t think this distortion is due simply to anti-communism.The book draws heavily on the testimony of survivors and it appears from what the author tells us that the survivors themselves are in these latter days more inclined to talk about nationalism and religion than communism. They lived a whole lifetime under a stifling and oppressive political regime which used the genuine traditions of the revolution like a religious dogma. They experienced economic stagnation in the 1970s and 80s, and the disastrous restoration of capitalism in the 90s. All in all they received a poor reward for saving the world from fascism. Stalingrad became part of official dogma, and they are keen to get beyond the propaganda and tell a more authentic story. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If in his general attitude Jones took his cues from the survivors themselves, that’s understandable. But the distortion of the incident with the novel is really bad and not justifiable.

Even with this significant defect, How the Red Army Triumphed gives a gripping and down-to-earth account of the defence of Stalingrad. It convinced me that the victory was one of morale, initiative and innovation, not of terror.

Celtic Communism? Pt 3: The Un-Free (Premium)

Un-free – premium – see what I did there?

I’ll get my coat…

We started this series by looking at what James Connolly had to say about early Irish history and asking, ‘Was Gaelic Irish society in any meaningful sense socialist? Or was this just one of those unfortunate examples of Connolly giving ground to romantic nationalism?’

In parts 1 and 2 we looked mostly at customs around kingship in the years 800-1200 CE, drawing out examples of the democratic and egalitarian features of Gaelic Ireland. As one of my readers summed it up:

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Celtic Communism? Pt 2: Make Beer Not War

In Part One we began a critical look at James Connolly’s claim that Gaelic Irish society was basically socialist. We focused on the period from about 800 to the late 12th Century, and in particular on the question of kingship.

We have seen that Irish kings were elected from a wide pool of candidates and by a wide electorate; that they were neither sacred nor above the law, and that the people were their clients and electors, not their subjects. In short, they don’t look much like our traditional idea of kings and appear more like elected officials or public servants.

Today we’re going to look at warfare and hospitality, two very different subjects that both tell us a lot about kingship and Irish society in the early Middle Ages.

So far, so wholesome. But before we begin….

A word of warning

We are not here to romanticise Gaelic Ireland. I have little patience for ‘noble savage’ or ‘Fremen mirage’ tropes. No pre-modern society presents us with a tradition which modern people can or should attempt to copy. I’m also impatient with claims that the way X or Y people lived two hundred or even two thousand years ago was a more ‘authentic’ or ‘organic’ way of life than modernity. A lot of commentators like to put nationalities or religions (or even points of the compass like ‘The West’) in separate boxes, as if they were or factions in a videogame. For centuries every scholar pretended that there was some essential continuity between the Germans of Tacitus and modern German people.

Sometimes this kind of thing is flattering and romanticising. Other times it’s meant as an insult. Either way it’s annoying. A few years ago an Irish journalist said that the French president was only unpopular because French people have something written into their culture that makes them want to cut the heads off authority figures. Or the whole trope of saying that there’s some line of continuity from 7th century Irish monks writing their manuscripts all the way to James Joyce. I don’t like this kind of thing – broad national stereotypes projected into periods where they don’t even apply.

Except when it’s done as a joke in a children’s comic… in fact, I like this trope when it’s just a joke

So let’s not come at Gaelic Ireland from that kind of angle.

In most countries, go back even three hundred years and 90%+ of the folks you’d meet would be illiterate toiling people confined to small rural communities. In their daily lives, ambitions and morality they would be very different from any modern person. If the past is another country, then the pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment past is another planet.

Even if, somehow, there existed some utopia in amid all the scarcity and violence and narrow horizons of the pre-industrial past, we couldn’t bring it back. And if modern people could dismantle modernity and return to that past, they would find they don’t like having to make every stitch of clothing by hand, or sleeping in a dim close hall with ten other people and a few cows and dogs, able to hear every fart and snore; or toiling away at crops and livestock for your entire life, never more than a few steps away from ruin.

It’s important to start with these sobering thoughts, because last week and again this week the focus is on the more egalitarian features of Gaelic Ireland. A lot of people, me included, find this stuff appealing. But as we touched on last week, Gaelic Irish society also had features that modern eyes would find hideous – features which challenge Connolly’s assertion that this society was ‘as Socialistic as the industrial development of their time required.’ Part 3 will deal with this sinister stuff more fully, and draw some conclusions from it.  

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‘Those who make war’

From a St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, 2014, part of an imaginative depiction of the Battle of Clontarf 1000 years before. No, the medieval Irish did not ride on stags, but it’s a cool image

Warfare was generally of a low intensity in Gaelic Ireland – raids, skirmishes, cattle theft. There was no warrior class and there were no housecarles or king’s bodyguards. There was no fyrd or militia, no custom of holding land in exchange for military service and no landless professional warriors.[i] A king did not have the means to maintain armed forces at his own expense, and billeting them on his people or on allies was politically fraught; he could do it, but it was a great way to lose friends and resources.[ii]

The only armed forces he could call upon were his electors. It was the duty of all free and able members of the tuath (people, territory or petty kingdom) to carry arms, and they assembled and fought only for limited periods.[iii]

By contrast, the nobles of medieval Europe had war at the heart of their identity. Knights were a special class elevated above the others. They held their land in exchange for an oath that they would fight. When contemporary writers chose just one word to describe the nobility, bellatores was the word they used – ‘those who make war.’[iv] But the Irish flaith (nobles/officials) were not a warrior class. In fact, I’m not sure they were even a class full stop.

The Irish king had no armed force loyal to himself. His armed forces were the same people who had a duty to depose him if he should fail in his duties. Military leadership was only one criterion, and not the foremost, on which contemporary sources judged kings; it was more important that they be wise, generous, cheerful, sound judges of disputes, etc.

War… War actually does change

Like a lot of things, this changed later in the period under discussion.

The Normans arrived from 1169 or so, with their ruthless hierarchies of knights and lords and their castles and their armies of knights and archers. Then came the gallóglaigh (foreign soldiers, often anglicised as ‘gallowglasses’), heavy infantry fighters from the Isles of Scotland who came to Ireland from the 13th Century on and revolutionised warfare.

Gallóglaigh and peasants in a 16th Century image by Albrecht Durer

From this point on Gaelic Irish kings tended to become more like lords and less like elected chiefs. As Simms writes in From Kings to Warlords: ‘A leader whose military strength was based on a professional army rather than on a hosting of his own free subjects had little need to consult the wishes of those subjects, except the half-dozen or so chief vassals who, like himself, controlled hired troops.’ Elections became a formality.[v]

This is why I chose the late 12th Century as a cut-off point. From here on Ireland is a country under conquest. Those natives who do not bend the knee adapt to the presence of the conquerors.

But even before the Normans and gallóglaigh, things were changing. My intuitive guess would be that the gallóglaigh came as a response to changes in Ireland; suddenly there was a market for mercenaries in Ireland. Why? Because from around 1000, beginning with Brian Boru, provincial kings arrogated more power from the rí tuaithe to themselves. As we noted last week, they fielded greater armies for longer periods, built fleets and fortresses, and placed heavier burdens on the people to pay for it all. They enjoyed the revenues of Scandinavian ports like Dublin and Limerick (which means they made a mint on the slave trade – of which, more next week). They billeted troops on their ‘allies,’ who no longer dared to resist or to complain. From around this time, people tended to start calling the rí tuath (petty king) a taoiseach (chief), reflecting a loss of status and sovereignty.

The social order in Ireland was changing even before the conquest. The kings and flaiths were developing into an unaccountable ruling class with a monopoly on violence. But they were still a long way off. These changes had not yet added up to a total transformation.

From Noho.ie – the Viking port of Dublin (The area occupied today by the space between Dame Street and Hawkins Street, I think). A slave trading centre which shaped Irish development – more on that next week.

Hospitality

O’Sullivan’s Hospitality in Medieval Ireland is a fascinating read. All pre-modern societies placed an emphasis on hospitality but Gaelic Ireland went further. Every ‘free law-abiding Irishman’ was entitled to entertainment and a night’s lodging.[vi] Everyone above the rank of ócaire (a humble farmer) was obliged to host. ‘Expulsion’ or ‘Refusal’ of a guest was a civil crime. To provide uncomfortable lodgings or bad food left the host open to the dreaded satire of the poets. Generosity was a solemn precondition for kingship: ‘the Old Irish gnomic text Tecosca Cormac maintains that the most shameful thing a king could do was give a banquet without brewing beer.’[vii]

I believe this custom was an extension of the king’s obligation to redistribute wealth. Each farmer or artisan having their own specialisation and limited means of exchange, the role of the king or flaith, the reason such official positions existed, was to receive and redistribute the various products.[viii]

Receiving and redistributing could take many forms, including tributes, gifts and the king’s many obligations to his tuath: maintenance of roads, bridges, ferries, common mills and common fishing-nets; and the cumal senorba, the portion of the common property that was set aside for the elderly, the disabled and the sick.

Remains of a fortified household or rath. These dot the landscape in Ireland

One of the key signs that kings and chiefs were getting more arrogant later in this period, and more decisively after the Norman conquest, is that their demands in terms of billeting and the annual ‘coshering circuit’ grew heavy – less of the redistribution, more of the extraction. These demands were necessary to keep up the kind of relentless military campaigns, year after year, that the 11th and 12th century provincial kings engaged in.

Hospitality was a natural extension of a king’s obligations. A satire on an inhospitable king was not simply a condemnation of his personal stinginess. It was a political attack; the king in question had neglected his duties as surely as if he had fled from battle or allowed a bridge to fall into disrepair.

Brett Devereux’s blog explains the role of nobles or ‘big men’ in agrarian societies the world over and how they helped to redistribute the surplus (although on terms that benefited themselves more than anyone else). So this is by no means confined to Ireland. But my argument is that the Irish king did a hell of a lot more of the redistributing and a lot less of the fighting compared to nobles in England and further afield. Redistribution was so central to the role of Irish kings that flaithiúl, ‘lordly,’ remains the modern Irish word for ‘generous’ – which is a long way from bellatores.

Gods without notions

To round off this week’s post, let’s look at two Irish legends that were popular around this period and that shed some more light on the question of hospitality. Of course, these are fictional stories told in a culture that took delight in the most extravagant exaggeration. But these are the stories that the people (or more cynically, the powerful patrons of culture) wanted to hear. They tell us a lot about people’s expectations and values.

Dagda was a god; people sometimes say that he was the Irish equivalent of Zeus or Odin but I don’t buy that (for reasons I’ll touch on below).

Cridenbel, ‘an idle blind man,’ used to ask for part of Dagda’s food every day:

‘For the sake of your good name let the three best bits of your share be given to me.’

It would have been dishonourable for Dagda to refuse, so every day he parted with most of his dinner. At this time Dagda was working at digging ditches and building raths (fortified households) so he had quite an appetite. Deprived of one-third of his food every day, he began to starve. But there was no way out of this sticky situation; it was better to starve than to refuse a request. At last Dagda’s son Angus Óg came up with a clever plan. Dagda put three pieces of gold on his plate and, when Cridenbel asked for the ‘three best bits’ of the meal, Dagda gave him the pieces of gold to eat. ‘And no sooner had Cridenbel swallowed down the gold than he died.’[ix]

Another story, related in O’Sullivan’s book, told of a kind one-eyed king who would never refuse anyone anything. A poet who was his guest decided to test his kindness. He asked the king to give him his eye for a gift. The king had no choice but to hand it over, leaving the poet with three eyes and himself with a total of none.

These stories reflect social mores. In them, hospitality is an obligation, not a gift. It is less dishonourable for Dagda to murder Cridenbel (!) than to refuse any request he might make.

In a call-back to points in Part 1 about how Irish kings could be deposed, note that the incident with Cridenbel and Dagda occurs in a context of austerity, brought about by the stinginess of King Bres. Though Bres is not without merit as a king (he is easy on the eyes), his lack of generosity is not long tolerated; the people overthrow him and drive him out of Ireland.

Bres imagined by, once again, the great Jim Fitzpatrick. Detail from Breas.Cú Brea

(While we’re at it, let’s take a slightly closer look at Dagda. In other stories we see him unable to restrain his appetites: eating and drinking until he vomits and passes out; going on an important mission only to be seduced by two different women; falling on his bare arse and staggering about with his ‘enormous penis’ trailing on the ground.[x] He’s more of a pintsman than a patriarch of Olympus. Irish kings were less exalted than kings elsewhere, and the same goes for Irish gods.)

Until next time…

Again, so far so wholesome, apart from the blinding, murder and binge drinking. When we look at the period between 800 and 1200, there’s actually a lot of evidence for the claim that an Irish king was something like a public servant.

However, we have only established that the king was a public servant in relation to the free heads of household – presumably men – of the tuath. What about women? What about the unfree, the slaves? Next week’s post will address these questions, adding plenty of darker shades to our picture of Gaelic society.

A 9th-Century settlement somewhere in Britain or Ireland – as imagined in the great Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia

[i] Hayes-McCoy, GA. Irish Battles: A  Military History of Ireland, Gill & Macmillan 1969 (1980), p 48

[ii] O’Sullivan, Catherine Marie. Hospitality in Medieval Ireland 900-1500, Four Courts Press, 2004,  p 50-51

[iii] Jaski, Bart. Early Irish Kingship and Succession, Four Courts Press, 2000. p 99

[iv] Bishop Adalbero of Laon famously summed up the nobility, clergy and peasants as bellatores, oratores et laboratores -those who fight, those who pray and those who work. ‘Adelbero Ascelin’ in World Heritage Encyclopedia, Project Gutenberg, http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Adalbero_Ascelin, accessed 17 May 2021

[v] Simms, Katharine, From Kings to Warlords, The Boydell Press, 1987 (2000), pp 19-20

[vi] O’Sullivan, p 31

[vii] O’Sullivan, 32, 87

[viii] Woolf sums this up as ‘the practise of redistributive chieftaincy that characterised the Irish political system.’ Woolf, Alex. ‘The Scandinavian Intervention’ in Smyth, Brendan (ed), The Cambridge History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 117.

[ix] Gregory, Augusta. Gods and Fighting Men, Colin Smythe Limited, 1904 (1970), 32-33

[x] The detail about Dagda’s member comes from The Silver Arm (Butler Sims (1981, 1983) written and illustrated by Jim Fitzpatrick, Ed. Pat Vincent. P 65. I don’t recall coming across that particular detail in Gregory’s book.

Celtic Communism? Pt 1: James Connolly’s Celts

James Connolly is widely remembered for his heroic death in the 1916 Rising. Less well-known, tragically, is his main life’s work: the struggle for international socialism. More than once in his writings he argued that Gaelic Ireland before the English conquest was essentially a communist society.

The Irish rose in rebellion again and again throughout history because to them English rule represented

the system of feudalism and private ownership of land, as opposed to the Celtic system of clan or common ownership, which they regarded, and, I think, rightly, as the pledge at once of their political and social liberty […] The Irish system was thus on a par with those conceptions of social rights and duties which we find the ruling classes to-day denouncing so fiercely as “Socialistic.”

(Erin’s Hope, 1897)

This is a conception of ‘liberty’ which the 21st-Century world should take note of – liberty based on democratic common ownership of wealth, rather than the ‘liberty’ of rich people to pollute, exploit and destroy without hindrance.

According to Connolly, Gaelic Ireland right up to its destruction by Cromwell in the 17th Century was

…a country in which the people of the island were owners of the land upon which they lived, masters of their own lives and liberties, freely electing their rulers, and shaping their castes and conventions […] the highest could not infringe upon the rights of the lowest – those rights being as firmly fixed and assured as the powers of the highest, and fixed and assured by the same legal code and social convention.

(The Re-Conquest of Ireland, 1915)

Connolly drew on the concept of primitive communism advanced by Friedrich Engels (who also, by the way, wrote a history of Ireland and learned Irish):

Recent scientific research by such eminent sociologists as Letourneau, Lewis Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, and others, has amply demonstrated the fact that common ownership of land formed the basis of primitive society in almost every country. But, whereas, in the majority of countries now called civilised, such primitive Communism had almost entirely disappeared before the dawn of history […] In Ireland the system formed part of the well defined social organisations of a nation of scholars and students […]

(Erin’s Hope, 1897)

These historical points were part of Connolly’s political mission: to champion the movement for Irish independence, but to take it further, to fight for social as well as political liberty. This was his contribution to debates around the Gaelic cultural revival.

The Gaelic Irish fortress of Grianan Aileach, Co Donegal

But is it true?

Was Gaelic Irish society in any meaningful sense socialist? Or was this just one of those unfortunate examples of Connolly giving ground to romantic nationalism?

I want to test his claim against a range of historical sources. This is part 1 of a series that will be on-and-off; I will post three or four instalments over the next few weeks.

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If Gaelic Ireland really was communist, it throws a new sidelight on the whole Celtic world.[i] It’s also very significant for those interested in the theory of primitive communism.

Connolly was not alone in believing that Gaelic Irish society possessed a democratic and communal social order. ‘Before the conquest the Irish people knew nothing of absolute property in land,’ wrote John Stuart Mill in 1868. ‘The land virtually belonged to the entire sept, the Chief was little more than the managing member of the association. The feudal idea which came in with the conquest was associated with foreign dominion, and has never to this day been recognised by the moral sentiment of the people.’[ii] Lawrence Ginnell in his impressive 1894 study of Brehon Law said that ‘the flaith [usually translated as ‘lord’ or ‘noble’] was properly an official, and the land he held official land, and not his private property at all.’[iii] In 1970 Peter Beresford Ellis painted a similar picture in the opening chapter of his History of the Irish Working Class.[iv]

By contrast, in much current writing on Gaelic Ireland we see heavy use of terms like ‘Lord and Subject,’ ‘Elite and Commoners’ ‘aristocracy’ and ‘hierarchy.’ This is an expression of a conflicting view, also of long standing, that ‘Irish society was rigidly stratified’[v] in the early medieval period. The same irreconcilable difference of opinion existed in Connolly’s day.

Gaelic Irish kings: Royalty or public servants?

In the first few posts of this series we’re going to take a look at one particular issue: the specific claim that a Gaelic Irish chief or king was ‘little more than the managing member of the association,’ ‘an official.’ If this is true he would be accountable and obliged to his people, relatively modest in status, something more akin to a public servant than to a member of a hereditary ruling warrior class.

For perspective, we should take a look at Ireland’s contemporary neighbours. An 11th-century Anglo-Saxon cleric remarked, ‘the people have the choice to choose as king the one who pleases them: but after he is consecrated as king, he then has power over the people, and they are not able to shake his yoke from their necks.’[vi] They could elect their kings; this could also be applied to Ireland at the time. But by contrast Irish people, if they thought their king was not doing a good job, were required by law to ‘to shake his yoke from their necks.’ The English King Alfred was seen as sacred and could not be deposed by his own people. He could appoint reeves (officials), muster a fyrd (an army) and levy burdensome taxes, unlike his Irish counterparts. This gap only widened later in the Anglo-Saxon period, and that is to say nothing of Norman customs like primogeniture and knight service.[vii]

Chronology

In this series, we will deal with Irish kingship in the period between the Eighth Century and the Norman conquest of the late Twelfth Century. This span of time encompasses thousands of kings who ruled over hundreds of diverse tuaithe (peoples or petty kingdoms, singular tuath). Within that period, profound changes occurred: lesser kings became known as dux or taoiseach (leader or chief) and the over-kings and provincial kings extended their powers and prestige, fielded larger armies for longer periods further afield,[viii] and began to levy a form of taxation.[ix] Any attempt to describe the Gaelic Irish social order must begin by stressing this diversity and by acknowledging this general pattern of change – in general, towards more centralised kingship, and away from customs we might see as democratic or communistic.

Under English conquest from the 12th Century on things changed – unevenly and see-sawing, but they definitely changed – in the direction of feudal institutions along the lines of what we see in England. Norman lords had inspired greedy Irish kings to copy them – to turn tributes into rents, to turn clients into tenants. Jaski bears out this general point: from the twelfth century on, ‘free clients’ grew closer in status to ‘base clients,’ and the position of base clients worsened as the power of kings and flaiths grew.

On the other hand, Gaelic Irish custom remained strong even after centuries under conquest. English observers like Spenser and Davies in the 16th Century describe elective kingship, tanistry, etc. When we talk of how the Normans became ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’ it’s not just that they started playing hurling and stealing cattle and speaking Irish. It’s a commentary on how they were assimilated into the Gaelic Irish system of common land ownership. But it was a two-way street. The legal superstructure of Irish society didn’t change much between the Normans and Cromwell but he society underlying it changed a great deal. The old ways were not finally broken, however, until the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, when we see the Plantations – waves of violence that exterminated around a quarter of the people and overthrew the social order.[xii]

Feudal relations could grow up inside the framework of the communal, democratic system of the Gaelic Irish – but could only go so far, until the final shattering of that framework in the 17th century.

Oliver Cromwell, champion of the campaign of ‘primitive accumulation’ that destroyed what remained of Gaelic Ireland

Connolly lumped in all of pre-Cromwell Ireland into one description. But the further on we go in his chronology, the less Gaelic Irish society resembles what he describes. In his defense, this is political and not historical writing. He is making a political point – that common ownership of land prevailed until the Cromwellian rupture, that not just two nations but two social systems confronted one another in Ireland up to that point. This is true. But in the way he makes the point he drives a steamroller over Gaelic Ireland and flattens it out.

Everyone has to read Connolly. He’s brilliant. But don’t read him for a detailed and accurate history of Gaelic Ireland (or at least don’t begin and end with Connolly). He doesn’t offer one and, in fairness, he never pretended to.

Succession

How did a person get to be a king? In Norman England, kingship passed from father to eldest son. Gaelic Irish kings, on the other hand, were not born to rule but elected. Even the tánaiste (king’s deputy) was heir-apparent but not heir-designate. The electorate was narrow for the loftier kings but relatively broad for petty kings: provincial kings were elected by the titled persons of a province, while the king of a tuath was elected by all heads of households.[xiii]

Who could be a candidate? Family descent mattered a great deal, with scribes ‘pursuing endless genealogies to improbable beginnings’[xiv] in the interests of propaganda. ‘A non-kinsman does not take possession to the detriment of a kinsman,’ declared one law tract, to which a footnote by another legal scholar clarified that a candidate was entitled ‘if he be someone of the family [and] if he be right for the lordship.’[xv]

But hereditary claims were emphasised (even fabricated) by candidates precisely because succession could be contentious. The pool of candidates could be very wide; everyone who had the same great-grandfather. In addition, there was provision in the laws for illegitimate children and even non-relatives to contest the election. That a candidate must be ‘right for the lordship’ meant that it was at least as important for a candidate to possess febas (excellence or personal qualities).[xvi] Youth, old age, disability, incapacity or physical blemishes usually disqualified a candidate.[xvii]

(One legend tells of a king who had a lime-calcified brain thrown at him so that it stuck in his face. Because he was a really capable king, his people gave him a dispensation and let him rule.)

A woodcut by John Derricke from 1581, part of The Image of Irelande

People in a contractual relationship with a flaith were divided into free clients and base clients, the former enjoying better terms than the latter. Base clients, even those related to the king, were singled out for disqualification. This suggests three interesting conclusions:

  • that descent was secondary to social grade;
  • that a free client could be king;
  • and that it was known for a king to have base clients among his close male relatives.

These points challenge notions of a ‘rigidly stratified society’ and the last point suggests that we are dealing not with lofty family oligarchies but with broad kinship groups whose members were woven into the fabric of (often very small) tuaithe. The tuath was essentially a very big, broad family. Predictably enough, only a member could be the head of the family.

(As an aside, Fraser’s The Golden Bough mentions societies such as the Picts where the exact opposite custom held: the king of a community had to be an outsider.)

Inheritance did exist. Land and other property was divided between a king’s sons on his death. But that portion of his land which he only possessed through his title passed back to the community, to be given to whoever was next elected.

Heredity was a decisive advantage. But a candidate for kingship, whoever his ancestors were, had to demonstrate his own personal worth before the critical eyes of his peers.

Detail from Oisín at Royal Tara, by the brilliant Jim Fitzpatrick

Status

The free member of the tuath was not a subject of any king or lord. Even an individual in a contractual relationship with a king was not a subject or a vassal but a céile, a word which carries connotations of ‘partner’ or ‘companion’ and is usually translated as ‘client.’ All in all, Irish kings did not enjoy the exalted status of their contemporaries in Anglo-Saxon or Norman England. They were neither sacred nor above the law. According to the Old Testament, a king could not be deposed. But in Ireland the people had a duty to depose a ‘defective’ king, or else calamities would befall them.[xviii] A defective king was one who failed to repair infrastructure, who was stingy, who ripped off his own people, or who got his wounds on his back in battle (unless, the laws stipulate, he got those wounds on his back by running through the enemy lines).

Irish law had no sense of sublime majesty. Different categories of king were divided up into grades and their ‘honour price’ set down in bald numbers. Some professions, such as poet, judge or hostel-keeper, could attain the same honour price as a king.[xix]

Here we enter more disturbing territory, because honour price was measured in a unit of value called the cumal. The same word was used for a female slave. We need to let the dehumanising implications of that fact sink in, and then think about the general question of slavery. Connolly doesn’t mention it. Ginnell and Ellis deal with the issue, in my opinion not satisfactorily. This is a serious challenge to the idea of Gaelic Irish society as an equal, democratic, communistic society. We will deal with this question more fully in a future post.

You will have noticed a lot of ‘he’ and a lot of ‘his’ in the above points; that is because women could not hold political office. This suggests another topic for a future post: the position of women in Gaelic society, which was in some respects better than their position in other contemporary societies, but still bad. We need to consider this also in our judgement on Gaelic Irish society.

Next week in Part 2 we’ll continue our focus on the strange nature of Irish kingship. We’ll look at Irish kings at war; at the crazy array of social grades into which Irish society was divided; and at the question of wealth redistribution.

The cover image above is from Sláine: Time Killer, (Mills, Belardinelli, Fabry, Pugh, Talbot.) I’m a fan of of Sláine – read my review here. The image shows an Irish army preparing for battle in 1014.

[i] It is bold, to say the least, to draw conclusions about the Gauls in 100 BCE based on what some Irish monk wrote in 1000 CE, but people still do it; Ireland occupies a special place in Celtic studies because the Irish were the only Celtic people to produce a large amount of writing about themselves, as opposed to being written about by people like Julius Caesar when he could find time in between slaughtering them.

[ii] Mill, John Stuart. England and Ireland, Longman, Green, Read and Dyer, 1868, p 12

[iii] Ginnell, Lawrence. The Brehon Laws: A Legal Handbook, 1894. https://libraryireland.com/Brehon-Laws/Contents.php, ‘Section IV: Flaiths’

[iv] Connolly, James. Erin’s Hope, 1897, 1909, https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1909/hope/erinhope.htm. See also Labour in Irish History (1910) and The Reconquest of Ireland (1915). https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/flaith; P Berresford Ellis, A History of the Irish Working Class, Pluto Classics, 1972, 1996, p 14

[v] Frame, Robin. ‘Contexts, Divisions and Unities: Perspectives from the Later Middle Ages,’ and Ní Maonaigh, Máire. ‘Perception and Reality: Ireland c. 980-1229’ both in Smyth, Brendan (ed), The Cambridge History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 535, 150, 153. Byrne, FJ, ‘Early Irish Society,’ in TW Moody and FX Martin (eds). The Course of Irish History 1967 (2011), p 45

[vi] Quoted in Godden, MR. ‘Ælfric and Anglo-Saxon Kingship.’ The English Historical Review, Vol 102, No. 405 (Oct, 1987), pp. 911-915. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/572001. Accessed 10 May 2021

[vii] Rosenthal, Joel T. ‘A Historiographical Survey: Anglo-Saxon Kings and Kingship since World War II.’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, 1985, pp. 72–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/175445. Accessed 10 May 2021.

[viii] Simms, Katharine. From Kings to Warlords, The Boydell Press, 1987 (2000), p 11

[ix] Ní Maonaigh. p 150

[xii] Jaski. pp. 271-3

[xiii] Ginnell, ‘Section II: Irish Kings.’ ‘The king of a tuath was elected by the flaiths, aires and probably all heads of families in the tuath.’

[xiv] Hayes-McCoy, GA. Irish Battles: A  Military History of Ireland, Gill & Macmillan 1969 (1980), p 16

[xv] Jaski. p 156

[xvi] Ibid. pp. 157-162

[xvii] Ibid. pp. 82-87

[xviii] Ibid. p 62

[xix] O’Sullivan, Catherine Marie. Hospitality in Medieval Ireland 900-1500, Four Courts Press, 2004, p 128. See also Jaski, p 174

Review: War and Revolution by Domenico Losurdo

‘…the deeds and misdeed of Communism are compared not with the actual behaviour of the world it sought to challenge (about which the strictest silence reigns), but with liberalism’s declarations of principle…’

Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, Verso 2015, p 313

In 2013 Russell Brand made a call for revolution which gained a popular echo. For a while Russell Brand’s debate with Jeremy Paxman was a reference point for a growing anti-austerity left that later rallied around Jeremy Corbyn.

Comedian Mark Webb, ‘the other one from Peep Show,’ responded to Brand with a very patronising open letter that ended with the words: ‘We tried that [revolution] again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder. In brief, and I say this with the greatest respect, please read some fucking Orwell.’

It’s funny how Webb thought that 1984 and Animal Farm were actual history books. But the most obnoxious part of the letter was the claim that revolution leads to (in the words of Monty Python) ‘blood, devastation, death, war and horror.’ This claim relies on the complete erasure of all the nasty parts of the history of capitalism and liberal democracy. It is a claim rooted in a long-standing historical tradition of tracing all the evils and horrors of the 20th century to revolution. It is precisely this claim that the late Domenico Losurdo challenged in his 2015 book War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century. The author passed away in 2018. This book is a great monument to leave behind.

Imperialism

Losurdo shows how Europe’s empires were practising discrimination and mass violence long before the October Revolution. JA Hobson drew attention to the genocide of African Bushmen and Hottentots, Indigenous people in the Americas and Maoris. The Boer war saw tens of thousands die in British concentration camps; Spain’s war in Cuba and the USA’s war in the Philippines also saw the use of concentration camps. In the Belgian Congo a ‘civilising crusade’ became a merciless campaign of extermination that claimed ten million lives. In the 1904-1907 Herero rebellion German authorities shot the armed and the unarmed, men, women and children.

Losurdo, who is a historian of ideas, accompanies his account of imperial crimes with an account of the justifications that accompanied them. Ludwig Gumplowicz in Der Rassenkampf (1909) justified genocide, referring to Native Americans, Hottentots of South Africa and Australian aborigines. Theodore Roosevelt claimed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and justified genocide ‘if any black or yellow people should really menace the whites.’ The idea of an ‘ultimate solution to the Negro problem’ was a topic of public debate in the USA before World War One. For Ludwig Von Mises, poor people and ‘savages’ are ‘dangerous animals.’

Going back further, Locke defended slavery and the genocide of ‘Irish papists’; Jefferson harped on the theme of the ‘inferiority’ of blacks, John Stuart Mill demanded ‘absolute obedience’ of ‘races’ in their ‘nonage’ and celebrated the Opium Wars.

Chinese defences during the Second Opium War (1856-1860). The European powers fought this war to force the Chinese to import opium.

All this, you may have noticed, was long before the October Revolution. And it was said and done not by radicals on the left but chiefly by people on the liberal wing of the political establishment. 

Reactionary historians

Return briefly to Webb’s open letter and note that it talks about ‘death camps’ and ‘gulags’ in one breath, implying that Nazism and Communism are linked, are both the results of ‘revolution.’ This is another idea tackled by Losurdo. He traces it to right-wing historians like Furet, Nolte and Pipes, who argued that the revolutionary tradition was somehow ‘responsible’ for the rise of Nazism. For reactionary historians, the 1917 October Revolution broke previously sacred moral taboos, above all the use of violence and discrimination against particular groups in society (‘de-specification’). Attacks on rich people and aristocrats, in this schema, open the door to attacks on ethnic minorities.

But War and Revolution demonstrates with a thousand examples that the old regime (the capitalist world order, not just Tsarist Russia) had long since broken every one of these supposed taboos a thousand times and on a greater scale. Fascism and totalitarianism were not in any sense inspired by the Russian Revolution (except insofar as the victim can be said to ‘inspire’ the attempted murder); fascism had its origin in imperialist violence, in the ‘total mobilisation’ around World War One, and in traditional hierarchies.

De-specification at home and overseas

All the grisly categories and keywords of the Nazi Third Reich were invented in ‘liberal’ Britain and the US: concentration camp, untermensch, final solution, miscegenation, ‘race-hygiene’, war of extermination.

For example Lothrop Stoddard (cited as ‘this man Goddard’ by Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby) published The Menace of the Under Man in 1922, warning of the social and ethnic threat of ‘inferior races’ and popularising the term which became untermensch. Racial and class hatred went hand in hand: it was a widespread belief among the rich that poor people were poor because they were ‘racially inferior.’ 13 US states had laws for compulsory sterilisation before World War One.

‘Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?…The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved… This fellow has worked out the whole thing…’

-Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1

The imperialist tradition was explicitly cited as an inspiration and justification for Hitler’s war in Eastern Europe and for Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Hitler argued that Germany had every right to do to the Slavs what the USA had done to Native Americans and what the British had done to India.

The continuities between imperialism and fascism are obvious, clear and undeniable. The most we can concede to defenders of capitalist democracy is that the fascists took imperialist ideas to extremes.

And the continuities between capitalism and fascism go further. To take just one example, arch-capitalist Henry Ford directly inspired Hitler with his anti-Semitic newspaper the Dearborn Independent.

Even if we pretend that imperialism never happened, Losurdo exposes what was in reality ‘master race democracy.’ How many of these liberal democratic states in 1910, or even in 1950, really had a ‘one person, one vote’ system? Women and those who did not own property (ie, the majority) were excluded. Assassinations and massacres of striking workers were commonplace (and still are – see Marikana and Zhanaozen in 2012).

The Challenge of October

Racial, gender and anti-worker discrimination were normal and all-powerful, backed by lethal force and explicitly defended by mainstream liberal politics in the year 1917. The October Revolution opposed all three.

The more moderate socialists, some grudgingly (like Kautsky) and some enthusiastically (like Lensch), made their peace with imperialism. Only Lenin and other ‘extremists’ like him kept up the attack on imperialism and discrimination consistently. The October Revolution appealed to colonial peoples, workers and women to revolt. It was therefore branded as an expression of the ‘barbarism’ of ‘inferior races’ and as a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.’ Class hatred was inseparable from race hatred. I have read news reports from the time which claimed that Lenin was Jewish and that the soldiers who supported him were ‘chiefly Letts and Chinese.’ The Nazis were fired up by these wild racial conspiracy theories into a frenzy to annihilate communists at home and abroad.

‘Far from being attributable to the October Revolution,’ says Losurdo, the key features of Nazism ‘derived from the world against which [the October Revolution] rebelled.’

World Wars

We have seen how the ‘democracy’ of the early twentieth century was in fact saturated with violence and racism. The coming of World War One brought about a ‘mutual excommunication from whiteness’ among the European powers: suddenly the ‘Slavs’ were ‘Asiatic,’ there was talk of ‘Black France,’ and Germans were ‘Huns’ and ‘Vandals.’

The world wars ushered in all the features of dictatorship and totalitarianism: collective punishment of populations, firing into crowds, the punishment of deserters’ families, propaganda and strict control of information, and ruthless persecution of groups and individuals opposed to the war. Repression came from above, brutal mob violence from below: Germans were attacked in the USA and UK. The Turkish state carried out genocide against Armenians. Tsarist Russia persecuted the Jews of occupied Galicia, then during the Civil War the counter-revolutionary White Russians murdered between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews in Ukraine. Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in concentration camps for the duration of the Second World War. Whole cities were levelled by both sides, hundreds of thousands of their occupants killed.

So we don’t have to cook up far-fetched arguments about how communists invented totalitarianism; they had no need to. Liberal democracy had already perfected it.

Losurdo debunks with great flair the Black Book of Communism, a work that made the case that ‘communism’ killed 100 million people and was worse than Nazism. He deconstructs the category of ‘man-made famine’ and the claim that a government’s political responsibility for a famine constitutes ‘genocide.’ Britain blockaded Germany in World War One, and kept up the blockade even after the armistice was signed, condemning many to death from hunger and disease. In the very same way Britain and France enforced artificial famine on the red-controlled areas of Russia during the Russian Civil War. Famine has remained in the arsenal of capitalism as a weapon of war, used against Iraq in the 1990s leading to the deaths of half a million people, most of them children. These atrocities are never recognised as ‘man-made famine.’ It appears it’s only man-made famine if it happened in Russia after 1917 or in China after 1949.

The Revolutionary Tradition

To demonstrate the hypocrisy of liberal attacks on socialism is a great achievement. A broad spectrum of socialist opinion can read Losurdo and cheer him on. But we live in a historical interregnum – after the manifest bankruptcy and collapse of the two giants of social democracy and Stalinism, and before the rise of the next great challenge to capitalism. Confusion and disagreement prevail. I read in Losurdo’s obituary some uncomfortable facts about his politics that, having read this book, I didn’t know but am not too surprised to learn.

His defence of the revolutionary tradition is more divisive than his attack on liberalism. Without spilling too much ink on it, I think he is too critical of the October Revolution and too uncritical of the Stalinist tradition. In fact, he does not acknowledge any rupture or distinction between the two. The book attacks liberal democracy on its own terms, and presents a modest defence of revolutionary socialism on the same terms. But it does not go on the offensive; it makes no case for an alternative model of participatory working-class democracy, that is Soviet democracy. This is a serious shortcoming that weakens the analysis. Absent is any analysis of what went wrong with the Soviet Union. How did a supposedly ‘socialist’ country end up presiding over the hunger and terror of the 1930s? People want a serious answer.

Conclusion

In school, they taught us the history of the early 20th century in the simple binary terms of ‘Dictatorship and Democracy.’ On the one hand there were dictatorships, and within that category there were Communist and Fascist dictatorships. The Dictatorships were opposed by the Democracies. Most of the world was excluded from this schema: old regime monarchies, conservative bourgeois dictatorships, semi-colonies and colonies apparently did not exist. Imperialism was never acknowledged. When Word War Two rolled around, it was never explained why, all of a sudden, the British were to be found fighting in Singapore and Egypt, the Americans in the Philippines, etc.

Stacked up against even a single chapter of Losurdo’s War and Revolution, the contention that ‘revolution ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder’ is not tenable. All existed long before anyone ever revolted against capitalism. These revolts were attempts to end these horrors. The rules of liberal democracy, so pristine and perfect in the abstract, were in practise not applied to the majority of humanity or in times of war and crisis.

Not only was this a historical reality, it was explicitly defended and theorised by supporters of liberal democracy at the time. And it has not changed. This is not just in the past, but in Webb’s own present-day Britain, under Labour and Tory alike: in Iraq and Yemen; in Grenfell tower; in prisons, among the homeless and refugees; in the rigid discipline, terrifying precarity and back-breaking toil of low-paid workplaces. And all that is just attacking liberal democracy on its own terms. In the light of all this, it should be clear that to defend the status quo is to defend ‘death camps, gulags, repression and murder.’