On March 17th Bono wrote a poem about the Ukraine war. Without even proofreading it, he sent it to a top US politician, and she read it out at a public gathering. Then he decided to post it on Twitter,
‘It wasn’t written to be published, but since it’s out, here it is,’ he tweeted. No, he didn’t want it to be out. He just sent it to a luncheon involving top political elites in the most powerful country in the world.
The poem was so bad it was a shock to the senses. But now that a few weeks have passed we should take a closer look. What are the specific features that make it so bad?
It’s on the nose
Usually poems weave in symbols and imagery and metaphors. For example, a poem about a vicious invasion might use snake imagery to signify evil. It might weave the metaphor into various vivid images.
Instead of doing that, Bono simply tells us what his poem’s symbol is: ‘For the snake symbolises/ An evil that rises…’
From this we can surmise that if Bono had written ‘The Road Not Taken’ he would have begun, ‘A fork in the road symbolises a major life choice…’
But that’s not quite it. We need more comparisons to really do it justice. If Bono had written ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he would have begun, ‘This Greek vase is a symbol of stuff not getting old.’
Or ‘This Greek vase is like a wife who you’ve married but haven’t had sex with yet.’
It’s a textbook case of Irish narcissism
How are we to read the line ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine’? It seems that he’s saying Ireland had sorrow and pain in the past, and now Ukraine is getting a taste. As if Ukraine was some kind of bucolic hobbit village during the twentieth century – as opposed to a land ravaged by two world wars, famine, terror, the Nazi Holocaust, nuclear disaster and looting by oligarchs.
In this poem, Bono responds to the horror in Ukraine by talking about Ireland. There are grounds for empathy in our shared history of national oppression. But can’t Irish people engage with global events with a bit of taste, without making it all about us?
It’s largely babble
Let’s repeat that phrase; ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine.’ Sometimes in long complex sentences, we mistakenly switch between the singular and the plural. But what excuse does Bono have here, in a phrase eight words long?
Even if he had written ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ ARE now the Ukraine,’ what would that phrase even mean? I struggle to put it into words. Our emotions have been transferred to another country? …have been transformed into another country?
An updated version of the poem reads ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now in Ukraine.’ Did we put our sorrow and pain on a container ship and send it over to the port of Odesa?
‘And they [saints] struggle for us to be free/ From the psycho in this human family.’ Us? But Bono is already free from Putin! Putin doesn’t control any territory in which Bono or his offshore money reside.
‘For the snake symbolises/ an evil that rises/ and hides in your heart/ as it breaks.’ What does this line mean? You, Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of US politicians, have got evil hiding in your heart. I’m not entirely sure that’s what Bono meant to say. And what’s this about hearts breaking?
All these musings are a waste of time, because later we are told that ‘the evil has risen my friends [sic, no comma] / From the darkness that lives in some men.’ All of a sudden, the evil is not something that rises in the hearts of Bono’s heartbroken friends in the US political elite. It is an outside force that threatens us. From context we can guess that it is Putin.
More examples of this incoherence are nailed down here.
It’s banal
When the poem is coherent, it is usually not saying anything worth saying.
What does itactually say about the war in Ukraine? Only that from time to time ‘sorrow and fear’ come along, because of evil. In this poem, evil is a category which includes (presumably amongst other things), paganism in Fifth Century Ireland and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But evil no longer hides in Nancy Pelosi’s broken heart. The source of the evil is now ‘the darkness that lives in some men.’
How unfortunate that darkness lives in the hearts of some men. If only it had taken up lodgings in some more convenient place. Then this war wouldn’t have happened.
It’s absurd
When the poem is coherent and not banal, it’s absurd.
It is entirely possible to write a poem paying tribute to the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people and to the resilience of civilians and aid workers under the bombs. But Bono does not go down that route; instead he singles out the politician who happens to be in charge of Ukraine at this time, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And not only does Bono praise this politician, and not only does Bono compare him to St Patrick. No, at the end of his poem Bono says that Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick.
Because this is the image that comes to mind whenever I hear the name ‘Volodymyr Zelenskyy.’
So St Patrick was personally brave. And yes, it appears Zelenskyy is also personally brave. But there the similarity ends, because (A) St Patrick was never an actor. And (B) he didn’t have a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group on his payroll.
But even if the comparison fit… So Putin is a snake and Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick. Zelenskyy is banishing Putin. But… why? Why say this?
It’s tasteless
In his tweet Bono explains that every year he sends a funny limerick to US politicians for their St Patrick’s Day luncheon. As you do.
This year, he explains, instead of sending a cheeky little rhyme, he felt compelled to send a serious and heavy limerick. Yes, a heavy limerick. Because this year things are different. There’s a war on. People are dying.
Not like all those other years, when there was no war on and nobody was dying. And if there were any wars happening, the US politicians who chuckled at Bono’s funny Irish limericks certainly had nothing to do with any of those wars.
But even leaving all that aside, maybe you shouldn’t write a limerick about a war. Maybe you shouldn’t try to discuss the nature of evil in a limerick. You see, the limerick genre has certain limits.
But as Bono admits, it’s an ‘irregular’ limerick. You can say that again. Limericks are disciplined, with a tight rhyming scheme and rhythm.
For example, ‘There once was a singer from Dublin/ Whose tax situation was troubling…’ etc.
Limericks have to scan well, or else they sound contrived. And they are short, like five lines.
It’s not a limerick
When I first read Bono’s poem, it scanned so poorly I didn’t even realise it was a limerick. There were words that I didn’t realise were supposed to rhyme with other words. I only learned that it was a limerick because Bono said so. Then I went back and read it in the sing-song jokey rhythm of a limerick. It sounded so much more tasteless and bizarre. In other words, it’s not an irregular limerick, it’s an atrocious limerick.
If Bono had written something like the following, it wouldn’t have been quite as bad:
A snakey old psycho named Putin
Escalated the bombing and shooting
But Zelensky had tactics
Because he is St Patrick
And so for Ukraine I am rooting.
It’s absurd, offensive, tasteless, baffling. But it’s brief, and it’s actually a limerick.
And it says everything Bono takes fifteen lines to say. That’s it. All the essential points are there. But to create the impression that he’s saying something deep and heartfelt, he ties the poem up in knots with vague phrases that mean nothing. He does not succeed in covering up his poem’s essential banality and absurdity, only in adding a layer of incoherence.
March 26th will mark one year since i launched The 1919 Review. I want to mark the occasion by offering some advice for beginner bloggers.
1. Blogs Snowball
I had an old blog which I approached with zero plan or consistency, but on which I threw a lot of varied stuff over 5+ years. I have not posted on it since 2015. Somehow in spite of this complete neglect its View Count and Visotor Count coasted along with a combined 6,000 visitors in 2016, 2017 and 2018. It took years for engagement to fall away. Even now it’s a rare week the old blog doesn’t get 20+ views. For a lot of last year, the old blog was doing better than The 1919 Review!
There’s some good stuff on that blog and I’m happy people are still reading it. But my point is this: blogs snowball. Through some mysterious process, they develop a momentum of their own.
So…
2. Keep at it and be consistent
I launched The 1919 Review with a budget of zero but with a bit more planning and determination than I had put into previous projects.
For months, it got practically no views or visitors unless I shared something on social media. The base line default was zero.
One year on, the blog has organic reach. Social media shares generate a spike of views and visitors, of course, but now I have a steady base line of engagement between shares.
It might be the subscribers I’ve built up. It might be that, having built up a certain volume of posts, I’m casting the net wider on search engines. Unless it’s just some inscrutable trick of the algorithm that governs the WordPress Reader feed, it must come down to this: the blog has organic reach because I posted religiously once per week for a year.
3. Use social media
For me, this means Facebook; I don’t really use the others. I’m not a big fan of Facebook, for all the usual reasons, but I still use it every day, again, for all the usual reasons.
One good development over the last few years has been the culture of well-moderated and pleasant public and private groups. It is through sharing posts in such groups that I got some of my biggest spikes in engagement.
Be a member of the group for a while before posting your own stuff, and meanwhile contribute in other ways. Give more than you take. Before you self-promote, read the room and take a look at the rules.
4. Make a podcast
I linked in with Anchor and Youtube to make a very basic, rough-and-ready audio version of my series Revolution Under Siege. It’s not somewhere I expected to go, and it hasn’t brought massive traffic, but it was a lot of fun and it has potential.
5. Savour the little victories
Cut your cloth to measure. With no promotion budget and with many other commitments in my life, it was out of the question that I would be marking big victories and breakthroughs in the first year of The 1919 Review. But I hit every target I set myself, and that feels good. Celtic Communism and Sláine were the biggest hits of year one.
Rather than my usual rule of once per week, I’ve posted three times in the last few days. This is because I’ll be away from tomorrow until April.
Until then, thanks to all my readers, subscribers and sharers.
In 2003 the United States government and its allies invaded Iraq in a war of aggression. Within 3 weeks, over 3,000 civilians had died under the bombs, and twenty years later Iraq has not recovered and no US official has been held accountable.
In 2022 the Russian government invaded Ukraine in a war of aggression. Currently the war is assuming the form of terrible sieges of Ukraine’s major cities. The death toll so far is unknown but around 1 million have already fled the country.
But newspapers did not cover the two events in quite the same way. That’s putting it mildly. I live in Ireland, so here are the headlines I’m seeing from our biggest newspaper. Here are five front pages each from the first week or so of the Iraq War (March 2003) and of the Ukraine War (Feb-March 2022). No further comment from me. The bias speaks for itself.
(You will notice this image is edited to make the headline easier to read)
This is an Appendix post to Revolution Under Siege, my series on the Russian Civil War.
This post started life as a (terrible) idea for a drinking game. Read or listen to my blog and drink any time you come across
a) A White leader whose name starts with K
b) A Red leader who was later killed by Stalin
When you’re reading any account of the Civil War, the phrase “…who was later killed by Stalin…” is a repeating motif. On rare occasions, like the case of Semyonov, this refers to a White leader. But nearly all the time it refers to a Red.
Hence the title.
But instead of inventing the least funny drinking game ever, I went back through all the posts from Series 1 (covering 1918) and made a list of every named individual who supported the Red side. Some are people I spent a whole chapter talking about, others accidental mentions in the captions of photos, others still the authors of sources.
For each one I asked, ‘What happened to them? How did they die?’
This graph was the result.
The graph is based on 39 people. It counts all Red supporters mentioned during Season 1 – so, Reds who were prominent during the year 1918, plus a scattering of accidental figures. There will be omissions, but it is broadly representative. I have in no sense deliberately weighted this sample so as to make Stalinism look bad. I could have weighted it far further in that direction without stretching credibility. For example, I have included Adolf Joffe under ‘Natural Causes or Illness’ even though his suicide was triggered by the persecution of the Left Opposition by the Stalin group.
So that you can see for yourself, here is the full list.
Natural Causes or Illness
1. Alexander Serafimovich (Author, The Iron Flood) – Natural causes, 1949
2. Kliment Voroshilov (Red commander in Southern Army Group in 1918) – Natural Causes, 1969
3. Klavdia Nikoaevna (Editor of Kommunistka) – Killed in a German bombing raid, 1944
4. Vasily Chuikov (Red Guard, later commander at Stalingrad in 1942-43) – Natural causes, 1982
5. Vladimir Lenin (Leading figure in Bolshevik Party) – Illness, 1924
6. Nikolai Andreyev (Assassin of Count Mirbach) – Illness (Typhus), 1919
7. Felix Dzerzhinsky (Founder and leader of the Cheka) – Illness (Heart attack), 1926
In Stephen King’s novel The Stand two new societies emerge in a post-apocalyptic USA, based on opposite sides of the Rocky Mountains. A democratic society takes shape in Boulder, Colorado. Meanwhile in Las Vegas power is seized by a supernatural madman who punishes drug users with crucifixion. Only one of these two regimes can survive.
That great, flawed horror epic comes to mind because this post is about two distinct White regimes which emerged on either side of the Ural Mountains in Russia in 1918, and how one consumed the other. As we saw in Part 5, the Czech Revolt led to dozens of White-Guard governments popping up. The Right Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party set up a regime called Komuch (the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly) based in the Volga town of Samara. They wanted a republican, democratic counter-revolution, with a mandate from the Constituent Assembly and all the ‘t’s crossed and the ‘i’s dotted. Meanwhile across the mountains a faction of officers and Cossacks set up the Provisional Siberian Government at Omsk, a military dictatorship with a thin Siberian Regionalist veneer.
The most important difference was that Samara was anti-landlord and Omsk was pro-landlord. They were at loggerheads on the land question.
These two regimes did not use direct violence against one another – until the very end, when the outcome was no longer in any doubt. They were supposed to be on the same side against the Reds. But relations were tense; Omsk boycotted Samara’s manufactured goods, and Samara boycotted the grain of Siberia.[i] In August the Omsk regime shut down the Siberian Regional Duma – an elected body dominated by Right SRs, of which the Omsk regime itself was an ungrateful child. Komuch was never secure even within its own territory: ‘Russian officers as well as business and middle-class circles much preferred the state-conscious anti-Communism of Omsk.’[ii] And that territory was shrinking. In a strange twist of fate, the military men of Omsk resided safely a thousand miles in the rear while the Right SRs – civilian politicians – led the regime that was actually fighting the Reds on the Volga. From early September that fight was going very badly. As we saw in Part 8, Kazan and Simbirsk had fallen, and this had thrown Komuch into crisis.
Omsk
While Komuch had grown weaker, the Provisional Siberian Government had grown stronger. The Omsk government did not rest on popular support. Its political wing consisted of junior government officials, conservative refugees from central Russia and the Siberian Regionalists. Its military wing consisted of officers and Cossacks, assisted by a battalion of British soldiers from the Middlesex Regiment. This military wing had built itself up to a force of 38,000 by September, poaching officers from Komuch instead of helping them in any serious way.
The ‘Novoselov Affair’ of September 1918 manifested something that had been obvious for some time. The Siberian Regionalists wanted to increase their presence in cabinet, and a politician named Novoselov was their chosen candidate. But he was abducted by Cossacks and murdered. It was a clear signal, Smele suggests, that anyone who tried to challenge the officers and Cossacks would be found dead some fine morning by the banks of the Irtysh River.
Members of the Provisional Siberian Government
The western Allies looked on with impatience, and demanded Komuch and Omsk get their act together and present a united front. The result was the state conference at Ufa on September 23rd 1918. Ufa is a mountain town half-way between republican Samara and military Omsk. It was as if Stephen King’s two post-apocalyptic tribes held a conference somewhere in Utah. At the Ufa (not Utah) conference a wide array of different counter-revolutionary governments came together. Intellectuals, ‘moderate socialists’ and former terrorists sat down to discuss cooperation with Black-Hundred generals, foreign agents and Cossacks.
Chernov
The centre of gravity within the SRs had swung from the Right to the Centre. This Centre was embodied in Viktor Chernov, the leading figure in the party, a stout man with a powerful presence who had served as Minister for Agriculture under Kerensky in 1917. During the few hours’ life span of the Constituent Assembly, the deputies had elected him president of Russia. Unlike most Right SRs, he had actually criticised the policy of coalition with the right during the year 1917, though like the others he had dragged his feet on land reform. In the view of his supporters, the October Revolution had vindicated his criticisms; in the view of the officers, he was largely responsible for ‘the weak and indecisive policy that led to the downfall of Mr Kerensky’s government.’[iii]
Now, along with others, he had arrived in Komuch territory arguing for the Right SRs to take a hard line at the Ufa conference. He was up against the resistance not only of officers and Cossacks but of many in his own party. The historian Radkey writes that many Right SRs had become ‘fervent patriots, partisans of the Entente, and devotees of the cult of the state.’ By 1917 ‘a large segment of the Populist intelligentsia had become [Constitutional Democrats] without admitting it.’[iv] We have already seen how the Left SRs split from the party in disgust at these developments. But the divisions ran deeper still. Even Chernov’s centre was divided into a right centre and a left centre. Chernov himself was prevented from going to Ufa by his own comrades, in case his presence upset the Omsk faction.
Viktor Chernov
The Ufa conference opened with a religious service, then talks began. The numbers of delegates heavily favoured the left, but the various factions all had veto power, tipping the balance back to the right. On the other hand, the need to keep the Czechs happy and to impress the Allies put a certain weight on the scale for the left. Countering this in turn was the real balance of forces between Samara and Omsk, which worsened for Samara every day as the Reds advanced.
One sore point was the Constituent Assembly. The Right SRs insisted that it was the only legitimate state power in Russia, sanctioned by the elections of December 1917. Omsk refused to recognise this body, ‘elected in the days of madness and made up chiefly of the anarchist element.’[v] It appears the Omsk officers believed no election could be considered valid until half the Russian working class was dead or behind barbed wire, and until a knout-wielding Cossack could be placed next to every polling station to glower at the voters. An election held in conditions where the workers were organised and confident could not be considered legitimate in their eyes.
It could be argued that Samara won this round. The Omsk government accepted the legitimacy of the Constituent Assembly in principle. But they would not allow it to assume power until January 1919 at the earliest, and even then it must assemble a quorum of 250 elected deputies. To assemble such a quorum, in the chaos of Russia in 1918, was impossible; it had taken Chernov months to make his way to Samara. So it was a hollow victory for Komuch; the generals’ ‘recognition’ was meaningless.
The Ufa Directorate
The outcome of the conference was a merger of Samara, Omsk and other statelets into a government called the Ufa Directorate. Its programme: abolish the Soviets; return lost territories to Russia; resume the war against Germany; and set up a democratic regime.[vi] The Right SRs also changed their land policy to favour the White landlords with whom they were making a deal.[vii]
On paper, the five-member Directorate had a Socialist majority – a concession to the Czechoslovak Legion, who were increasingly war-weary and cynical of the rightward trajectory in the White camp.
But this was only on paper. Just two of the five members of the Directory were SRs, and they were the two most conservative and least authoritative SRs who could be found. The other member of the Directorate with ‘Socialist’ credentials was Tchaikovsky, who was safely in the Arctic Circle at the time, performing socialist fig-leaf duty for another White government.
The Right SR Central Committee had previously voted 6:2 in favour of Chernov’s position that the SRs should fight against ‘the left-wing Red dictatorship [and] an equally despotic Right-wing White dictatorship’ that would probably emerge. ‘In order to fulfil its historic role,’ the party ‘must emerge as a Third Force and fight a determined war for democracy on two fronts.’[viii]
But the same Central Committee flew in the face of this resolution when it voted 4:3 in favour of the Ufa agreement.
Toward the climax of The Stand, that compelling and problematic 1978 horror novel, the democrats from Boulder go to confront the dictator at Las Vegas. They are armed only with their own courage and moral rectitude, along with a mandate from a supernatural higher power.
You can read the book yourself to find out how this plan works out for them. But you only need to read on another few paragraphs to find out how the same method worked out for the SRs when they entered the Ufa Directorate.
If the comparison seems far-fetched, consider these words by the Right SR Avksentiev: ‘We must put our head in the lion’s mouth. Either it will eat us, or it will choke on us.’[ix]
Life in the lion’s mouth was not comfortable. The officers resented what little influence the Right SRs had in the Directorate . In their view, Chernov was whispering in their ears urging them to set up democratic soldiers’ committees inside the White Army. In fact Chernov was not supported by a majority on his Central Committee, let alone by Avksentiev. But he was the bogeyman conjured up by the ‘Siberians’ to add colour to the implausible assertion that the Directorate was dominated by elements who were only two steps away from Bolshevism. ‘The name ‘socialist’ was for them synonymous with ‘traitor.’’[xiii]
‘I drink to dead Samara!’
Meanwhile the Reds were advancing across Komuch’s territory.
The 6,000 workers of Ivashchenko near Samara rose up against the Whites. But this rising was premature; Komuch still had enough strength to put down the rising, killing 1,500.[x] The officers of the People’s Army went from village to village conscripting the peasants. They used the old tried-and-tested Tsarist recruitment methods: public floggings and violent reprisals for deserters and their families.
But they were not so bold in early October, when the Red Armies closed in on Samara. The White volunteers were too few to defend the town. The Czechs retired without a fight. The peasant conscripts deserted to the Reds. The Cossack Dutov withheld any aid. Nobody would defend Samara, but it gets worse; no-one could be found to organise its evacuation. It was a rout, everyone for himself (Chernov included) crowding onto trains to get away.
An SR leader named Volsky was reportedly found drunk and despairing, smashing glasses and ranting: ‘I drink to dead Samara! Can’t you smell the corpse?’
Czech officers taunted Constituent Assembly deputies: ‘Where’s your Army?’ ‘Government? You the government?’
As Samara fell to the Reds, Komuch lashed out at its Red prisoners, killing 306 of them.
This picture appears to show a Red triumphal procession on Sadovaya Street, Samara, in late 1918 or early 1919.
In spite of its name the Ufa Directorate spent most of its existence governing from railway cars, and officially moved to Omsk in early October. The Novoselov Affair had demonstrated that no civilian politician should push their luck in Omsk, where drunken officers still sang ‘God Save the Tsar.’ The Council of Ministers which served under the Directory was dominated by people more associated with Omsk than Samara. In that city the SR politicians felt the same sense of insecurity and isolation that they had felt in Petrograd in 1917, and in the words of Serge, ‘The very same illusions fortify their spirits. The vocation of parliamentary martyr rises in their breasts.’[xi] Think of Avksentiev with his head in the lion’s mouth. I don’t know what they were thinking; that if they did everything by the book, hosts of constitutional angels would come to their aid… Or that they would get their reward in parliamentary heaven.
Why all the hostility between Samara and Omsk? One way of looking at it is that the generals were too stubborn to recognise that the Right SRs could be a useful political fig-leaf for their cause. They could have kept many Right SR leaders on side by making a few superficial concessions. Their association with the Right SRs was used at the time and is still used today to claim democratic credentials they did nothing to deserve. But the other way of looking at it is that the generals were sophisticated enough to realise that the Right SRs were of little use even as fig-leaves. The Right SRs had only a very narrow base in 1918; their most reliable supporters were the Czechoslovak Legion. Their electoral mandate, such a powerful instrument in constitutional politics, might have been expected to translate into something impressive in the language of civil war. But it simply did not translate.
The Bolsheviks were wise not to recognise the authority of the Constituent Assembly – because practically no-one else did.
Two devastating scenes remained to be played out in the tragedy of the Right SRs. Their protagonist was Admiral Alexander Kolchak.
The Council of the Supreme Ruler
Alexander Kolchak arrived in Omsk in mid-October and was given the Ministry of War and the Marine.
Kolchak was a naval officer from a well-off military family. He explored the Arctic Circle in 1903, travelling by dog-sleigh and spending 42 nights on the open sea. After the disaster of the Russo-Japanese war he approached the Duma (the rigged Tsarist parliament) with plans for naval reform. During World War One he served as an admiral first on the Baltic and then on the Black Sea. During the Revolution, he defied a sailors’ committee by throwing his sword into the sea and declaring the men unworthy of him. ‘Many organisations and newspapers with a nationalist tendency spoke of him as a future dictator.’[xiv]
Still from the movie Admiral (2008) dir. Andrei Kravchuk. Kolchak, centre, confronted by the sailors’ committee, draws his ceremonial sword prior to throwing it overboard.
He spent a long time abroad on various wartime plans and projects with the US and other Allies which came to nought. He became an agent of the British state, and was called by London ‘the best Russian for our purposes in the Far East.’[xv] He returned to Russia with the Japanese invasion forces and tried to organise armed detachments in Manchuria and the Far East. Thence he came to Omsk.
A conspiracy coalesced around him, with or just-about-possibly without his knowledge. According to one of his comrades, he ‘had no part in the plot, but was in favour of a military dictatorship.’[xvi]
General Knox and other British officers in Siberia. Kolchak was their guy, and they supported his coup.
He had just returned from a tour of the front when it all kicked off. On the night of November 17th, a Cossack detachment arrested many Right SRs, including the two members of the Directorate. The Council of Ministers assumed power. There was a battalion of the British Middlesex Regiment stationed in Omsk at the time, and their leader General Knox knew about the coup before the event and did nothing because he hated the Directorate and was a ‘great champion’ of Kolchak.[xvii] The Omsk garrison commander was on board too. It was a clean sweep.
The Czechs were appalled; but the French and the British dissuaded them from taking any action, the French verbally and the British by physically defending the conspirators. So the coup was bloodless. A new power took over, calling itself the Council of the Supreme Ruler.
The ministers offered the vacant position of Supreme Ruler to Kolchak. He accepted the position, it appears, with a heavy heart, refusing it on the first offer.
Today’s cover image, another still from Kravchuk’s Admiral. Kolchak in the centre, flanked by the church, plenty of Russian flags, the military, and the flags of Britain and France. This is a very pro-White Guard film. For example it begins with the Admiral sinking a German ship using the power of prayer.
Apologists for the coup preferred not to use the word. It was simply ‘the change;’ one regime ‘gave place’ to another; ‘the directorate ceased to function, and its place was taken by Admiral Kolchak and his ministry,’ who ‘[took] the authority… into their own hands.’ It had been necessary, because the Right SRs had prepared the ground for the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and ‘The same fate now threatened the Directorate.’[xviii]
The Komuch deputies were holding a congress in the mountain town of Yekaterinburg when news arrived of the coup – news, soon followed by armed bands of Siberian Whites who surrounded the venue and arrested them all. The Czechoslovak general Gajda saved them from being murdered by taking them into his custody. There was one last attempt to raise the banner of Komuch with yet another congress, this time in Ufa on December 2nd. It was shut down by Kolchak’s men.
Alone and on the run, Chernov decided to propose a deal to the Reds. They would have the support of the Right SRs if they would only recognise the Constituent Assembly. Still he clung to it. And why wouldn’t he? With it, he was president of Russia. Without it, he was an isolated politician alone on the run.
The Right SRs were legalised – not due to Chernov’s efforts, and needless to say the Constituent Assembly was not recognised. Chernov went to Moscow where he lived in hiding for a year or so before leaving Russia forever.
Back in Siberia, meanwhile, the Regionalist tradition was openly discarded in favour of old-fashioned Russian chauvinism.[xix]
The lion had closed its jaws and, without choking, swallowed the head of the Right SRs. Chernov blamed his own party: ‘our comrades were among those who helped Kolchak’s dictatorship to happen. They pulled down the bulwark of democracy with their own hands.’[xx]
Detail from Russian Civil War pictorial wall map #4, ‘The German Revolution and Entente Intervention’ with some of the captions translated by me. Some details, such as the position of the frontline, are from a later date. The yellow flag in the NW corner represents the Ufa Directorate. The larger tricolour next to it was the flag adopted by the Council of the Supreme Leader. The little explosion is dated and marks the Omsk coup which overthrew the Directorate.
Kolchak had emerged as one of the two paramount leaders of the White cause. In Spring 1919 the Allies would recognise him as superior to Denikin. He was ‘Supreme Ruler’ and not ‘dictator,’ says Smele, ‘so as to maintain the decorum of the civic spirit.’
The note Kolchak struck in his first major address to the Russian people should be familiar to anyone acquainted with Denikin and his ‘I am not a politician, just a simple soldier’ routine:
I am not about to take the road of reaction or of disastrous party politics, but my chief aim will be the creation of a fighting army, victory over the Bolsheviki, and the establishment of justice and order so that the nation may without interference choose for itself the form of government that it desires.[xxi]
The Stand
Joshua Rossett, an aid official from the United States, gives an insight into the perspective on Kolchak held by many in the Pacific port of Vladivostok. He paints a picture of the intelligentsia, workers, peasants and well-meaning Americans all working hard to deal with humanitarian problems, united under the zemstvo, or local government. Then comes the shock of the Omsk coup. He describes Omsk, and the Ufa Directorate which preceded it, as a coup by food hoarders.
At the last local elections in Vladivostok, 35,000 votes were cast. A commissar came down from Omsk and began striking names off the voter rolls, eventually leaving only 4,000 – whom Rossett says were monarchists and speculators.
Rossett had a more visceral shock when local authorities asked a Russian cavalry officer to provide escort for 600 prisoners – men, women and children, mostly Red, some criminals. They were infected with typhus and had to be moved into quarantine. The officer at first refused, then then ‘with genuine enthusiasm’ offered to kill them all.
Very soon there was resistance to the new regime – not from civic-minded people angry at Kolchak’s disregard for the Constituent Assembly, or from appalled American aid workers, but from peasants. They deserted from the White army, refused to supply food, resisted the return of old landlords and old Tsarist officials. The hand of the Supreme Ruler came down heavy on them with hundreds of townships bombarded or burned and peasants ‘shot in dozens.’[xxii] The Red workers had long since fled from White rule in their home towns and set up guerrilla armies in the endless forests of Siberia. Now they were joined by masses of peasants.
The guerrillas composed songs about the untouched forest that sheltered them: ‘Sombre taiga, danger-ridden, Massed, impenetrable trees! Yet we rebels, safely hidden in thy glades, found rest and ease.’[xxiii]
Soon resistance flared up right at the heart of Kolchak’s power. The last scene in the tragedy of Komuch was the December revolt in Omsk. Communists based in the city led a workers’ uprising against the Supreme Ruler. It was crushed, and in response Kolchak lashed out indiscriminately to his left. Serge says that 900 were killed in the repression. Many of the remaining Right SRs and Mensheviks, who had taken no part in the uprising, were included in the massacre. Mawdsley writes: ‘Prominent SRs, including several Constituent Assembly delegates, were summarily executed.’ Of those who were lucky enough to get away, many went over to the Reds. The less lucky survivors sat huddled in cold dungeons, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Communists as 1918, the year of Komuch, withered and died.
From Admiral.
Consolidation
The Russian Civil War is so chaotic and confused that when, from time to time, a pattern emerges in the whirlwind of events, we should pause and examine it. In the White camp over the course of 1918 we can trace the following pattern:
Step 1: Foreign Intervention
On the river Don in May 1918, the Germans intervened.
On the river Volga in May 1918, the Czechs intervened.
Step 2: Local revolt with a ‘democratic’ flavour
Aided by the Germans, the Don Cossacks rose up against the Reds and established a state.
Aided by the Czechs, the Right SRs rose up against the Reds and established a state.
Step 3: In the shelter of the revolt, reactionary forces coalesce
Behind the shelter provided by the Germans and the Don Cossack state, there arose a military dictatorship of officers and Kuban Cossacks.
Behind the shelter provided by the Czechs and the Right SR state, there arose a military dictatorship of officers and Siberian Cossacks.
Step 4: Tensions between democratic and reactionary wings
Nonetheless the Don Cossacks were on unfriendly terms with the Volunteer Army, and the Right SRs were on unfriendly terms with the Omsk regime.
Step 5: Reactionary wing defeats democratic wing
The Don Cossacks spent their strength at Tsaritsyn, then their remains (as we will see in future posts) were cannibalised by the Volunteer Army.
The Right SRs spent their strength at Kazan, then their remains (as we have just seen) were cannibalised by the Omsk regime.
The parallels should be noted well because in them we can see the complex mess of factions tending to resolve itself into united and powerful White armies. Cossack autonomy, Siberian regionalism and Democratic Counter-Revolution – transitional forms, gateway drugs – fall by the wayside and everywhere the White cause takes the form of a far-right military dictatorship.
[ii] Pereira, NGO. ‘The Idea of Siberian Regionalism in late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia.’ Russian History, vol. 20, no. 1/4, Brill, 1993, pp. 163–78, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24657293.
[v] I copied and pasted this quote word-for-word from a reliable source – but I can’t remember which one! When I find it again (probably as I comb through my notes in search of something completely different six months from now), I will post a proper citation here.
[vi] Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, p 346
[xiii] M. I. Smirnov. “Admiral Kolchak.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 11, no. 32, Modern Humanities Research Association, 1933, pp. 373–87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202781.
Looking out from revolutionary Moscow to each point of the compass in August 1918, the prospect ranged from threatening to dire. In Part 7 we saw how the Don Cossack revolt was battering at Tsaritsyn and Voronezh. Tsaritsyn lay on the steep right bank of the Volga river. On the left bank of the same river, but eight hundred kilometres north, lies the city of Kazan.
Kazan is the thousand-year-old capital of the Tatars, with a mosque-dotted skyline and a Kremlin of white limestone. It was the site of key battles in Russia’s history.
Kazan’s White Kremlin, seen from the Volga
From the city, Jukums Vacietis commanded the Red Army Group on the Eastern Front. Vacietis was the former commander of Latvian Rifles. Though he was himself a Left SR, he had put down the revolt in Moscow, and it had been his idea to fire shells at short range into the Left SR stronghold, harming no-one but shattering the morale of the insurgents. No sooner had the dust settled in Moscow than Murav’ev, defender of Petrograd and conqueror of Kiev, rose up on the Volga with the intention of leading Red and White alike against Germany. Vacietis had taken over in Kazan after the failure of this Murav’ev mutiny. But the staff in his new HQ were leftovers from the Murav’ev days, and in spite of the energy and enthusiasm for which he was known, he faced a steep challenge in trying to get the Red Army organised.
Vacietis was tasked with resisting Komuch, the Right SR-dominated regime which claimed the democratic mandate of the Constituent Assembly. Twelve million people inhabited the food-rich territory on which Komuch carried out its experiment in Democratic Counter-Revolution. This territory was growing thanks to the victories of the People’s Army and the Czech Legion. Beyond Komuch – the officers’ government at Omsk, the warlords of Siberia and the Trans-Baikal, the Japanese occupation force. From the Volga to the Pacific counter-revolution was in the saddle.
Many local Soviets had given up without a fight. Some Red Guard units had immortalised themselves with heroic – but in the short term futile – martial deeds; others had fled or deserted or fallen to pieces.
By August the Soviet government was turning its attention to this Eastern Front. Around 30,000 soldiers were transferred from the west to the Volga in a few weeks over that late summer, a dangerous gamble seeing as Germany might yet attack in the West. They were explicitly threatening to do so; if the Reds failed to deal with the Whites, Germany would invade and deal with both.
It was decided to send out the war commissar Trotsky by train. After scrounging around the chaos and shortages of Moscow to procure a train and supplies, he set off on August 7th. The day before he had sent a dispatch ahead of him:
Any representative of the Soviet power who leaves his post at a moment of military danger without having done all he could to defend every inch of Soviet territory is a traitor. Treachery in wartime is punished with death.[i]
But by the time this message arrived in Kazan, the city was already under attack. There was fighting in the streets, and many representatives of the Soviet power had already left their posts – or worse.
A month to the day after his battle in the streets of Moscow, Vacietis was directing a desperate battle, first outside Kazan on the riverbank and then on the streets of the city itself.
Jukums Vacietis, commander of the Latvian Rifles and later of the Eastern Army Group
The People’s Army and the Czechs had launched a lightning attack on the city of Kazan on August 5th. The officers who led this assault were doing so in defiance of direct orders from Komuch and from the Czech top brass, who had a more cautious policy. But the officers reasoned that ‘Victors are not court-martialled.’ They brought up heavy guns on tugs and barges and forced a landing with a ‘microscopic force’ of only 2,500. They failed on the first attempt, then got a foothold. The following day, the 6th, they broke through to the streets, and there was heavy fighting in Kazan itself.[ii] One Latvian unit held off the enemy time after time with ‘self-sacrifice and heroic courage, regardless of heavy losses in dead and wounded.’[iii]
But the local Red Guards were poorly-disciplined, could not shoot well, could not build barricades. The staff officers, friends of the late Murav’ev, deserted Vacietis and went over to the enemy. The Red commander ended up trapped in his own HQ, under fire. He barely escaped with his life – the enemy entering his HQ even as he was going out the back door – fighting his way out of the city and fleeing across the river with a few dozen riflemen.
By the morning of the 7th, Kazan had fallen to the Whites. The local bishop and the staff and students of the university joined in the counter-revolution wholeheartedly. Komuch seized half of Russia’s gold reserves from Kazan’s vaults, worth 700 million roubles.
Men with weapons and white armbands conducted house-to-house searches, killing ‘Bolsheviks’ on the spot. Red prisoners were torn apart by a ‘well-dressed mob.’ ‘Young women slapped them and spat in their eyes.’ ‘For several days the streets were strewn with disfigured, undressed corpses.’[iv]
Resistance at Sviyazhsk (8 to 28 August)
The stiff resistance of the Latvian Rifles had bought a few hours. This proved significant. Some Red units regrouped at the nearby town of Sviyazhsk, and when the Whites tried to seize the town’s railway bridge, the Reds held on and drove them back.
The Reds numbered around ten thousand, holding on around Sviyazhsk in ‘a line of pathetic, hastily-dug trenches,’[v] defending the Romanov railway bridge and barring further advance from Kazan. Effectively, Kazan and Sviyazhsk faced each other from either end, and from opposite banks of, a twenty-kilometre stretch of water. The Red force at Sviyazhsk was the Fifth Army, forming part of Eastern Army Group.
…and another, perhaps clearer, map. Source unknown – like most images I use, I found it on the priceless Wikimedia Commons.
Sviyazhsk was a rustic settlement scattered for some distance along the right bank of the river. It lay twenty to thirty kilometres west of Kazan and it was the first stop on the line to Moscow. Its railway station commanded the bridge.
It was at this small railway station that Trotsky arrived from Moscow. Film footage of his arrival shows no great ceremony or dramatic speech – simply an awkward muddle as a man standing next to the War Commissar tries and fails to find some important document or other.[vi]
The locomotive detached and drove away from Trotsky’s train – a signal that he was here to stay. The carriages remained in the railway yard, turning into offices and depots. A second train arrived from Moscow – this one carrying 300 cavalry, an aeroplane, a mobile garage for five cars, a radio-telegraph office and a print shop.
A still from Dr Zhivago (1965, Dir David Lean). I have big problems with the historical accuracy of this movie but damn, David Lean can frame a shot. The train here is fully-armoured with naval guns, though it’s not visible in this still. Later in the war, Trotsky would travel in an armoured train of this kind. But at Kazan his train was basic and unarmoured. (I do not own the rights to this image, just found it and screenshotted it on Youtube.com.)
Vacietis made a hand-over to Trotsky, and left to assume overall command of the front.
Conditions were grim. Larissa Reissner, a writer and Red Army soldier, described the defenders of Sviyazhsk ‘sleeping on the floors of the station house, in dirty huts filled with straw and broken glass.’ The Red Army soldier was ‘a human being in a torn military coat, civilian hat, and boots with toes protruding.’ It was a rainy month. Kazan kept up the pressure. ‘Planes came and went, dropping their bombs on the station and the railway cars; machine guns with their repulsive barking and the calm syllables of artillery, drew nigh and then withdrew again.’[viii]
A company of Communists from Moscow who had arrived by train with Trotsky barely knew how to handle their rifles, but fought bravely. On the other extreme was a Latvian unit, hardened veterans, but shattered by the defeat at Kazan and angry at the lack of basic supplies. They threatened mutiny. Trotsky immediately had their officer put up in front of a tribunal and imprisoned.
Nature of the Red Army
We are already acquainted, from previous posts in this series, with the kind of people who made this stand at Sviyazhsk.
34,000 of the 50,000 Red Guards had been incorporated into the new Red Army, along with volunteers who were former soldiers. The all-volunteer Red Army numbered 300,000 in May 1918, but it is likely that only a minority actually had weapons. The others remained in the rear performing auxiliary duties. At first a Red Army soldier needed a reference from a trade union or left-wing political party to join. But from June, the Soviet government brought in conscription in response to mass desertion and to the military crisis.
We are fighting for the greatest good of mankind, for the rebirth of the entire human race, for its emancipation from oppression, from ignorance, from slavery. And everything that stands in our way must be swept aside. We do not want civil strife, blood, wounds! We are ready to join fraternally in a common life with all our worst enemies. If the bourgeoisie of Kazan were to come back today to the rich mansions that they abandoned in cowardly fashion, and were to say: ‘Well, comrade workers’ – or if the landlords were to say: ‘Well, comrade peasants, in past centuries and decades our fathers and grandfathers and we ourselves oppressed, robbed and coerced your grandfathers and your fathers and yourselves, but now we extend a brotherly hand to you: let us instead work together as a team, sharing the fruits of our labor like brothers’
– then I think that, in that case, I could say, on your behalf: ‘Messrs landlords, Messrs bourgeois, feel free to come back, a table will be laid for you, as for all our friends! If you don’t want civil war, if you want to live with us like brothers, then please do … But if you want to rule once more over the working class, to take back the factories – then we will show you an iron fist, and we will give the mansions you deserted to the poor, the workers and oppressed people of Kazan…[xix]
This is the second-last main narrative post in Season One of Revolution Under Siege, a series about the Russian Civil War. Catch you again in two or three weeks’ time for the conclusion; in the meantime there will be smaller side-posts and a podcast version of this episode. Thanks for reading.
‘to settle the question whether homes, palaces, cities, the sun and the heavens are to belong to the working people, to the workers the peasants, the poor, or to the bourgeois and the landlords […] I am today eating an eighth of a pound of bread, and tomorrow I shall not have even that, but I shall just tighten my belt, and I tell you plainly – I have taken power, and this power I shall never surrender!’
And then there were Red partisan units, armed bands of poor peasants led by local charismatic leaders. One Red commander on the Northern Front described how difficult it was to incorporate them into the Red Army:
We certainly had a lot of trouble with them at the front. They often upset all our plans and arrangements; they never conformed to any general scheme, but just trusted to their own inspiration. The “Wolf Pack” band did specially good work; it was commanded by a sailor, and consisted entirely of sailors, soldiers and workmen. An anarchist band also distinguished itself; it was not a particularly large one-barely two hundred men, but a very compact body, firmly knit together by the reckless courage of all its members.[ix]
So the defenders of Sviyazhsk would have been a mix of former Red Guards; veterans of the Great War; adventurous guerrillas of the ‘Wolf Pack’ variety; and new peasant conscripts. In addition, thousands of communists answered an appeal and joined the army.
Red Army soldiers under shell fire during the struggle for Kazan
One in every twenty-five Red Army soldiers was an international volunteer; Reissner even mentions Czechs in the Red camp at Sviyazhsk, fighting against their own countrymen on the opposite bank. Many wore their own national army’s uniform, in defiance of orders. There was a good reason for this, a reason which many conscripts discovered to their cost. Some conscripts showed up for enlistment dressed in their worst clothes, assuming that they would trade them in for a uniform. But the Red Army had no uniforms! So they had to go to war in the most threadbare and ill-fitting garments they owned. They wore a red badge with a hammer-and-plough device, or an upside-down red star; apart from that, it was impossible to tell who was Red and who was White.
There were sixty different makes of artillery in Red service during the war, and thirty-five different varieties of rifle from American Springfields to Japanese Arisakas. No doubt some of the same variety was on display at Sviyazhsk.[x] You can easily imagine the mess caused by incompatible ammunition, parts, or training.
There was no formal organisational structure and there were no training centres. All army ranks had been abolished; ‘commander’ was a post held, not a title or a distinction. Outside of the military sphere, in day-to-day life, subordination of lower ranks to higher was not allowed. Some years later, one private got his commander into deep trouble by polishing his boots. Erich Wollenberg writes that the commander was accused of acting in an aristocratic spirit. He was let off the hook when it became clear that the private had been acting on his own initiative.
The commanders were drawn from three main sources. First, and well in evidence during the struggle for Kazan, were the military cadres. These were communists who had infiltrated the old Tsarist army during 1917. After the October Revolution they had to make the switch from dissidents in the old army to leaders of a new army. They had enough humility to stay in their lane and defer to actual trained soldiers on military matters.
Second, former corporals and sergeants of the old army. (Some, like Kliment Voroshilov in the South, commanded whole armies). In general these former Non-Commissioned Officcers – numbering around 130,000 – lacked the humility of the military cadres, and considered themselves superior to the commissioned officers. Sometimes they were right about this and sometimes they were wrong. In other words, the tsarist officer was known by the red board on his shoulder; the former NCO was known for the chip on his shoulder.
Third, around 22,000 former officers had been brought into the Red Army by this point. Some were revolutionaries, like Tukhachevsky. Others were conscientious public servants and patriots who believed, as we have seen in Part 7, that ‘the people are not mistaken.’ Many were conscripts, working under compulsion. Some were simply waiting for the chance to betray their men to the Whites. Years later, Trotsky was poring over memories from the struggle for Kazan when he realised that a particular artillery officer at Sviyazhsk had been trying to kill him.
Trotsky and the poet Damian Bedny near Kazan
Red Cohesion
The scene of Red soldiers enduring shellfire and rain on a dreary riverbank in early autumn has not been deemed worthy of a dramatic military painting by any artist. This is understandable. But day by day something momentous was happening. According to one historian, these were ‘operations which we may with hindsight deem to have been key to the eventual outcome of the civil wars.’[xi] According to another, the moment of the struggle for Kazan was one of two at which the existence of the Soviet state hung in the balance.[xii]
Behind and around the Reds at Sviyazhsk, tens of thousands of soldiers were being drawn up and prepared for a counter-attack on Kazan. This took time, especially in the chaotic conditions of Russia in 1918. If Sviyazhsk did not hold, this concentration of forces could not take place, and there was little hope of recovering Kazan. If the Red Army could not concentrate its forces and take Kazan, then what use was it? For the Reds, there had been no significant victories since the start of full-scale civil war. If Sviyazhsk, the Fifth Army and Eastern Army Group had been shattered, the damage to morale might have constituted a death-blow to the revolution.
This was not a straight battle but a test of cohesion. Red forces had broken and fled countless times since the Czechoslovak revolt. What was to stop them breaking again, under daily attack and with poor supplies?
The old Tsarist army had held together under fire through drill and traditional hierarchies and violent disciplinary measures. The new Red Army needed a new kind of cohesion.
Over the month of August, through trial and error and through will, the Red Army found ways and means. In small ways at first, they began to cohere.
The train carriages from Moscow got to work. Boots and food started to arrive. Reinforcements came – from tiny bands to large regular units. Telephone and telegraph wires were strung out across the countryside. Order began making its first inroads against chaos. The war commissar’s carriage was in the station, and he himself was touring the river-bank under enemy shells. Political newspapers improved morale, linked the dreary riverbank to the world revolution.
A panorama of modern-day Sviyazhsk
It must have had an impact on a conscripted krasnoarmeyets (Red Army member) from a village background to share trenches and cheap cigarettes and long discussions with workers from the towns, with communists and anarchists and SRs, veterans of the revolutionary storm of 1917 or even of underground and exile; people who had fought as Red Guards or partisans in the struggles of early 1918.
The Baltic sailors arrived, the shock troops of 1917 in their military vessels, straight from the sea to the Volga via the Mariinsky canal system. Artillery skirmishes between Red and White flotillas took place three or four times a day on the Volga. To the immense satisfaction of the Red soldiers, the White vessels were driven back.
A small airfield was set up, and an anarchist pilot named Akashev put in charge of scouting from the air and dropping bombs into Kazan. White planes were now being answered by Red, and this gave heart to the defenders of Sviyazhsk.
Morale was improving. But it was still shaky. Every day saw attacks on Sviyazhsk or other positions. From time to time units would abandon their positions, break under fire, refuse to follow orders.
But another factor in Red cohesion at Sviyazhsk was indicated by Trotsky’s order of August 14th:
It has been reported to me that the Petrograd guerrilla detachment has abandoned its position…
The soldiers of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army are neither cowards nor scoundrels. They want to fight for the freedom and happiness of the working people. If they retreat or fight poorly, their commanders and commissars are to blame.
I issue this warning: if any unit retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the commissar, and the next the commander.
Soldiers who show courage will be rewarded for their services and promoted to posts of command.
Cowards, self-seekers and traitors will not escape the bullet.
For this I vouch before the whole Red Army.
Raids (28-30 August)
The attack on Kazan by the White forces had been a brilliant and daring exploit. But weeks had passed and no further progress had been made. Every day the Reds grew stronger. From the point of view of the Whites, another daring operation was called for.
Raid by Land
On August 28th 2,000 White Guards crossed the river under cover of darkness. They made a wide circle around the Red lines. After an exhausting forced march, they arrived at a railway station behind Sviyazhsk, killed its small garrison to a man, and left it in ruins. They cut the railway line to Moscow.
An armoured train with naval guns was sent out from Sviyazhsk to intercept the Whites. But the Whites took it and burned it, and its remains lay by the roadside only a kilometre or two from town, a visible warning. The Whites advanced on the Sviyazhsk railway station and on the key bridge next to it.
The railway bridge at Sviyazhsk near Kazan (not Athlone).
The front was under pressure and shaky; Trotsky could only spare two or three companies to turn and face the White infiltrators. To compensate, he emptied the train of every one of its personnel: clerks, wireless operators and cooks. They were armed and sent out one kilometre to block the White advance.
Reissner describes the eight-hour battle which ensued:
The staff offices stood deserted; there was no “rear” any longer. Everything was thrown against the Whites who had rolled almost flush to the station. From Shikhrana to the first houses of Svyazhsk the entire road was churned up by shells, covered with dead horses, abandoned weapons and empty cartridge shells. The closer to Svyazhsk, all the greater the havoc. The advance of the Whites was halted only after they had leaped over the gigantic charred skeleton of the armored train, still smoking and smelling of molten metal. The advance surges to the very threshold, then rolls back boiling like a receding wave only to fling itself once more against the hastily mobilized reserves of Svyazhsk. Here both sides stand facing each other for several hours, here are many dead.
The Whites then decided that they had before them a fresh and well organized division of whose existence even their intelligence service had remained unaware. Exhausted from their 48 hour raid, the soldiers tended to overestimate the strength of the enemy and did not even suspect that opposing them was only a hastily thrown together handful of fighters with no one behind them except Trotsky and Slavin sitting beside a map in a smoke-filled sleepless room of the deserted headquarters in the center of depopulated Svyazhsk where bullets were whistling through the streets.[xiii]
The Whites withdrew. But the Red Army was not just battling against the Whites. It was faced with its own inexperience and the accumulated trauma of a summer’s worth of shattering defeats. One intention of the raid was to damage the Reds’ morale. In this it was not a failure. The raid sent a fresh wave of panic through the Fifth Army.
Mutiny
The 2nd Numerny Petrograd Regiment, a body of 200, broke. This was not a band of peasant conscripts or partisans, but a unit of worker-militants led by commissar Panteleev.[xiv]
Not only did this unit break; led by their commander and commissar, the 200 stormed on board a steamship that lay at anchor on the Volga, hijacked it and set sail.
A Bolshevik sailor named Nikolai Markin acted fast.
Boarding an improvised gunboat with a score of tested men, he sailed up to the steamer held by the deserters, and at the point of a gun demanded their surrender. Everything depended on that one moment; a single rifle-shot would have been enough to bring on a catastrophe. But the deserters surrendered without resisting. The steamer docked alongside the pier, the deserters disembarked.[xv]
At once Trotsky assembled a tribunal to pronounce judgement on the Regiment. Its decision was announced on August 30th in Order No 31, authored by the War Commissar:
The brave and honorable soldier cannot give his life twice – for himself and for a deserter. The overwhelming majority of the revolutionary soldiers have long been demanding that traitors be dealt with ruthlessly. The Soviet power has now passed from warning to action. Yesterday twenty deserters were shot, having been sentenced by the field court-martial of the Fifth Army.
The first to go were commanders and commissars who had abandoned the positions entrusted to them. Next, cowardly liars who played sick. Finally, some deserters from among the Red Army men who refused to expiate their crime by taking part in the subsequent struggle.[xvi]
The sailor Markin, who would go on to be killed in action in October 1918
Raid by Water
The Reds took the initiative. That very night there was a daring raid by small Red torpedo-boats on the White flotilla docked at Kazan. Trotsky and the sailors Markin and Raskolnikov were on this raid personally. They came under fire. At one point Trotsky’s boat was separated from the others, disabled by machine-gun bullets, pierced by a shell, lit up by a burning oil-barge, and stuck on a half-sunken enemy vessel. The occupants of the boat thought they were as good as dead.
But the other vessels had already gone into Kazan harbour, where they wrecked the enemy flotilla and destroyed artillery on land. The Whites were in too much chaos even to realise they had a chance to kill the War Commissar, much less to do so.
In the days after the raid, the pilots under the anarchist aviator Akashev brought good news. The Second Red Army, commanded by a Red Cossack, had advanced to within ten or fifteen kilometres of Kazan from the north. In all, 25-30,000 Red soldiers were now closing in on Kazan on both sides of the river. There began an exodus of the wealthier classes, and there was an uprising of workers within the city.
Threats rang out from Red lines: any White who deserted now would be pardoned, but White collaborators could expect confiscation of property, imprisonment or death. Dozens of Whites had already deserted and come over to the Reds. To those who held out in Kazan, ‘Remember Yaroslavl’ was the chilling threat. The Red commanders contemplated, but never carried out, an artillery bombardment of the city.
Meanwhile, the Whites put down the workers’ revolt within Kazan with a massacre.
The Recapture of Kazan (1 to 9 September)
On September 1st news reached Sviyazhsk of the shooting of Lenin (which we mentioned in a previous post, ‘Controversies: Terror’). Trotsky hurried back to Moscow. He was not present when the Fifth Army, after a month at Sviyazhsk, crossed the Volga and made a landing at Kazan. But Reissner was there:
On September 9 late at night the troops were embarked on ships and by morning, around 5:30, the clumsy many-decked transports, convoyed by torpedo boats, moved toward the piers of Kazan. It was strange to sail in moonlit twilight past the half-demolished mill with a green roof, behind which a White battery had been located; past the half-burned Delphin gutted and beached on the deserted shore; past all the familiar river bends, tongues of land, sandbanks and inlets over which from dawn to evening death had walked for so many weeks, clouds of smoke had rolled, and golden sheaves of artillery fire had flared.
[…] yesterday, words of command were restlessly sounding and slim torpedo boats were threading their way through smoke and flames and a rain of steel splinters, their hulls trembling from the compressed impatience of engines and from the recoil of their two-gun batteries which fired once a minute with a sound resembling iron hiccups.
People were firing, scattering away under the hail of down-clattering shells, mopping up the blood on the decks … And now everything is silent; the Volga flows as it has flowed a thousand years ago, as it will flow centuries from now.
We reached the piers without firing a shot. The first flickers of dawn lit up the sky. In the grayish-pink twilight, humped, black, charred phantoms began to appear. Cranes, beams of burned buildings, shattered telegraph poles – all this seemed to have endured endless sorrow and seemed to have lost all capacity for feeling like a tree with twisted withered branches. Death’s kingdom washed by the icy roses of the northern dawn.
And the deserted guns with their muzzles uplifted resemble in the twilight cast down figures, frozen in mute despair, with heads propped up by hands cold and wet with dew.
Fog. People begin shivering from cold and nervous tension; the air is permeated with the odor of machine oil and tarred rope. The gunner’s blue collar turns with the movement of the body viewing in amazement the unpopulated, soundless shore reposing in dead silence.
This is victory.
The Whites had abandoned Kazan. In the face of the Red build-up, they had calculated that they could not hold the city. The advancing Reds found in ‘the courtyard of the prison, a row of fresh corpses: the arrival of the Red cavalry […] had interrupted the executions.’[xvii]
The Red Cavalry enter Kazan
Komuch troops fleeing from Kazan
By mid-September, there would be 70,000 fighters of the Red Army on the Eastern Front, throwing back the Czechs and Komuch at all points. In Part 5 we briefly mentioned the workers of Troitsk, Verkhne-Uralsk and Ekaterinburg, who formed a partisan army and made a fifty-day march, in constant battle, out of hostile territory. A few days after the recapture of Kazan, this march came to an end when they linked up with the Third Red Army near Perm.
Almost simultaneous with the fall of Kazan, a Red army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky took Simbirsk from Komuch. This battle saw a series of daring and innovative exploits on the Red side: an unmanned locomotive thundered across an iron bridge through White barricades, followed by a manned and armoured train; Red Army soldiers infiltrated behind enemy lines and organised an uprising of railway workers (Simbirsk, home town of Lenin, is today called Ulyanovsk).
But it is perhaps a mistake to focus on these kinds of spectacular operations. As we have seen, at Kazan itself daring exploits were more a feature of White tactics. Revolutionary élan was in evidence on the Red side, but it was not a new phenomenon. What the Red Army had learned at Kazan was plain professional soldiering. The victory was won not necessarily with reckless death-defying charges, but through stoic endurance. It was a victory of supplies, logistics and politics, all contributing to cohesion. (That is one reason, I suspect, why it has not been deemed worthy of a dramatic painting or of the Mosfilm treatment).[xviii] What happened at Sviyazhsk was the synthesis of the zeal of the commissar and the technique of the specialist.
In their thousands, the people of the re-conquered Kazan attended revolutionary meetings in the streets and in the main theatre, celebrating the victory.
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The 1919 Review 