History

Revolution Under Siege: Conclusion (Part 2 of 2)

In Part 1 of this conclusion we looked at the popularity of the Reds, the anti-democratic spirit of the Whites and the terrible impact of foreign intervention. The Soviets were popular and progressive. They were attacked in a brutal civil war, and they have been lied about and misunderstood ever since.

But that doesn’t mean they did nothing wrong. For the first half of this post we’re going to look at the question of terror. Finally, we’re going to ask whether the Civil War led to Stalinism.

Cover art for a 1920s Soviet board game called ‘Red vs White: War Game’

Terror

The most disturbing part of the Civil War is the use of terror by the winning side. ‘After the outbreak of Civil War,’ writes Fitzpatrick, ‘the Cheka became an organ of terror, dispensing summary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages.’ According to Fitzpatrick, terror encompassed ‘not only summary justice but also random punishment, unrelated to specific guilt […].’ [1]

Deutscher sums up the violence in a vivid phrase: ‘terror and counter-terror inexorably grew in a vicious and ever-widening spiral.’ But he does not elaborate much beyond saying that the Reds ‘did not shrink from the shooting of hostages’. [2]

Smith writes that ‘the extent to which the new [Soviet] regime relied on violence is now much clearer than it once was’ – for example, in Deutscher’s time. But he adds that it is also better understood to what extent all sides relied on violence. [3]

My own reading bears this out. There’s no indication that Red Terror was in any sense worse than White Terror. All sides, from Makhno to Piłsudski and from the Soviet regime to peasant insurgents, used terror as a weapon. These were the grisly rules of this war.

The question is: Who wrote the rulebook? Who were the instigators of the unconstrained use of violence?

Who instigated terror?

In 1917 itself the conduct of the Bolsheviks was markedly restrained and humane; massacres committed by enraged sailors were condemned. The early White Guards were not just spared but paroled.

Late in 1917 White Guards massacred Red Guards within the walls of the Kremlin. Even before the start of Civil War proper the two foremost leaders of the White armies, Alexeev and Kornilov, defended the practise of shooting all Red prisoners. Kornilov was public and outspoken, calling for as much terror as possible and declaring that he was ready to kill most of the population if necessary.

From May, we have the Civil War proper. Unrestrained terror against ‘Bolsheviks’ was the rule during the White risings of Spring-Summer 1918. At Omsk, according to a Right SR witness, 2,500 captive Red soldiers and workers were massacred. At the hands of Ataman Dutov, hundreds were buried alive. These are just a few examples of many to show that the Whites got a big head-start on terror. White terror was decentralized and unsystematic throughout the war, but practically every faction engaged in it.

The White head-start on terror is an obvious and clear fact to me when I look at the timeline. But none of my sources talk about it.

Repression under the Soviets

Red Terror ramped up gradually over the summer and began in earnest with an explosion of violence in September 1918. It kept raging in local peaks and troughs until the end of the war.

The Soviet regime’s violence was not premeditated. It was a response to a crisis not of its making. Most of the country’s territory had been seized – not by a popular revolt against ultra-left excesses, but by a well-armed minority and by foreign armies. The insurgents were killing Soviet-aligned soldiers and civilians by the thousand long before the Soviets responded in kind.

The case for Red Terror was made openly. The Communists justified it by pointing to the crimes of their enemies, and promised it would be set aside as soon as possible:

The proletariat who strive for equality of all human beings, have no longing for dictatorship with terrorism, and do not themselves choose that tactical course. As soon as the situation permits of it they will forego it. In the process of the Socialist revolution they will always seek to discover whether this or that section of the bourgeoisie can be induced to join with them in the exercise of power, whether the circle of those possessing equal rights is not capable of extension, and they will greet the day with ringing of bells and shouts of joy in which all chains will disappear […]

Karl Radek, ‘Dictatorship and Terrorism’ Chapter 6 https://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1920/dictterr/ch06.htm

Radek also emphasized that the curtailing of soviet democracy and the security measures in his own country were not a model for other countries to follow.

The Soviet Union needed a severe security regime in order to survive this war. The Communists in Baku, Azerbaijan stuck to peaceful methods and ended up being executed. The problem is this: what the Soviets actually did went beyond the kinds of measures covered by Trotsky’s and Radek’s arguments. We have covered some of the gruesome details before in this series.

Two dreadful massacres early in 1918, at Kokand and Kyiv, were outliers: carried out by non-Bolsheviks in peripheral places far from central oversight. But it is a problem that they are neglected in any Soviet sources I’ve come across.

Some of the worst excesses, including the above, occurred in regions that were not predominantly Russian – such as Astrakhan and Crimea. The Bolsheviks took an inspiring stand on the question of national liberation – but the age-old racism and chauvinism of the Russian state found expression in the severity with which some of the agents of the Revolution acted when surrounded by non-Russians.

Revolutionary movements in the future must not take the same road. Terror had a brutalizing effect on the Soviet state and on its supporters. The Red side never endorsed torture – but there is evidence that it happened in some places. Can that be a surprise, when the Communist paper in Petrograd in September 1918 literally called for blood? On the pretext of deterring counter-revolutionaries, violence could be used maliciously. It was often counter-productive, triggering revolt. All this is on top of the cruelty and waste, which go without saying.

‘Ideas learned under fire’ included many negative and paranoid ideas – in other words, trauma. The idea learned from Baku or Omsk in 1918 – that one must take ruthless measures against any stirring of counter-revolution – was a very harmful idea when applied generally.

On the other hand, the English-speaking reader is never challenged, in accounts of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, to imagine how his own government might react if foreign armies and insurgents seized most of its territory. 9/11 was enough to bring out the US political establishment in open defence of torture.

The Soviet regime was under unimaginable threats and pressures. This popular and progressive government had a right to fight for its survival. Ultimately these pressures and threats caused it to stoop to inhumane and counterproductive measures when it should have held firm to a line which might have better balanced security concerns with humanitarian principles.

Red Armoured Train No. 17, named ‘Victory or Death.’ From the US labour paper *The T*oiler, shared online by a great page called Revolution’s Newsstand

Did the Civil War lead to Stalinism?

Repression dismantled

Some accounts narrate the executions in Crimea and after Kronstadt in a way that leaves the reader believing that the repressive apparatus built up during the Civil War was kept in place afterwards. In fact, the Cheka was radically cut down, most of its staff let go and its powers curtailed. The use of executions ‘diminished into insignificance.’ The system of prison camps used during the Civil War was shut down; there is no direct continuity between it and the notorious Gulag system. The Cheka, renamed OGPU, was left in charge of only a small number of prisons.

The criminal justice system in the Soviet Union in the 1920s was progressive and lenient. Exile was abolished, prison sentences cut down, crimes caused by poverty judged lightly, non-custodial sentences preferred. Prisoners were paid for work, educated, and often allowed to live outside the prison. The imprisoned population in the whole Soviet Union was under 200,000 in 1927 – likely an overcount as many sentences were shorter than a year.

In other words, repression actually was a Civil War emergency measure.

There were also around 8,500 people in harsher OGPU-run facilities. In 1929, the year Stalin’s regime began its notorious campaign of forced collectivization, 60,000 were transferred from the prisons to new OGPU unpaid labour camps. ‘[T]he network of camps grew to embrace 662,000 by the middle of 1930, and it was to grow within another couple of years to nearly two million.’ [4]

From 8,500 to two million in a few years – that’s a historic rupture.

This leads us on to the second main point of this post. The society which emerged from the war fell a long way short of, say, what Lenin envisaged in The State and Revolution. But it fell even further short of totalitarian Stalinism. The devastation of the war was only one condition, and not by itself a sufficient one, for the descent into the totalitarian nightmare.

Red Army demobilised

As early as the start of 1920 the Red Army started demobilizing. ‘Lenin and the majority of the party’s leadership were obsessed with the recovery of the economy,’ (not fanatical world conquest) so 90% of the Red Army was sent home. There were 5.3 million personnel in 1921 – and just 562,000 by 1924, structured as a territorial militia.

This was very much army of a new type – commanders and rank-and-file soldiers were drawn from the same social classes; their uniforms were nearly identical; ranks were abolished; revolutionary discipline forbade corporal punishment and appealed to conscience. [5]

This army was wrenched away from its egalitarian and liberatory origins – but again the rupture came in the 1930s, not in the Civil War era.

The Red Army changed radically in the Stalinist period. Ranks were reinstated. Commissars were abolished, only to return later in a more inquisitorial form. Forced collectivization stunned the rank-and-file soldiers; the Great Terror decimated and terrorized the officers. The Soviet Union entered World War Two with a severely demoralized and fundamentally changed Red Army.

Living conditions

In 1921, after fighting on several fronts throughout the Civil War, Eduard Dune returned to the factory where he had been working when he first became a Bolshevik in 1917. The place was silent and shuttered. A handful of the old workers were minding the place, living off potatoes they grew on the grounds. But on the inside, the factory was perfectly preserved in the hope of economic recovery. [6] This is an image of promised renewal and reconstruction.

The promise was fulfilled. Contrary to the clichéd fatalistic aphorisms about how socialism only ‘shares out misery more equally,’ ‘runs out of other people’s money’, etc, in the 1920s working-class people saw huge benefits. City dwellers could now avail of free healthcare and far cheaper housing. Workers had a generous social insurance scheme. The countryside was far less penetrated by new social services, but appreciated the absence of landlords. A generation of worker and peasant youth benefited from much wider access to education. Smith (Russia in Revolution, p 320 and following) emphasizes the achievements in healthcare, in spite of scarce resources.

It is significant that, as soon as the Civil War was over, economic recovery began. This backs up the idea that war conditions, not Bolshevik policies, caused economic crisis.

Soviet democracy

The regime in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War was far more pluralist than one might expect in a country utterly devastated by war. It was a rich period culturally – Soviet youth experimented with free love; nudists jumped onto trams in Moscow; Esperanto speakers organized themselves; Soviet artists were at the cutting edge globally.

Contrary to another cliché, the Communists never actually abolished workers’ control in the factories. What emerged by the end of the Civil War was a compromise (there’s that word again). Some factories were run by elected committees, others by a centrally-appointed manager (a communist, a former manager, a chief engineer, or even in some cases the former owner), others still by a worker or group of workers from the plant appointed to run it. The latter was ‘often the most successful’ arrangement. [7] In other words, where workers’ control functioned well, it was kept. Where it turned out badly (and there are many reasons it might, in a context of economic collapse and war), the state stepped in and either modified it or ended it.

In practically every ‘democratic’ country at the time, poor people, minorities and women were excluded from voting. By contrast, the Soviets were elected by all men and women over 18. Those deemed to be exploiting others were denied the vote; this amounted to a tiny percentage of people.

The Soviet regime is sometimes accused of lacking ‘checks and balances’ necessary to prevent tyranny. In 1917-18 it was nothing but checks and balances. However, it’s true that the state which emerged from the Civil War was authoritarian and dysfunctional.

The Mensheviks had by this stage positioned themselves as a loyal opposition. Lenin and his old comrade, the Menshevik leader Martov (according to Tariq Ali in The Dilemmas of Lenin) were warmly reconciled before their deaths. Nonetheless the Soviet state subjected the Mensheviks to a severe crackdown in 1921, with thousands of them arrested. There was a parallel crackdown against oppositionists inside the Communist Party – Shlyapnikov and Kollontai were not arrested, but their faction was shut down. These measures were supposed to be temporary, to be reviewed after the Soviet Union had put a few years of urgent reconstruction behind it. But as the 1920s went on the Left Opposition, which included many of the most prominent Old Bolsheviks, found itself having to campaign for a restoration of democracy, amid increasing crackdowns from the party apparatus.

Though Lenin supported the crackdown on Mensheviks and the ban on internal party factions, he sounded the alarm early about the Soviet state and, in his final writings, took a democratic turn – for example on Georgia and on cooperatives. In 1920 he cautioned: ‘ours is a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.’ ‘Later,’ writes Faulkner, ‘alarmed at the influence of former Tsarist officials and newly appointed careerists in the government apparatus, he posed the question: ‘This mass of bureaucrats – who is leading whom?’ [8]

The bureaucrats included the former Mensheviks Beria and Vyshinskii. Beria would later serve as the notorious head of Stalin’s secret police. Vyshinskii, as prosecutor in the Moscow show trials later in life, would call for the ‘mad dogs’ (the defendants) to be shot.

Be conscious of how much heavy lifting is being done by this word ‘later.’ Here as with other topics, the decisive break came not in the Civil War but after 1928.

We have to note, however, that with the political regime, the curve is less dramatic, the rupture less obvious. Terrible damage was done in the Civil War, and the cost of economic recovery in the 1920s was a growth of bureaucracy and ‘NEPmen’, develoments which helped Stalin’s rise to power. Faulkner writes: ‘The revolution had been hollowed out. And, in one of history’s most bitter twists, another species of counter-revolution […] was growing, a malignant embryo, inside the revolutionary regime itself.’

Today’s cover image. Caption copied directly from WIkimedia Commons: ‘Russian_Revolutionary_Poster,_Red_Cavalry kiev Russian Revolutionary Poster Mount your horses, workers and peasants! The Red Cavalry is the guarantee of victory. Designer unknown, 1919.’

To be or not to be

We can’t hope to understand the Soviet Union without understanding that it was engulfed in its formative years by a cataclysm not of its making. This, alongside the country’s underdevelopment and isolation, created the authoritarian and bureaucratic tendencies, personified in Stalin, which would later seize power. So if people want to know where the Soviet Union’s siege mentality came from, they should probably read up on the siege.

We can’t hope to understand how the Soviet Union survived this cataclysm without appreciating that the October Revolution was genuinely popular.

It might be objected that if the Red soldiers could have seen the future, the cynicism and brutality of Stalinism, they would have lost the will to fight.

Maybe, maybe not. People at the time did consider the possibility of something like Stalinism; they had historical precedents in Cromwell and Bonaparte. In Victor Serge’s novel Conquered City, written in the 1930s but set during the Russian Civil War, two characters discuss the possibility that the Revolution might one day be hijacked by a dictator.

‘It wouldn’t be worth it, no…’ says Kirk. ‘It would be better, for the Revolution, to perish and leave a clear memory.’

Osipov responds: ‘No, no no, no! Get rid of those ideas, comrade. They’ve been beaten into us with billy clubs, I mean with defeats. No beautiful suicides, above all!’ [9]

I reckon western opinion of the Russian Revolution would be kinder if the revolutionaries had had the decency and good sense to be defeated and to die horrible deaths. The memory of the Soviet regime would be ‘clear.’ What’s not clear is what great service would be rendered to humanity by another epic of popular revolt and cruel defeat – another Paris Commune, Finnish Soviet, Spanish Republic, Indonesia 1965-66, or Chile 1973.

Osipov’s phrase ‘No beautiful suicides!’ brings to my mind the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – ‘to be or not to be…’ In Malcolm X’s reading, the Danish prince was deciding, in that speech, whether to suffer in silence or to risk death and damnation by resistance. [10] The Russian Revolution was a moment of liberation and creativity when humble working people exercised real power. They were brave to take arms against a sea of troubles, to defend their new socialist republic by every means consistent with that end.

The Revolution lit a beacon of liberation and creativity. Revolution Under Siege set out to trace what happened to this flame. It is not surprising that the Revolution fell short of its promise. What is surprising is that even after the years of hunger, typhus, shellfire and blood, there survived still a spark emitting the light of social justice and the warmth of human solidarity.

Osipov, in the trenches before Petrograd in 1919, continues his debate with Kirk:

‘We’re here to stay, by God! to hold on, to work, to organise […] To live, that’s what the flesh-and-blood working class wants, that great collection of hungry people behind us whom we seem to be leading but who in reality are pushing us forward. Whenever there is a choice – give up or continue – they continue. Let’s continue, let’s get into the habit of living.’

References

[1] Fitzpatrick, 77-78

[2] Deutscher, Stalin, 192

[3] Smith, 383

[4] Solomon, Peter H. ‘Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation.’ Slavic Review, Vol 39, No 2. Jul 1980. P 199, 202, 210.

On the Cheka being cut down, see Smith, Russia in Revolution, p 296: ‘At the end of 1921 there were 90,000 employees on the official payroll of the Cheka, but by end of 1923 only 32,152 worked in OGPU. In the same period the number of those working clandestinely for the political police fell from 60,000 to 12,900, and by late 1923 the total number in the internal troops, border guards, and escort troops had fallen from 117,000 to 78,400.’A

A note on the structure of the post-war Red Army:

In 1921 Trotsky argued for the replacement of the standing army by a territorial militia – a more traditional socialist position which had been favoured until the military emergencies of 1918. What emerged was a compromise: a small Red Army backed up by a large territorial militia. In 1934, at the height of this hybrid system, 74% of personnel were in the territorial militia. Men were drafted to serve for five years, during which time they would be soldiers for a few days a month, or a month or two in the summer. After their five years, they would be subject to recall in wartime.

[5] Reese, 40, 53-55

[6] Dune, 86-87

[7] Fitzpatrick p 80

[8] Faulkner, p 236

[9] Serge, Conquered City, p 141

[10] Malcolm X on Hamlet: https://www.openculture.com/2009/08/malcolm_x_at_oxford_1964.html

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

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Appendix: When did the Civil War end?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North Russia

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

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

Siberia & the Far East

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

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

Territory of the Far Eastern Republic at its height

Mongolia

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

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

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

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

The Caucasus and Persia

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

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

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

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

Makhno

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

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

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

Internal Revolts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I’m going to say November 1920.

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

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

29: The Storming of Fortress Crimea (Premium)

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28: The Black Baron

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

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

White Crimea

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circumstances dictate an offensive

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

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

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

It was necessary to make a move.

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

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

The Allies draw back

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

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

But…

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

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

The Cossacks draw back

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

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

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

The peasants draw back

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

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

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

Reds on the back foot

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

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

Bridgehead

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Worker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakthrough

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

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

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

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

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References

[1] Beevor, 479

[2] Beevor,444

[3] Smith, Russia in Revolution, 177

[4] Jackson, 188-9

[5] Mawdsley, 367

[6] Mawdsley, 363; Beevor,444

[7] Smith, 200; Mawdsley, 371

[8] Smele, 169

[9] Beevor, 480

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

[11] Dune, 207-208

[12] Smele, 169

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

[14] Belash

[15] Mawdsley, 377

27: The Devil’s Wake (Premium)

This is Episode 27 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War, and the third and final episode dealing with the Polish-Soviet War. Here are the first and second parts.

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26: Pursuit into Poland

The Red Army drives back the Polish invasion. The Soviet leadership faces a choice: whether to make peace or to carry the war into Poland. This is part 26 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War.

‘We are a force in the world, and you are destined for the mortuary. I despise you and hold you in contempt.’ Piłsudski, in a fit of anger, was fantasising out loud about what he would like to say to the Soviets. This was during the months before the Polish invasion of Ukraine. ‘No, no, I have not been negotiating. I have just been telling them unpleasant facts… I have ordered them to understand that with us they ought to be humble beggars.’ [1]

It was indeed in a beggarly and humbled condition that the Soviet Union found itself in a full-scale war with Poland a short while after this outburst. Still, somehow, the Soviets found ways to dig deeper. 280,000 communists joined the Red Army – that was 65% of the party’s membership. A measure of the chaos of the times, of the threadbare state of the new institutions, is the fact that 2.5 million people had deserted from the Red Army over the winter of 1919-1920 – to put that into perspective, the Soviets had over three times more deserters than the Poles had soldiers. But an indication that perhaps the Soviets were not bound for the mortuary after all is found in another statistic: 1 million – the number of deserters who returned voluntarily to the Red Army after the Poles invaded. [2] The war commissar Trotsky toured Ukraine speaking to crowds of deserters, urging them to re-enlist.

As you are probably re-enlisting as a reader of this blog after a gap of a week or two, here is a reminder that the Polish-Soviet front was divided by the Pripet Marshes into a Northern and a Southern Sector. In the Southern Sector, Budennyi and First Cavalry broke through enemy lines and the Red Army’s South-West Front forced the Polish forces to withdraw across western Ukraine.

Red Cavalry. A stunning work by Kazimir Malevich, dated to some time betwen 1928 and 1932

Kaleidoscope of Chaos

In the Northern Sector, the Red Army’s Western Front went on the offensive – with disappointing initial results in late May, followed by stunning successes in June and July. Here Third Cavalry Corps, known as Kavkor, played a key role. Kavkor was commanded by a Persian-Armenian socialist named Hayk Bzhishkian.

(This name entered the mangling process of Slavicisation then Latinisation and came out the other end, somehow, as ‘Gay,’ ‘Gaia Gai’, or worst of all ‘Guy D. Guy.’ I will call him Bzhishkian. And if I alienate any readers, I hope it’s because of my long-windedness, my blatant partisanship or my preoccupation with violence, and not because I made you pronounce an Armenian name in your head.)

Kavkor and Bzhishkian advanced on the right flank of the Western Front, where they found weak spots in the overstretched trench lines of the Poles, and broke through before reinforcements could arrive.

Barysaw, where the Polish side had insisted talks must take place, was soon in Soviet hands – what was left of it. The Polish army reduced it to ruins with chemical and incendiary shell-fire. [3]

Bzhishkian’s cavalry seized Vilnius. A 14-year-old scout went ahead and reported back key information. Then Kavkor attacked, aided by local communists, and the city soon fell. The Soviets handed Vilnius over to the Lithuanian government, a magnanimous gesture that ensured the Baltic States didn’t join in on Poland’s side. And at Brest-Litovsk, local Polish communists played a key role in aiding the Red Army.

Piłsudski called the Polish retreat ‘a kaleidoscope of chaos.’ If you look at the Battle of Grodno, you can see what he meant. Here 500 Polish uhlans, an entire regiment, were swept away and drowned while trying to cross the Niemen River.

As at Petrograd and in the South, the Red Army at the Battle of Grodno had to face tanks kindly supplied by the Allies: some were mobile, some were able to fire but were stuck on their transport train.

A frightened soldier shouted to Bzhishkian: ‘Tanks, comrade corps commander! How can one sabre them when they’re made of steel?’

Another cavalryman added: ‘Bayonets are no use; in any case you can never get near them.’

But the cavalry surrounded the French Renault tanks and forced them to retreat, playing for time as the steel monsters were disabled one by one: by artillery, by collisions, by breakdowns and by lack of fuel. Only two escaped across the burning bridge over the Niemen.

‘An armoured tank is nothing to frighten a skilled cavalryman,’ wrote Bzhishkian of the experience in his 1930 memoirs. [4] He would not live to see World War Two and history’s final judgement on that question.

The Polish retreat was chaotic but, Davies points out, tenacious. The most spectacular battles were on horseback; Russian sabres were sometimes defeated by Polish lances. On one occasion a Polish cavalry division commander personally defeated and killed his Soviet counterpart during a battle which delayed the Red advance by two or three days.

Nonetheless the movement was all in one direction, and to the Polish soldier, in Piłsudski’s words, the Soviet advance was ‘like a heavy, monstrous, uncontainable cloud.’ [5]

Today’s cover image. A Red Cavalry fighter, photographed in 1922

The Curzon Line

On July 11^th the Allies tried to step in with a peace proposal. [6] Imagine a posh English politician gesturing at a map and saying, ‘Pans, comrades, why not draw the Soviet-Polish boundary just here.’ This here was known as the Curzon Line. It gave the Soviets a lot more territory than they had when the Poles first attacked, and also gave the Poles a lot more than what they stood to lose if Bzhishkian and Tukhachevskii kept advancing.

The Allies proposed this border because they still believed the Soviet Union would collapse and be replaced by a conservative Russian Empire, and they were keen to establish relatively generous borders for their hypothetical future ally.

The Curzon Line, with information allowing you to compare its borders to modern-day Poland. In today’s terms, Wilno is Vilnius and Lwów is Lviv.

Whatever the motivations of the Allies, it suited the Polish government to quit before they got any further behind, and they agreed. [7]The offer was Moscow’s to take or leave – not humble beggars anymore.

The Soviet leaders entered into a debate, dynamic as was the Bolshevik tradition but short and to the point. The question at issue was whether to launch a counter-invasion of Poland or, having repulsed the Polish invasion, to make peace. Unhelpfully, the British tacked on a provision that the Soviet Union should recognise Baron Wrangel and let him hold onto Crimea, which Moscow would never do.

On either July 16^th or 17^th, Trotsky on behalf of the Red Army command made the case for accepting the peace proposal – though he never accepted the point about Wrangel. Rykov, Radek, Stalin and others also opposed crossing the Curzon Line. Of Radek, Lenin later said, ‘I was very angry with him, and accused him of “defeatism”.’ [8] Lenin was in favour of advancing on Warsaw, and so were most of the Polish communists resident in Russia.

The Debate

The broad arguments of the two sides – let’s call them the peace party and the war party – are laid out below in the form of a dialogue, in my words. Where I am directly quoting, I have indicated it using inverted commas.

War:

We have been subjected to a full-scale invasion. We have driven back our enemy, but if we do not pursue him to his lair and finish him off, he will strike again. Just look at what happened in South Russia – how many times did we have to fight our way across the Don and the Kuban? And now Wrangel is trying to raise the Kuban in revolt yet again. Woe to he who does not carry matters to a finish! We have every right to invade and to destroy this regime of criminal military adventurers, who have brought so much suffering and destruction on the working people of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus.

The Russian peasant uses his scythe to behead, Itchy-and-Scratchy-style, the Polish Pan (landlord) and Wrangel.

Peace:

From a military perspective, to invade Poland is insane. It is not like Denikin or Kolchak; it is not a question of fighting officers, undisciplined Cossacks and raw conscripts. We face 750,000 Polish troops. It is ‘a regular army, led by good technicians.’ Even if the Red Army takes Warsaw, its supply lines would be stretched too thin to occupy Poland for long. [9] The Soviet Union is crying out for peace. We won’t survive another winter of war. Hunger and disease will be rampant. The regime may even fall apart.

War:

We do not assess these problems purely from a military perspective. It is not a question of conventional war or occupation. The mass of the Polish people, the working class and poor peasantry, will join us in our war against the Polish landlords and bourgeoisie.

And we must also consider the perspective of world revolution. In Britain the ‘Hands off Russia!’ campaign is making headway; on 9^th and 10^th May, British dockers refused to load munitions onto a ship bound for White Poland. There is a developing revolutionary situation in Italy, with soviets in Turin and factory occupations; and in Germany we’ve seen the defeat of the Kapp Putsh by a workers’ general strike and even the organisation of a workers’ Red Army in the Ruhr. If we defeat Poland, we open the way to Germany, and may trigger revolutionary events there and elsewhere. Imagine if Budennyi or Bzhishkian arrived in Berlin just on time to prevent another massacre of communists like that of January 1919.

We also want peace. But this latest onslaught by the Allies shows that they are hell-bent on our destruction. We cannot hope for peace except by breaking out of our isolation.

Peace:

The Polish workers and poor peasants are unlikely to join us. By pursuing the Polish army into Poland, we will drive them into the arms of Piłsudski and his military-Bonapartist clique. It is still the honeymoon period of Polish independence. Resentment of all things Russian is still understandably strong. ‘This is the historical capital from which ‘Chief of State’ Piłsudski hopes to draw interest.’ [10]

We too see the perspective of world revolution. But if we are defeated, it will be a setback for the revolution everywhere.

War:

The key question, then, is the attitude of the Polish masses. The Polish revolution has always marched in step with the Russian; our anthem ‘Varshavianka’ refers to the Polish revolutionary tradition. In 1905 the Poles held out for longer against the Tsar than the workers of Moscow. In 1919 there were reports of Soviets in Cracow. [11] There were ‘village republics’ where the farmers took collective control of the land. On May Day this year, the demonstrations in Warsaw, Łódź and Czechostochowa were anti-war and anti-government – remarkably, a mere week after the beginning of the Polish invasion. A railway strike in Poznań, beginning the day after the invasion, turned into a week-long pitched battle between strikers and the authorities. [12]

The reports from the Belarussian Front have been most encouraging. Arrogant Polish landlords return on the coat-tails of their army and try to grab the land, and this angers the people and the rank-and-file soldiers. The Poles barely hold the frontline zone, which is traversed freely by refugees, deserters, bandits, petty traders, cocaine dealers and Polish Communist partisans. We have reports of mutinies and of harsh reprisals by Polish officers against the men – including executions. More recently, Polish soldiers returning from leave are condemning Piłsudski as the puppet of the landlords and questioning the aimlessness of the war. On July 26^th an infantry unit rose from their trenches singing The Internationale and preparing to cross over to us; they were only prevented by their own side opening fire on them from behind. [13]

And we have many talented Polish communists here in Russia, who are enthusiastic to carry the revolution to their homeland; on May 3^rd 90 Polish delegates met in Moscow. In Kharkov and Smolensk we have printed masses of material in the Polish language – 280,000 copies in Smolensk alone. We will guarantee the Polish worker, soldier and farmer an independent Soviet Poland. We even have a Polish brigade, 8,000-strong, on our Western Front, to form the nucleus of a Polish Red Army.

A Polish poster from the 1920 war. The struggle for national independence – ‘the historical capital from which […] Piłsudski hopes to draw interest.’

Peace:

Taken as a whole, the indications are not nearly so favourable. The Polish Socialist Party received only 9% of the vote in January 1919. The Polish Communist Workers’ Party is illegal and has very little support in Poland.The Cracow Soviet was put down. The ‘village republics’ were suppressed with draconian severity. The Piłsudski government is Bonapartist in character; it does not simply represent the landlords or the bourgeoisie, but tries to play a balancing act. It has embarked on land reform of its own accord, which saps the agitational strength of our land programme. The Polish landlords who are trying to claw back parts of Belarus and Ukraine are supported by the Polish officers, but opposed by government agencies [14].

The Polish soldier on the Belarussian Front is demoralised, it is true. But the Polish soldier defending the approaches to Warsaw may prove to be a more formidable opponent.

To invade would not hasten revolution – it would delay it. We cannot tolerate Wrangel in Crimea for a moment longer than is necessary – on that we agree. Let us then focus as much of our strength as possible on Wrangel. But let’s talk to the Allies, and agree on the Curzon Line as our border with Poland.

The Advance to Warsaw

Intra-Bolshevik debates were often conflicts between audacity and caution. Today audacity won out. All agreed that the Soviet Union could not build socialism in isolation from the rest of the world. The key strategic imperative was to break out. Up to this point it was assumed this would happen through an indigenous revolution in another country, but this war represented another kind of opportunity. The war party won the vote, and the Red Army was ordered to sweep on into Poland.

Kalinin and Trotsky review the troops. Trotsky argued against carrying the war into Poland, but according to Davies, once the vote had been taken, few took the war more seriously than Trotsky.

From July 19^th to August 7^th the Communist International held its Second Congress, a bigger and more impressive affair than the First Congress back in March 1919. Among the 220 delegates was Alfred Rosmer who has given us an often-quoted description of a large map of Eastern Europe that was on display outside Lenin’s office. Visitors watched as little flags were moved across it to mark the positions of the armies; in July, all the red flags were moving west. ‘The advance of the Red Army was stunning; it was developing at a pace which nonplussed professional soldiers ,as only anarmy born of revolutionary enthusiasm is able to do.’ Tukhachevksii’s Western Front took Minsk on July 11^th, Vilnius on July 14^th, Grodno on July 19^th, crossed the Bug River on August 1^st and by August 10^th was closing in on Warsaw. [15] Some of Hyak Bzhishkian’s Kavkor had in fact run on ahead, west of Warsaw.

Semyon Budennyi, undated. While Tukhachevksii advanced on Warsaw, Budennyi spearheaded the advance on Lviv in the southern sector.

In the Southern Sector, the Red Army captured Rivne and Kamianets-Podilsky on July 4th. Budonnyi is reported to have said that if he had as many riders as the old Tsarist army – that is, 300,000 – ‘I would plough up the whole of Poland, and we would be clattering through the squares of Paris before the summer is out.’ For better or for worse, he had only 16,000, which along with the Red Army’s South-Western Front, aimed to capture the city of Lviv.

What struck Rosmer in a conversation with Lenin, however, was how the Soviet leader was just as interested in what he had to say about developments in the French Socialist Party as he was in Poland. For Lenin, then and always, it was all one struggle. [16]

In August 1920, the crux of that struggle lay not in the Ruhr Valley or the factories of Turin but on the Vistula River. The humble beggars had come to Piłsudski’s doorstep.

References

[1]Davies, p 74
[2] Davies, 142
[3] Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3,‘Postal Telegram No 1886-B’
[4] Davies, p 148
[5] Davies, p 148
[6] Smele, 156
[7] Mawdsley, 349
[8] Zetkin, Clara. Reminiscences of Lenin, January 1924. International Publishers, 1934. ‘The Polish War.’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1924/reminiscences-of-lenin.htm#h04
[9] Numbers from Smele, 165; ‘good technicians,’ Mawdsley, 255
[10] Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3,‘The war with Poland – reportMay 5^th’
[11] Read, 111
[12] Davies, 113
[13] Davies, 78-91, 151
[14] Davies, 82-3
[15] Smele, p 156
[16] Rosmer, Alfred. Lenin’s Moscow, 1953, Bookmarks, 1971. P 52-53. Budennyi quote from Davies, 120

25: Polish Invasion

Full-scale war breaks out between the young Polish Republic and the young Soviet Union. This is Episode 25 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War. We are approaching the half-way point in the fourth and final series.

The Bloodless Front

Readers will remember the young Red Cossack Vasily Timofeich Kurdyukov, whose father was a White Guard but who himself joined the Reds along with his brothers. Vasily – I hope Isaac Babel, who recorded this story, changed the names, but let’s call him Vasily – was a witness to the murder of one brother by the father. Is this ringing a bell yet? He was there too when, after the defeat of Denikin, he and his brothers tracked down their father in Maikop and killed him in retaliation despite the protests of the ‘Yids’, by which Kurdyukov meant the Soviet officials.[1]

April 1920 found VasilyKurdyukov on the move. Denikin was, along with Timofei Kurdyukov, vanquished. So Vasily, his older brother Semyon, and 16,000 other members of Budennyi’s First Red Cavalry Army had left South Russia, going from Maikop through Hulyaipole. They were making their way across Ukraine to take part in another campaign, covering 1200 kilometres in 30 days. Compared to the epic struggle against counter-revolution that was behind them, nothing too serious or historic appeared to lie ahead. The war was over, bar the fighting in parts of Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The political regime seemed to be opening up, loosening up. The Allies lifted the blockade in January. The death penalty had been abolished. The leaders in the Kremlin were discussing post-war reconstruction, not the starting of new wars. Back east in the Urals, Third Army had laid down their rifles and turned to chopping down wood as the first Labour Army. 7^th Army, after routing Iudenich near Petrograd, began digging peat. ‘Communiques from the bloodless front’ announced the rebuilding of this bridge or that railway line, the numbers of locomotives repaired, etc. And throughout the Red Army, literacy classes were a day-to-day reality, with thousands of mobile libraries in operation. As Kurdyukov rode, he would have been able to read educational letter-boards on the backs of the riders in front of him. [2]

For most Red Cossacks and for the large minority of worker-volunteers in the Red Cavalry, we can assume that peace couldn’t come soon enough. The fields of the Don and Kuban had been tended largely by the women and the old men since 1914. But we can easily imagine that for some Cossacks who had been at war for six years, life in the saddle with a sabre was the only life they had known as adults.

The First Red Cavalry Army was going west to join up with the Red South-Western Front under Egorov. They would then grab a few Ukrainian towns from the Polish Army, so that when the Soviets and Poland finally got around to signing their peace treaty, the line on the map would be a little further west and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that bit bigger.

So far, the Poles had been having their own way – defeating the Ukrainian Nationalists in Galicia and seizing from them the city of L’viv (which they called Lwów and the Russians called L’vov, and which is today part of Ukraine); and to the north, beyond the Pripet marshes, the Polish forces had been chipping away at the Soviet border for a year, seizing one Belarussian town after another. But now that Denikin and Kolchak were finished, it was time to hit back. In a few weeks or a month – if peace with Poland hadn’t been signed by then – the Red Army would be ready to launch an offensive, to hammer that border into a more agreeable shape.

But on April 24^th 75,000 Polish soldiers invaded Soviet Ukraine. 11,000 fighters lately incorporated into the Red Army mutinied, led by their commanders, and went over to the Poles. The Polish government had signed a treaty with Petliura, the leader of the late Rada, and he and two divisions of Ukrainian soldiers were aiding the invasion. To make matters worse, Makhno chose this moment to strike the Reds: on 25 April his guerrillas massacred a regiment of the Ukrainian Labour Army at Marinka on the Donets. They also blew up bridges around the Kyiv area, crippling transport.

The Polish invasion made swift progress. This was no border skirmish. They were well-armed. Motor trucks infiltrated Red lines on small country roads. 150 planes supported them from the air with devastating attacks on armoured trains and on flotillas on the Dnipro river. There were 82,847 Red Army personnel on the whole South-West Front – but only 28,568 of them had weapons, and they were in disarray. Egorov pulled back his troops rapidly. The Poles gained 240 kilometres in two weeks. On May 7^th they took Kyiv, and soon they had bridgeheads east of the Dnipro River. Since April 24th they had suffered only 150 fatalities.

Less than one month later, the White Guards who had found refuge in Crimea began an assault on Ukraine’s mainland. Wrangel’s 35,000-strong ‘Russian Army,’ which contained many of the same officers and Cossacks who had been fighting Soviet power since 1917, had rejoined the fray. Two new fronts had opened up, and the prospect of peace had receded to the very distant horizon.

Petliura (left) and Pilsudski on April 9th, not long before the invasion

At War Again

We can imagine the dismay and fear now felt by people in the Soviet Union, from the Kurdyukov brothers in Budennyi’s ranks to their mother back in South Russia. Just when the country was escaping, at long last, from the realm of war, here was another massive foreign intervention. It would set off the dreadfully familiar cycles of confusion, fear, revolt, hunger, disease, red and white terror. The death penalty was soon restored. The railways were militarised.

In the words of John Reed:

The cities would have been provisioned and provided with wood for the winter, the transport situation would have been better than ever before, the harvest would have filled the granaries of Russia to bursting – if only the Poles and Wrangel, backed by the Allies, had not suddenly hurled their armies once more against Russia, necessitating the cessation of all rebuilding of economic life – […] the concentration once again of all the forces of the exhausted country upon the front.

In the words of Trotsky: ‘Ahead of us lie months of hard struggle… before we can cease to weigh the bread-ration on a pharmacist’s scales.'[3]

This time there was also a strong element of patriotic indignation. A repeat of the Polish invasion of 1612 was widely feared. The famous tsarist General Brusilov came out of hiding and volunteered his services as an advisor to the Red Army.

Communists, from the Politburo in the Kremlin down to the volunteer in the trenches, found themselves trying to rein in patriotism whenever it threatened to spill over into the familiar Tsarist channels of imperialistic contempt for the Polish people. Trotsky and Lenin were scrupulous about never speaking of ‘The Poles’ or ‘Poland’ but only ‘The White Poles’ or the ‘Polish landlords.’ ‘Do not fall into chauvinism,’ urged Lenin. One Red Army paper, Voyennoye Dyelo, got into big trouble. Officers were sacked from the editorial board and the paper was suspended over the use of the phrase ‘the innate jesuitry of the Polacks.’

Trotsky affirmed that ‘defeat of the Polish White Guards, who have attacked us will not change in the slightest our attitude concerning the independence of Poland.’

Ukrainian communists, too, made appeals for the defense of Ukraine as a nation. A common charge was that Petliura was the chosen caretaker of the Polish landlords, to mind the Ukrainian estate which they had their eyes on. [4]

The rest of this post will explore the background to the invasion from the perspective of the Polish Republic, then describe the initial Soviet response.

A Soviet poster from this time. The caption says, ‘This is how the Polish lords’ invasion will end up.’

Intermarium

With the defeat of Germany in November 1918, a strong Polish military force emerged. Four of the combatant empires had large Polish units in their armies – not least a 35,000-strong Polish unit that had been raised in France and was now sent back into Poland. Also important was the Polish unit in the Austrian military, which was led by a man named Józef Piłsudski. The strength of the Polish military is probably what led to the emergence of a bourgeois capitalist Poland instead of a proletarian socialist Poland (though we will look next week at how close Poland came to a socialist revolution).

Let’s dwell for a minute on Józef Piłsudski. A Pole from Eastern Lithuania, he grew up under the heavy hand of Tsarist oppression, became a socialist but in his own words he dismounted from ‘the socialist tramcar at the stop called independence.’ He was not a leader of masses but a back-room conspirator and bank robber. [5] Service as an officer in the Polish unit in the Austrian military during World War One promoted him to the front rank of national leaders. In 1920 he was head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. His huge moustache belonged to the flamboyant 19th Century, but his glowering eyebrows and cropped hair gave an impression of urgency and severity.

Piłsudski had a vision of what he called Międzymorze, ‘Between the Seas,’ also known as the Intermarium. Without understanding Międzymorze we can’t understand the Polish-Soviet War. The idea was that Poland should lead a federation of countries stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic – which meant taking over, or at least installing pliable governments in, Ukraine and Lithuania. This idea harked back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of centuries past.

But in Poland as in Russia and Ukraine, grand plans had to be put on hold, as famine gripped the countryside and there were years of misery and want. Poland was not torn apart by war as Russia and Ukraine were, but the new Polish state battled with Germans, Czechs and, as we have seen, Ukrainians. Unlike in the Soviet Union, vast amounts of American aid alleviated the situation – in 1919-1920 the American Relief Administration fed and cared for 4 million Poles. By the end of 1919 a strong Polish state was in existence with a population of around 20 million and armed forces numbering 750,000. [6]

The time was ripe for Międzymorze. And the territories of the new Polish empire would be wrestled from the small Lithuanian republic and from the war-weary and ragged Soviet regime.

The communists, as imagined in a Polish wartime poster

Toward War

The revolutionary tradition, and most especially those trends around Lenin, had long supported Polish independence, and the Soviet government never made any territorial claim over Poland. An independent capitalist Poland, like Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would be accepted by Moscow.

Of course, the Soviet Union was in favour of world revolution. But this amounted to supporting communist revolutions and parties in other countries. Military intervention, even in the form of support for indigenous movements, was controversial. As the Brest-Litovsk episode showed, the Bolsheviks’ confidence in world revolution could in the right circumstances make them more amenable to signing a peace treaty, not less, because future revolutionary events would render an unfavourable treaty void.

The issue was where to draw the Soviet-Polish border – where, in the ‘300-mile band of polyglot territory between indisputably ethnic Poland and indisputably ethnic Russia,’ [7] would one state end and the other begin? This question had not been on the agenda since the 18^th Century, and there was no recognised border. While Soviet Russia was busy fighting against the White Armies in 1919, Poland was settling this question at the point of a bayonet, making steady gains in a small-scale but one-sided war. Galicia was theirs by July 1919.

So the Polish and Soviet armies had been skirmishing for a year before the Polish invasion in 1920. Since the first clashes between Polish and Red troops took place as early as February 1919, the historian Norman Davies accuses other historians of ‘ignoring’ the ‘first year’ of the Polish-Soviet War. [8] It is Davies who here ignores the qualitative difference between the low-level conflict of that ‘first year,’ and the all-out war which began in April 1920 (This is a flaw in his generally great book).

The borderlands between Poland and the Soviet Union can be divided roughly into a northern area around Belarus and Lithuania, and a southern area, Galicia and Ukraine. The Pripet marshes lay in between the northern and southern areas. Polish, Russian and Jewish people lived in both, Belarussian and Lithuanian farmers in the north, Ukrainian farmers in the south.

The possibility of a peace settlement was there. The Soviets had no shortage of competent Polish supporters, some of whom they sent to Poland to try to negotiate peace from late 1918 right up to the eve of the invasion. One typical offer was of territory and plebiscites in exchange for peace. These got off to a bad start when a joint delegation of Soviet diplomats and Red Cross officials visited the Polish Republic soon after its foundation. They were immediately arrested and deported. During their deportation, Polish police dragged them out into the woods and shot them, killing three and leaving one who survived by playing dead. Nonetheless the Soviets kept up their peace efforts through 1919 and into 1920.

Frustration and alarm gripped Soviet diplomats and politicians in early 1920. They were still at the ‘talks about talks’ stage, and the Polish negotiators were stubborn and demanding. They would only agree to meet for peace talks in Barysaw (Borisov), a town recently captured by the Poles. It was not acceptable to the Reds as it was in a zone of active military operations. The Soviets proposed Warsaw, Estonia, Moscow, or Petrograd, all of which the Polish side rejected. Meanwhile Soviet leaders had accepted six out of seven conditions presented by the Poles as a basis for talks, but balked at the seventh – it demanded that they never attack the Ukrainian Nationalist leader Petliura. [9] When Moscow pushed back, Piłsudski broke off talks.

Beevor characterises all this as Piłsudski ‘playing for time.’ The time, from the first Soviet peace mission, was nearly 18 months. Piłsudski ‘s stubbornness is explained by the fact that he did not seek to make peace, but sought a pretext to invade.

‘When diplomatic moves failed,’ writes Robert Jackson, ‘the Reds launched a series of small attacks along their western front; the Poles beat them off and held their positions.’ [10]

The Soviet leaders were not naive, so they understood that a Polish attack was likely. They developed their own plans for a strategic offensive as far as Brest – hence Kurdyukov and 16,000 other riders hurrying over from South Russia. The limit of the Red Army’s ambition was to seize a few more towns before the signing of a peace treaty, and to foil any plans the Poles might have of doing the same.

Unfortunately, some writers highlight a few facts out of context – a troop build-up here, a local offensive there – and paint a picture of a savage communist horde massing to trample and enslave Poland. Piłsudski’s grandiose imperial ambitions, his deliberate wrecking of peace talks, and his very ambitious and large-scale invasion of Ukraine feature only as minor details, if at all. [11]

The Allies

The Soviet leaders were convinced that the Polish invasion was the work of the Allies. It was characterised as ‘The Third Campaign of the Entente’ in an article written by Stalin in Pravda on May 25, 1920. We can say with hindsight that this impression was wrong.

The Allies did not egg on the Poles to attack the Soviet Union. In fact they were shocked and dismayed by the attack. The Allied leaders had learned that the Soviets were not to be trifled with, and they were getting cold feet on the question of intervention. On the more liberal end, Lloyd George thought the Poles had ‘gone rather mad’ and were behaving as ‘a menace to the peace of Europe.’ [12]

The Allies had rejected schemes proposed by Polish leaders which involved the Allies bankrolling a Polish march on Moscow. In addition to their growing wariness toward the Red Army, the Allies still held out hope that the Soviet regime would collapse, and they didn’t want to big up the Poles too much in case it offended a future conservative regime in Russia. Ideally, they wanted Poland to act as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ protecting Germany from the influence of revolutionary Russia – much as Stalin would use it later as a defensive glacis against the west. To that end the Allies began arming Poland in earnest from January 1920: rifles captured from the Austrians, planes and pilots, 5,000 French officers to train them. It was not much compared to the total resources of the Allies. But for a Polish army severely overstretched by its recent conquests, it was a game-changer [13].

In that very important sense, the Soviets were right. The Allies had backed (and still backed) the Reds’ opponents up to this point, and although they did not push Poland into war, in the months and years leading up to the war they backed Poland, armed its soldiers, gave equipment, lent advisors – in short, made the war possible. People on the Soviet side could not have known the ins and outs of Allied policy, and would have been innocent to believe any verbal reassurances along the lines of, Yes, we are bankrolling the army that’s invading you, and we got some other people to invade you a few months ago, but we didn’t actually want this army to invade you right now.

So the Soviets treated it as a seamless continuation of the Civil War. But the fact remains that their strategic understanding of the situation was wrong on a fundamental point. The initiative had come from Piłsudski, not from the Allies.

Moscow: volunteers for the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War

The Soviets Rally

This was one of several mistaken ideas with which the Soviets were burdened as this war began. But it would take time for these mistakes to have their fatal effects.

The Poles had made their own strategic mistakes in counting on Petliura and the Rada. After a month in Kyiv, things were not going well. Their ally (or ‘caretaker’) Petliura could not rally the Ukrainian people to his cause. It did not help that the price of the alliance was for the Rada to sign away Lviv and West Ukraine to Poland, which demoralised many Ukrainian Nationalists. This was on top of the basic point that Petliura was acting as an ally to the Polish landlords and business owners who had oppressed and exploited Ukrainians.

On May 25th the Reds began their general counter-offensive. At first, the Red Cavalry tried advancing directly on Polish trenches. They rapidly discovered that wild Cossack charges would not work as well as they had against Denikin, and the first few days of the offensive saw little progress. The Poles were experienced at trench warfare, and it was futile to attack them head-on. The Red Cavalry commanders refined their tactics. They would dismount close to the enemy, use artillery, use small striking forces to take strong points; or find gaps in the enemy line, turn enemy flanks, wreak havoc in the rear.

This Budennyi did personally on June 5th. He spent a sleepless night worrying about the following day’s attack, and rose to bad news about one of his divisions being forced to retreat during the night. He personally joined 1st Brigade of 14th Division and led the unit into marshy ground shrouded in early morning mist. They ran into some Polish cavalry, known as uhlans, and gave chase. One uhlan fired at Budennyi and missed. Budennyi caught up to him, knocked him from his horse. The dismounted uhlan fired again, and the bullet whined past Budennyi. The Red Cavalry commander used the flat of his sabre to disarm the uhlan, and brought him in for questioning. This encounter bore fruit: Budennyi learned of an ideal place to cross the Polish trench lines, and even found good places to fire directly down the trenches. The brigade passed through into the Polish rear.

This cavalry infiltration tactic saw widespread success. The area was too large for Great War-style trenches to cover it fully. Zhitomir, far behind Polish lines, was recaptured by the Reds on June 8th. On June 10th the Poles, threatened with being surrounded, evacuated Kyiv. Two or three days later the Reds marched in – this was, Mawdsley points out (p 348) the sixteenth time that the city had changed hands during the Civil War. Fortunately for the residents of the city it was also the last time.

Egorov’s South-West Front had been evacuated quickly enough that they did not suffer major losses during the Polish advance. It showed lessons learned from 1919: let the enemy advance run out of steam, then hit back hard. A Polish veteran summed it up bluntly: ‘We ran all the way to Kiev, and we ran all the way back.’ [14]

As the South-West Front covered the distance between Kyiv and Lviv, the Reds felt the wind at their backs. The insolent invaders were on the run. They might run all the way back to Warsaw. The Polish army appeared to be weak.

Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Soviets, predicted that the defeat of the Polish Army by the Red would deal the first blow to the Polish bourgeoisie, but that the Polish people themselves would deal the second and fatal blow. Likewise Trotsky ‘assumed that Poland would be liberated by her own people… His only recognisable war aim was to survive.'[15]

The Polish defeat, like the Tsar’s, might lead to revolution at home. A fraternal Soviet Poland might help alleviate the horrible suffering in the Soviet Union, might push Germany into revolution, might ignite Europe. The Reds had entered into the conflict with a notion of a struggle over the borderlands. Now they were being tempted by the idea, to use a modern phrase, of regime change.

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References

[1] Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Pushkin Press 1926, trans Boris Dralyuk (2014), p 25-26
[2] Davies,p 118. John Reed, ‘Soviet Russia Now,’ published January 1921 in The Liberator, accessed at Marxists Internet Archive on 10 Jan 2024 at 21:49. https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1921/01/russianow.htm
[3] On the numbers on South-West Front, Makhno, and mutiny of East Galicians, see Davies, p 108. Quote from Reed, ‘Soviet Russia Now.’ Quote from Trotsky, ‘Speech at a meeting in the Murom railway workshops,’ June 21^st 1920. In How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
[4] Davies, p 115, Smele, p 357, Trotsky quote from ‘The Polish Front and Our Tasks’ in How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
[5] Davies, p 63
[6] Davies, p 93; Smele, p 153-154
[7] Smele, p 153
[8] Davies, p 22
[9] Davies, p 71-73
[10] Jackson, Robert. At War with the Bolsheviks, Tom Stacey, 1972, p 229.p 230
[11] See Beevor, The Russian Civil War, Chapter 36; and Read, The World on Fire, p 110-111. Trotsky in May 1920 said: ‘[T]the most double-dyed demagogues and charlatans of the international yellow press will be quite unable to present to the working masses the irruption of the Polish White Guards into the Ukraine as an attack by the Bolshevik ‘oppressors’ on peaceful Poland’ How wrong he turned out to be. ‘The Polish Front: Talk with a representative of the Soviet press.’ How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
[12] Davies, p 89; Smele, p 320 n46
[13] Jackson, p 229.
[14] Davies, p 105
[15] Davies, p 114

What if the 1930s USA had turned Nazi?

A review of Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (Crown, 2023)

You may have heard of Father Coughlin, the pro-Nazi Catholic priest whose radio broadcasts went out to tens of millions of Americans in the 1930s. You may have read in Jacobin that Philip Johnson, one of the most successful architects of the 20th Century United States, spent the pre-World War Two years promoting fascism in the USA and trying to keep the country out of the war. You may have heard of the Silver Shirts, the US equivalent of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. You may have known that the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was pro-Hitler and led an organisation called America First.

I’d heard of the above, but most of my understanding of fascism in the pre-war US came from alternative history fiction: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth and K is for Killing by Daniel Easterman.

But Rachel Maddow’s 2023 book Prequel opened my eyes to much crazier stuff. I remember that at one point in Easterman’s novel we encounter a federal employee whose job it is to figure out legal loopholes so that mass internment and concentration camps don’t break US laws. Well, it turns out the Nazis actually sent legal experts over to the US to study how the Jim Crow laws worked, so that they could bring in similar racist laws back in Germany. It’s a reminder that the USA was already a bizarre race-obsessed oppressive dystopia.

I didn’t know that at least 24 elected members of the US Congress abused their free mail privileges to send out millions of copies of pro-Nazi speeches bearing their own signatures but written by Nazi agents. I hadn’t heard of General George Van Horn Moseley. I didn’t know that in California a coalition of fascist and far-right groups planned a mass lynching of famous Jewish people from Hollywood, to be followed by a spree of random gun and gas attacks on Jewish homes. This Helter Skelter-like plan was supposed to trigger a race war. I didn’t know that Coughlin followers in New York organised militias, armed with weapons stolen from the National Guard by sympathetic military officers.

Maddow also tells the stories of various private citizens who campaigned to expose and thwart the Nazis: the LA private investigator Leon Lewis, the assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge (After the war, he tried to reveal to the public the extent of Nazi penetration into the US; he was fired and his report quashed) and a cast of other brave individuals.

But they are merely individuals. An important episode in the fight against fascism in the US in the 1930s was the counter-protest at the America First rally in Madison Square Garden. But Maddow dismisses this protest in one passing sentence. The only mentions of the labour movement, as far as I can recall, are negative. She correctly emphasises that the US Communist Party was by no means the seditious threat it was portrayed as. But the role of communists, socialists and trade unions in opposing fascism is skated over entirely. Pelley and the Silver Shirts were based in Minneapolis – but Maddow does not look at the labour movement and the socialist left in that city, which confronted and organised against the Silver Shirts.

The focus is instead on the judicial system journalists, Hollywood, etc. To be fair, Maddow does not neglect to show how the state, from beat cops to the Attorney General, enabled the fascist agitation.

Maddow’s style is very engaging. She brings a laugh-out-loud quality to some of the farcical scenes from the Dies Committee. She does not write coyly or piously or with any false neutrality. That gives the narrative plenty of energy but it has overheads. I’m not from the United States and I found the self-righteous nationalism a bit weird (And I’m sure there are plenty of people from the US who would find it equally weird). For example, on page 195 we are supposed to be shocked at a politician refusing to show sufficient uncritical jingoism in the context of the First World War. The First.

I know of Maddow only by reputation as a liberal national security hawk who was very into the Trump-Russia stuff. This story, as the title implies, is supposed to be taken as a parallel to more recent events. And the strange constellation of far right thugs we see here do offer many parallels to the MAGA right today.

In spite of my criticisms I read through this book quickly and with great interest. Many parts of it were truly fascinating and horrifying. Not only does it recover a hidden history, it invites us to ponder alternative – and far worse – ways things could have turned out.

It’s New Year’s Eve so I want to thank all my readers. It’s been a fantastic year for the blog and I have big plans for 2024.

24: Escape to Crimea

This post tells how the White Guards fled South Russia in a state of complete chaos, but survived and established a new base in Crimea. This is Series 4, part 3 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War.

A Red soldier named Eduard Dune was captured during Denikin’s advance on Moscow. Among other terrible ordeals in captivity, he succumbed to typhus. Thirst and headaches gave way to two long comas; the second time, he woke up in the war-scarred city of Tsaritsyn, far away from where he’d passed out, and was soon loaded on a train bound for Novorossiysk. There he slowly recovered in an infirmary near the Black Sea port city, and as his faculties returned, he got active in underground work.

There were partisans in the hills near town, and he stole medical supplies from the infirmary and passed them to these ‘Green’ guerrillas. This close to the port of Novorossiysk, the supplies sent by the British government were piled up.

There was so much in storage that food supplies were lying under the open sky, and still the English continued to send more in ship after ship. Now that the White Army had their backs to the sea, the English had begun to supply all that had been promised when the army had stood near Moscow. The prisoners’ infirmary now enjoyed bed linens and other English hospital linen. In our storeroom lay trunks packed with English food products, including cocoa and dried vegetables. There was more than our cook could cope with.

There was a sand spit within sight of the infirmary where the Whites regularly took people for executions. The patients kept watch on this spot, collected intel and helped escapees. Dune and his fellow captive invalids stole papers from comatose typhus-inflicted Whites and supplied them to Red and Green agents in the city. They had a workshop on hospital grounds where they turned out false documents.

Novorossisyk had already been the site of things so strange and terrible they are difficult to visualise; way back in the fourth episode of this series, we followed the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov on his mission to scuttle the Black Sea Fleet. Very soon after that, the port fell to the Whites. Now, less than two years later, it was to witness one of the most surreal and pitiful scenes of the war.

Russian Civil War pictorial map number 7, ‘Liquidation of Iudenich and Denikin.’ The White Guards (coloured green) are pursued southward. Trace the Red arrows across the Don River, over the Kuban steppe, and down the Black Sea coast. Note also in the map two things we’re not going to deal with in much detail here: the final victory in North Russia and the rise of Soviet power around Baku, Azerbaijan.

Rostov

Meanwhile the war was raging on, the Whites falling back, the Reds surging southward: in January Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) saw its last battle of the Civil War when it fell to the Reds. But when the Whites reached their old base area of the Don and Kuban Countries, they rallied. The river Don, as if it was in sympathy, froze to let the Whites retreat across it, then thawed before the Reds could. Alongside this military recovery, the White civilian government, such as it was, promised reforms and tried to juice up some popular support. The Red Army hit the moat of the Don in disarray from its long advance, overstretched and agitated with internal disputes.

The Whites recaptured Rostov-on-Don on February 20^th. But the Reds were by this time over the worst of their confusion, and it was the Whites’ turn to have some internal disputes. Denikin had made concessions to the Kuban Cossacks – not enough to stop them deserting, but enough to enrage the White officers. ‘What are we?’ they demanded. ‘Cannon fodder for the defence of the hated separatists?’

The First Red Cavalry Army (which by this time boasted 16,000 riders, 238 machine-guns, nineteen artillery pieces and eight armoured trains) crossed the Don and threatened the rear of Rostov; there was nothing for it but to abandon the town and fall back to Ekaterinodar (the city outside which a shell had killed the Whites’ chief inspirer Kornilov two years earlier) and then, after a short hopeless struggle, on to Novorossiysk.[1]

One of many grim chapters in Beevor’s recent book deals with the entry of the Reds into Ekaterinodar. He describes the summary murder of men falsely identified as officers, Kalmyks being massacred for no apparent reason, and dead White Guards being mounted on a locomotive as trophies. Beevor appears to be repeating contemporary rumours which his source’s author heard second-hand, which is consistent with some of my criticisms of the book. [2] But even allowing for exaggeration and rumour-mongering, such excesses probably did form a part of the picture of the Red Army’s advance in some areas.

The cover image is a detail from this 1921 Soviet poster. Of the text, all I can tell you is that the heading means a frontline soldier. Thankfully the images are self-explanatory.

Novorossisk

The resumption of Red advance translated into rumours heard by Dune in the Novorossiysk infirmary: ‘The Whites had won victories with the aid of their cavalry, but ever since Trotsky had said, “Proletarians, to horse!” we too fielded a cavalry, and ours beat the Cossacks all hollow. The Red cavalry had captured all the English tanks.’

This was confirmed by what Dune could see with his own eyes; White Guard Russia was visibly shrinking and contracting around him. First, discipline grew lax, and he could get out into the city on errands. Once there he saw the streets fill up with a strange juxtaposition of affluence and squalor: cartloads of expensive household goods, and huge numbers of typhus-stricken refugees. White officers began taking entire battalions to join the Greens. Back at the infirmary, White Army supplies were stolen wholesale now instead of retail.

Moving away and up the chain of command from the humble soldier Dune, the British General Bridges was disgusted: ‘the whole affair was a degrading spectacle of unnecessary panic and disorder, and I urged the government by cable to dissociate themselves from the White Russians who had no prospects and little fight left in them.’ But Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, overruled him. So the British remained and took responsibility for the evacuation of White officers and their wives and children. [3]

Suddenly the British project of pumping in great quantities of supplies and war materiel had to go into reverse: now the British were evacuating White officers and their families, and anyone else who could be crammed on board. At the quays, crowds pressed against the British Army cordon and the ships heaved with people. A tank drove slowly over a row of thirteen British aeroplanes, turning them to matchwood so that the Reds couldn’t use them. Then, of course, the tank itself was abandoned. Other engines of war littered the sea floor where they had been dumped. Tearful Cossacks shot their horses.

The other White naval evacuations were disasters, but Novorossiysk was the worst. [4] It was so bad, Denikin resolved to resign as soon as it was all over. The misery, destruction and desperation were extraordinary:

…the waterfront was black with people, begging to be allowed on board the ships… Conditions were appalling. The refugees were still starving and the sick and the dead lay where they had collapsed. Masses of them even tried to rush the evacuation office and British troops had to disperse them at bayonet point. Women were offering jewels, everything they possessed – even themselves – for the chance of a passage. But they hadn’t the ghost of a chance. The rule was only the White troops, their dependants and the families of men who had worked with the British were allowed on board. [5]

Above: the chaos at Novorossiysk.

The 2^nd Royal Scots Fusiliers acted as a rear guard, supported by a naval bombardment (one of the ships firing was the Waldeck-Rousseau, which had mutinied the year before). On March 27^th the Red Army arrived, lobbing shells after the fleeing ships. By then, 34,000 had been evacuated (A disproportionate number were Volunteers, which suggests the Don Cossacks got shafted).

The Reds found on the quays an indescribable landscape of dead horses and destroyed equipment – but also heaps of intact supplies, such as one million pairs of socks. General Bridges had not been permitted to abandon the Whites, but he had left food and clothing to try to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people in war-torn South Russia. The Reds captured 22,000 White Guards in the town, and 60,000 later surrendered further down the coast at Sochi.

Other Whites fled into the Kuban steppe, where they waged a guerrilla war. As for the Green armies, at the moment of victory they suffered a split between the pro-Communist elements and the various other forces who were in the mix, and soon dissolved. [6]

London

Meanwhile in London, time of death was called on the White cause. Field Marshal Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: ‘so ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s attempts. Antwerp, Dardannelles, Denikin. His judgement is always at fault.’

Several days later he wrote: ‘cabinet at 6pm. We decided, Curzon leading, finally to tell Denikin to wind up affairs and come to terms with the Soviet government. Great joy. Winston fortunately absent.’ [7]

It was neither the first nor the last time the British had decided to withdraw from the Russian Civil War. They were sick of being on the sidelines of the bloody mess, acting as referee and sponsor, and occasionally stepping onto the pitch to play midfield, only to be frustrated again and again by the unexpected strength of the opposition and the shocking failures of their own side. In spite of all this, British intervention continued while the Whites made another throw of the dice. The fact that some tens of thousands of White Guards had escaped in one piece, plus an accident of geography and miitary fortune, gave the Whites an opportunity.

During the chaotic White retreat across Ukraine, one White officer had fought his way through Makhno’s anarchists to reach Crimea. There he held the Perekop Isthmus, the narrow strip of land connecting Crimea to the mainland. This officer, who had entered Ukraine as one of Shkuro’s notorious ‘White Wolves,’ bore the evocative name Slashchev.

Because of Slashchev’s feat the Whites held onto Crimea, an area 27,000 square kilometres in size, or one-third the size of Ireland. The Reds had no fleet on the Black Sea and the Allies had, so Crimea was a natural fortress as well as a base area of manageable size and with a population of over a million. That’s where the British fleet obligingly left those 35,000 evacuated White Guards. We have the strange picture of masses of hardened veterans disembarking at seaside resort towns.

Crimea

The first item on the agenda was leadership. At a Council of War in April, power passed from Denikin to his rival and critic, the ‘Black Baron’ Wrangel. The military chieftains objected on principle to electing Wrangel. To be clear, they did not object to Wrangel himself, only to the idea of electing a leader. So they insisted Denikin appoint him. After the galling experience of handing power to his rival, Denikin had nothing left to do but depart for Constantinople on a British destroyer, never to return. [8]

Above: photographs and a poster depicting Wrangel

Wrangel was not a graduate of Bykhov prison-monastery or a survivor of the Kuban Ice March, not at all one of the original Kornilov club. But with his height and striking features, he looked the part more than any other major White leader; Soviet cartoons and posters got great mileage out of him.

But there was still a line of continuity going all the way back to those origins as ‘the saga of the Volunteer Army continued in the Crimea.’ The elite ‘colourful units’ that were named after Markov, Alexeev, Kornilov and the others still existed as I Corps. [9] Like his predecessors, Wrangel called himself ‘Ruler’ and his army the ‘Russian Army.’

One of the themes that keeps popping up in this series is the role of the individual in history. Wrangel is a striking case study, because under him a new and distinct White Guard regime emerged in Crimea. Whereas Denikin’s regime was overstretched, ragged and undisciplined, Wrangel’s was every bit as lean and severe as he was.

In contrast to the previous White regimes, there was a functioning government and strict discipline. Reds who deserted were given a fair hearing. Looters were shot. Wrangel’s government would even pass a law redistributing landlords’ holdings to peasants – yes, the Whites were finally ready to cut their losses on that one, and the irony is that Wrangel, unlike Denikin, was actually of the land-owning nobility. His regime also made overtures to Tatars and Ukrainians, and cooperated with the Poles.

(L) Wrangel inspecting White pilots, and (R) his functioning government

Was this all down to Wrangel’s personality?

Perhaps not so much. Actually, the Baron had been a champion of the conservatives within the White movement against the more ‘liberal’ Denikin. Wrangel spoke of the need ‘to make leftist policies with rightist hands’ and pronounced a policy of ‘With the Devil, but for Russia and against the Bolsheviks.’ [10] Every living White Guard, one assumes, had learned extremely harsh lessons in 1919. Popular opinion and practical common sense would have favoured this new approach.

Above, images of Wrangel from the Soviet point of view. ‘Three grenadiers’ labelled Iudenich, Denikin and Wrangel; Wrangel as Khan of the Crimea; and ‘The Tsarist gendarme, Baron Wrangel’

What made this approach possible was the fact that an overwhelming mass of White Guards were now concentrated in a stable, small, self-contained base area. Just as one example of how Crimea insulated the Whites from the chaos that had messed things up before, the Cossacks could no longer do the old loot-and-desert routine. They didn’t have horses anymore, let alone horses that could swim across the Black Sea. The character of the new regime had more to do with the new base than with any other factor. But it is one of those interesting moments when so many things, right down to the physical appearance of the leader, produce the same impression: this was a White army, but leaner and smarter, confronting Moscow with a new type of challenge.

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References

[1] Mawdsley, pp 302-309. Special thanks are due to Mawdsley, on whose book I relied heavily for this post. Dune, 180-198

[2] Beevor, pp 431-2

[3] Kinvig, p 311

[4] Smele,p 140

[5] Kinvig, p 309

[6] Smele, p 140. Dune, p 211. On the Greens, see the notes from Diane Koenker and SE Smith in Dune’s memoirs, p 187

[7] Kinvig, p 312

[8] Mawdsley, p 309

[9] Mawdsley, p 364

[10] Ibid, p 363

The new texture behind the ‘Revolution Under Siege’ text is from the Wikimedia Commons image ‘Rust and dirt’ by Roger McLassus. Not that anyone is eagle-eyed enough to notice, but it is important to credit people

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A review of Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (Crown, 2023)

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