Komuch

09: Behind White Lines

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In Stephen King’s novel The Stand two new societies emerge in a post-apocalyptic USA, based on opposite sides of the Rocky Mountains. A democratic society takes shape in Boulder, Colorado. Meanwhile in Las Vegas power is seized by a supernatural madman who punishes drug users with crucifixion. Only one of these two regimes can survive.

That great, flawed horror epic comes to mind because this post is about two distinct White regimes which emerged on either side of the Ural Mountains in Russia in 1918, and how one consumed the other. As we saw in Part 5, the Czech Revolt led to dozens of White-Guard governments popping up. The Right Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party set up a regime called Komuch (the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly) based in the Volga town of Samara. They wanted a republican, democratic counter-revolution, with a mandate from the Constituent Assembly and all the ‘t’s crossed and the ‘i’s dotted. Meanwhile across the mountains a faction of officers and Cossacks set up the Provisional Siberian Government at Omsk, a military dictatorship with a thin Siberian Regionalist veneer.

The most important difference was that Samara was anti-landlord and Omsk was pro-landlord. They were at loggerheads on the land question.

These two regimes did not use direct violence against one another – until the very end, when the outcome was no longer in any doubt. They were supposed to be on the same side against the Reds. But relations were tense; Omsk boycotted Samara’s manufactured goods, and Samara boycotted the grain of Siberia.[i] In August the Omsk regime shut down the Siberian Regional Duma – an elected body dominated by Right SRs, of which the Omsk regime itself was an ungrateful child. Komuch was never secure even within its own territory: ‘Russian officers as well as business and middle-class circles much preferred the state-conscious anti-Communism of Omsk.’[ii] And that territory was shrinking. In a strange twist of fate, the military men of Omsk resided safely a thousand miles in the rear while the Right SRs – civilian politicians – led the regime that was actually fighting the Reds on the Volga. From early September that fight was going very badly. As we saw in Part 8, Kazan and Simbirsk had fallen, and this had thrown Komuch into crisis.

Omsk

While Komuch had grown weaker, the Provisional Siberian Government had grown stronger. The Omsk government did not rest on popular support. Its political wing consisted of junior government officials, conservative refugees from central Russia and the Siberian Regionalists. Its military wing consisted of officers and Cossacks, assisted by a battalion of British soldiers from the Middlesex Regiment. This military wing had built itself up to a force of 38,000 by September, poaching officers from Komuch instead of helping them in any serious way.

The ‘Novoselov Affair’ of September 1918 manifested something that had been obvious for some time. The Siberian Regionalists wanted to increase their presence in cabinet, and a politician named Novoselov was their chosen candidate. But he was abducted by Cossacks and murdered. It was a clear signal, Smele suggests, that anyone who tried to challenge the officers and Cossacks would be found dead some fine morning by the banks of the Irtysh River.

Members of the Provisional Siberian Government

The western Allies looked on with impatience, and demanded Komuch and Omsk get their act together and present a united front. The result was the state conference at Ufa on September 23rd 1918. Ufa is a mountain town half-way between republican Samara and military Omsk. It was as if Stephen King’s two post-apocalyptic tribes held a conference somewhere in Utah. At the Ufa (not Utah) conference a wide array of different counter-revolutionary governments came together. Intellectuals, ‘moderate socialists’ and former terrorists sat down to discuss cooperation with Black-Hundred generals, foreign agents and Cossacks.

Chernov

The centre of gravity within the SRs had swung from the Right to the Centre. This Centre was embodied in Viktor Chernov, the leading figure in the party, a stout man with a powerful presence who had served as Minister for Agriculture under Kerensky in 1917. During the few hours’ life span of the Constituent Assembly, the deputies had elected him president of Russia. Unlike most Right SRs, he had actually criticised the policy of coalition with the right during the year 1917, though like the others he had dragged his feet on land reform. In the view of his supporters, the October Revolution had vindicated his criticisms; in the view of the officers, he was largely responsible for ‘the weak and indecisive policy that led to the downfall of Mr Kerensky’s government.’[iii]

Now, along with others, he had arrived in Komuch territory arguing for the Right SRs to take a hard line at the Ufa conference. He was up against the resistance not only of officers and Cossacks but of many in his own party. The historian Radkey writes that many Right SRs had become ‘fervent patriots, partisans of the Entente, and devotees of the cult of the state.’ By 1917 ‘a large segment of the Populist intelligentsia had become [Constitutional Democrats] without admitting it.’[iv] We have already seen how the Left SRs split from the party in disgust at these developments. But the divisions ran deeper still. Even Chernov’s centre was divided into a right centre and a left centre. Chernov himself was prevented from going to Ufa by his own comrades, in case his presence upset the Omsk faction.

Viktor Chernov

The Ufa conference opened with a religious service, then talks began. The numbers of delegates heavily favoured the left, but the various factions all had veto power, tipping the balance back to the right. On the other hand, the need to keep the Czechs happy and to impress the Allies put a certain weight on the scale for the left. Countering this in turn was the real balance of forces between Samara and Omsk, which worsened for Samara every day as the Reds advanced.

One sore point was the Constituent Assembly. The Right SRs insisted that it was the only legitimate state power in Russia, sanctioned by the elections of December 1917. Omsk refused to recognise this body, ‘elected in the days of madness and made up chiefly of the anarchist element.’[v] It appears the Omsk officers believed no election could be considered valid until half the Russian working class was dead or behind barbed wire, and until a knout-wielding Cossack could be placed next to every polling station to glower at the voters. An election held in conditions where the workers were organised and confident could not be considered legitimate in their eyes.

It could be argued that Samara won this round. The Omsk government accepted the legitimacy of the Constituent Assembly in principle. But they would not allow it to assume power until January 1919 at the earliest, and even then it must assemble a quorum of 250 elected deputies. To assemble such a quorum, in the chaos of Russia in 1918, was impossible; it had taken Chernov months to make his way to Samara. So it was a hollow victory for Komuch; the generals’ ‘recognition’ was meaningless.

The Ufa Directorate

The outcome of the conference was a merger of Samara, Omsk and other statelets into a government called the Ufa Directorate. Its programme: abolish the Soviets; return lost territories to Russia; resume the war against Germany; and set up a democratic regime.[vi] The Right SRs also changed their land policy to favour the White landlords with whom they were making a deal.[vii]

On paper, the five-member Directorate had a Socialist majority – a concession to the Czechoslovak Legion, who were increasingly war-weary and cynical of the rightward trajectory in the White camp. 

But this was only on paper. Just two of the five members of the Directory were SRs, and they were the two most conservative and least authoritative SRs who could be found. The other member of the Directorate with ‘Socialist’ credentials was Tchaikovsky, who was safely in the Arctic Circle at the time, performing socialist fig-leaf duty for another White government.

The Right SR Central Committee had previously voted 6:2 in favour of Chernov’s position that the SRs should fight against ‘the left-wing Red dictatorship [and] an equally despotic Right-wing White dictatorship’ that would probably emerge. ‘In order to fulfil its historic role,’ the party ‘must emerge as a Third Force and fight a determined war for democracy on two fronts.’[viii]

But the same Central Committee flew in the face of this resolution when it voted 4:3 in favour of the Ufa agreement.

Toward the climax of The Stand, that compelling and problematic 1978 horror novel, the democrats from Boulder go to confront the dictator at Las Vegas. They are armed only with their own courage and moral rectitude, along with a mandate from a supernatural higher power.

You can read the book yourself to find out how this plan works out for them. But you only need to read on another few paragraphs to find out how the same method worked out for the SRs when they entered the Ufa Directorate.

If the comparison seems far-fetched, consider these words by the Right SR Avksentiev: ‘We must put our head in the lion’s mouth. Either it will eat us, or it will choke on us.’[ix]

Life in the lion’s mouth was not comfortable. The officers resented what little influence the Right SRs had in the Directorate . In their view, Chernov was whispering in their ears urging them to set up democratic soldiers’ committees inside the White Army. In fact Chernov was not supported by a majority on his Central Committee, let alone by Avksentiev. But he was the bogeyman conjured up by the ‘Siberians’ to add colour to the implausible assertion that the Directorate was dominated by elements who were only two steps away from Bolshevism. ‘The name ‘socialist’ was for them synonymous with ‘traitor.’’[xiii]

‘I drink to dead Samara!’

Meanwhile the Reds were advancing across Komuch’s territory.

The 6,000 workers of Ivashchenko near Samara rose up against the Whites. But this rising was premature; Komuch still had enough strength to put down the rising, killing 1,500.[x] The officers of the People’s Army went from village to village conscripting the peasants. They used the old tried-and-tested Tsarist recruitment methods: public floggings and violent reprisals for deserters and their families.

But they were not so bold in early October, when the Red Armies closed in on Samara. The White volunteers were too few to defend the town. The Czechs retired without a fight. The peasant conscripts deserted to the Reds. The Cossack Dutov withheld any aid. Nobody would defend Samara, but it gets worse; no-one could be found to organise its evacuation. It was a rout, everyone for himself (Chernov included) crowding onto trains to get away.

An SR leader named Volsky was reportedly found drunk and despairing, smashing glasses and ranting: ‘I drink to dead Samara! Can’t you smell the corpse?’

Czech officers taunted Constituent Assembly deputies: ‘Where’s your Army?’ ‘Government? You the government?’

As Samara fell to the Reds, Komuch lashed out at its Red prisoners, killing 306 of them.

This picture appears to show a Red triumphal procession on Sadovaya Street, Samara, in late 1918 or early 1919.

In spite of its name the Ufa Directorate spent most of its existence governing from railway cars, and officially moved to Omsk in early October. The Novoselov Affair had demonstrated that no civilian politician should push their luck in Omsk, where drunken officers still sang ‘God Save the Tsar.’ The Council of Ministers which served under the Directory was dominated by people more associated with Omsk than Samara. In that city the SR politicians felt the same sense of insecurity and isolation that they had felt in Petrograd in 1917, and in the words of Serge, ‘The very same illusions fortify their spirits. The vocation of parliamentary martyr rises in their breasts.’[xi] Think of Avksentiev with his head in the lion’s mouth. I don’t know what they were thinking; that if they did everything by the book, hosts of constitutional angels would come to their aid… Or that they would get their reward in parliamentary heaven.

Why all the hostility between Samara and Omsk? One way of looking at it is that the generals were too stubborn to recognise that the Right SRs could be a useful political fig-leaf for their cause. They could have kept many Right SR leaders on side by making a few superficial concessions. Their association with the Right SRs was used at the time and is still used today to claim democratic credentials they did nothing to deserve. But the other way of looking at it is that the generals were sophisticated enough to realise that the Right SRs were of little use even as fig-leaves. The Right SRs had only a very narrow base in 1918; their most reliable supporters were the Czechoslovak Legion. Their electoral mandate, such a powerful instrument in constitutional politics, might have been expected to translate into something impressive in the language of civil war. But it simply did not translate.

The Bolsheviks were wise not to recognise the authority of the Constituent Assembly – because practically no-one else did.

Two devastating scenes remained to be played out in the tragedy of the Right SRs. Their protagonist was Admiral Alexander Kolchak.  

The Council of the Supreme Ruler

Alexander Kolchak arrived in Omsk in mid-October and was given the Ministry of War and the Marine.

Kolchak was a naval officer from a well-off military family. He explored the Arctic Circle in 1903, travelling by dog-sleigh and spending 42 nights on the open sea. After the disaster of the Russo-Japanese war he approached the Duma (the rigged Tsarist parliament) with plans for naval reform. During World War One he served as an admiral first on the Baltic and then on the Black Sea. During the Revolution, he defied a sailors’ committee by throwing his sword into the sea and declaring the men unworthy of him. ‘Many organisations and newspapers with a nationalist tendency spoke of him as a future dictator.’[xiv]

Still from the movie Admiral (2008) dir. Andrei Kravchuk. Kolchak, centre, confronted by the sailors’ committee, draws his ceremonial sword prior to throwing it overboard.

 He spent a long time abroad on various wartime plans and projects with the US and other Allies which came to nought. He became an agent of the British state, and was called by London ‘the best Russian for our purposes in the Far East.’[xv] He returned to Russia with the Japanese invasion forces and tried to organise armed detachments in Manchuria and the Far East. Thence he came to Omsk.

A conspiracy coalesced around him, with or just-about-possibly without his knowledge. According to one of his comrades, he ‘had no part in the plot, but was in favour of a military dictatorship.’[xvi]

General Knox and other British officers in Siberia. Kolchak was their guy, and they supported his coup.

He had just returned from a tour of the front when it all kicked off. On the night of November 17th, a Cossack detachment arrested many Right SRs, including the two members of the Directorate. The Council of Ministers assumed power. There was a battalion of the British Middlesex Regiment stationed in Omsk at the time, and their leader General Knox knew about the coup before the event and did nothing because he hated the Directorate and was a ‘great champion’ of Kolchak.[xvii] The Omsk garrison commander was on board too. It was a clean sweep.

The Czechs were appalled; but the French and the British dissuaded them from taking any action, the French verbally and the British by physically defending the conspirators. So the coup was bloodless. A new power took over, calling itself the Council of the Supreme Ruler.

The ministers offered the vacant position of Supreme Ruler to Kolchak. He accepted the position, it appears, with a heavy heart, refusing it on the first offer.

Today’s cover image, another still from Kravchuk’s Admiral. Kolchak in the centre, flanked by the church, plenty of Russian flags, the military, and the flags of Britain and France. This is a very pro-White Guard film. For example it begins with the Admiral sinking a German ship using the power of prayer.

Apologists for the coup preferred not to use the word. It was simply ‘the change;’ one regime ‘gave place’ to another; ‘the directorate ceased to function, and its place was taken by Admiral Kolchak and his ministry,’ who ‘[took] the authority… into their own hands.’ It had been necessary, because the Right SRs had prepared the ground for the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and ‘The same fate now threatened the Directorate.’[xviii]

The Komuch deputies were holding a congress in the mountain town of Yekaterinburg when news arrived of the coup – news, soon followed by armed bands of Siberian Whites who surrounded the venue and arrested them all. The Czechoslovak general Gajda saved them from being murdered by taking them into his custody. There was one last attempt to raise the banner of Komuch with yet another congress, this time in Ufa on December 2nd. It was shut down by Kolchak’s men.

Alone and on the run, Chernov decided to propose a deal to the Reds. They would have the support of the Right SRs if they would only recognise the Constituent Assembly. Still he clung to it. And why wouldn’t he? With it, he was president of Russia. Without it, he was an isolated politician alone on the run.

The Right SRs were legalised – not due to Chernov’s efforts, and needless to say the Constituent Assembly was not recognised. Chernov went to Moscow where he lived in hiding for a year or so before leaving Russia forever.

Back in Siberia, meanwhile, the Regionalist tradition was openly discarded in favour of old-fashioned Russian chauvinism.[xix]

The lion had closed its jaws and, without choking, swallowed the head of the Right SRs. Chernov blamed his own party: ‘our comrades were among those who helped Kolchak’s dictatorship to happen. They pulled down the bulwark of democracy with their own hands.’[xx]

Detail from Russian Civil War pictorial wall map #4, ‘The German Revolution and Entente Intervention’ with some of the captions translated by me. Some details, such as the position of the frontline, are from a later date. The yellow flag in the NW corner represents the Ufa Directorate. The larger tricolour next to it was the flag adopted by the Council of the Supreme Leader. The little explosion is dated and marks the Omsk coup which overthrew the Directorate.

Kolchak had emerged as one of the two paramount leaders of the White cause. In Spring 1919 the Allies would recognise him as superior to Denikin. He was ‘Supreme Ruler’ and not ‘dictator,’ says Smele, ‘so as to maintain the decorum of the civic spirit.’

The note Kolchak struck in his first major address to the Russian people should be familiar to anyone acquainted with Denikin and his ‘I am not a politician, just a simple soldier’ routine:

I am not about to take the road of reaction or of disastrous party politics, but my chief aim will be the creation of a fighting army, victory over the Bolsheviki, and the establishment of justice and order so that the nation may without interference choose for itself the form of government that it desires.[xxi]

The Stand

Joshua Rossett, an aid official from the United States, gives an insight into the perspective on Kolchak held by many in the Pacific port of Vladivostok. He paints a picture of the intelligentsia, workers, peasants and well-meaning Americans all working hard to deal with humanitarian problems, united under the zemstvo, or local government. Then comes the shock of the Omsk coup. He describes Omsk, and the Ufa Directorate which preceded it, as a coup by food hoarders.

At the last local elections in Vladivostok, 35,000 votes were cast. A commissar came down from Omsk and began striking names off the voter rolls, eventually leaving only 4,000 – whom Rossett says were monarchists and speculators.

Rossett had a more visceral shock when local authorities asked a Russian cavalry officer to provide escort for 600 prisoners – men, women and children, mostly Red, some criminals. They were infected with typhus and had to be moved into quarantine. The officer at first refused, then then ‘with genuine enthusiasm’ offered to kill them all.

(From The Rise of a New Russian Autocracy by Joshua Rossett, printed by the Independent Labour Party, 1919)

Very soon there was resistance to the new regime – not from civic-minded people angry at Kolchak’s disregard for the Constituent Assembly, or from appalled American aid workers, but from peasants. They deserted from the White army, refused to supply food, resisted the return of old landlords and old Tsarist officials. The hand of the Supreme Ruler came down heavy on them with hundreds of townships bombarded or burned and peasants ‘shot in dozens.’[xxii] The Red workers had long since fled from White rule in their home towns and set up guerrilla armies in the endless forests of Siberia. Now they were joined by masses of peasants.

The guerrillas composed songs about the untouched forest that sheltered them: ‘Sombre taiga, danger-ridden, Massed, impenetrable trees! Yet we rebels, safely hidden in thy glades, found rest and ease.’[xxiii]

Soon resistance flared up right at the heart of Kolchak’s power. The last scene in the tragedy of Komuch was the December revolt in Omsk. Communists based in the city led a workers’ uprising against the Supreme Ruler. It was crushed, and in response Kolchak lashed out indiscriminately to his left. Serge says that 900 were killed in the repression. Many of the remaining Right SRs and Mensheviks, who had taken no part in the uprising, were included in the massacre. Mawdsley writes: ‘Prominent SRs, including several Constituent Assembly delegates, were summarily executed.’ Of those who were lucky enough to get away, many went over to the Reds. The less lucky survivors sat huddled in cold dungeons, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Communists as 1918, the year of Komuch, withered and died.

From Admiral.

Consolidation

The Russian Civil War is so chaotic and confused that when, from time to time, a pattern emerges in the whirlwind of events, we should pause and examine it. In the White camp over the course of 1918 we can trace the following pattern:

  • Step 1: Foreign Intervention
  • On the river Don in May 1918, the Germans intervened.
  • On the river Volga in May 1918, the Czechs intervened.
  • Step 2: Local revolt with a ‘democratic’ flavour
  • Aided by the Germans, the Don Cossacks rose up against the Reds and established a state.
  • Aided by the Czechs, the Right SRs rose up against the Reds and established a state.
  • Step 3: In the shelter of the revolt, reactionary forces coalesce
  • Behind the shelter provided by the Germans and the Don Cossack state, there arose a military dictatorship of officers and Kuban Cossacks.
  • Behind the shelter provided by the Czechs and the Right SR state, there arose a military dictatorship of officers and Siberian Cossacks.
  • Step 4: Tensions between democratic and reactionary wings
  • Nonetheless the Don Cossacks were on unfriendly terms with the Volunteer Army, and the Right SRs were on unfriendly terms with the Omsk regime.
  • Step 5: Reactionary wing defeats democratic wing
  • The Don Cossacks spent their strength at Tsaritsyn, then their remains (as we will see in future posts) were cannibalised by the Volunteer Army.
  • The Right SRs spent their strength at Kazan, then their remains (as we have just seen) were cannibalised by the Omsk regime.

The parallels should be noted well because in them we can see the complex mess of factions tending to resolve itself into united and powerful White armies. Cossack autonomy, Siberian regionalism and Democratic Counter-Revolution – transitional forms, gateway drugs – fall by the wayside and everywhere the White cause takes the form of a far-right military dictatorship.

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[i] Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War, p 145

[ii] Pereira, NGO. ‘The Idea of Siberian Regionalism in late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia.’ Russian History, vol. 20, no. 1/4, Brill, 1993, pp. 163–78, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24657293.

[iii] Bechhofer, CE. ‘What happened in Omsk? Admiral Kolchak’s Credentials.’ Current History, Vol 10, no. 3, pt 1, June 1919, 484-485. Accessed on Jstor.org https://www.jstor.org/stable/45324453?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

[iv] Pereira

[v] I copied and pasted this quote word-for-word from a reliable source – but I can’t remember which one! When I find it again (probably as I comb through my notes in search of something completely different six months from now), I will post a proper citation here.

[vi] Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, p 346

[vii] Smith, SA. Russia in Revolution, p 169

[viii] Trapeznik, Alexander. The Revolutionary Career of Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1873-1952). Masters’ thesis, University of Tasmania, 1988, p 283

[ix] Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, p 74

[x] Serge, Year One 344

[xi] Serge, Year One, p 377

[xii] Mawdsley, 153

[xiii] M. I. Smirnov. “Admiral Kolchak.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 11, no. 32, Modern Humanities Research Association, 1933, pp. 373–87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202781.

[xiv] Smirnov

[xv] Smele, 291

[xvi] Smirnov

[xvii] Smith, p 170

[xviii] Bechhofer

[xix] Pereira

[xx] Trapeznik, p 285

[xxi] Bechhofer

[xxii] Serge, Year One, p 378

[xxiii] Wollenberg, The Red Army, Ch 2 https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1937/wollenberg-red-army/ch02.htm

08: The Fight for Kazan

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The Fall of Kazan (5 to 7 August)

Looking out from revolutionary Moscow to each point of the compass in August 1918, the prospect ranged from threatening to dire. In Part 7 we saw how the Don Cossack revolt was battering at Tsaritsyn and Voronezh. Tsaritsyn lay on the steep right bank of the Volga river. On the left bank of the same river, but eight hundred kilometres north, lies the city of Kazan.

Kazan is the thousand-year-old capital of the Tatars, with a mosque-dotted skyline and a Kremlin of white limestone. It was the site of key battles in Russia’s history.

Kazan’s White Kremlin, seen from the Volga

From the city, Jukums Vacietis commanded the Red Army Group on the Eastern Front. Vacietis was the former commander of Latvian Rifles. Though he was himself a Left SR, he had put down the revolt in Moscow, and it had been his idea to fire shells at short range into the Left SR stronghold, harming no-one but shattering the morale of the insurgents. No sooner had the dust settled in Moscow than Murav’ev, defender of Petrograd and conqueror of Kiev, rose up on the Volga with the intention of leading Red and White alike against Germany. Vacietis had taken over in Kazan after the failure of this Murav’ev mutiny. But the staff in his new HQ were leftovers from the Murav’ev days, and in spite of the energy and enthusiasm for which he was known, he faced a steep challenge in trying to get the Red Army organised.  

Vacietis was tasked with resisting Komuch, the Right SR-dominated regime which claimed the democratic mandate of the Constituent Assembly. Twelve million people inhabited the food-rich territory on which Komuch carried out its experiment in Democratic Counter-Revolution. This territory was growing thanks to the victories of the People’s Army and the Czech Legion. Beyond Komuch – the officers’ government at Omsk, the warlords of Siberia and the Trans-Baikal, the Japanese occupation force. From the Volga to the Pacific counter-revolution was in the saddle.

Many local Soviets had given up without a fight. Some Red Guard units had immortalised themselves with heroic – but in the short term futile – martial deeds; others had fled or deserted or fallen to pieces.

By August the Soviet government was turning its attention to this Eastern Front. Around 30,000 soldiers were transferred from the west to the Volga in a few weeks over that late summer, a dangerous gamble seeing as Germany might yet attack in the West. They were explicitly threatening to do so; if the Reds failed to deal with the Whites, Germany would invade and deal with both.

It was decided to send out the war commissar Trotsky by train. After scrounging around the chaos and shortages of Moscow to procure a train and supplies, he set off on August 7th. The day before he had sent a dispatch ahead of him:

Any representative of the Soviet power who leaves his post at a moment of military danger without having done all he could to defend every inch of Soviet territory is a traitor. Treachery in wartime is punished with death.[i]

But by the time this message arrived in Kazan, the city was already under attack. There was fighting in the streets, and many representatives of the Soviet power had already left their posts – or worse.

A month to the day after his battle in the streets of Moscow, Vacietis was directing a desperate battle, first outside Kazan on the riverbank and then on the streets of the city itself.

Jukums Vacietis, commander of the Latvian Rifles and later of the Eastern Army Group

The People’s Army and the Czechs had launched a lightning attack on the city of Kazan on August 5th. The officers who led this assault were doing so in defiance of direct orders from Komuch and from the Czech top brass, who had a more cautious policy. But the officers reasoned that ‘Victors are not court-martialled.’ They brought up heavy guns on tugs and barges and forced a landing with a ‘microscopic force’ of only 2,500. They failed on the first attempt, then got a foothold. The following day, the 6th, they broke through to the streets, and there was heavy fighting in Kazan itself.[ii] One Latvian unit held off the enemy time after time with ‘self-sacrifice and heroic courage, regardless of heavy losses in dead and wounded.’[iii]

But the local Red Guards were poorly-disciplined, could not shoot well, could not build barricades. The staff officers, friends of the late Murav’ev, deserted Vacietis and went over to the enemy. The Red commander ended up trapped in his own HQ, under fire. He barely escaped with his life – the enemy entering his HQ even as he was going out the back door – fighting his way out of the city and fleeing across the river with a few dozen riflemen.

It was the same old story. In the months after October 1917, a few thousand sailors and Red Guards had gone out on the railways and conquered all of Russia. But the challenge was much greater now. Factory workers were up against crack detachments made up entirely of officers. Whenever some Red units made a bold and professional stand, they would be undermined by mass panic and treachery in other units.

By the morning of the 7th, Kazan had fallen to the Whites. The local bishop and the staff and students of the university joined in the counter-revolution wholeheartedly. Komuch seized half of Russia’s gold reserves from Kazan’s vaults, worth 700 million roubles.

Men with weapons and white armbands conducted house-to-house searches, killing ‘Bolsheviks’ on the spot. Red prisoners were torn apart by a ‘well-dressed mob.’ ‘Young women slapped them and spat in their eyes.’ ‘For several days the streets were strewn with disfigured, undressed corpses.’[iv]

Resistance at Sviyazhsk (8 to 28 August)

The stiff resistance of the Latvian Rifles had bought a few hours. This proved significant. Some Red units regrouped at the nearby town of Sviyazhsk, and when the Whites tried to seize the town’s railway bridge, the Reds held on and drove them back.

The Reds numbered around ten thousand, holding on around Sviyazhsk in ‘a line of pathetic, hastily-dug trenches,’[v] defending the Romanov railway bridge and barring further advance from Kazan. Effectively, Kazan and Sviyazhsk faced each other from either end, and from opposite banks of, a twenty-kilometre stretch of water. The Red force at Sviyazhsk was the Fifth Army, forming part of Eastern Army Group.

…and another, perhaps clearer, map. Source unknown – like most images I use, I found it on the priceless Wikimedia Commons.

Sviyazhsk was a rustic settlement scattered for some distance along the right bank of the river. It lay twenty to thirty kilometres west of Kazan and it was the first stop on the line to Moscow. Its railway station commanded the bridge.

It was at this small railway station that Trotsky arrived from Moscow. Film footage of his arrival shows no great ceremony or dramatic speech – simply an awkward muddle as a man standing next to the War Commissar tries and fails to find some important document or other.[vi]

The locomotive detached and drove away from Trotsky’s train – a signal that he was here to stay. The carriages remained in the railway yard, turning into offices and depots. A second train arrived from Moscow – this one carrying 300 cavalry, an aeroplane, a mobile garage for five cars, a radio-telegraph office and a print shop.

A still from Dr Zhivago (1965, Dir David Lean). I have big problems with the historical accuracy of this movie but damn, David Lean can frame a shot. The train here is fully-armoured with naval guns, though it’s not visible in this still. Later in the war, Trotsky would travel in an armoured train of this kind. But at Kazan his train was basic and unarmoured. (I do not own the rights to this image, just found it and screenshotted it on Youtube.com.)

Vacietis made a hand-over to Trotsky, and left to assume overall command of the front.

Conditions were grim. Larissa Reissner, a writer and Red Army soldier, described the defenders of Sviyazhsk ‘sleeping on the floors of the station house, in dirty huts filled with straw and broken glass.’ The Red Army soldier was ‘a human being in a torn military coat, civilian hat, and boots with toes protruding.’ It was a rainy month. Kazan kept up the pressure. ‘Planes came and went, dropping their bombs on the station and the railway cars; machine guns with their repulsive barking and the calm syllables of artillery, drew nigh and then withdrew again.’[viii]

A company of Communists from Moscow who had arrived by train with Trotsky barely knew how to handle their rifles, but fought bravely. On the other extreme was a Latvian unit, hardened veterans, but shattered by the defeat at Kazan and angry at the lack of basic supplies. They threatened mutiny. Trotsky immediately had their officer put up in front of a tribunal and imprisoned.

Nature of the Red Army

We are already acquainted, from previous posts in this series, with the kind of people who made this stand at Sviyazhsk.

34,000 of the 50,000 Red Guards had been incorporated into the new Red Army, along with volunteers who were former soldiers. The all-volunteer Red Army numbered 300,000 in May 1918, but it is likely that only a minority actually had weapons. The others remained in the rear performing auxiliary duties. At first a Red Army soldier needed a reference from a trade union or left-wing political party to join. But from June, the Soviet government brought in conscription in response to mass desertion and to the military crisis.

We are fighting for the greatest good of mankind, for the rebirth of the entire human race, for its emancipation from oppression, from ignorance, from slavery. And everything that stands in our way must be swept aside. We do not want civil strife, blood, wounds! We are ready to join fraternally in a common life with all our worst enemies. If the bourgeoisie of Kazan were to come back today to the rich mansions that they abandoned in cowardly fashion, and were to say: ‘Well, comrade workers’ – or if the landlords were to say: ‘Well, comrade peasants, in past centuries and decades our fathers and grandfathers and we ourselves oppressed, robbed and coerced your grandfathers and your fathers and yourselves, but now we extend a brotherly hand to you: let us instead work together as a team, sharing the fruits of our labor like brothers’

 – then I think that, in that case, I could say, on your behalf: ‘Messrs landlords, Messrs bourgeois, feel free to come back, a table will be laid for you, as for all our friends! If you don’t want civil war, if you want to live with us like brothers, then please do … But if you want to rule once more over the working class, to take back the factories – then we will show you an iron fist, and we will give the mansions you deserted to the poor, the workers and oppressed people of Kazan…[xix]

This is the second-last main narrative post in Season One of Revolution Under Siege, a series about the Russian Civil War. Catch you again in two or three weeks’ time for the conclusion; in the meantime there will be smaller side-posts and a podcast version of this episode. Thanks for reading.

‘to settle the question whether homes, palaces, cities, the sun and the heavens are to belong to the working people, to the workers the peasants, the poor, or to the bourgeois and the landlords […] I am today eating an eighth of a pound of bread, and tomorrow I shall not have even that, but I shall just tighten my belt, and I tell you plainly – I have taken power, and this power I shall never surrender!’

And then there were Red partisan units, armed bands of poor peasants led by local charismatic leaders. One Red commander on the Northern Front described how difficult it was to incorporate them into the Red Army:

We certainly had a lot of trouble with them at the front. They often upset all our plans and arrangements; they never conformed to any general scheme, but just trusted to their own inspiration. The “Wolf Pack” band did specially good work; it was commanded by a sailor, and consisted entirely of sailors, soldiers and workmen. An anarchist band also distinguished itself; it was not a particularly large one-barely two hundred men, but a very compact body, firmly knit together by the reckless courage of all its members.[ix]

So the defenders of Sviyazhsk would have been a mix of former Red Guards; veterans of the Great War; adventurous guerrillas of the ‘Wolf Pack’ variety; and new peasant conscripts. In addition, thousands of communists answered an appeal and joined the army.

Red Army soldiers under shell fire during the struggle for Kazan

One in every twenty-five Red Army soldiers was an international volunteer; Reissner even mentions Czechs in the Red camp at Sviyazhsk, fighting against their own countrymen on the opposite bank. Many wore their own national army’s uniform, in defiance of orders. There was a good reason for this, a reason which many conscripts discovered to their cost. Some conscripts showed up for enlistment dressed in their worst clothes, assuming that they would trade them in for a uniform. But the Red Army had no uniforms! So they had to go to war in the most threadbare and ill-fitting garments they owned. They wore a red badge with a hammer-and-plough device, or an upside-down red star; apart from that, it was impossible to tell who was Red and who was White.

There were sixty different makes of artillery in Red service during the war, and thirty-five different varieties of rifle from American Springfields to Japanese Arisakas. No doubt some of the same variety was on display at Sviyazhsk.[x] You can easily imagine the mess caused by incompatible ammunition, parts, or training. 

There was no formal organisational structure and there were no training centres. All army ranks had been abolished; ‘commander’ was a post held, not a title or a distinction. Outside of the military sphere, in day-to-day life, subordination of lower ranks to higher was not allowed. Some years later, one private got his commander into deep trouble by polishing his boots. Erich Wollenberg writes that the commander was accused of acting in an aristocratic spirit. He was let off the hook when it became clear that the private had been acting on his own initiative.

The commanders were drawn from three main sources. First, and well in evidence during the struggle for Kazan, were the military cadres. These were communists who had infiltrated the old Tsarist army during 1917. After the October Revolution they had to make the switch from dissidents in the old army to leaders of a new army. They had enough humility to stay in their lane and defer to actual trained soldiers on military matters.

Second, former corporals and sergeants of the old army. (Some, like Kliment Voroshilov in the South, commanded whole armies). In general these former Non-Commissioned Officcers – numbering around 130,000 – lacked the humility of the military cadres, and considered themselves superior to the commissioned officers. Sometimes they were right about this and sometimes they were wrong. In other words, the tsarist officer was known by the red board on his shoulder; the former NCO was known for the chip on his shoulder.

Third, around 22,000 former officers had been brought into the Red Army by this point. Some were revolutionaries, like Tukhachevsky. Others were conscientious public servants and patriots who believed, as we have seen in Part 7, that ‘the people are not mistaken.’ Many were conscripts, working under compulsion. Some were simply waiting for the chance to betray their men to the Whites. Years later, Trotsky was poring over memories from the struggle for Kazan when he realised that a particular artillery officer at Sviyazhsk had been trying to kill him.

Trotsky and the poet Damian Bedny near Kazan

Red Cohesion

The scene of Red soldiers enduring shellfire and rain on a dreary riverbank in early autumn has not been deemed worthy of a dramatic military painting by any artist. This is understandable. But day by day something momentous was happening. According to one historian, these were ‘operations which we may with hindsight deem to have been key to the eventual outcome of the civil wars.’[xi] According to another, the moment of the struggle for Kazan was one of two at which the existence of the Soviet state hung in the balance.[xii]

Behind and around the Reds at Sviyazhsk, tens of thousands of soldiers were being drawn up and prepared for a counter-attack on Kazan. This took time, especially in the chaotic conditions of Russia in 1918. If Sviyazhsk did not hold, this concentration of forces could not take place, and there was little hope of recovering Kazan. If the Red Army could not concentrate its forces and take Kazan, then what use was it? For the Reds, there had been no significant victories since the start of full-scale civil war. If Sviyazhsk, the Fifth Army and Eastern Army Group had been shattered, the damage to morale might have constituted a death-blow to the revolution.

This was not a straight battle but a test of cohesion. Red forces had broken and fled countless times since the Czechoslovak revolt. What was to stop them breaking again, under daily attack and with poor supplies?

The old Tsarist army had held together under fire through drill and traditional hierarchies and violent disciplinary measures. The new Red Army needed a new kind of cohesion.

Over the month of August, through trial and error and through will, the Red Army found ways and means. In small ways at first, they began to cohere.

The train carriages from Moscow got to work. Boots and food started to arrive. Reinforcements came – from tiny bands to large regular units. Telephone and telegraph wires were strung out across the countryside. Order began making its first inroads against chaos. The war commissar’s carriage was in the station, and he himself was touring the river-bank under enemy shells. Political newspapers improved morale, linked the dreary riverbank to the world revolution.

A panorama of modern-day Sviyazhsk

It must have had an impact on a conscripted krasnoarmeyets (Red Army member) from a village background to share trenches and cheap cigarettes and long discussions with workers from the towns, with communists and anarchists and SRs, veterans of the revolutionary storm of 1917 or even of underground and exile; people who had fought as Red Guards or partisans in the struggles of early 1918.

The Baltic sailors arrived, the shock troops of 1917 in their military vessels, straight from the sea to the Volga via the Mariinsky canal system. Artillery skirmishes between Red and White flotillas took place three or four times a day on the Volga. To the immense satisfaction of the Red soldiers, the White vessels were driven back.

A small airfield was set up, and an anarchist pilot named Akashev put in charge of scouting from the air and dropping bombs into Kazan. White planes were now being answered by Red, and this gave heart to the defenders of Sviyazhsk.

Morale was improving. But it was still shaky. Every day saw attacks on Sviyazhsk or other positions. From time to time units would abandon their positions, break under fire, refuse to follow orders.

But another factor in Red cohesion at Sviyazhsk was indicated by Trotsky’s order of August 14th:

It has been reported to me that the Petrograd guerrilla detachment has abandoned its position…

The soldiers of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army are neither cowards nor scoundrels. They want to fight for the freedom and happiness of the working people. If they retreat or fight poorly, their commanders and commissars are to blame.

I issue this warning: if any unit retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the commissar, and the next the commander.

Soldiers who show courage will be rewarded for their services and promoted to posts of command.

Cowards, self-seekers and traitors will not escape the bullet.

For this I vouch before the whole Red Army.

Raids (28-30 August)

The attack on Kazan by the White forces had been a brilliant and daring exploit. But weeks had passed and no further progress had been made. Every day the Reds grew stronger. From the point of view of the Whites, another daring operation was called for.

Raid by Land

On August 28th 2,000 White Guards crossed the river under cover of darkness. They made a wide circle around the Red lines. After an exhausting forced march, they arrived at a railway station behind Sviyazhsk, killed its small garrison to a man, and left it in ruins. They cut the railway line to Moscow.

An armoured train with naval guns was sent out from Sviyazhsk to intercept the Whites. But the Whites took it and burned it, and its remains lay by the roadside only a kilometre or two from town, a visible warning. The Whites advanced on the Sviyazhsk railway station and on the key bridge next to it.

The railway bridge at Sviyazhsk near Kazan (not Athlone).

The front was under pressure and shaky; Trotsky could only spare two or three companies to turn and face the White infiltrators. To compensate, he emptied the train of every one of its personnel: clerks, wireless operators and cooks. They were armed and sent out one kilometre to block the White advance.

Reissner describes the eight-hour battle which ensued:

The staff offices stood deserted; there was no “rear” any longer. Everything was thrown against the Whites who had rolled almost flush to the station. From Shikhrana to the first houses of Svyazhsk the entire road was churned up by shells, covered with dead horses, abandoned weapons and empty cartridge shells. The closer to Svyazhsk, all the greater the havoc. The advance of the Whites was halted only after they had leaped over the gigantic charred skeleton of the armored train, still smoking and smelling of molten metal. The advance surges to the very threshold, then rolls back boiling like a receding wave only to fling itself once more against the hastily mobilized reserves of Svyazhsk. Here both sides stand facing each other for several hours, here are many dead.

The Whites then decided that they had before them a fresh and well organized division of whose existence even their intelligence service had remained unaware. Exhausted from their 48 hour raid, the soldiers tended to overestimate the strength of the enemy and did not even suspect that opposing them was only a hastily thrown together handful of fighters with no one behind them except Trotsky and Slavin sitting beside a map in a smoke-filled sleepless room of the deserted headquarters in the center of depopulated Svyazhsk where bullets were whistling through the streets.[xiii]

The Whites withdrew. But the Red Army was not just battling against the Whites. It was faced with its own inexperience and the accumulated trauma of a summer’s worth of shattering defeats. One intention of the raid was to damage the Reds’ morale. In this it was not a failure. The raid sent a fresh wave of panic through the Fifth Army.

Mutiny

The 2nd Numerny Petrograd Regiment, a body of 200, broke. This was not a band of peasant conscripts or partisans, but a unit of worker-militants led by commissar Panteleev.[xiv]

Not only did this unit break; led by their commander and commissar, the 200 stormed on board a steamship that lay at anchor on the Volga, hijacked it and set sail.

A Bolshevik sailor named Nikolai Markin acted fast.

Boarding an improvised gunboat with a score of tested men, he sailed up to the steamer held by the deserters, and at the point of a gun demanded their surrender. Everything depended on that one moment; a single rifle-shot would have been enough to bring on a catastrophe. But the deserters surrendered without resisting. The steamer docked alongside the pier, the deserters disembarked.[xv]

At once Trotsky assembled a tribunal to pronounce judgement on the Regiment. Its decision was announced on August 30th in Order No 31, authored by the War Commissar:

The brave and honorable soldier cannot give his life twice – for himself and for a deserter. The overwhelming majority of the revolutionary soldiers have long been demanding that traitors be dealt with ruthlessly. The Soviet power has now passed from warning to action. Yesterday twenty deserters were shot, having been sentenced by the field court-martial of the Fifth Army.

The first to go were commanders and commissars who had abandoned the positions entrusted to them. Next, cowardly liars who played sick. Finally, some deserters from among the Red Army men who refused to expiate their crime by taking part in the subsequent struggle.[xvi]

The sailor Markin, who would go on to be killed in action in October 1918

Raid by Water

The Reds took the initiative. That very night there was a daring raid by small Red torpedo-boats on the White flotilla docked at Kazan. Trotsky and the sailors Markin and Raskolnikov were on this raid personally. They came under fire. At one point Trotsky’s boat was separated from the others, disabled by machine-gun bullets, pierced by a shell, lit up by a burning oil-barge, and stuck on a half-sunken enemy vessel. The occupants of the boat thought they were as good as dead.

But the other vessels had already gone into Kazan harbour, where they wrecked the enemy flotilla and destroyed artillery on land. The Whites were in too much chaos even to realise they had a chance to kill the War Commissar, much less to do so.

In the days after the raid, the pilots under the anarchist aviator Akashev brought good news. The Second Red Army, commanded by a Red Cossack, had advanced to within ten or fifteen kilometres of Kazan from the north. In all, 25-30,000 Red soldiers were now closing in on Kazan on both sides of the river. There began an exodus of the wealthier classes, and there was an uprising of workers within the city.

Threats rang out from Red lines: any White who deserted now would be pardoned, but White collaborators could expect confiscation of property, imprisonment or death. Dozens of Whites had already deserted and come over to the Reds. To those who held out in Kazan, ‘Remember Yaroslavl’ was the chilling threat. The Red commanders contemplated, but never carried out, an artillery bombardment of the city.

Meanwhile, the Whites put down the workers’ revolt within Kazan with a massacre.

The Recapture of Kazan (1 to 9 September)

On September 1st news reached Sviyazhsk of the shooting of Lenin (which we mentioned in a previous post, ‘Controversies: Terror’). Trotsky hurried back to Moscow. He was not present when the Fifth Army, after a month at Sviyazhsk, crossed the Volga and made a landing at Kazan. But Reissner was there:

On September 9 late at night the troops were embarked on ships and by morning, around 5:30, the clumsy many-decked transports, convoyed by torpedo boats, moved toward the piers of Kazan. It was strange to sail in moonlit twilight past the half-demolished mill with a green roof, behind which a White battery had been located; past the half-burned Delphin gutted and beached on the deserted shore; past all the familiar river bends, tongues of land, sandbanks and inlets over which from dawn to evening death had walked for so many weeks, clouds of smoke had rolled, and golden sheaves of artillery fire had flared.

[…] yesterday, words of command were restlessly sounding and slim torpedo boats were threading their way through smoke and flames and a rain of steel splinters, their hulls trembling from the compressed impatience of engines and from the recoil of their two-gun batteries which fired once a minute with a sound resembling iron hiccups.

People were firing, scattering away under the hail of down-clattering shells, mopping up the blood on the decks … And now everything is silent; the Volga flows as it has flowed a thousand years ago, as it will flow centuries from now.

We reached the piers without firing a shot. The first flickers of dawn lit up the sky. In the grayish-pink twilight, humped, black, charred phantoms began to appear. Cranes, beams of burned buildings, shattered telegraph poles – all this seemed to have endured endless sorrow and seemed to have lost all capacity for feeling like a tree with twisted withered branches. Death’s kingdom washed by the icy roses of the northern dawn.

And the deserted guns with their muzzles uplifted resemble in the twilight cast down figures, frozen in mute despair, with heads propped up by hands cold and wet with dew.

Fog. People begin shivering from cold and nervous tension; the air is permeated with the odor of machine oil and tarred rope. The gunner’s blue collar turns with the movement of the body viewing in amazement the unpopulated, soundless shore reposing in dead silence.

This is victory.

The Whites had abandoned Kazan. In the face of the Red build-up, they had calculated that they could not hold the city. The advancing Reds found in ‘the courtyard of the prison, a row of fresh corpses: the arrival of the Red cavalry […] had interrupted the executions.’[xvii]

The Red Cavalry enter Kazan
Komuch troops fleeing from Kazan

By mid-September, there would be 70,000 fighters of the Red Army on the Eastern Front, throwing back the Czechs and Komuch at all points. In Part 5 we briefly mentioned the workers of Troitsk, Verkhne-Uralsk and Ekaterinburg, who formed a partisan army and made a fifty-day march, in constant battle, out of hostile territory. A few days after the recapture of Kazan, this march came to an end when they linked up with the Third Red Army near Perm.

Almost simultaneous with the fall of Kazan, a Red army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky took Simbirsk from Komuch. This battle saw a series of daring and innovative exploits on the Red side: an unmanned locomotive thundered across an iron bridge through White barricades, followed by a manned and armoured train; Red Army soldiers infiltrated behind enemy lines and organised an uprising of railway workers (Simbirsk, home town of Lenin, is today called Ulyanovsk).

But it is perhaps a mistake to focus on these kinds of spectacular operations. As we have seen, at Kazan itself daring exploits were more a feature of White tactics. Revolutionary élan was in evidence on the Red side, but it was not a new phenomenon. What the Red Army had learned at Kazan was plain professional soldiering. The victory was won not necessarily with reckless death-defying charges, but through stoic endurance. It was a victory of supplies, logistics and politics, all contributing to cohesion. (That is one reason, I suspect, why it has not been deemed worthy of a dramatic painting or of the Mosfilm treatment).[xviii] What happened at Sviyazhsk was the synthesis of the zeal of the commissar and the technique of the specialist.

In their thousands, the people of the re-conquered Kazan attended revolutionary meetings in the streets and in the main theatre, celebrating the victory.

< Back to Contents

In addition to the sources below, I found this article on the Civil War museum at Sviyazhsk useful and illuminating.

[i] Trotsky, Leon. How the Revolution Armed, ‘The Fight for Kazan,’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch33.htm

[ii] Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War, p 79-80

[iii] Trotsky, Leon. How the Revolution Armed, ‘The Fight for Kazan,’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch33.htm

[iv] Serge, Year One, p 320

[v] Serge, Year One, p 332

[vi] Axelbank, Herman (dir.), Tsar To Lenin, 1937

[vii] Trotsky, Leon. My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 1930. Chapter 33, ‘A Month at Sviyazhsk.’https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch33.htm

[viii] Reissner, Larissa. ‘Svyazhsk.’ Republished in Fourth International, June 193. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol04/no06/reissner.htm

[ix] Wollenberg, Erich, The Red Army, Chapter 2

[x] Khvostov, Mikhail. The Russian Civil War (1) The Red Army, p 17

[xi] Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 87

[xii] Mawdsley, 268

[xiii] Reissner

[xiv] Service, Robert. Trotsky. Macmillan, 2009. P 221

[xv] Trotsky, My Life https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch33.htm

[xvi] Trotsky, Leon. How the Revolution Armed, ‘The Fight for Kazan,’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch33.htm#baugust24

[xvii] Serge, Year One, p 339

[xviii] Another reason, I suspect, is that it is impossible to erase Trotsky from the events. The closest thing we’ve got is the 2017 Russian TV series Trotsky which presented, in episode 1, a distorted portrayal of the execution of Panteleev and the others. I have written about this lamentable TV series here.

[xix] Trotsky, Leon. How the Revolution Armed, ‘The Fight for Kazan.’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch33.htm#baugust24

05: Czech Revolt in the East

If you look up a map of the Russian Civil War, you will see that the Reds were reduced to a small part of Russia. How did that happen? Mostly due to the Czech Revolt.

This post will tell the story of how the Eastern Front of the Russian Civil War blazed up in Spring 1918. The major players were the Allied powers, the Right SRs, the officers and the Cossacks. The biggest part of the heavy lifting, however, was done by an outfit called the Czechoslovak Legion, an improbable but enormously significant presence in Russia in 1918.

THE ALLIES

The first piece of context here is the implacable hatred with which the October Revolution was greeted by the wealthy and powerful in the Allied countries.

All over the world there were many who sympathised with the Revolution – from the IWW in the United States to followers of the late James Connolly in Ireland.

But in politics and media it was a different story. Newspapers reported that all women over the age of eighteen had been made public property; that Lenin, ‘alias Zederblaum’[i] was secretly Jewish, and that he and Trotsky were busy murdering one another in drunken brawls over gambling debts; that Red Guards, who were ‘chiefly Letts [Latvians] and Chinese’, had spent the spring of 1918 gunning down crowds of people in the cities.

The viewpoint of the Allied leaders was distorted; they saw the revolution only through the prism of the war. With the Russians out of the war, they believed, the Germans would soon be in Paris and the Turks on the  borders of India. The Russian revolutionaries were referred to as ‘Germano-Bolsheviks.’ Count Mirbach, the German ambassador, was described by the US ambassador as ‘the real dictator of Russia.’ It was taken as a fact that the Bolsheviks were funded by German intelligence and that the Red Guards were led and trained by German officers. The Allied leaders seriously imagined that from the POW camps of Russia would be recruited a new German army, millions strong, armed and equipped from the Allies’ own bloated supply depots in Vladivostok and Murmansk.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were expounded by, among many others, Winston Churchill (to whom the Reds were a ‘strange band of Jewish adventurers’) and the London Times (they were ‘adventurers of German-Jewish blood in German pay’).

Nov 9th 1917. From https://www.germansfromrussiasettlementlocations.org/2017/11/the-bolshevik-revolution-beginning-of.html

Western journalists knew so little about the Bolsheviks that they confused them, perhaps through a clumsy translation, with the SR Maximalists. The Bolsheviks were an open mass party which rejected terrorism and had hundreds of thousands of members; the Maximalists were a conspiratorial terrorist outfit with a membership of one thousand. But even without the translation problems, many in the Allied camp probably would not have known the difference. They behaved as if a few hundred bohemian bomb-throwers had stumbled into power.

Some were, in hindsight, more sensible: the Tory Arthur Balfour reasoned that hostility to the Soviets would push them into the arms of the Germans, while a pragmatic accommodation with the Soviets might deny the Germans resources and the opportunity to redeploy their armies to the west.[i]

But they were up against others whose grasp on reality was less firm: to Lord Robert Cecil the Soviet regime was ‘outside the pale of civilised Europe’ – and it was treated as such: western diplomacy boycotted Moscow.

“Revolt will be short lived”!

Journalists who were actually in Russia in the first half of 1918 tried to convey the reality. Louise Bryant from the US bore witness to a revolution that was remarkable for its clemency and tolerance, that had mass support and that had already made drastic improvements to the lives of workers, women and peasants. On Stockholm on her way out of Russia in early summer, she met ‘a correspondent from one of our biggest press agencies,’ who immediately described the Bolsheviks as ‘scum.’

I felt myself forced to ask one more question. ‘If you had to choose between the Bolsheviki and the Germans, which would you prefer?’

Without hesitating he replied, ‘The Germans.’

‘Have you ever been in Russia?’

‘No.’[iii]

Why were they so hostile? We can dismiss any notion that their hostility was based on a prophetic fear of Stalinist totalitarianism. On the contrary, they denounced ‘anarchy,’ ‘chaos,’ ‘adventurers,’ etc. The picture of Bolshevism in their heads was quite the opposite of the totalitarian caricature. The real reasons were as follows:

  • Because the Bolsheviks had pulled Russia out of the war and published the secret treaties between Russia and the Allies. This became especially urgent from Spring 1918, as German forces, reinforced by divisions redeployed from the quiet eastern front, made a devastating offensive, and later Turkey seized Baku.
  • Because the revolution had renounced Russia’s debts to the Allied countries and had nationalised foreign-owned industries.
  • Because the Bolsheviks had made a socialist revolution, which might inspire the workers to take power in other parts of the world.

THE ALLIES

From the very start, Allied powers supported the White Guards. On December 2nd the British cabinet voted to give money to the counter-revolutionary armies of Alexeev and Kaledin.[ii] On December 23rd, Britain and France did a ‘carve-up’ of their respective spheres of influence in Russia: Britain’s ‘sphere’ corresponded suspiciously to British money invested in the oil of the Caucasus, France’s to French money in Ukrainian coal and iron.

Early on, the Soviets tried to come to an understanding with the Allies. With the ever-present threat of the German military, even after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, a pragmatic orientation to the Allies made sense. There was cooperation early on, for example in relation to Murmansk – where a British battleship fired a salute to the Red Flag, and an Allied train went to the aid of Red Finns against White Finns.

Some Bolsheviks opposed this cooperation on principle, but Lenin spoke for most when he said, ‘We will accept guns and potatoes from the Anglo-French imperialist bandits.’

The Americans were reluctant to intervene at first. President Wilson believed his democratic peace plan, known as the Fourteen Points, would induce the Russians to rejoin the war, and I read that 30,000 copies of it were pasted up by American agents all over the walls of Petrograd.[iii]

Early on, the Soviet regime planned to have a mass civilian militia instead of a standing army. It was in response to the threat of the German military that the Soviet regime shelved this idea and began, from February, to build the Red Army. The Red Army’s first battles at Pskov and Narva, commemorated annually in Russia and beyond even to the present day, were not against the Whites or the Allies but against the German invasion of late February.

Meanwhile in Ukraine the Red Army fought alongside an Allied force against the Germans. This force was the Czechoslovak Corps or Legion.

A Red commander paid tribute to the Czechs’ fight against the German advance: ‘The revolutionary armies of South Russia [sic] will never forget the brotherly aid which was granted by the Czech Corps in the struggle of the toiling people against the hordes of base imperialism.’[iv]

The Germans were ‘the hordes of base imperialism’! Germano-Bolsheviks indeed.

But the World War was the all-consuming priority. Allied representatives promised aid, if only the Soviets would force their own people back into the trenches. They would not. Allied attitudes hardened.

Russia was meanwhile crawling with Allied military missions, officials and agents, a legacy of the war. By May 1918 this apparatus was busy making links and distributing funds. AJP Taylor writes, ‘they imagined that somewhere in Russia was to be found some group of people who wanted to continue the war.’[iv] 

The wealthy, the officers and the professional classes did want to continue the war. They felt humiliated and threatened by the revolution, believed that the fatherland and/or civilisation were about to perish, and still possessed enough wealth, connections, self-confidence and skills to fight back. These people formed leagues, networks, councils, and linked up with foreign powers. Funds were transferred, plans laid, promises made.

At this point the intelligentsia were deeply conflicted about the revolution, symbolised in the split within the SRs. Looking at where the two sides stood in May 1918, it is difficult to imagine that they had ever been in the one party. The Left SRs held high positions in the Soviets, the fledgling Red Army and the Cheka, while the Right SRs were in the various leagues and councils of the underground counter-revolution, shoulder-to-shoulder with Black Hundreds and Tsarist generals.[v] In that milieu they nursed their grudges over the Constituent Assembly and waited for a chance to strike back.

Thus the Allies saw the Soviets as an enemy, and possessed the assets on the ground to wage a struggle against them.

The original purpose of intervention was to rebuild a front against the Germans in Russia, either with the Reds or over their dead bodies.

It is often denied that the Allies wanted, at this stage, to overthrow the Reds. But this second aim of intervention, the overthrow of the Soviet regime, was neatly encapsulated in the first aim from the very beginning.

If the destruction of the Soviet power was only of secondary concern at this point, that is only because the Allies had contempt for that regime. They believed that the Tooting Popular Front had seized power by accident in a temporary episode. They believed the Soviet regime would collapse sooner or later, with or without their intervention.

The first aim was foremost while the war continued; the second aim became obvious when intervention not only continued but deepened after the war’s end.

But counter-revolution would not have assumed the explosive form it did without the Czech Legion. The time has come to explain what this force was doing in Russia.

CZECH LEGION

On Russian soil in 1918 there were tens of thousands of Czech and Slovakian soldiers. Czechia and Slovakia were oppressed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A Czechoslovak Legion was initially recruited from among immigrants in Russia, then from among prisoners of war. They were induced to fight with the promise of an independent state after the war. By 1917 the Czechs made up a whole Corps, numbering 30,000-70,000 and fighting on the Eastern Front against the Germans and Austrians, under Russian officers and with liaisons and attachés from the Allied powers.

A Czechoslovak scout

The Czechs[vi] did not join in the Russian Revolution. While the Russian army disintegrated, the Czechoslovak Legion remained cohesive. The Russian soldier deserted and went home to his land. The Czech had no home. He was fighting against Germany and Austria to secure one, and he was determined to carry on the fight.  

Virtually all other military forces, both White and Red, were either in the final stages of collapse or just coming into being. In the Legion, then, the Allies possessed a unique asset that could really test the strength of Soviet power: a military force that was large, cohesive and present.

Various telegrams and other communications between British agents on the ground and their superiors in London are referred to in the postscript which Peter Sedgwick has added to Victor Serge’s book Year One of the Russian Revolution, published by Haymarket Books, 2015. Taken together they show the outlines of the Allied plans, which had four main elements:

  • A revolt of the Czech Legion against Soviet power, possibly linking up with the White warlord Semyonov, who was raiding across the border from China.[v]
  • Several central Russian towns to be seized by officers, Black Hundreds, Right SRs etc, designed to encircle Moscow.
  • These Czechs and White Guards to link up with the British, French and US forces at Archangel’sk, in the far north of Russia.
  • Another element of the plan was outlined by Balfour, previously a critic of intervention: the Czechs could be used to trigger a conflict, drawing in Japan and the US who had been reluctant up to that point. ‘If we act, the Japanese will; if the Japanese do, the United States will.’[vi]

General Lavergne of the French mission in Russia, after explaining this plan to a colleague, added, ‘But I shall feel guilty because, if our plan succeeds, the famine in Russia will be terrible.’ The plan did not succeed entirely, but as we will see the resulting famine was indeed terrible, probably beyond Lavergne’s ability to comprehend.

The French had a second misgiving about the plan: they would rather have the Czechs on the Western Front. But these were misgivings, reservations, not opposition. Simply put, Allied agents ‘had been plotting for [a Czechoslovak revolt] since… late 1917.’[vii]

The Czechs themselves, for the most part, wanted to get out of Russia and to fight on the Western Front. Both the Tsar and Kerensky had refused to let them go. The Reds, however, made a sincere effort to grant this wish. At first there was no ill-feeling between the Reds and the Czechs; the Czech rank-and-file were mostly republican or social-democratic in their sympathies. Czech leader Masaryk had ignored appeals from Alexeev to join the White Guards. The Reds allowed them to travel with 168 rifles and one machine-gun per carriage – this shows trust, not draconian suspicion (and on top of this, the Czechs had concealed weapons).

But the Soviets were bedevilled by the challenges of transporting tens of thousands of soldiers out of a vast, hungry, war-torn territory. First it was decided – by the Reds and the Allies – that the Czechs were to circumnavigate the globe via North America to get from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. So the Soviets began to move the Czechs from European Russia to the Pacific Ocean. But on April 4th Japan (a member of the Allies) made a first tentative landing at Vladivostok in the far east, which was the Czechs’ destination. Later in the year the Japanese would occupy eastern Siberia with an army of tens of thousands, so Moscow’s fear that the landing was part of a full-scale invasion was reasonable. This fear meant that the Czechs were left stranded for a week, strung out in detachments all along the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Volga to Vladivostok. Tension was rising: on April 14th a Czech congress demanded more weapons, plus control over their locomotives. 

Czechs on the railways

Meanwhile it was far from pleasant for the Czechs to be high and dry at railway stations spread across the whole breadth of revolutionary Russia. Raids by White warlords caused further delays, and these delays bred distrust. Local soviets were sometimes truculent, even hostile. The Czechs, egged on by SRs and Allied agents, suspected that the Soviets were working hand-in-hand with the Germans and were somehow plotting to hand them over. The Soviets, on their side, suspected that the Czechs might join the White-Allied cause.

Czech fears were delusional in that there were no German soldiers within thousands of kilometres of even the westernmost of the Czech detachments. But millions of people were moving across Russia at that moment in the opposite direction to the Czechs, prisoners of war from the German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, released and being borne home (Among them was Josip Broz who would later be known as Tito, Bela Kun who would lead the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the writer Jaroslav Hašek). The Czechs identified these former POWs as proxy Germans, as a threat. Even if they weren’t a threat, they were still a nuisance to the Czechs, burdening the railway system and causing further delays. The tragedy is that they were mostly subject peoples of Austria, like the Czechs, and like the Czechs all they wanted to do was go home – and, no doubt, like the Czechs they were frustrated with the state of the railways and the often-squalid and chaotic conditions in Russia.

In short, there was a massive armed-to-the-teeth traffic jam on the railways, and no solution in sight. An alternative plan to move half of the Czechs north and ship them out of Archangel’sk was agreed by the Allies and the Soviets. But the Czechs were angered by this plan, and further frustrated by another week-long delay caused by White attacks.

On May 14th, Czechs going east and Hungarians going west met at a railway station in the Ural town of Chelyabinsk. In that same town at that moment a Czech congress was taking place, discussing how to get out of Russia.

At first the Czechs and Hungarians were friendly enough; the Czechs shared rations. Then an argument broke out, and a Hungarian threw a scrap of iron at a group of Czechs. Someone fell – scholars are not sure if it was a fatality or an injury. Czechs lynched the Hungarian.

The Chelyabinsk town soviet investigated the murder and arrested several Czechs for questioning. The Czechs were furious. They sent two battalions into town, disarmed the Red Guards, seized the arsenal and freed their comrades.

The situation in Chelyabinsk was actually settled by negotiations. But by then word of it had got out, and there was no going back. ‘To the Bolsheviks,’ says Silverlight, ‘the Chelyabinsk incident must have looked like unprovoked aggression.’ Trotsky, the Commissar for War, ordered the arrest and disarming of the entire Czechoslovak Corps.

I’ve mentioned that there was a conference going on in Chelyabinsk during all this drama. Allied agents met with the leaders of the Czech Legion at this conference and on May 23rd the Czechs agreed to join an all-out armed struggle against the Soviets. Two days later, on May 25th, Trotsky ordered that the Czechs not just be disarmed, but that any armed Czechs be shot on the spot.

In some accounts I’ve read, all the above is summarised very quickly, and the impression is given that Trotsky’s second, more severe order to disarm the Czechs was the inciting incident.

While Trotsky issued his orders, violence was flaring up in half a dozen places along the Trans-Siberian Railway. In town after town, the Czechs drove out Soviet power. There were 15,000 Czechs in Vladivostok – who were still there because the Allies had, through negligence or design, failed to provide ships to get them out. On June 25th these Czechs seized the town and linked up with the Allied naval forces which had been gradually massing in the harbour all year. By this stage they were fully committed to all-out war.

Silverlight attributes this all to a string of misunderstandings. This is a common trope. I am less charitable. It seems clear to me, beneath the usual plausible deniability, that the British and French governments each played a role in using the Czechs to trigger a war. French policy was more reluctant (they wanted the Czechs on French soil to defend Paris, on which the Germans were advancing) but they were also more active in funding Russian counter-revolutionary groups. It’s difficult to see how things could have gone down the way they did without the Allies’ utterly deluded project of rebuilding a front against Germany.

The Czechs’ perspective seems to have been that the Bolshevik adventure would collapse and a new Eastern Front for World War One would take shape in Russia. What they ended up doing was setting up a new Eastern Front within the Russian Civil War. Their tragedy is that all they wanted to do was get the hell out, but in their impatience they triggered a war from which they would struggle to extricate themselves for two more years.

The plans of Britain and France were partly frustrated. Their forces in the Arctic would have been too little, too late to help the Czechs or the Whites. That would be if the Czechs had consented to march north, which they did not. The plan for White-Guard risings fell short by a long way, as we will see in the next post. In short, the French and British conspiracy came off about as well as any plan of such ambition and scale could be expected to, in the confusion and vast distances of revolutionary Russia. Also, they spectacularly underestimated the stability and social base of the Soviet regime.

But that last point was not at all obvious in the Spring and Summer of 1918. The result of all these plans was an earthquake under the feet of Soviet power. The Czech Revolt presented an opportunity for all the organisations of counter-revolutionaries and many of the Cossack hosts to rise up. ‘Revolt flared along the powder trail of the [Czech Legion’s] scattered elements, stretching over 4900 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway.’[viii]Moscow was cut off from a vast and rich territory, from tens of millions of workers and peasants.

Another detail from Map 3 of the series. Moscow and Soviet territory are in the north-west corner. Note what a vast expanse of territory they don’t hold. The Green men represent Allied-oriented soldiers – Czechoslovaks, for the most part, stretched out across the Trans-Siberian from The Middle Volga all the way to Lake Baikal. The French flag represents the French officers who staffed the Legion – they were formally part of the French Army. The yellow flag surrounded by outward-thrusting yellow arrows is marked ‘Komuch’. The sinuous red arrow may represent the workers of Ekaterinburg, Troitsk and Verkhne-Uralsk in their heroic march under Blyukher (I’m not sure if the geography is right so it might represent something else). The execution of the royal family is marked by an X over the crown. See the green-and-white Siberian flag raised at Omsk. All the yellow pockets represent the Right SRs – the ones in the far east are marked “SR detachment” and “People’s Army.”

KOMUCH

Under the wing of the Czechs, new White governments sprouted like mushrooms after rain. They expanded, shrank, absorbed one another peacefully or at gunpoint.

The most interesting of the new governments was led by the Right SRs. In early June Czechs were passing through Samara on the Volga on their way east. Local Right SR party members convinced the Czechs to stay and to help them seize power. The Czechs agreed. On June 9th at dawn they overthrew Soviet power in Samara. That evening the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly was set up. The name, abbreviated as Komuch, claimed the dubious electoral mandate which we looked at in Part 3.

Komuch was later referred to by Soviet historians as part of the Democratic Counter-Revolution. It is tempting to put scare quotes around the word ‘Democratic’ there; in the formal sense of being elected, the rule of law, democratic freedoms, etc, Komuch was no more ‘democratic’ than any other force operating in the war-torn Russia of 1918. The Constituent Assembly was in its name, but it never got a quorum of deputies together in one place. According to a report from a Komuch organ, ‘At Simbirsk, most of the Red Army soldiers captured in the town were shot. There was a real epidemic of lynchings.’ In August Komuch set up its own repressive police organ to parallel Moscow’s Cheka.

But the term ‘Democratic Counter-Revolution’ does not refer to democratic forms. It refers to property. Komuch was bourgeois-democratic in the classical sense that it was anti-landlord but pro-capitalist. It did not attempt to give the landlords back their land, but it ended workers’ power in the factories and brought back the private owners.

Cathedral in Samara, some time around 1918

FAILURES OF THE RED ARMY

How was the new Red Army coping with all this?

When the Czechoslovak Legion revolted in the east, the Red Army was a thousand-plus miles away and facing in the other direction. As Mawdsley says, ‘the new army was pointed backwards.’[ix] Along with the simultaneous Cossack Revolt in the South, the Czech Revolt marked the real start of the Civil War. It should be obvious how little the Red side expected or prepared for, much less planned or wanted, that war. The Red Army had designated the Volga and the Urals as ‘Internal’ not ‘Border’ regions. So little did the Soviet government anticipate civil war in the east that their contingency plan in the event of German invasion, as we have mentioned, was to retreat east and form an ‘Uralo-Kuznets Republic’ in the Urals and Siberia. That was obviously off the agenda now.

Meanwhile in the Urals and along the middle third of the great arc of the Volga, local Soviets surrendered or fled without a fight. Where the Red Guards tried to fight back, they suffered humiliating defeats. Trotsky held out hope, manifested in alternating dire threats and magnanimous appeals, carrots and sticks, right up until November, that the Czechs could be split along class lines like the Don Cossacks in January 1918. It was not to be.

Trotsky, Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs

Irregular ‘detachments’ of workers, thrown together from whatever volunteers presented themselves, had been sufficient in the early months after the October Revolution. But now full-scale civil war had broken out. To win, the Reds needed a real army. This was something they did not have. Facing the Czechs near Chelyabinsk, for example, was a force of 1,000 armed Red Guards, made up of thirteen local detachments numbering from nine members to 570, each with its own commander, each pretending it was autonomous.

By the river Kyshtyma, Red Guards heard a rumour that the enemy were approaching their home villages; whole units deserted the frontline to defend their own homes.

Nearby, the Seventh Ural Regiment was absent from its positions. The commander reported: ‘The men wanted to get themselves dry and have a sleep; they decided to go off only for half an hour but are still sleeping; I can’t do any more.’[x]

KOMUCH IN POWER

Faced with this kind of feeble resistance, or even sometimes no resistance at all, the Czechs took over the Middle Volga region. Komuch would set up shop in each locality before the dust had settled. French officers would start to appear in great numbers. Students and Russian officers would go on a reign of terror against local workers, and Komuch would make half-hearted and impotent appeals for the killing to stop.

According to the Czechoslovak nationalist leader Beneš, ‘The Czechoslovak army on principle shoot every Czech found fighting with the Red Guards and captured by them, for instance at Penza, Samara, Omsk etc (200 at Samara).’[xi]

Czech Legion members, later in 1918

Komuch would restore the bosses to their factories and end fixed grain prices. On the other hand it would confirm the peasants in the ownership of the land. It flew red flags over public buildings and held peasants’ conferences. It formed a military force called the People’s Army. It even attempted to set up a Soviet – which was hastily disbanded after it passed a Bolshevik resolution!

At its height, this state had twelve million people in its territory. It held rich land, key transport links and important cities such as the capital, Samara. It included at its furthest reaches the factory town of Izhevsk. The munitions workers there, who were loyal to the Right SRs, rose on their own initiative to join Komuch – a unique episode of an armed workers’ revolt against rather than for the Soviets. ‘The Samara Komuch never paid much attention to distant Izhevsk.’[xii] But the Izhevsk workers formed a cohesive unit in successive White armies.[xiii]

Mawdsley asks, ‘Did the [Izhevsk] rising foreshadow what would have happened had the People’s Army succeeded in striking west?’ There are good reasons to doubt it. It is striking that in a territory embracing 12 million people, there was only one Izhevsk.

The wealthy classes owed a lot to Komuch, but they did not repay it with loyalty. The well-off citizens were happy to carry out terror in the rear, but in general did not deign to go anywhere near the frontline. One business owner summed up the attitude of the wealthy to the struggle between Komuch and the Reds: ‘When two dogs are fighting, a third shouldn’t join in.’ In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the Right SRswere on the same canine level as the Bolsheviks.

Recall Lenin’s anxious remark as he contemplated the Komuch territory on a map: ‘I know the Volga countryside well. There are some tough kulaks there.’ He was born and raised in Simbirsk, which fell to Komuch on July 22nd. We can safely assume that the Middle Volga kulaks (the relatively rich peasants) were happy to be out of the grip of Soviet power; now they could sell their grain at whatever price they liked, or indeed not sell it at all. But the poor and middle peasants showed no enthusiasm for the new regime. The Right SRs had received a very impressive vote in this region in the Constituent Assembly elections, but in the end that didn’t translate to very much.

Komuch attempted to recruit 50,000 soldiers from the rural population, but only managed 10,000-15,000. After this failure 30,000 were conscripted. There was no time to train them up, and arms were in short supply, so a large part of the People’s Army was shut up in barracks. There were small, capable detachments under a talented and popular commander, a Russian officer of the Czech Legion named VO Kappel. With considerable Czech assistance, these detachments took town after town. But they were always on an exhausting itinerary, being shuttled up and down the Volga fighting the Reds in one place after another.

In general, as we have seen, workers were hostile to Komuch. For every Izhevsk, there were several stories of heroism on the part of Red-aligned workers. The people of Ekaterinburg, Verkhne-Uralsk and Troitsk, miners and factory workers, formed a partisan army to oppose the Czechs. This army consisted of 10,000 fighters, followed by civilians in carts with their samovars and household linen. Surrounded, they had to fight their way over mountain ridges and across rivers, covering 1,000 miles in fifty days. Arms were scarce; many fought with pikes and clubs and even old weapons from museums. They manufactured their own bullets wherever they could find equipment. At around the same time, a similar Anabasis was taking place in the South, where the Taman Red Army escaped from the Kuban Cossacks.

Vasily Blyukher, leader of the 10,000-strong partisan army of Ekaterinburg, Troitsk and Verkhne-Uralsk

Heroism by itself was not sufficient to win this war. But it mattered. When Service writes that the October Revolution was basically a matter of Trotsky firing up a bunch of ‘disgruntled’ soldiers, and when Ulam claims that the Bolsheviks deliberately fomented chaos in order to step into a power vacuum, and when a documentary on the Russian Revolution gives no reason for its success except ‘the skilful use of black propaganda,’[xiv] they are wide of the mark. The revolution was not some trick played behind the backs of the people. It would not have survived without the sincere enthusiasm of millions. The heroic marches in the Urals and the Kuban were of minor military significance in themselves. But they were evidence of that enthusiasm and spirit of self-sacrifice, which would prove decisive over the next few years.

SAMARA AND OMSK

While Komuch fought with the Reds to the west, it was waging a peaceful but bitter struggle with a rival White government that had sprung up to its east: the Provisional Siberian Government.

The vast expanse of Siberia was populated by Russian settlers and a wide range of indigenous peoples. Class distinctions were not so stark here as elsewhere, and the Communist Party had received only 10% of the Constituent Assembly votes – as against 25% nationally. Three-quarters of Siberian votes had gone to the SRs. Since then, ‘hamfisted’ attacks on the farmers’ co-operatives had damaged the popularity of the Soviets. There were solid Red Guard units in Siberia – but they were away beyond Lake Baikal far to the east, battling the warlords Semyonov and Ungern. Meanwhile there were several Cossack hosts ready to kick off rebellion at any moment – the Siberian Host alone numbered 170,000 – and an underground White network of 8,000 officers, one-third of them concentrated in the city of Omsk.

When the Czech revolt took place, all this dry kindling went up in flames. The Cossacks and the officers rose up. Here as on the Volga, Czech assistance was key; there was only one city (Tomsk) which the Siberian Whites captured without their assistance. But Soviet power was wiped off the map of Siberia. Workers took to the forests and formed the nuclei that would later become Red partisan armies.

From the chaos emerged a new power, centred on the city of Omsk: the Provisional Siberian Government, founded at the end of May.[xv] This government flew a white-and-green Siberian flag – white for snow and green for the coniferous trees of the taiga. This was a nod to a tradition of Siberian regionalism, which The Provisional Siberian Government (henceforth ‘Omsk’ for short) managed to bring on board, albeit in a way that was only ‘skin-deep.’[xvi] It was a stern conservative regime which represented the rifles and sabres of Tsarist military remnants rather than any popular mandate, even a contrived one.

The Iron Bridge, Omsk

In Siberia the SRs were even more popular than on the Volga. But in Siberia, even more so than on the Volga, this support base punched below its weight. This proved how passive and confused that vote was. There was an elected Siberian Regional Duma, which Komuch and the SRs attempted to convene, but the Omsk Government shut it down. This was one of many significant clashes between Komuch and Omsk.  

Komuch was not the only example of the Democratic Counter-Revolution. At this point it’s worth getting ahead of ourselves chronologically to look at the trajectory of some of the other governments in a similar mould to Komuch. The British in Persia linked up after the fact with an uprising in the Transcaspian region on 11-12 July. The Reds were chased out, and a Transcaspian Provisional Government led by SRs and Mensheviks ruled there until January when it was replaced by the ‘far more conservative’ Committee of Social Salvation. In July 1919 this government merged with the White regime of General Denikin in the south of Russia. In short, this Central Asian equivalent of Komuch was cannibalised by the reactionary generals.

The snows of North Russia saw the same political developments as the sands of Central Asia, only at a faster pace. On August 2nd the British forces landed at Archangel’sk. On the same day, the Archangel’sk Soviet was overthrown in a military coup, and the Supreme Administration of North Russia came to power. This was staffed by Right SRs and led by Chaikovskii of the Popular Socialist party. On September 6th the local military forces, supported by the Allies, overthrew this ‘moderate socialist’ government. Chaikovskii was first deposed, then brought tentatively back into the fold, then exiled.

Smele writes:

On the day of Chaikovskii’s departure, 1 January 1919, there duly arrived at Archangel’sk General EK Miller, who was to become military governor of the region for the remainder of the Civil War in the North. They must have passed each other in the harbour; socialist democracy was leaving Russia as White militarism disembarked.[xvii]

The ‘Democratic Counter-Revolution’ had suffered the same fate in Central Asia and in the Arctic Circle: a government of ‘moderate socialists’ had come to power with the help of right-wing authoritarian officers and Allied interventionists, only to realise sooner or later that it existed on their sufferance, that it had no social base of its own, that in the polarised conditions of civil war the fate of ‘moderates’ could not be a happy one.

Would things turn out the same way for Komuch?

Later we will trace a similar conflict between ‘moderate socialists’ and militarism in the relationship between Komuch and Omsk. But at the height of the revolt in Siberia, in July, seismic events occurred behind Red lines, and these will be the focus of the next post.

Sorry the footnotes are a mess. I’ll sort them out when I get a chance. Though they are in two different formats, it should still be possible to follow up any quotes or facts.

[i] Robert Silverlight, The Victors’ Dilemma: Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, p 8-9

[ii]Silverlight, 10

[iii]Silverlight, 19

[iv]Silverlight, p 33

[v]Silverlight, p 35

[vi]Silverlight, p 36

[i] Tsederbaum (not Zederblaum) was actually the name of Lenin’s former comrade, now opponent, Julius Martov of the Menshevik-Internationalist faction.

[ii] Ransome, Arthur. The Truth About Russia. 1918. https://www.marxists.org/history/archive/ransome/1918/truth-russia.htm

[iii] Bryant, Louise, Six Red Months…, Chapter XXXI. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bryant/works/russia/ch31.htm

[iv] Taylor, AJP. The First World War…, p 205

[v] Dr Zhivago imagines that, at the fictional battle of Yuriatin, the Red and White commanders are former neighbours and revolutionary comrades from Moscow. While I have questions about the novel’s timeline, I think this detail is plausible enough.

[vi] It is fair to refer to them as Czechs since only around one in ten were Slovaks.

[vii] Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 68

[viii] Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, 64

[ix] Mawdsley, 82

[x] Serge, Year One, 311

[xi] Serge, 496

[xii] Mawdsley, 90

[xiii] Khvostov, The Russian Civil War – The White Guards, p 46. They addressed one another as ‘comrade’ and attacked to the music of accordions. They maintained their cohesion right to the end of 1920, after which many settled on farms in Manchuria.

[xiv] See (or don’t!) Service, Robert, Trotsky: A Biography, Belknap Press, 2009, Ulam, Adam B, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, 1965, The Russian Revolution (documentary film), Dir. Cal Seville, 2017

[xv] For the first month of its life it bore the name ‘Western Siberian Commissariat’

[xvi] Smele, 70

[xvii] Smele, 72