Red Army

17: Anarchy in the Ukraine

This episode tells how the warlord Grigoriev in Ukraine led a bloody revolt against the Soviet power. The episode will then describe his fatal showdown with the anarchist Nestor Makhno.

‘Anarchy’ means ‘without rulers,’ not ‘without order’ or ‘without laws.’ Still the word is often used to signify chaos. Here we can sidestep the controversy, because the word applies in both senses to Ukraine in 1919. The title of this post refers to the Anarchist army which operated in Ukraine at this time, ‘a singing army which moved in carts – a machine-gun and an accordion in each cart – under black banners.’[i] But it also refers to the state of chaos and violence which prevailed in many parts of the country and under flags of all colours – not just black. By May, ‘villages turned in on themselves’ for protection, ‘while armed bands roamed the countryside, led by warlords.’[ii]

Nikolai Grigoriev, aka Nikifor Hrihoriiv, aka Nychypir Servetnyk. His identities were as unstable as his loyalties.

Grigoriev in Odesa

When last this series covered events in the great port city of Odesa, it was in a state of utter chaos with the evacuation of Allied interventionists. Reds were already marching in.

A Red commander reported to Moscow that the city had been taken ‘exclusively’ by the forces of the charismatic partisan leader Nikifor Grigoriev. These fighters had shown ‘revolutionary stamina’ and Grigoriev had led from the front: he had two horses shot from under him, and bullet holes in his uniform. But on the day before the fall of Odesa he was taking a well-earned break: he spent the day drinking from a bucket of wine and listening to the regimental band.[iii]

A Red demonstration in Odesa, April 1919

Odesa was a wealthy city, and in 1919 its warehouses were bursting with the goods and equipment which the Allies had left behind in the chaos of their evacuation. Grigoriev made himself a kingly giver of gifts in relation to all this loot – for example, 30,000 rifles were apparently sent to the villages of the Kherson region. There is also a story that he looted hundreds of kilograms of gold from the Odesa State Bank.[iv]

The local Communists – those who had fraternised with the French in the cafés – celebrated the liberation. But very soon the city’s revolutionary committee was addressing complaints to the warlord about his claiming of the loot.

‘… I occupied Odessa,’ he later told Makhno, ‘from where the Jewish Revolutionary Committee appeared. They came to my headquarters … They began to demand that [I obey them], that the lads stop beating the Jews. And you know, people on the campaign were torn, worn out, and there are a lot of Jewish speculators in the city […] I took the city, therefore, it is mine, and then the Revolutionary Committee crawled out of the underground and stood in my way, talking about submission. When I attacked, there wasn’t a single member of the Revolutionary Committee with me, but now, you see, they decided to be the boss.’

He was just boasting. But the eyes of the Soviet government were not blind to the problems Grigoriev might present. He had switched sides three times already. He gave lip-service to communism but anti-Semitic slogans were current among his supporters. Yet he had driven the Allied interventionists right out of Ukraine. The Soviet government awarded him the Order of the Red Banner for this triumph.

After ten days in Odesa, local communists were already demanding that Grigoriev be arrested. A bloody clash appeared inevitable. But Grigoriev and his forces withdrew to the villages near Kropvynitsi (then known as Elizavetgrad). To give you a sense of the distance, today that’s a five-hour drive inland.

Grigoriev in Budapest?

As summer approached, the Soviet laid plans to have Grigoriev carry the banner of the October Revolution to the very heart of Europe. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was isolated and under attack. Grigoriev’s force was, on paper, a short distance from Hungary: just charge right through Transnistria and Romania (Or through Poland and Slovakia), and boom, there you are. But the problems are so obvious that one is forced to wonder what the hell the Soviet leaders were thinking. Grigoriev was not exactly the ideal ambassador for communism, and once he’d seized Budapest he might well change sides again. He was a partisan leader, not a rounded-out military genius, and such an ambitious attack was likely beyond his capabilities. Maybe the Soviet government was desperate (We have to help the Hungarian comrades, no matter the cost or the risks!) or maybe they were cynical (this might keep Grigoriev out of trouble – and with any luck he won’t come back alive) or maybe some mixture of the two was at work. At the very least Grigoriev might divert Romanian forces and take the pressure off Soviet Hungary.

Note Soviet Hungary, and the dark arrow linking west Ukraine to it.

For better or for worse, probably for better, it never happened. Grigoriev switched sides again. He had turned from Rada to Hetman and back again, before turning to the Reds. Now he struck out on his own, backed by tens of thousands of armed soldiers and by a large part of the Ukrainian farming classes.

Grigoriev in Revolt

When is an ataman officially in revolt? When does he cross the line? He always has plausible deniability, because he is not fully in control of his forces. Many Communists, such as Antonov-Ovseenko, were in denial about his revolt at first.

By his own account, his revolt developed organically as a response to overbearing communists: ‘My troops could not stand it and began to beat the [Cheka] themselves and chase the commissars. All my statements to Rakovsky and Antonov ended only with the dispatch of commissars. [Eventually] I just kicked them out the door.’

From the communists’ perspective, Grigoriev had been operating as a law unto himself for too long. Soviet government officials were allowed no authority on his territory, and many communists were quietly murdered. One commissar ordered to go to strike a deal with Grigoriev refused, citing poor health. But it is obvious the commissar was in fear for his life, with good reason.

On May 1^st a Grigoriev armoured train celebrated International Workers’ Day by firing explosive shells into Kropvynitsi. Over the next week, anti-Jewish and anti-communist pogroms swept through the local area. On May 7^th a Red commander threatened to attack Grigoriev if the pogroms did not stop. On the same day several Chekists boarded Grigoriev’s armoured train and tried to arrest him. They were themselves captured and later shot.

On May 8^th (one month after literally riding into Odesa on a white horse), Grigoriev published a manifesto titled the ‘First Universal.’ It was no longer possible to doubt his intentions.

It was a forceful appeal to the Ukrainian farmer. It began by recounting the horrors of the Great War and German occupation before moving on to those of the Civil War. It blames the ‘Muscovites’ and those ‘from the land where Christ was crucified.’

‘Those who promise you a bright future exploit you! They fight you with weapons in their hands, take your bread, requisition your cattle and assure you that all this is for the benefit of the people. Hard-working, holy man of God! Look at your calloused hands, look: all around – untruth, lies and insults […] You are the Feeder of the World, but you are a slave.’

He called for soviets but without communists, along with representative bodies where the majority of seats would be reserved for Ukrainians. He demanded that the Ukrainian Soviet government ‘leave us’ and summoned each village to send fighters to Kyiv and to Kharkiv – with weapons, and if there were no weapons to hand, with pitchforks.

By May 10^th there was no longer any pretense or hesitation. Grigoriev’s army, which was between 16,000 and 20,000-strong, had risen up against Soviet Ukraine, with armed columns speeding out in all directions from Kropyvnitsi.

What did this revolt look like? A Grigorievite column would ride into town by horse or by train, or a Red garrison would declare for Grigoriev; usually a combination of the two – for example at Kremenchug, Chigirin, Zolotonosha and Cherkasy. In Pavlograd the Red Army soldiers revolted of their own accord. In Dnipro anarchists and sailors went over to Grigoriev and handed him the city. In all, about 8,000 Red Army soldiers went over to Grigoriev.

Soviet officials would be shot. Jews would be robbed, violated, killed. Prisons would be opened. In Kropyvnitsi, epicentre of the revolt, we see all of the above on May 15^th: a pogrom which killed 3-4,000 Jews and several hundred Russians. Some of the murderers were those who had deserted from the Red Army. In other towns and villages, we see hundreds killed here, thousands killed there. According to Savchenko: ‘The commanders of the Grigorievites in Cherkassy urged each insurgent to kill at least 15 Jews. An eyewitness writes: “There is no street in Cherkassy where families have not been killed. Russians and Jews were dying… indiscriminately.”’

Dnipro was briefly recaptured by the Reds, and they executed one out of every ten ten of the captured Grigorievites. But in short order the other nine out of ten revolted in prison, and again took over the city.

What was the scope of the revolt? The Dnipro River runs through the heart of Ukraine, and within two weeks the Grigorievites had taken over the middle third of that river. Roughly speaking, their power stretched 100-200km wide to the west side of the river and 50-100km to the east, in places much further. At their furthest advance, they came within 80km of Kyiv and 20 of Poltava.

There was a considerable crossover between Grigoriev’s base and Makhno’s, and as we have seen some anarchists joined the revolt. But Makhno resisted any pressure to join Grigoriev, and stayed with the Red Army, though he denounced the latter as ‘political charlatans’ and condemned the ‘feud for power’ between the two.

Titled ‘The End of the Adventure,’ this cartoon shows Grigoriev watering ‘Hetmanism’ (Warlordism) with ‘Innocent Blood’

The Ukrainian Soviet Government

The Ukrainian Soviet government under Yuri Pyatakov, and even its more moderate successor under Christian Rakovsky, had in many ways sown the seeds of the Grigoriev revolt. There were trigger-happy Chekists gunning down innocent people, Red Army units looting villages, and there was the same grain requisitioning that had angered the Russian peasants. Pushing Ukraine over the edge were the same ultra-left policies on the land and the national question which had done so much damage in Latvia. The ‘First Universal’ complained about land nationalisation directly, with a complaint about the farmers being forced into a ‘commune.’

In an aside, it is customary at this point to lob a casual accusation that the Communists refused to cooperate with other parties, specifically the Borotbisti, who were the Ukrainian Left SRs. But Grigoriev himself was a Borotbist. His membership in the party was symptomatic of the unstable streak that was part of the Left SR DNA. It’s hardly fair to criticise the Communists for cooperating with a Borotbist and in the same breath to criticise them for not cooperating with the Borotbisti.[v]

It is tempting to present Grigoriev as a monster and to invite ridicule of his changing loyalties. Yes, as Golynkov says, he was politically illiterate and unprincipled.[vi] But a more nuanced interpretation comes from Timkov: that Grigoriev was a ‘hostage’ to his large and varied support base. ‘[I]n order to preserve his power, the chieftain had to wade into the chaos of the opinions and wishes of the peasant masses. You can say that he became their hostage.’[vii] He was, says Smele, ‘a complex and possibly unbalanced character’ and an ‘outrageous freebooter,’ but on the other hand he was ‘genuinely popular.’[viii]

His vacillations are more understandable as the vacillations of a large mass of people, not of one individual. And the wild character of these twists and turns – the turn from Rada to Hetman and back again, from Rada to Reds, from Reds to vicious pogroms – can be better understood as the throes of a mass of people in severe pain.

And we can’t blame all this pain on the mistakes of Soviet Ukraine. The Allies, the Whites, the Germans, the Rada and the Poles had all played their part as well. Further, regardless of specific mistakes or crimes by this or that force, the Grigoriev revolt was an outbreak of rage against the intolerable burdens which the Civil War had placed on rural communities in Ukraine. Partisan armies would have revolted against whoever was in charge, and later did revolt en masse against the Whites.

The Grigoriev revolt was a severe trial for the Ukrainian Red Army. As we have seen, this army was in a shambolic state. But a force of about 20,000 Ukrainians and 10,000 Russians was quickly assembled. Officials, communist youth members and members of the Jewish Socialist Bund all volunteered.

The revolt had spread like flames on petrol, but within a few weeks it had burned itself out. On May 14^th large Red forces set out from Odesa, Kyiv and Poltava. Grigoriev’s all-out advance in all directions, meanwhile, was faltering. It seemed early on that his columns were advancing and conquering at lightning speed. In fact they were dispersing in all directions and disintegrating in the vast spaces of Ukraine. One by one the Red Army re-conquered the cities Grigoriev had taken, and in a series of battles in late May he lost 8,000 killed and wounded.

Grigoriev’s army disintegrated. The 3,000 who remained loyal switched to guerrilla warfare west of the Dnipro. While the Reds could declare complete victory, other local warlords had risen up in other parts of Ukraine, and Grigoriev could still raid towns, hold up trains, destroy railways.

A poster warning peasants not to shelter partisans in their villages

The Whites Attack

Meanwhile the Whites had been well-positioned in the Donbass region, and in late May they had seized their moment. The White general Mai-Maevsky himself had warned his men not to underestimate Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, the army on carts under the black flag of anarchism. Their partisan tactics had run rings around the Germans and the Whites. But in late May Mai-Maevsky’s forces struck deep into Ukraine. The Whites simply cut through the Anarchists. The Black Army fled, like Grigoriev, to the western fringes of Ukraine. They had been reduced to 4,000 fighters.

Arshinov, an anarchist writing in 1923, presents this move as a stubborn fighting retreat.[ix] He claims that the Reds, by contrast, gave up Ukraine to the Whites without any fight-back at all. The first claim is probably an exaggeration, and the second is completely untrue. Trotsky’s armoured train rolled into the Mikolayiv-Kherson region (Trotsky’s own home turf where his dad still had a farm) and there tried to make a stand; Kharkiv was turned into a fortress; Iona Yakir led several divisions on one of those ‘Long Marches’ which so characterized the Civil War – a 300-mile fighting retreat which succeeded in preserving large forces from destruction.

The failure of Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine requires explanation. The Black Army was a partisan army, its military doctrine an extension of its political philosophy. There was no contradiction between Mai-Maevsky’s appreciation of its strengths and the ease with which the same general scattered it. Its strength lay in raids and mobility; it was utterly incapable of holding a line against a determined advance. At the very least this defeat represented a political and military failure for the Anarchists. For Moscow, it was nothing less than treachery, and Makhno was outlawed.

Warlords in Exile

West Ukraine was getting crowded with the remnants of defeated armies. The Anarchists were pursued there by the General Shkuro, a cunning and merciless Kuban Cossack whose personal bodyguard were known as the ‘Wolf Hundred.’

To survive the onslaught of the White Wolves, the Anarchists made a tactical alliance with the Rada forces of Semyon Petlyura who, like themselves and Grigoriev, had ended up west of the Dnipro. The alliance was short-lived. Arshinov says the Ukrainian Nationalists soon betrayed them, a development which all parties had anticipated.

Next Grigoriev came knocking on Makhno’s door. Though Makhno had previously condemned Grigoriev and his pogroms, he agreed to cooperate pending an investigation. They fought side-by-side for three weeks against the Reds.

Grigoriev, Makhno and other Ukrainian partisans – reportedly 20,000 in all[x] – gathered for a great congress on July 27^th in a village near Oleksandriya. The supposed aim of this peasant congress was to unite an anti-Bolshevik army.

A *tachanka* (machinegun cart) in a Moscow museum. Today’s cover image shows a Soviet-era monument in the shape of a *tachanka*

There are different versions of what happened next, which you can follow up and tease out in the sources. Here is my composite sketch:

The Grigoriev forces were camped outside the village, but the village itself was occupied by Makhno’s forces, the lanes dominated by his tachankas, machine-gun carts.

At the congress, the Makhnovist Chubenko stood up at the podium and denounced Grigoriev as a murderer of Jews and a hireling of the Whites. Grigoriev denied the charges and reached for one of his Mauser semi-automatic pistols. But he realized he was surrounded by armed anarchists. He placed the Mauser in the back of his boot and fled from the scene, intending to make an appeal to the village council. But he found Makhno and his lieutenants waiting for him at the house ofthe village council. Chubenko arrived and a heated argument began.

Some days before, the anarchists had captured some White officers who had letters addressed to Grigoriev. It was obvious from the letters that the ataman was planning to join with Denikin. Remember I mentioned Iona Yakir and his fighting retreat across Ukraine? It appears Shkuro and Grigoriev were planning together to catch and destroy the retreating Reds. The anarchists shot the captured White officers and kept this intel to themselves, for the time being. Now, at the congress of July 27th, they revealed it before 20,000 partisans.

Chubenko told the Soviet security forces later:

‘Grigoryev began to deny it, and I answered him: “And who and to whom did the officers whom Makhno shot come?”

‘As soon as I said this, Grigoriev grabbed the revolver, but I, being ready, shot point-blank at him.’

Grigoriev called to Makhno by his nickname: “Oh, father, father!”

‘Makhno shouted: “Beat the ataman!”

‘Grigoriev ran out of the room, and I followed him and shot him in the back all the time. He jumped out into the yard and fell. That’s when I finished him off.’

By other accounts, such chaos ensued when Grigoriev fled, with people running in all directions, that it was impossible to see who fired the fatal shot.

Makhno and his men shot down Grigoriev’s bodyguard, then went around the village to kill the ataman’s head honchos.

‘That was the sort of treatment I always reserved,’ Makhno later wrote, ‘for those who had carried out pogroms or were in the throes of preparing them.’

But why did the Anarchists ever collaborate with these pogromists in the first place? Arshinov explains that many of the mass following Grigoriev were genuine revolutionaries, who must be won over. The July 27^th congress was in fact an elaborate trap for Grigoriev. It is even rumoured that someone had secretly emptied the bullets out of the ataman’s Mauser.

The Anarchists got what they wanted: the leadership of Grigoriev’s band was wiped out, but the rank-and-file joined the Black Army.

Another rumour has it that the gold reserves of the Odesa State Bank had been in Grigoriev’s train, and that Makhno’s men immediately rode out to seize it, then buried the gold a month later. The place where they are supposed to have buried the gold is near Kherson, not far from the frontline in the current war at the time of writing. If there is any gold around there, it’s under water as well as earth. Since the 1950s the area has been flooded by the Khakovsky reservoir. Maybe someone reading this will go on a mission to the heart of a warzone to look for Makhno’s Gold.

The Fall of Soviet Ukraine

That summer, Soviet Ukraine collapsed. In August, two weeks after Trotsky recorded that half of Red Army soldiers in Ukraine had no boots or underwear, Kyiv fell to the Whites.[xi] A number of factors which we have dealt with in the last few episodescame together to produce this collapse. The Don Cossack revolt in neighbouring South Russia, the pressure from Kolchak’s Spring Offensive, the Grigoriev revolt and the flight of the Anarchists all weakened the Red southern and Ukraine fronts. This set the stage for the defining campaign of the whole Civil War: Denikin’s march on Moscow.

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Sources

[i] Serge, Conquered City, p 99

[ii] SA Smith, Russia in Revolution, p 186

[iii] Savchenko, ‘Ataman of Pogroms Grigoriev’, http://militera.lib.ru/bio/savchenko/04.html/index.html. Most of my information comes from this long and remarkable essay. That, unless otherwise stated, is generally the source for whatever detail or quote you may want to follow up.

[iv] From a source quoted on the blog of Alexandria Cossacks: https://kozactvo-jimdofree-com.translate.goog/%D1%83%D0%B2%D1%96%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE-%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BC-%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C-%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

[v] On the Borotbisti more generally, my sources offer a sliding scale of sweeping statements. Supposedly the Communists merged with the Borotbisti, but also they banned them; they also, it seems, cooperated with them, all the while completely refusing to cooperate with them. I can only throw my hands up. Of course historians are supposed to summarise, employing their own interpretations. But in this case the same set of data produces completely contradictory interpretations. See EH Carr and SA Smith.

[vi] David Golynkov, quoted in https://kozactvo-jimdofree-com.translate.goog/%D1%83%D0%B2%D1%96%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE-%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BC-%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C-%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

[vii] Oleg Timkov, ‘Ataman Grigoriev: Truth and Fiction.’ https://kozactvo-jimdofree-com.translate.goog/%D1%83%D0%B2%D1%96%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE-%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BC-%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C-%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

[viii] Smele, 98, 102

[ix] Arshinov, https://libcom.org/library/chapter-07-long-retreat-makhnovists-their-victory-execution-grigorev-battle-peregonovka-

[x] Arshinov

[xi] Deutscher, p 364

16: The Black Sea Revolt

This post tells the story of how the French military invaded Ukraine and was defeated – by its own personnel. The French soldiers and sailors fraternised and mutinied under the Red Flag, singing the ‘Internationale’ – symbols of the regime they had been sent to fight.

Tiraspol

*Orientatsiia:* South-West Ukraine and Transnistria/ Moldova

Let’s imagine a member of the 58^th Infantry Regiment, from Avignon in the South of France. This soldier would have spent a large part of the First World War fighting in Bessarabia (today called Moldova). But when the war ended in November 1918, instead of being sent home or given quiet garrison duties, the French soldier of the 58^th received orders to cross the Dnister River and to enter the former Tsarist Empire – in other words, to stick his hand into the furnace of the Russian Civil War.

Some soldiers in the 58^th had been involved in the vast mutinies which swept the trenches of the Western Front in 1917; they had been deported to this part of the world as a punishment. The average soldier in the Regiment might also have known that there was a revolutionary committee active in the ranks – there was Corporal Thomas, and the soldier Tondut who had been in the Socialist Youth.

The 58^th were ordered to capture Tiraspol from the Reds (Tiraspol is today the capital of the breakaway republic of Transnistria). A French scouting party was captured by the local Tiraspol Red Guards, but treated well. The Red Guards had lengthy political discussions with them, then released them with their weapons. So when these scouts came back to the French ranks, they were practically enemy agents.

When the whole regiment was ordered to advance on Tiraspol, there were protests: ‘So, that’s what it is! We’ve come to invade Russia! It’s the war again! We’ve had enough! Enough!’

To most people at the time, Transnistria and Ukraine were simply parts of ‘Russia.’

An officer replied to the complaints of the soldiers: ‘The Russians borrowed money from us, which they refuse to pay us. We shall encounter revolutionary patrols, but since they are badly commanded and lack arms, the Bolsheviks will flee.’

But when the regiment advanced, it came under machine-gun fire. By prior agreement, the French rank-and-file refused to fire back or to advance.

Refugees streamed out of the town, and French artillery fire swept the fleeing carts with shrapnel. The artillerymen could not see the civilians being killed, but the infantry, already mutinous, saw the death and destruction, and grew even angrier. They cut the telephone wires so that no orders could reach the artillery. Then they deserted. They packed up and returned across the river to the town of Bender.

The 58^th Regiment only entered Tiraspol after the Polish army had captured the town from the Reds. The mutinous French soldiers were soon disarmed, shipped to Morocco, and drafted into disciplinary companies.

But the Tiraspol Mutiny was just the beginning.

Kherson and Mikolayiv

Between late 1918 and early 1919, in a complicated series of acts, south-west Ukraine passed from German to Allied occupation. There were 10,000 French, 30,000 Greeks, 3,000 Poles, 32,000 Romanians and apparently 15,000 of Denikin’s White Guards in the vicinity of Odesa.

French and North African soldiers in Odessa, 1919

In November 1918 General Franchet D’Esprey anticipated the mutinies: ‘The moment military operations are shifted to Russian territory, there will be a danger that active revolutionary propaganda may be attempted among the troops.’

He supported a ‘carrot and stick’ approach. He urged officers to see that troops were provided with good food and billets. Meanwhile they must ‘ruthlessly’ deal with every violation of discipline.

After the hell of the First World War, the French soldier now feared that his government had dreamt up a whole new war for him to die in. And the political justification for this war was even more flimsy than for the last one.

The underground Communist movement gave expression to this mood – local Ukrainian communists published leaflets and even a newspaper in French, and distributed them among the occupying forces. Here is a part of an article from that paper:

Today we have a right to ask why it was that when Russia was headed by a tsar, by an autocratic despot, our government was on friendly terms with her. Now everything has changed. Russia is now undeniably a Republic, a Soviet republic. Are not our two sister republics akin in their ideas and tendencies? Could they not unite and work for a common cause? Is it perhaps because the Soviet republic is too socialistic?

The French at the time ruled a vast colonial empire, and it appears a majority of their 10,000 soldiers were in fact from Algeria and Senegal. Later, war veterans would play an important role in the liberation struggles on the African continent. But in 1919 the high command considered them reliable, even as their trusted enforcers.

All the same, in November French ‘colonial’ troops at Archangel in the Arctic Circle had staged a mutiny. And at a key moment in early April the 1^st Zouave Route Regiment (an Algerian unit) refused to harness horses to artillery, in effect aiding the Red advance.

Among English-speaking historians there is a tendency to downplay Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The attitude is: ‘Quit complaining: we barely invaded you at all.’ We are told that there was very little direct fighting between Allied and Red forces… apart from the fierce battles in North Russia; and with the Japanese in the Far East; and the unauthorised frontline role of British personnel in the South. Likewise at Mikolayiv and Kherson there was heavy fighting. But we should grant the Anglophone historians this much: the Allied rank-and-file were not keen to fight. In early March when the fighting was heaviest, some refused to go to Kherson, and others, when they arrived, refused to fight. In the end Ataman Grigoriev (whom you will recall from ‘Warlords of Ukraine: Continued’) drove 1,000 French and Greek soldiers out of Kherson.

On March 20^th the London Globe reported:

The Bolshevik occupation of Kherson and Nikolaieff [today Mikolayiv] was only effected after heavy fighting on the part of the French troops, who had, however, eventually to evacuate the towns and were transported by sea to Odesa. The German garrisons left behind apparently made no opposition, and even handed over their arms and fraternised with the Bolsheviks.

From the cover of André Marty’s book on the Black Sea revolt (See below)

Odesa

French intervention in Ukraine, meanwhile, followed no clear policy.

They arrived in Odesa, fought and killed the local Ukrainian Rada troops who had just prevailed over the Hetman, and took over the city in collaboration with Whites who had landed by sea. As we have seen, at first they fought alongside the Hetman, the German puppet, until his regime died a death. For a long time after that the French ignored the Rada, because they were German collaborators (yeah, I know!). At the last possible moment, right before the Reds took Kyiv, the French recognised the Rada. It was too late to be of any use to either the French or the Rada, but it was in plenty of time to anger the White Volunteer Army under Denikin.

The French soldier met the Reds not just on the battlefield, but in the cafés and bars and on the streets. We have seen how the Red advance across Ukraine was sweeping but precarious. But in the cities the Communists were in their element. Odesa especially was a hotbed of fraternisation between Reds and Allied soldiers.

Written appeals once again give us a sense of what was said in their discussions:

Demand your immediate return home! And if your leaders don’t agree to send you back home, then organise your own return! Go back home and work with all your strength at the great task begun by the Russian Revolution, which will guarantee to the proletarians of the whole world, together with freedom and dignity, a greater well-being and happiness. Long live the soldiers’ and sailors’ soviets!

French officers grew scared at the influence of Red agents. They warned that ‘robbers, murderers, and Bolshevik agitators will be shot on the spot.’[i]

A commemorative stamp featuring Jeanne Labourbe

They were as good as their word. Ivan Smirnov, the leader of the Odesa communists, was tortured and shot by the French military. A French teacher named Jeanne Labourbe, who had been won over to communism and helped the Reds in their fraternisation efforts, was arrested. French officers and White Russians tortured and then shot her, along with ten of her comrades – five men, five women.[ii]

By the end of March Odesa was ‘without food and in a state of virtual anarchy.’ The Red Guards were outside the city. No doubt the presence of Red sabres and rifles helped to focus minds. But the French were troubled by their friends as well as their adversaries. The large Jewish population in Odesa brought into stark relief the anti-Semitism among the Whites and the Ukrainian nationalists. Anti-Semitism was no stranger to the France of the Dreyfus affair, but the massacres which had begun would have shocked the French soldiers, and posed once again the question of what they were doing there.

The French top brass made the decision to quit Odesa without consulting Denikin. The evacuation was a complete disaster, characterised by mass panic. The Reds were entering the city and the French troops were, in places, refusing to fight or even sabotaging the defence. 10,000 Russian Whites and 30,000 civilians crowded onto the Allied ships, including 8,000 of the Greek community in Odesa.[iii]

French military personnel embarked on April 5^th. Entire units marched to the ships singing the ‘Internationale.’

But the real mutiny, that is, the one that our historians deign to mention, had not even begun.

Historian Evan Mawdsley makes a strange remark about the evacuation of Odesa: ‘The French did not leave – as is sometimes suggested – because of a naval mutiny; this came three weeks afterward.’[iv]

It was two weeks. More importantly, Mawdsley’s remark neglects to take into account the whole cycle of fraternisation and mutiny which we have just described. And after evacuating Odesa the French just sailed a little ways down the coast and invaded Sevastopol. Intervention was not finished after the Odesa evacuation.

Anger in the fleet

On April 16^th, in the Romanian port of Galaţi, a plot was unfolding on board the French vessel Protet. This vessel had quit Odesa just a few days before.

André Marty, who was on board the Protet, believed that mutiny was ‘the most sacred of duties.’ By attacking Russia without a declaration of war the French fleet was violating the constitution. Marty, an engineer, planned to seize the Protet and take it to Odesa under the red flag. His conspiracy was betrayed by informers, and he was arrested.

But discontent in the French fleet was not confined to the Protet or to Marty’s circle of conspirators. Throughout the fleet, the sailors were ready to revolt. They had been deeply effected by the experience in Odesa, and unknown sailors had even composed the Odesa Song which had caught on throughout the fleet.

After eight days on the high seas

We’ve arrived at last in Odessa town.

The Russians celebrated the went

With cannon and vintovka shots.

We were made to join the Volunteers,

A corps made up of officers,

So that we would our brothers fight

For the Bolsheviks are workers all.

You who run the show

Because you’ve got the dough

And piles of stocks and bonds,

If you want the cash,

Make haste to embark,

Ye capitalists

For the true poilus,

Those who fought in the war,

Are determined today

Not to fight any more,

Nor their brothers to kill

Or by them be killed.

The song goes on to promise to bring the Russian Revolution home to Clemenceau and to the French ruling class.

The sailors also knew and sang the ‘Hymn to the 17^th’ – a song about a French military unit sent to crush a strike in 1907, who mutinied in protest.

The grievances of the sailors of 1919 are best summed up in the demands they would soon raise during the mutiny:

1. An end to the war against Russia.

2. Immediate return to France.

3. Less rigorous discipline.

4. Improved food.

5. Leave for the crew.

A list of demands raised by a different group of sailors raised similar points:

Immediate return to France.

Better food.

Display in all artillery emplacements of all news picked up by radio.

Demobilisation of reservists.

Immediate putting ashore of the master-at-arms.

Leave to be granted in a regular order.

As these grievances simmered, action committees were organised on most of the French warships. Petty officers and engineers were the leaders in this underground work. There was an anti-war socialist newspaper called ‘The Wave’ which reportedly had a circulation of 300,000 within the fleet. Every issue had a page of correspondence from ordinary sailors airing their grievances. It was banned, and officers would confiscate it on sight. But often the orderlies would steal it back for the sailors. Cuttings from the paper were hidden inside the right-wing newspapers. There were besides The Wave at least five other underground papers in regular circulation in the fleet.

Sevastopol: mutiny on the ships

Scene: the battleship France, a vessel 166 metres long and 27 wide, with over 1100 men on board. It is April 16^th, and eleven days after evacuating Odesa the France sails in the outer harbour of Sevastopol, a port on the west coast of the Crimean peninsula.

A mechanical engineer named Vinciguerra maintains an underground library of socialist books, papers and pamphlets. He is at the centre of a group of twenty or thirty members of leftist organisations, most of an anarchist persuasion. This group exerts an influence over a great part of the crew.

In 1918 the ministers of the Crimean Soviet Republic were massacred in a Tatar uprising.[v] But by April 1919 the Reds have returned to Crimea, and they are advancing on Sevastopol.

The France, lying in the outer harbour, opens fire with its artillery and sends ashore landing parties to block the Red advance.

On April 17^th the crew are called to man the guns. Many hide out in the latrines and refuse to leave; the officers are forced to man the guns on their own. Three French ships fire explosive shells at the Reds all night – so much for the end of the French intervention.[vi] The Reds are forced to retreat. In the morning, the ringleaders of the protest are locked up.

The sailors are informed that they will have to load coal on Easter Sunday, April 20^th. This is a laborious task for a holiday, and it is greeted with anger. This is the trigger for the rebellion.

The word goes around the vessel: ‘Those who don’t want to carry coal, assemble on the forecastle, after the piping to quarters in the evening.’

Virgil Vuillemin, a spokesperson for the mutineers on the *France*

On April 19^th, almost all the crew gather on the forecastle for a protest. Things start out with an innocent appearance, but then the Odesa Song is sung. When the strains of the Internationale carry across the water, the crew of the neighbouring vessel, the Jean-Bart, joins in. The 600 on the deck of the France and many of the crew of the Jean-Bart join together in the chorus:

C’est la lutte finale

Groupons-nous et demain

L’Internationale

Sera le genre humain…

The officers, terrified, gather and arm themselves. They are right to be afraid. The sailors storm the prison cells and release their comrades. They take the steam-launch to the Jean-Bart and raise the crew in revolt.

‘To Toulon! No more war against the Russians!’ ‘Rise up! Rise up! Revolution!’

An unsigned article in the journal Revolutionary History takes up the story:

Vice-Admiral Amet, the commander of the fleet, arrived on board the France. Sailors and the Admiral stood face to face. The Admiral’s sermon was interrupted by shouts of ‘Take him away! Kill him!’ When he claimed that the Bolsheviks were bandits, a mutineer shouted at him: ‘You’re the biggest bandit.’ […]

On the Jean-Bart, Amet and the officers bring up great containers of wine in the hopes that the sailors will drink themselves into a stupor. But the sailors place a guard around the wine, and nobody touches a drop.

André Marty writes:

‘Practially every sailor on the France and the Jean-Bart was standing on the vast forecastle heads of the battleships, and, instead of saluting the tricolour being raised on the stern, they faced forward and sang the Internationale while the red flag was being hoisted on the bowsprit.’

An officer shouts, ‘You don’t know what that rag stands for, it means civil war!’

But to the sailors, it is obvious that the Russian Civil War has come on board their ship, not through any desire on their own part, but because their government and their officers are helping the Whites.

There is a moving scene when a Russian ship enters the harbour. It is called the Kherson, and its crew and passengers sympathise with the revolution. While the Kherson is in earshot of the French vessels, they join in a rendition of the Internationale.

At this point mutiny spreads to a fourth vessel, the Justice; the red flag is raised.

The commander is angry.

‘Who hoisted this rag?’

Silence.

‘It wasn’t hoisted by itself, was it?’

‘The entire crew is in on it,’ some of the sailors reply.

‘So I have a crew of Bolsheviks?’

‘We want to go back to France!’

Sevastopol: Mutiny in the streets

Instead of spending Easter Sunday loading coal, large numbers of mutineers go ashore. The city is occupied by Greek and French soldiers and sailors. The Greeks are tense, rifles ready; the French rank-and-file leave their weapons behind and mix with the civilian population. The French mutineers begin a march up Ekaterinskaya Street to the city centre. A group of local trade unionists meet them and present them with the banner of the metal workers’ union; behind that banner the crowd proceeds slowly through the streets, growing to two or three thousand, roughly one in ten of whom are French mutineers.

Outside the city hall they are greeted by the chair of the local Revolutionary Committee, who speaks fluent French; years ago he lived as an immigrant in Paris, working in a department store. He demands the evacuation of the military forces from the city and the transfer of power to the Soviet. The applause is enthusiastic. A French sailor from the crowd speaks in reply, assuring the chairman of the sympathy and support of the French sailors.

The march continues, growing further in size as sailors from all the ships join in. A French officer approaches the crowd and tries to seize the red banner of the metal workers. After a bit of shouting, he is sent packing with a slap to the face.

Retribution is sudden. A French Lieutenant gathers a group of Greek soldiers and a small number of French sailors from the Jean-Bart. Theytake cover on Morskaya Street. As the crowd crests arise, machine-guns and rifles open fire. The demonstration scatters into the side-streets, leaving many dead and wounded lying on the street.

The banner-bearer, a helmsman from the Vergniaud, mortally wounded by a bullet, lay on the ground covered by the red banner he had been carrying. A petty officer, a brave man, who had continued shouting “Forwardl Death to the dogs!” also fell mortally wounded and lay beside a young girl of sixteen who had been killed outright.[vii]

Victory

The Black Sea mutiny could have gone further, and very nearly did.

So enraged were the sailors by the massacre that French and Greek personnel were inches away from a pitched battle. The French did not, as one of my sources claims, open fire on the Greek flagship.[viii] But this was only because the officers and mates rushed to sabotage the guns before the sailors could lay a hand on them. On land, one party of French sailors had to be held back at gunpoint by their own officers, otherwise they would have gone to fight the Greek soldiers.

But the furious reaction to the massacre appears to have shaken the officers. The French Lieutenant who gave the order to shoot on Morskaya Street killed himself that very night. This saved the top brass some embarrassment. It is easier to make a scapegoat out of a dead man.

The sailors were in control of the ships, and in close contact with the soldiers. They held the power. But the officers were smart enough to bend rather than break. They promised that the ships would go home. They promised that there would be no reprisals.

Several days later, the ships quit Sevastopol and sailed home. In spite of the solemn promises of the officers, the ‘ringleaders’ of the mutiny were later arrested and sentenced.

The next vessel to erupt in protest was the Waldeck-Rousseau, back at Odessa. When the prisoner André Marty was brought on board, sailors rallied and sang the Internationale. There were further mutinies at nearby Tendra and on the torpedo boat Dehorter at Kerch.

Unrest in the French fleet carried on unabated all through the summer of 1919 and all through the Mediterranean. Rebellion flared up at Toulon, the main French naval base, with protests in the streets and unrest on the ships in the harbour. Sailors held stormy mass meetings on the glacis of the fort. For several days the town was practically under the control of protestors. From June 12^th to 17^th the rebellion was discussed in the French parliament.

The revolt comes home to France. Not part of the Toulon movement, but a protest in favour of the release of the mutineers, 1922

From the first scouting party advancing on Tiraspol to the revolutionary events in Sevastopol and all the way back to French soil, the war effort in Ukraine and Russia was sabotaged by French sailors and soldiers. It must have sorely hurt the pride of the politicians and generals and admirals that their rank-and-file had revolted under the red flag – the symbol of the very regime they had been sent to help crush.

France had been the most aggressive of the western Allied powers. But the French soldier and sailor forced all the Allied leaders to recognise that if they pushed their luck in Russia and Ukraine, they would face troubles not just among their own soldiers but on their own streets. On the British side, there was the Calais Soviet, the soldiers’ protest in London, and the rapid spread of the ideas of the Russian Revolution in Ireland and Scotland.

France was forced to drop its policy of intervention in favour of a cordon sanitaire: besieging Soviet Russia in a ring of hostile states armed and funded by France. This policy would bear fruit in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, which we will look at in Series Three.

What about all those mutineers who were arrested? They were harshly sentenced, but some years later, after a public campaign, they were amnestied and released.

Marty with his brother, on his release from prison in 1923

On May 1^st 1919, Sevastopol celebrated its liberation. It was a triumph not of arms, but of ideas, and not of combat but of fraternisation. The revolutionaries of many nationalities who made this victory wrote an important chapter in the history of revolutionary warfare – a chapter which, in most English-language accounts published in the last few decades, is reduced to a dismissive sentence or two.

The defeat of the French intervention in south-west Ukraine and Crimea was achieved with the most humanistic methods: through finding common cause with the enemy combatants, rather than by shooting at them. It was no less decisive for that. The new Soviet regime held a new and powerful weapon in its hands: the power of the class appeal. The Black Sea revolt represents the most outstanding example of mutiny and fraternisation, but it was a general feature of the Russian Civil War, and an inspiring one.

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Sources

May Day in Odessa, a sketch showing a monument erected for the occasion

Sources

Most of the above is drawn from these sources:

‘The Black Sea Revolt’ from Revolutionary History:

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol8/no2/blacksea.html

‘During the Black Sea Mutiny, French Sailors rejected France’s war on Soviet Russia,’ from Jacobin:

https://jacobin.com/2020/12/black-sea-mutinies-france-sailors-soviet-russia

The Epic of the Black Sea Revolt by André Marty:

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/821/

[i] The Globe, February 13^th 1919

[ii] André Marty, The Epic of the Black Sea Revolt, (See Above) p 8

[iii] Anthony Read, The World on Fire, Jonathan Cape, 2008, p 164

[iv] Mawdsley, 178

[v] Mawdsley, 48

[vi] Marty, 28

[vii] Marty, 41

[viii] Read, 164

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14: First Drafts of the Future

In the cities of Central Russia, hope contends with hunger. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army faces Kolchak.

*Oriyentatsiya*: this post deals with events in ‘Central’ Russia and in the Ural Mountains.

Red wedge and white circle are set on a canvas. The red wedge is slicing into the white circle. Around them smaller shapes are scattered, perhaps fragments shaken loose by violence, or forces of secondary importance in the conflict. It is an abstract image, but it is suffused with energy and struggle. The red object is not larger than the white, but it has shape, momentum, direction.

El Lissitzky painted Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge in 1919, the decisive year of the Russian Civil War. It is one product of the ‘tidal wave of artistic creativity’ which followed the Revolution. This was a golden period for the Constructivist and Suprematist schools, for Malevich, Tatlin, Popova, Rodchenko and many other artists.[i]

The Promise of Revolution

The innovation and excitement on the canvas (and of course in the work of poets and writers) was a reflection of the changes the Revolution promised. Serge remembers the officials of the new state apparatus hurrying through the streets: ‘men and women alike, young or ageless, carrying over-stuffed briefcases under their arms’ filled with dossiers, decrees, mandates – ‘the precious first drafts of the future, all this traced in little Remington or Underwood characters.’[ii]

The town houses of individual bourgeois families had been transformed into communal dwellings, housing multiple families. Better than the slums and barracks – or shelled ruins – they had come from. Palaces that had once housed princes and their mistresses now housed public institutions such as the Palace of Motherhood where modern maternity care was driving a wedge into an over-medicalised and patriarchal tradition. Public canteens served up nutritious meals for free. Families availed of public laundries and crèches.

The promise of the revolution delivered on the frontlines too. In February, before the outbreak of Kolchak’s great offensive, the Whites faced a complication in the middle of their frontline when the Bashkirs switched sides to the Reds. The Bashkirs were traditionally a nomadic people. They were one of several ethnic groups like the Tatars and Chuvash who predominated in parts of the Ural and Volga regions (Lenin’s grandfather was a Chuvash tailor from the Volga). It was the Bashkirs who had named the Ural mountains, after their legendary hero who sacrificed himself to enrich the earth.

When the 6,000 Bashkir cavalry went over to the Reds, it was as I said a complication for Kolchak, not a devastating blow. But in hindsight it matters a great deal. The Bashkirs, who lived under a near-medieval social structure, were at first disoriented by a revolution they could not understand, and followed their chiefs and Islamic clerics into the White camp. But the Whites mistreated them and refused to give them autonomy. The Reds made a better offer. It was to be an early example of the decisive importance of the Soviets’ democratic policy on the national question.

A Bashkir railway worker in the Urals, 1910

Neil Faulkner writes of ‘the explosion of creative activity unleashed by the October Revolution,’ particularly in education. The country went from six universities to sixteen, in just over a year, and courses were open to all and free of charge. ‘The workmen crowd to these courses’, reported journalist Arthur Ransome. ‘One course, for example, is attended by a thousand men, in spite of the appalling cold of the lecture rooms.’ The number of libraries had doubled in Petrograd and tripled in Moscow. ‘In one country district, there were now 73 village libraries, 35 larger libraries, and 500 hut libraries or reading-rooms.’[iii]

Today’s cover image: ‘Spatial Force Construction,’ Lyubov Popova, 1920

A Hungry Winter

These are only a few examples of the sweeping social changes. But the winter of 1918-19 was bleak beyond description. A wreck of an empire emerging from the most terrible war in human history into the disruption attendant upon revolution – these would have been years of hardship even in the best possible scenario. Now, on top of that, civil war had thrown transport and supplies into complete chaos. The food supply system had been broken by the Great War. In 1918 the Soviets had taken grain by force from the villages to avert starvation. Many of the peasants hadn’t bothered planting.

There was no international famine relief effort to speak of. The American Red Cross made a difference – but their activities were confined to Siberia. The Fridtjof-Nansen scheme attempted to feed civilians in both zones. It showed what might have been possible if the rulers of the world had responded with humanity and compassion rather than with an all-out crusade against the revolution. But it was the exception rather than the rule.

The Soviets had nationalised industry and given land to the peasants; for this crime tens of millions of civilians would be collectively punished with the weapon of mass hunger, like the German civilians during World War One, or the Iraqi and North Korean civilians under sanctions in more recent years.

The city and town dwellers of Russia, their immune systems weakened by hunger, became easy prey for typhus and the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic. Factories were short of supplies, understaffed by the hungry and the sick. Things were worst of all in Petrograd – a city with no farming hinterland from which to feed itself. Kollontai, the Bolshevik minister who was behind the Palace of Motherhood and other impressive projects, joked bitterly that ‘there is a great deal of moral satisfaction in deciding whether you want thick cabbage soup or thin cabbage soup.’[iv]

The industrial workforce fell from 2.5 million in 1918 to 1.5 million in 1920.[v] Where did all the workers go after the workers’ revolution? Hundreds of thousands into the Red Army; tens of thousands into the state apparatus; millions to the countryside, where food was more plentiful.

In the novel Conquered City, we see a crowd of exhausted and angry factory workers in Petrograd. Timofei sees the sad contrast between this crowd and the same crowd just a few months ago:

This crowd is spineless. The best among them have left. Some are dead. Eight hundred mobilised [for the Red Army] in six months […] they say [Leonti] died in the Urals. Klim is fighting on the Don. Kirk is head of something. Lukin, what happened to Lukin? Timofei could still visualise these veterans standing in this very shop, three or four ranks of men, successive generations who had come up and disappeared within a year. Gone. At the head of the army, at the head of the state, dead: heads riddles with holes, lowered into graves in the Field of Mars to the sound of funeral marches. The Revolution is devouring us. And those who remain are without a voice, for they are the least courageous, the most passive…[vi]

Peace Offensive

There was cause for hope that things would improve soon. Moscow had launched a ‘peace offensive’ in late 1918. They were offering to let the Whites and their Allied backers hold onto whatever territory they held in exchange for a peace treaty. It was the same basic equation as Brest-Litovsk the year before: space for time. The Soviets had the most to gain from time and the least to gain from war.

The call reached some receptive ears in the west. The Allied leaders were not all on the same page with regard to Russia. The Whites had basically failed in 1918, and many Allied leaders were growing tired of betting on losers. Some, such as Lloyd George in Britain, worried about what might happen even if these losers were to win. The Allies would be responsible for forcing a vicious reactionary regime onto Russia against the will of its people; Lloyd George saw that this would give labour and communist parties ammunition against the establishment.

So in January 1919 a radio broadcast went out from the summit of the Eiffel Tower inviting the Red and White leaders to a peace conference at the Isles of Prinkipo near Istanbul.[vii] In early March the US official William Bullitt was in Moscow offering generous terms for a peace treaty.

There were other promising developments. The partial bans on the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were lifted. Strict limits were placed on the power of the Cheka (a quick reminder, the Cheka was the police force which imposed harsh security measures). Central Europe was in the throes of revolution. Southern Europe appeared not to be far behind – see the factory occupations in Italy and the ‘Triennio Bolshevico’ in Spain. In March 1919 the first Comintern Congress met, founding a new communist workers’ international. The artist Tatlin designed an elaborate tower to serve as its headquarters.

But as we saw in Episode 11, in March Kolchak launched an offensive all along the Eastern Front. Kolchak had been enraged by the Eiffel Tower broadcast, and his offensive was in large part intended to cut off the possibility of a peace treaty. In this it was a complete, unqualified success. The advance through the Urals convinced the Allies that the Reds could be crushed, so they made another throw of the dice. The Istanbul conference never happened. Now the Allies were all in.

Tatlin and an assistant with a scale model of his famous tower. Like the Istanbul conference, like the promise of Soviet democracy, this tower never had its day; the steel was needed for guns and shells and rails.

‘Everything for the Front’

For civilians in the Red zone, the advance of Kolchak meant new sacrifices – of food and raw materials, of men and women, of energy and time. War production – weapons, boots, uniforms – would remain the priority over civilian production. The slogan was ‘Everything for the Front.’

But hadn’t the people already given everything? Just a few months ago it had sent a levy of thousands of communists and trade unionists into the battle for Kazan. But somehow new reserves were found. A fresh levy of thousands of activists volunteered and went from civilian life into the Red Army. It is a measure of how genuinely popular the Revolution was. It is proof of the fact that great masses of self-sacrificing activists were its lifeblood.

This blood was plentiful but still finite. Sending the best administrators and the most politically active and talented workers into the Red Army meant further impoverishing civilian life. Producing more rifles and uniforms and boots meant not producing consumer goods. Not producing consumer goods meant it was impossible to trade with the countryside. No trade meant that the seizure of foodstuffs from the village had to continue. For every victory at the front, the people were forced to pay a heavy price. For every victory at the front, the Soviet Union was forced to pawn more and more of its assets – Soviet democracy, relations with the peasants, the support of the working class – with the knowledge that they could only be redeemed at great cost, and the fear that they might never be redeemed at all.

Limits on the Cheka and decrees on legality did little or nothing to curb the terror. Contrary to what certain scholars profess,[viii] the Red Terror was not a product of any lack of regard for human rights or the rule of law. It was rather (and the same goes for the White Terror) an expression of the extreme intensity and bitterness of the conflict. The war intensified in early 1919, grew more complex, more threatening. Accordingly, terror on all sides escalated.

Who was the new Soviet state official, carrying some first draft of the future in their briefcase? Perhaps their factory’s Soviet delegate, or that of their regiment or village, or some party activist going back years, recruited to some job in the administration of the new state. They would read appeals in the papers, hear them at meetings and rallies, urging them to go to the front. They would talk the matter over with comrades and loved ones. What entered into the decision? The fear of a bloody White victory. The prospects for revolution in Germany. Maybe lower motives, like a desire to escape the squalor of the city, or to make a name for oneself as a military hero.

From Dr Zhivago, dir David Lean, 1965. This part of the movie (if my reading of the novel’s ambiguous timeline is correct) is set during the Spring 1919 fighting around Perm. Yuri is interrogated aboard an armoured train. It is accurate that the uniforms are not exactly, well, uniform. But one of the sentries has the new *bogatyrka* hat, which was entering circulation at this time.

They would decide to take up a rifle and go to the Urals. They might take a day or a week to settle their affairs, then they would go out on the railways across a countryside that was rife with discontent. Entering the Iaroslavl, Ural or Volga military districts, they would take their place in the rear. Here were 147,000 Red Army soldiers, only 18,000 armed – one in seven. The other six would be on transport, supplies, logistics, policing. This was an army without training centres or supply depots. New recruits were simply rushed to their units and there (usually) trained and (sometimes) equipped. This was anything but a streamlined red wedge.

In one of these rear military districts, the Middle Volga, there was a peasant guerrilla campaign against the Red Army. It fought under the confused slogan ‘Long live the Bolsheviks, Down with the Communists!’ How to explain this? The Bolsheviks had given the land to the peasants, and then under the new name of ‘Communist Party’ had come back a few months later to seize their grain. An Extraordinary Tax imposed in November 1918 had proved desperately unpopular, and the civilian Soviet administration was guilty of ‘manifest malpractises.’ Of course it was, if the best people had been poached by the Red Army.

Having passed through the rear areas, the volunteer would arrive at the eastern front.

The front against Kolchak was huge and complex (though in scale it did not even approach the frontlines of the First World War). From Perm in the north to Ufa in the centre and on to Orenburg in the south is a distance of over 700 kilometres. While they stretch a long way north to south, from snow to sand, the Ural Mountains are nowhere near as tall as the Andes or the Himalayas. Nonetheless, they represent a barrier with dense forests and steep, rough ground.

Five Red Armies were distributed across this front, billeted in the villages or in the mining and factory towns. Each Red Army numbered between 10 and 30,000, to a total of 120,000. Here 84,000, two in three, were armed. It was not a case of ‘every second man gets a rifle’ or anything so absurd. The unarmed were driving wagons, carrying stretchers or cooking dinner.

Now let’s look at the other side of the frontline, once again surveying the situation from north to south. There was a White army of 45,000 around Perm and another, 48,000-strong, at Ufa in the middle. In the south were two loose armies of White Guards, Cossacks and others, one numbering 20,000 and another numbering 25,000, who had been fighting against Red Guard militias around Orenburg on-and-off for over a year.

I have remarked that Kolchak was a landlocked admiral, but the irony is spoiled by the fact that Russia is a land of massive waterways and on this eastern front there was a naval struggle between Red and White flotillas on the Volga and Kama rivers. Here the Reds had the advantage thanks to the sailors of the Baltic fleet. This advantage on the water meant they could outflank Gajda on the land. The Czech officer had covered himself with ostentatious honours after his victory at Perm, but now he was on the back foot.

Back on the Red lines, the newcomer would have found the Red Army in a state of internal struggle and rapid change. In early 1919 a new culture of discipline still contended with the Red Guard and guerrilla mentality. In March the 8^th PartyCongress thrashed out the arguments even as Kolchak was advancing. In a political victory for Trotsky, the delegates came down on the side of the centralised, disciplined, professional army. A congress decision is instant, but the implementation of the decision in the real live Red Army would be a more difficult matter.

The Whites Falter

Having conquered an area the size of Britain, the Whites dug in from April into May as the spring floodsmade the roads impassable. But challenges emerged in the new territories. In Siberia, the land question was not the burning issue it was in Central Russia. So the regressive land policy of the Kolchak regime was not a huge liability. But the further west they advanced, the more of a liability it became.

In March the White vanguard had distributed leaflets proclaiming ‘Bread is coming!’ from Siberia. But, like all the contending forces in the Russian Civil War and in every war in Russian history to that point, the soldiers distributing these fliers were taking bread from the people.

In short, the people of the conquered territories had no reason to welcome the Whites.

Even at the high point of their advance, one anonymous White officer was pessimistic: ‘Don’t think that our successful advances are a result of military prowess. For it is much simpler than that – when they run away we advance; when we run away they will advance.’[ix] Here is a cynical but not entirely wrong view of the Civil War: retreat and attack as a function of inertia, not élan on the one hand or disintegration on the other.

In Mid-April Kolchak was at his height. But on the southern end of his front the worker militia at Orenburg still held out, a wedge sticking into his lines and forcing him to widen his front. A fresh attack by two divisions of his Fourth Corps ended in disaster on April 27^th, when they were almost annihilated on a river bank near Orenburg.

A brewery in Orenburg, some time before 1918. This picture is here so that you notice the camels and register that Orenburg is very much in Central Asia.

Desertion was becoming a serious problem. An order to Red Army units from May 1^st gives a vivid sense of what this meant:

Deserters from the enemy are to be received in a friendly way, as comrades who have freed themselves from under Kolchak’s lash, or as repentant adversaries. This applies not only to soldiers but also to officers. […] Enemies who have surrendered or who have been taken prisoner are in no case to be shot. Arbitrary shooting of men who come over from the enemy, as also of prisoners of war, will be punished ruthlessly in accordance with military law.[x]

This indicates that trigger-happy Red soldiers were still a problem. It also indicates that by May desertion from the ranks of Kolchak was occurring on a considerable scale. Finally this order shows us how, reinforced by the Congress decision of March, a new level of discipline was emerging in Eastern Army Group.

Red Advance

The Spring floods receded. In a few months, Eastern Army Group had tripled in numbers, from 120,000 to 361,000. The resistance at Orenburg made a concentration of forces possible, and on May 4^th a mobile group went on the offensive. Soon the five Red Armies were on the move eastward again. The White Western Army, which had seized the town of Ufa in March, was driven back to the Belaia River. More Whites deserted. Red prisoners-of-war incorporated into the White ranks changed sides again at the first opportunity. The White force around Ufa had numbered 62,000. It soon withered to 15,000.

The fresh communist volunteer in the ranks of the Red Eastern Army Group would have encountered people like Vasily Chapaev, an NCO in the Tsarist army turned Red commander. In the 1934 war film Chapaev he is a truly magnetic character, played by Boris Babochkin. He is depicted as being in conflict with himself: he is very much the Red Guard leader, rakish and untidy, thundering around on a cart gesturing furiously. He only learned to read in 1917 and is not what a communist would call politically developed; he is not sure whether it’s the first, second or third international that he is supposed to support. But his bluster shows that these are deficiencies he is deeply ashamed of.

His commissar, a newcomer to the unit, has some of the men arrested for looting. Chapaev’s first instinct is to stick up for his men and to tell his commissar to go to hell, but once his initial rage has passed he submits in a dignified way to his commissar, and has the criminals punished. After this, he and the commissar work as a team; he dresses more sharply; he demands more of the soldiers.

For the purposes of the point I’m making, I don’t care whether these details are accurate in relation to Chapaev himself. Nor am I concerned with the realism of this or that battle scene. My point is that the key conflict in Chapaev captures in an authentic way the development within the Red Army at this moment. It was a decisive advance, not only geographically but in terms of organisation.

Meanwhile the real Chapaev was playing a key role in the advance of Eastern Army Group. On June 9^th he led his 25^th Division in a sudden strike across the Belaia River and seized Ufa. There they found huge reserves of food and grain.[xi]

Even the Third Red Army, much maligned after it was devastated in the ‘Perm Catastrophe’ of December 1918, recovered its fighting spirit and, on July 1^st, recovered Perm itself.

On May 29^th Lenin had said, ‘If before winter we do not take the Urals, I consider that the defeat of the revolution will be inevitable.’[xii] Perhaps he feared Kolchak consolidating his hold over the Urals, developing war industries there, with Allied aid pouring in all the while. He need not have worried. Never mind winter – by August, the White Guards had been cleared out of the Ural Mountains. The red wedge was cutting deep into the sphere of the Whites.

To finish where we began, the Bashkir cavalry had picked the winning side before it was clear who would win. But by late summer they would have been confident that their choice had been the right one, at least as far as the Eastern Front was concerned. They were the first of many minority peoples to come over to the Reds, really their first successful advance beyond ‘Great Russia’ since the outbreak of full-scale war in spring 1918.

Banner of the Bashkir Division – I think this is from World War Two.

The Revolution had won over the Bashkirs with the promise of autonomy and respect for their culture. Today the Autonomous Republic of Bashkortostan lives on as a direct descendant of the first Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. It has four million inhabitants, most of them Bashkirs and Tatars, and its capital is Ufa. This territory was wrested from the hands of ‘Great-Russian’ chauvinists by the advance of the Red Army in spring 1919.

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Sources

[i] Conor Burke, ‘How revolution unleashed a tidal wave of creativity,’ Socialist Alternative journal, Winter 2017, pp 11-14

[ii] Serge, Victor, Conquered City, trans Richard Greeman, New York Review of Books, 1932 (2011), p 14

[iii] Neil Faulkner, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 9, World Revolution. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1k85dnw.16

[iv] Ibid

[v] Ibid

[vi] Serge, Conquered City, p 65

[vii] Smele, p 110. It was to Prinkipo that tens of thousands of Whites later fled. There, too, Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union years later.

[viii] Smith: ‘The Bolsheviks simply did not believe in abstract rights, and one consequence was that it left Soviet citizens bereft of a language in which they could seek redress against the arbitrary actions of the state.’ Russia in Revolution (p. 386). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. See also the essay ‘Red Tsaritsyn’ by Robert Argenbright

[ix] Smele, p 114

[x] Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Volume 2, Order 92, May 1^st 1919

[xi] This episode is absent from the film. Beevor’s account (p 298) is a little unclear but he seems to suggest Chapaev was dead by February 1919 in which case his most significant military feat could not have happened. Either that or Beevor jumped forward a year, or it was a typo. As a brief update on my ongoing assessment of Beevor’s contribution, I am still getting good concrete details out of this book. He knows when to slow the narrative down to real-time and when to focus on an interesting character. His anti-communist bias is still obvious but generally not as intrusive as in the chapter I reviewed in detail. He hasn’t mentioned Lenin much in a while, so I haven’t been forced to visualise the veins standing out purple on his forehead. But there is something about his preoccupation with squalor and gore that nearly repels me. I think it’s a question of theme. What is he trying to say with this book? That Russia is a land of squalor and gore?

On the Chapaev film and on the commmoration of the Civil War more generally, this is fascinating: https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Children-of-Chapaev-the-Russian-Civil/9983777197702771

[xii] Mawdsley, p 203

Short Post: Baltic Revolution

A British officer named Gough, before being sent out to the Baltic to join the ‘crusade’ against the Russian Revolution, spoke with Winston Churchill in London:

Pacing about his room and constantly referring to a map of Russia on the wall, Churchill optimistically explained to Gough how the various invasions then under way against the Bolsheviks – Kolchak from the east, Denikin from the south and the British from the north, together with the one proposed by General Iudenich from the Baltic – would encircle and crush the Reds. ‘He seemed to overlook the scale of the map,’ Gough noted, ‘and that these four movements, separated by immense distances, were handicapped by very inferior numbers and equipment […]’

Churchill dismissed these arguments: ‘Bolshevik morale was low and the resolute advance of even small armies would cause their organisation to disintegrate.’[i]

Like our cover image, this photo shows British ships and personnel operating in the Baltic in late 1918. The ship in the periscope sight, incidentally, was later sunk by one of the 60,000 mines left in the Baltic during the Great War.

This is a short post in Revolution Under Siege, a series about the Russian Civil War. There are theatres of the war which I have neglected in the main narrative. I have never been quite so crazy as to think I can write this series as a comprehensive history of the war. In this short post we will deal with one of these neglected areas: the Baltic, specifically Estonia and Latvia.

Estonia and Latvia

Estonia and Latvia, proudly independent states today, were until 1917 mere provinces of the Russian Empire – though like Poland they were more industrially and commercially developed than Russia itself.

The main landowners were all to be found among the ‘Balts,’ a privileged German minority of 10% or so. These Baltic barons were more German than the Germans (like the Nazi Alfred Rosenberg) and more Russian than the Russians (Like Budberg and Ungern-Sternberg) but dismissive of the language and culture of the majority. Their wealth and titles rested on the labour of Estonian-speaking and Latvian-speaking farmers. In the cities lived the cultural melting pot that was the working class – Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Russian, German and Belorussian. Among the middle classes and professionals, here as in many European countries in the era, national pride was awakening.

In 1917, Estonia and Latvia were Bolshevik. This will not be a surprise to readers who recall the key role of the Latvian Rifles in 1918.

For reasons we have discussed before, the Constituent Assembly elections of December 1917 gave a massive and unfair advantage to the Right SRs. Even so, the Bolsheviks won 40% of the popular vote in Estonia – as against 32% for the Estonian Nationalists. In Latvia, the result was 72% for the Bolsheviks, 23% for the nationalists, the highest Bolshevik vote of any electoral district in the whole of the former Russian Empire.

Tallinn (Capital of Estonia, then called Reval) had its own October Revolution a day before the events in Petrograd, when Jan Aanvelt declared a Soviet Republic. In the first week of November, every major city in Estonia declared for the Soviet power.

‘The Doom of Soviet Latvia’

But already by mid-1917 the German military had conquered Riga (Capital of Latvia). In February 1918 the Germans renewed the offensive, conquering Estonia. Part of their casus belli was that they wanted to ‘protect’ the Baltic German barons from having their lands taken off them.

On February 22^nd the Soviet government debated whether to accept the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which would effectively hand over Latvia and Estonia to the German Empire.

Stupochenko, who took part in the debate, described its conclusion: ‘The fraction decided by a majority to sign the treaty, making voting compulsory for all Bolshevists [sic] except the Latvian comrades, who were permitted to leave the room before it took place, since they could not be expected to take responsibility for the doom of Soviet Latvia.’[ii]

The offensive and the treaty destroyed the revolution in the Baltic States. These were grim days for the working class. German occupiers put the Baltic German barons back in charge and destroyed the Soviets. My Anglophone sources are silent on how the occupiers treated the Bolsheviks and other socialist parties, but they tell me that the liberal nationalist politicians were scorned by the occupiers, now and then locked up; but that in general the period of German occupation was favourable to them.

Evan Mawdsley phrases this in a curious way. Nine months of ‘relative stability’ gave a chance for ‘national consolidation.’ I would word it differently: nine months of military occupation destroyed the workers’ revolution and gave the wealthier classes a breathing space to rebuild their hegemony. Under the protection of the Germans, Russian White Guards began building armies in Estonia and Latvia. The Baltic States began serving as ‘a kennel for the guard-dogs of the counter-revolution.’[iii]

Revolution

Estonian nationalists celebrate their independence in Tallinn, February 1919

At the start of November 1918, with revolution and surrender in Germany, everything changed. In Estonia and Latvia a new, dynamic, complex situation emerged. New states, foreign intervention, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries were all in the mix.

British historians (see Kinvig and Mawdsley) tend to take the British ruling class at its word. It goes without saying, for them, that the Germans and the Soviets were up to no good but that the British armed forces intervened in the Baltic area to defend small nations and democracy.[iv] The Estonian and Latvian nationalists who eventually won are treated, in a teleological scheme, as the only legitimate local forces.

These parties and institutions are referred to by the name of their respective country – so it’s ‘Estonia’ against ‘the Bolsheviks,’ treating the former as the very embodiment of an entire nation and downgrading the latter to a wretched bunch of interlopers.[v] They will acknowledge that Estonia and Latvia had ‘significant groups of Bolshevik sympathisers among their population,’ but also say that they were ‘invaded by the Bolsheviks… under the guise of creating a federation.’ The British, meanwhile, wish to ‘come quickly to the aid of the new states.’ No ‘guises’ here.[vi]

I think we should start from a different perspective.

Civil War took place across the Baltic States, spilling over national boundaries. It was a class war with national cross-currents. As far as I can make out (reading between the lines of sources which are not interested in such questions), the main class forces were as follows:

The old landowners (Baltic Germans), eager to restore their privileges – supported by the German military.
Professionals and business owners, rallying a part of the workers and peasants under the banner of national freedom – supported by the British Empire.
Workers (of a range of nationalities) seeking to combine national freedom with socialist revolution – supported by the Soviet Union.
…and there were White Russians in the mix, allying variously with Germans, Allies and nationalists, but always against the Soviets.

Let’s flesh out this simple schema by introducing some of the concrete forces and events involved.

Germans, British and Whites

First, meet General Ruediger Von Der Goltz.[vii] Right when the Allies were cooking up the Versailles Treaty with the aim of trampling Germany into the ground, they were allowing thousands of German soldiers to represent German imperialism in Latvia. Against the Reds, any ally was a worthy ally.

By 1918 the German occupation force in the Baltic was ‘demoralised, mutinous and frankly Bolshevik’[viii] but help was on the way. Von Der Goltz arrived in February 1919 and took over an area around Libau, Latvia. He had a powerful base of support in the form of the wealthy Baltic Germans, plus German volunteers who had fought under him in the Finnish Civil War. Then came the ‘Freikorps,’ those military veterans turned paramilitaries who had crushed the Spartacus Uprising of January 1919.

Finnish volunteers arrive in Estonia. Fresh from the bloody Finnish Civil War. The Finns would return home in Feb-Mar 1919 after suffering 150 fatalities.

Within days of the Estonian and Latvian nationalists declaring independence in November 1918, the British navy was knocking on their doors and dumping thousands of weapons on their doorsteps. A little way into 1919, the armies of the Latvian and Estonian nationalists were kitted out from head to toe in British uniforms. The British fleet dominated the Baltic Sea and soon the Gulf of Finland, too. They sank Soviet ships in brief and one-sided naval battles, laid siege to the island fortress of Kronstadt, made daring raids into its harbour, ran agents in and out of Petrograd by boat, and lobbed shells at any Red Army unit that strayed into range near the coast. When the Red troops at the coastal fort of Krasnaya Gorka rose in a mutiny against the Soviets, the British supported them with artillery fire.

They also operated a kind of taxi service across the Baltic, ferrying White Russians, nationalists and Germans around to engage in talks; the British sometimes lost their patience in their attempts to get these mutually hostile forces to work together. They were the fixers. Without them the component parts of this anti-Soviet alliance would have been at each other’s throats.

The counter-revolutionary Russians who gathered their forces in Estonia constituted perhaps the most openly reactionary of the White Guard armies. There was none of the ‘keeping up democratic appearances’ that we get with Kolchak and Denikin; their recruits took the oath of loyalty to the Tsar.

But Estonia was exactly where a little bit of moderation would have gone a long way; the Whites and the Estonian nationalists fought side-by-side against the Reds, but their refusal to even consider granting self-determination meant the Estonians were not exactly ready to follow them to the gates of hell (or even, as it happened, Petrograd).

Rise and Fall

Early in 1919, the Latvian Soviet Republic made great gains, took Riga, and looked fairly secure. Meanwhile the Estonian Workers’ Commune established itself in the east of Estonia and took on the nationalists. The Workers’ Commune was supported by the Seventh Red Army, and soon it was 40 miles from Tallinn.

But by summer this had all melted into air. Finnish, White Russian and British aid for the Estonian nationalists secured a military victory. The Red Estonians (and there were many) were defeated and driven into Russia.

British naval guns were used to ‘help put down a mutiny among the Latvian [nationalist] troops’ and then to support the Germans in an assault on the Red-held town of Windau.

You don’t need to speak German – the retreat of the Reds from Feb through April to June is starkly visible

So far, so much foreign intervention. But there was a political side to these defeats. The Latvian Communists were ultra-left, like their Ukrainian comrades. They engaged in ambitious economic experiments and refused to give the nobles’ land to the peasants. This was in stark contrast to the Estonian nationalists, who carried out an ambitious land reform programme and gained popularity. This is barely remarked upon by my sources but it must have been of decisive importance.

Late in spring, things had turned so sour for the Soviets that the White Russians were able to make an attack from Estonia onto Russian soil. This attack was defeated, but it seems it was only a probing attack; the real onslaught came in October.

Iron Division

Meanwhile Von Der Goltz had risen up against the Latvian nationalists. In April forces semi-connected to him took Libau and arrested the Latvian government, denouncing them as Bolshevik sympathisers. A few weeks later, he invaded Estonia.

His ‘Iron Division’ took Riga in May and 3,000 people lost their lives during ‘a veritable reign of terror’ in the occupied city. His ambition appears to have been to carve out a Baltic German state.

Trailer for Defenders of Riga, dir Aigars Grauba, 2007

In June the Latvian and Estonian armies ganged up and defeated Von Der Goltz and his army. The British, ever with their eyes on the prize (smashing communism), brokered a peace deal which involved clearing the Germans out of Latvia.

With the Germans defeated and the new independent republics consolidated, the situation by the end of the summer was not quite so complex: there were now two small anti-communist states consolidated just to the east of Petrograd, armed to the teeth with British rifles… And playing host to thousands of armed and trained White Russians who would rather see them dead than independent.

And the British had a task for these White Russians.

Towards Petrograd

In late summer, a celebrated Russian general named Iudenich arrived in Helsinki. He had made his name inflicting heavy defeats on the Turkish army during the World War, and now he had been appointed commander of the White Guards in Estonia by Admiral Kolchak. British supplies began flooding in: 40,000 uniforms in August and September 1919 alone.[ix] Iudenich set out to take Petrograd, and by early October he was in the suburbs of the city.

But that’s a story for another post; this short post can at most serve as a prologue to that drama.

Let’s finish with a strange image that Kinvig gives us.[x] After the defeat of Von Der Goltz, the Baltic German force known as the Landwehr were not disarmed. Instead Harold Alexander, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Irish Guards who was somehow still in his 20s, took command of 2,000 of them and led them to the front against the Reds. He campaigned ‘dressed in his Irish Guards uniform, but wearing Russian highboots and a grey astrakhan Cossack-type hat.’ I think this image sums up the strange features of revolution and counter-revolution on the Baltic.

Local women dig trenches, somewhere on the southern front (that is, the south of Estonia, not of Russia). I don’t know are these women Russian or Estonian, or what side they are toiling on behalf of. A stark reminder that all this military stuff comes at the expense of the civilian population

Note:

By way of an appendix, I am getting a lot out of Clifford Kinvig’s book Churchill’s Crusade. It is heavily critical of British intervention – of course it is, since it is based on the testimony of the British officers who saw the fiasco first-hand. It’s a great book.

But one tic of Kinvig’s really annoys me: he relentlessly refers to the Red Army as ‘the Bolsheviks.’ The party was renamed in March 1918 to ‘Communist Party’ – and anyway, we are talking about the army, not the party. There were SRs and non-party individuals in high positions in the Red Army throughout the Civil War period. It’s true that 5-10% of the army were party members by late 1919. But obviously 90%+ were not!

By using the term in the way that he does, Kinvig is telling us how he sees the revolution: as the accidental triumph of a bunch of cranks. I hope this series has demonstrated that nothing could be further from the truth.

The non-party Red Army soldier and Red commander had various and complicated motivations; national defence, a desire to beat the landlords, a genuine ‘non-political’ ethos of service, state compulsion, etc. They would not have been surprised to be sneered at as a ‘Bolshevik’ by their conservative uncle or their kulak neighbour, they might be surprised that a historian is still using the term decades later.

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[i] Clifford Kinvig, Churchill’s Crusade, 142

[ii] Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army, chapter 1. https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1937/wollenberg-red-army/ch01.htm

[iii] LD Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Volume 2: ‘Petrograd, be on your guard!’ – December 22^nd 1919

[iv] It is accepted, after all, by a majority of people the world over that one’s own nation (whichever nation that might happen to be) is the only benevolent force in a dangerous world.

[v] Exercising hindsight in this way is not necessarily outrageous. But the contrast between the treatment of Estonia [applause] and Soviet Russia [Boo! Hiss!] is striking. Even the most enthusiastic Irish Nationalist historians do not refer to the underground Dáil Éireann of 1919 as ‘Ireland.’

[vi] Kinvig, 135

[vii] ‘Ataman Goltsev’ to the People’s Commissar for Nicknames, Trotsky

[viii] Kinvig, 136

[ix] Khvostov and Karachtchouk, White Armies, 12

[x] Kinvig, 143

13: Warlords of Ukraine (Continued)

This post continues our explainer on the main factions contending for power in Ukraine in 1919. Note the factions we already looked at last week: the Ukrainian Rada and the White Guards. The German military and their puppet Hetman are already out of the game, and in the east the new Polish state is muscling in.

1. The Reds

The Reds supported self-determination for Ukraine and said so before the world many times. Their preference was for Ukrainian autonomy within a federation, and language and cultural freedoms. This was no less than what the Rada had called for in 1917: ‘Long live autonomous Ukraine in a federated Russia.’[i] The difference between Rada and Soviet was one of class.

The Red Army entered German-occupied Ukraine in September 1918. After the German Revolution, intervention gathered pace. On 30 November a Ukrainian Red Army was officially founded.

In early December a 3-day general strike broke out in Kharkiv, in Eastern Ukraine, and a revolution from below installed Soviet power in the city. Note the contrast between 1919 and 2022: Kharkiv, which has a large Russian-speaking population, has held out against the Russian invasion up to the time of writing. In 1919 it went Red almost without a fight.

According to EH Carr, the fact that the Communists were unable to organise a revolution directly in Kyiv shows how little active support they had in Ukraine.[ii] But after the events in Kharkiv, the Reds took just two months to cover the distance to Kyiv. In February 5^th the Ukrainian Red Army captured Kyiv from the Rada. In contrast to the bloody and destructive five-day struggle between Red Guards and Rada in February 1918, and in stark contrast to the fiasco which Putin presided over in 2022, in 1919 the Reds ‘were greeted by the population with every display of enthusiasm.’[iii]

Ukrainian postage stamps from 1919. It is variously attributed to Soviet Ukraine or to the Anarchists. In spite of how much the guy there looks like Makhno, I’m more inclined to think this is a Communist than an Anarchist artefact

The Ukrainian Red Army was a horde of Red Guards and partisan units, a throwback to the freewheeling revolutionary days of early 1918. As if to underline this, the Red commander was Antonov-Ovseenko and one of his main officers was Dybenko; these two men had led the October 1917 insurrection in St Petersburg.

The war in Ukraine in 1919 was a war of loose ‘detachments’ and charismatic leaders, sudden spins of the wheel of fortune, and unstable alliances. ‘Being in an early phase of revolutionary ferment,’ according to Deutscher, it was ‘congenial ground’ to the left wing of the Communist Party.[iv]

The Red Ukrainian regime made rapid gains but it was soon overstretched. It was too aggressive on the land question, and dismissive on the national question. Instead of taking the land of the nobility and sharing it out, the Reds decided to turn this land over to state farms. The Ukrainian peasants might have just about tolerated the seizing of food, but this added insult to injury. Huge numbers of peasants rose up in rebellion.

‘In Ukraine today historians argue that Great Russian chauvinism coloured the whole of Bolshevik policy toward Ukraine in this period.’[v] Many Bolsheviks – especially, for some reason, Ukrainian Bolsheviks – were dismissive of the country’s national identity. But the general picture is of a movement with a real social base within Ukraine, in the cities especially but also among many peasants. The idea of the Reds as an imposition from outside is only tenable if we decide arbitrarily that Russian-speakers and Jews cannot be regarded as Ukrainian. The early missteps were later rectified thanks to intervention from Moscow – which goes against the impression that it was Russian imperial chauvinism. If we look back through the prism of later events, especially the famine and terror of the 1930s and the ongoing war, we will lose sight of this. Something very different was going on here.

Later in 1919 and into 1920, as noted above, the Ukrainian Reds, urged thereto by Moscow, adopted more sympathetic policies on land, food and the national question.[vi] But early 1919 was characterised by bold advances, impressive in the short term but storing up huge problems in the longer term.

The civilian administration of Red Ukraine was threadbare. The military presence was more fleshed-out, but not by much. The Dniepr River runs roughly north-south through the middle of Ukraine – from Chernobyl by the Belarus border to Kherson on the Black Sea. The commander-in-chief of the Red forces, Vacietis, wanted this to be the line at which the Red forces stopped short and dug in. But Moscow could not control Antonov-Ovseenko, and in any case Antonov-Ovseenko could not control his Red Guards and partisans. As winter turned to spring they swept on into the western half of Ukraine, carried on their own momentum.

At first the Red advance appeared to be successful. But the overreach had terrible consequences. One was that the Reds ended up dependent on deeply unreliable allies.

2. The Warlord

Painting by Mitrophan Grekov (probably showing South Russia rather than Ukraine)

The civil war in Ukraine, like that in Siberia, was a war of atamans. An ataman was a charismatic warlord who raised and led an army in wild pursuit of some quixotic, obscure or horrifying programme.

How would one go about becoming an ataman? What must you have on your CV? Below is a step-by-step guide for this career path, illustrated with reference to Nikifor Grigoriev, the foremost warlord of Ukraine. Grigoriev was a military officer who, by the hour of his death, had joined or tried to join almost every single one of the contending factions mentioned here.

Step One: Have murky origins

Grigoriev ‘constantly emphasized his Ukrainian origin, called for the destruction of Russians, but at the same time for some reason had a Russian surname’[viii] – the solution to the mystery is that he replaced his real name, Servetnik, with the more Russian-sounding ‘Grigoriev.’

And here we encounter another Lviv or Derry, because it is variously spelled Hryhoriiv and Hryhor’yev.

Step Two: Join the Tsar’s army

Apart from two years of elementary education, Grigoriev’s only school was the Tsarist military. Service as a Cossack cavalryman in the Russo-Japanese war taught him to fight and to lead. After the war followed eight years as either a tax official or a cop. Then in the Great War he returned to the cavalry, and won medals for his courage and skill.

Step Three: Make a lot of friends

He is described by contemporaries as a rude, ugly, heavy-handed man who spoke through his nose. But ‘the soldiers liked him for his recklessness, eternal drunkenness and simplicity in relations with the lower ranks. He was able to convince the rank and file to go into battle, often setting a personal example.’

Step Four: Find a political cause

Grigoriev took part in the soldiers’ committees during 1917. He eventually joined with Semion Petliura and the Rada (Ukrainian Nationalists), and became a Lieutenant-Colonel in its army in 1917-1918.

Step Five: Be fickle

When the Germans booted out the Rada and brought in their puppet Skoropadskii, Grigoriev sided with the Hetman and served in his forces. He may even have participated in the coup. But after a few months he joined the Rada again in their uprising against the Hetmanate.

Step Six: Raise hundreds of fighters, then thousands

He returned to his native Kherson region and convinced 200 middle peasants to fight alongside him. They attacked the Hetman’s police in order to lure out a German punitive detachment, which they defeated. Next they ambushed an Austrian train and made off with enough rifles, machine-guns and grenades to equip a force of 1,500.

This was all in the context of a developing revolution against the Hetman, which culminated in November 1918. In December, Grigoriev led 6,000 rebels into the town of Mikolayiv, seizing it from the Allies, the Germans and the Hetman’s troops.

He threatened the Germans: ‘I’m coming at you […] I will disarm you, and our women will drive you with clubs through the whole of Ukraine to Germany itself.’

Step Seven: Insist on your own independence

Soon, virtual dictator of a large swathe of southern Ukraine, Grigoriev began to turn against Kyiv, insisting on his own independence but also demanding to be made minister for war. He began to flirt with the left even while saying that ‘Communists must be slaughtered’ and threatening to attack striking workers. He joined the Borotbisti, the Left SRs of Ukraine, who were in alliance with the Communists.

Then the French military landed at the Black Sea ports of Ukraine. Petliura was hoping for aid from the French, so he forbade Grigoriev from attacking them. Angered by this, the warlord changed sides once again. He went over to the Reds.

This is not the last we’ll be hearing of ataman Grigoriev.

Grigoriev standing next to Antonov-Ovseenko, who co-led the October 1917 insurrection in Petrograd.

3. The Black Army

The village of Huliaipole lies in south-east Ukraine, some way inland from Mariupol. There, in 1907, a local school teacher named Nestor Makhno led a peasant protest movement. Makhno was an anarchist-communist. He may have absorbed from his upbringing the Cossack tradition of fierce independence and self-government. The Bolsheviks looked to the working class, but Makhno looked to the peasants.

Nestor Makhno, known as ‘Batko’ or ‘father’ to his supporters. Note the sailor’s cap on the bloke beside him.

In 1907 he was arrested and exiled. But in the days of the Revolution he surfaced again. Ten years after his failed rising in Huliaipole, he was elected leader of its soviet.

Summer of 1918 found him in Moscow. He had friendly interviews there with Communist leaders such as Lenin and Sverdlov. But Makhno believed that all state authority was oppressive and counter-revolutionary. He was unimpressed by the anarchist groups which operated freely on Soviet territory.

He returned to Huliaipole in autumn 1918, leaving behind the ‘paper revolution’ of the urban anarchists in favour of rifles and guerrilla attacks. He organised a partisan band, displaying exceptional ability in battles with the forces of the German puppet Skoropadsky.

Then the German empire crumbled and Ukraine became a political vacuum overnight. He organised his partisan band into a stateless peasant commune centred around Huliaipole and defended by a force numbering in the thousands, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine.

Makhno and his lieutenants pose before a studio backdrop in 1919

The Anarchists travelled on horses and carts, loaded down with all kinds of weapons: ‘curved swords, naval cutlasses, silver handled daggers, revolvers, rifles and cartridge pouches made of oilskin. Enormous black and red ribbons flew from every kind of hat and sheepskin cap.’[ix]

The Whites were among the first to confront the Black Army. Mai-Maevsky warned his troops about Makhno: ‘I don’t doubt your ability, but it is not likely that you will manage to catch him. I am following his operations closely and I wouldn’t mind having such an experienced troop leader on my side.’[x] Makhno’s mode of warfare was mobile. For example, as early as November 1918 his troops captured Ekaterinoslav (today Dnipro) simply by boarding a train in disguise, pulling up to the main station, then drawing their weapons and charging out. But they abandoned the town just three days later and returned to guerrilla struggle.

Makhno next to Pavel Dybenko, a Red commander and key leader of the October Revolution

In early 1919 Makhno’s ‘Black Army’ joined the Red voluntarily. One Red Army division was co-led by Dubenko, Grigoriev and Makhno.

Conclusion

We leave it there in early 1919. The Reds are in control of a vast area but stretched thin, and things are about to go sour for them. Soon Ataman Grigoriev will change sides once again. In future posts in this series we will also look more closely at the Anarchists and the Ukrainian nationalists. Future posts will also explore what happened when the French military blundered into this mess with an invasion of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. And keep an eye on those White Guards in the Donbass.

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Sources

[i] Smith, 128

[ii] Carr, 306

[iii] Again, Carr, 306

[iv] Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 360

[v] Smith, 186

[vi] Smele, 102. Smith, p 186: ‘Thanks to Lenin’s intervention in December 1919, Russian chauvinists had been removed from the leadership of the Ukrainian party, and the absorbtion of the Borot’bisty, a left-wing splinter from the Ukrainian SRs, finally gave the party cadres who could speak Ukrainian and had some understanding of the needs of the peasants.’

[vii] Deutscher, 364

[viii] Most of my information on Grigoriev comes from this very informative essay: http://militera.lib.ru/bio/savchenko/04.html/index.html

[ix] Beevor, 261

[x] Beevor, 260

12: Warlords of Ukraine

This is Revolution Under Siege, a series about the Russian Civil War. In this post, we will contrast Ukraine in 1919 with 2022. Then we will begin a round-up of some of the array of factions which contended for power in Ukraine during the Civil War.

From April to November 1918 the Ukrainian revolution was left to simmer under the heavy lid of Austro-German military occupation. With the end of the Great War the German and Austrian empires collapsed. Meanwhile the end of the Turkish Empire opened up Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.

The German soldiers cleared out. From the Taman peninsula at the eastern edge of Ukraine, the Germans vanished. ‘They disappeared in the night, quietly, as if they had never been there at all.’ Likewise one morning in Odessa citizens woke to find them gone.[i] It was not so sudden elsewhere; German soldiers would stay behind for a while, would join one faction or another or just try to keep out of it.

Within a few weeks, an array of diverse factions had appeared all over the country, and for a long time no force was able to hold the capital city, Kyiv, for longer than a few months. Nobody could count on their ‘allies’ and nobody was in full control of their ‘own’ soldiers. Suffice it to say that between 1917 and 1920 Kyiv changed hands sixteen times.

Ukraine in 1919 was as crucial as a theatre of war as the Don Country or Siberia. But civil war in Ukraine was even more complex than in Russia.

So this two-part episode takes the form of an explainer. First, we will go into the main ways in which Ukraine in 1919 was different from Ukraine in 2022. Then we will give a run-down of each of the main contending factions.

An Austrian postage stamp, with the arms of the Ukrainian nationalists superimposed

The current war in Ukraine lends immediacy to this topic. Then, like now, people were dying in terrible numbers in combat; masses of unarmed people were forced to leave their homes; civilians were murdered. The same place names feature, or the same cities under new names.

But if we look at 1919 through a prism of 2022, we will miss some essential points.

This was a civil war between Ukrainians, with direct armed intervention from a range of other countries including Poland, France, Romania and Russia (both White and Red). It was not an invasion of Ukraine by the Russian state, as we see today.

But even to speak of Russian ‘intervention’ in 1919 on a par with French intervention is not fair, as we will go into below.

2. In 1919 the war was fought primarily on socio-economic questions – workers against bosses, peasants against landlords, peasants against the varicoloured armies which lived by pillaging them. But in 2022, the national question is in first place.

Ukraine, in 1919 as in 2022, is not a small nation. Its language, culture and people suffered vicious oppression under Tsarism. But one-fifth of the Empire’s population resided in Ukraine – 20 million people or even 32 million, depending on how you count them.[ii]

Some Ukrainian nationalists in 1919 had a very ambitious idea of what the borders of Ukraine should be

Here we come to another difference between now and then.

3. Ukrainian nationalism in 1919 was simply not the force it is today. In February 2022 when Putin’s regime invaded Ukraine, he probably counted on splits developing within the Ukrainian government, military and society. Over the six months between then amd the time of writing the Ukrainian people have not fragmented under the onslaught, but on the contrary cohered. They got behind the Zelensky government, even though most of them didn’t trust Zelensky before the war.

In 1919 the situation was very different:

[…] enervating to Ukrainian efforts toward statehood was the very weakly developed sense of nationalism in the territories it claimed as “Ukrainian.” Despite the inculcation of Ukrainian nationalism by successive generations of intellectuals during the nineteenth century, few of the region’s numerically predominant peasant population seem yet to have absorbed the notion of a distinct Ukrainian identity by the early twentieth century.

The cities were dominated by Russians and Poles in the civil service and the professions, and by Jewish people in commerce and intellectual life. The urban population was miniscule. Ukraine was a land of farmers and Ukrainian was a language spoken in villages.

In 21^st-century Ukraine, 70% of the population lived in cities, and most of those city folk speak Ukrainian. It is a nation of workers and not of peasants. It is ruled not as in the early 20th century by Polish and Russian landlords but by Ukrainian capitalist oligarchs. The classes in Ukraine, the way people live and make a living, the national consciousness, have all changed utterly.

If today Kyiv was only 18% Ukrainian, and many of those 18% spoke Russian and considered themselves Russian, then Putin’s attack on that city would have turned out very differently. But those were the numbers in 1919. In the July 1917 local elections only 12.6% of the vote in small towns went to ‘overtly Ukrainian parties,’ and the corresponding figure for larger towns was 9.5%.[iii]

Unlike today, the idea that Ukraine should be an independent state did not have the support of a critical mass of the people. Among the urban and working-class population, this idea had very little support at all.

Released POWs from the Great War swear allegiance to the Ukrainian Rada, August 1919

4. In 1919 the Ukrainian nationalists did not have the support of the Allies. Today western leaders are effusive in their support for the Zelensky government, weapons have poured into the country, and blue and yellow flags are to be seen across Europe and North America. But in 1919 the Allies were suspicious of the idea of Ukraine being autonomous or independent of Russia. Remember, they hoped to see the White generals win the Civil War. These Whites spoke of Ukraine as ‘Little Russia’ and one of their key slogans was ‘Russia, one and indivisible.’ Why antagonise the White generals by ‘dismembering Russia’?

What was more, in February 1918 the Ukrainian nationalists signed a peace treaty with Germany. For this, the Allies never forgave the Ukrainian nationalists.

So there are some major differences between Ukraine a hundred years ago and now.

Below, our round-up of the various factions that contended for Ukraine in 1919 will further illustrate these points. It is divided into two parts, the second of which will follow next week.

1. The Hetmanate

Skoropadskyi, Hetman of Ukraine, with his boss, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany

As we have seen, in February and March 1918 the Germans advanced across Ukraine from the West, driving the Red Guards before them. The Ukrainian nationalists, led by Petliura and Vynnychenko, took Kyiv as the Reds cleared out, but soon surrendered to the advancing German military. The Germans tolerated Petliura and Vynnychenko for about five minutes before ousting them in a coup and setting up a puppet government. The leader of this government was Pavlo Skoropadskyi, a Russianised Ukrainian general and a former aide-de-camp to the Tsar, no less. His title was Hetman, which is a Ukrainian term for warlord.

In superficial trappings, the government of Hetman Skoropadskii, known as the Hetmanate, protested its Ukrainian-ness as if to compensate for its subservience to Germany.

The Hetman spoke only a little Ukrainian, and his ministers were from Russian political traditions hostile to Ukrainian liberation: the Costitutional Democrats and the Octobrists. They abolished all of the reforms that had been brought in before the coup, and they banned strikes.

The Hetmanate ‘jarringly bedecked itself with the pseudo-Cossack trappings of a semi-mythologized Ukrainian national reawakening – uniforms, flags, titles and ranks not heard of since the seventeenth century (and some not even then) could be espied on the boulevards.’[iv] The rifleman of the 1^st ‘Blue Coat’ Division of the Secheviye Streltsi wore a tall furry hat with a blue flamme, a long blue coat called a zhupan and baggy trousers of seventeenth-century fashion known as sharovari.[v]

But the reality of national oppression is summed up in one statistic: 51,428, the number of railway carriage-loads of grain and other goods which were, with the aid of the Hetman, stolen from the Ukrainian people and taken to Germany and Austria.[vi]

The Hetman’s soldiers, in traditional Ukrainian garb, October 1918

As we have seen, the German empire collapsed in revolution and surrender in November 1918. The pantomime was up, and Hetman Skoropadskii knew it. He cleared out on the next train to Berlin, dressed as a German officer. He made it to safety. Evidently this disguise was more convincing than his attempt to pass as a Ukrainian nationalist.

Most of my sources skim over the fact that there was a serious if brief war between the Hetman and the forces which replaced him, the Rada. In this war, the Allies promised to support the Hetman and even landed 5,000 British troops at Mikolayiv. But they were neutralised by the warlord Grigoriev, who we will look at next week.

2. The Rada

We already saw how in 1917 a parliament took power in Kyiv, calling itself the Rada. It was dominated by liberal and social-democratic Ukrainian nationalists.

Though at first it appeared the Rada and the Soviets might tolerate one another (even after the Rada suppressed the Kyiv Soviet) they ended up at war. The Kyiv Arsenal workers were massacred by the Rada. The Left SR Muraviev (who would later mutiny on the Volga) led a horde of Red Guards into Kyiv with much bloodshed and shellfire.

Then, as we have seen, came the Germans, who first allowed the Rada to stay in power, then had them overthrown in a coup.

The Rada forces led a 30,000-strong rebellion against the Hetman during the summer. Revolts simmered. Partisan forces organised.

After the Hetman jumped on the train to Berlin, ‘a largely peasant army swept Petrliura to power.’[vii] The Rada forces seized Kyiv. This regime was known as the Ukrainian National Republic or the Directorate – but for the sake of clarity and continuity it will be referred to here as the Rada. The leading figures were Vynnychenko and Petliura, two former members of the Social-Democratic and Labour Party. They passed laws nationalising industry and seizing the great private estates of the landlords. But the regime did not have the time or the machinery to implement these reforms, and it was in fact dominated by local military officials.[viii]

Peliura and Ukrainian soldiers (Picture taken later, in 1920)

In one source we read that they nationalised industry, at least on paper. But in another we read that the Rada was a regime of the military and the bourgeois and professional classes which did nothing to win over the workers and did not espouse ‘social reform on any significant scale, thus failing to rally the peasants.’ These failures were ‘frankly and repeatedly admitted by Vinnichenko [sic]’ who also admitted that ‘So long as we fought the Russian Bolsheviks, the Muscovites, we were victorious everywhere, but as soon as we came into contact with our own Bolsheviks, we lost all our strength.’ Ukrainianisation aroused hostility. Vynnychenko also confessed that the Rada’s political appeal forced the Ukrainian people to choose between nation and class, and the Ukrainians chose class.[ix]

The Rada only remained in power a short time. Just like in 1918, the Rada barely got time to unpack its bags in Kyiv before it was chased out, this time by the Red Army. Petliura fled west to Vinnytsia, ‘where he formed a more right-wing regime purged of Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries.’[x]

3. The Poles

Ukrainians often have cause to explain to foreigners that there are two, three or more ways of pronouncing their name, or the name of their home town. In Irish terms, it’s like the Derry/Londonderry debate, or when a Seán is pointedly addressed as John, or when a member of the Ward family signs off as Mac an Bhaird. The different versions of names are statements rooted in a history of conflict.

Take one city which is today in Western Ukraine: ‘Lwów (Polish), L’vov (Russian), L’viv (Ukrainian), Lemberg (German) and Liov (Romanian) were all current during the revolutionary period.’[xi] In media reports today it is universally Lviv (no apostrophe).

Let’s go with Lviv. In 1919 it was the chief city in what the Poles called East Galicia and the Ukrainians called West Ukraine. It had been for centuries a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This empire had all-Ukrainian units in its army. In November 1918, at the war’s end, these Ukrainian soldiers rose up in revolt. They seized Lviv and declared a West Ukrainian People’s Republic (WUPR), allied to the Rada in Kyiv.

But the Polish state newly arisen to the west had designs on the same territory. The WUPR fought a bitter and bloody war for its survival against the new Polish army. The region was stricken by famine in these years as a result of the fighting.

Apparently, this is a shell still lodged in a wall in Lviv, left over from the 1918-9 Polish-Ukrainian war

After the Rada was chased out of Kyiv by the Reds in February 1919, they found refuge with the WUPR. But this refuge was worn down by constant attacks from the Reds to the east and the Poles to the west.

In April, Petliura signed away West Ukraine/ East Galicia to Poland in a peace treaty. For this, the WUPR elements never forgave him, and in émigré circles after the war they denounced the Rada as ‘rude, East Ukrainian peasant cousins.’[xii]

4. The Whites

Ukraine bled seamlessly into the Southern Front of the Russian Civil War. Rostov-on-Don today is only a three-hour drive from Mariupol. The Volunteer Army was going from strength to strength in early 1919, and several thousand of these former officers and cadets occupied the Donbass region.

White officers, General Mai-Maevsky second from left.

The industrial, working-class Donbass region was not their natural habitat. Their numbers were not impressive. Their commander, General Mai-Maevsky, was a heavy drinker who looked ‘like a dissolute circus manager’ and brought with him a travelling brothel.[xiii]

Yet in the first half of 1919 they held the Donbass against three successive Red offensives. How? Professional soldiers are more mobile than militia, and steadier than partisans. They can wring the maximum out of whatever advantages they possess. In this case British aircraft scouted for the Volunteers, who made good use of the dense railway network of the Donbass. Under the leadership of Mai-Maevsky, who was courageous and brilliant in spite of first impressions, they were able to concentrate their forces at the decisive places whenever the Reds advanced.

The occupation of the Donbass, and the support of the British navy, meant the Whites were a factor in southern Ukraine.

Here we can compare 1919 and 2022. The White programme for Ukraine was broadly similar to Putin’s today: they did not want to loosen their grip on what they called ‘Little Russia.’ As for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Putin today condemns them for their acknowledgement of Ukraine’s right to its own culture and to self-determination. For him, the prophecies of medieval saints carry more weight than the aspirations of 40 million people who want to live in peace.

Join us again next week for ‘Warlords of Ukraine, continued,’ in which we will look at three more factions: the Reds, the warlord Grigoriev and the Anarchists.

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Sources

[i] Antony Beevor, Russia: Revolution and Civil War, p. 255 .

[ii] Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, p 96 (20 million); Mawdsley, p 162 (32 million)

[iii] Smele, 98

[iv] Smele, 61

[v] Khvostov, White Armies, p 43

[vi] Smele, 62. When we factor in smuggling, the real number may be twice as high.

[vii] Smith, Russian in Revolution, 162

[viii] Smele, 62

[ix] Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Book One, 310

[x] Smith, 186

[xi] Smele xii

[xii] Smele, 152

[xiii] Beevor, 258

So far, Beevor’s new book is terrible

I learned a lot from Stalingrad and The Battle for Spain, so I was interested to learn that Antony Beevor was tackling the Russian Civil War in his latest book.

But judging from what I’ve read so far, Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 is a crude offering. I’ll show what I mean by reference to a single chapter (which is more or less all I’ve read).

When I looked at the contents page, my eye was drawn to a chapter titled ‘The Infanticide of Democracy, November-December 1917.’

If you’re going to put an image of infanticide into my head, you’d better have a good reason. In this case, there is no good reason: during those two months, November and December, the Bolsheviks secured a majority in the Soviets, then received the blessing of a peasant soviet congress. They passed decrees on peace and land. They went into coalition with the Left SRs. They held the Constituent Assembly elections. The street fighting lasted only a few days, and the Whites involved were in general treated with magnanimity. Throughout, the Bolsheviks resisted the pressure to enter coalition with parties whose programme was diametrically opposed to theirs, and relied instead on the active support of millions of people.

All in all, I see this period as one during which, against challenging odds, the new soviet government lived up to its promise. But Beevor doesn’t see it that way.

Peace

He starts out talking about the war. Even though he dubs World War One ‘The Suicide of Europe’, he condemns the Soviets for trying to end the war. For him, the peace efforts were a bad thing because they encouraged rowdy and violent deserters (as if the rotten Tsarist army was not already collapsing due to mass desertion). If the Bolsheviks had broken their peace promise and forced everyone to fight on at gunpoint, no doubt Beevor would condemn that too. And he would be right!

Next in line for condemnation are the deserters themselves – because they ripped the upholstery out of first-class train carriages to wrap around their bare feet. Unmoved by the bare feet of the soldiers, Beevor is moved by the plight of the upholstery.

It must be fun for Beevor to come up with these taboo-busting chapter titles. ‘The Suicide of Europe,’ ‘The Infanticide of Democracy’… What’s next? ‘The Incest of Asia’? ‘The Opioid Addiction of Oligarchy’?

Plotting Civil War

Lenin, Beevor tells us, ‘welcomed destruction for its own sake.’ From there, he argues that Lenin wanted to start a civil war – ‘to achieve tabula rasa through violence,’ that he wanted all the horrendous destruction and inhumanity of 1918-1921 to happen so that he could ‘retain power’ and build communism on a clean slate.

So according to Beevor, Lenin’s plan was to hold power and to build communism in a context where the industries were devastated, where the areas which produced food and raw materials were occupied by enemy armies, where the urban working class – his support base! – were dying in huge numbers, where military spending made it impossible to pursue ambitious social programmes. Needless to say, this was not his plan.

By April, Lenin was happy (an unfortunately very wrong) to declare that the war was over. The idea that he wanted the Civil War at all is just as absurd as his alleged motivation.

But Beevor ‘proves’ his contention by cooking up the most negative and hostile interpretations of carefully-selected utterances by Lenin, then presenting these interpretations as fact.

You can feel Beevor’s fury and disgust every time he mentions Lenin. Whenever we see that name, it is accompanied by a bitterly hostile remark. He must have damaged his keyboard, angrily banging out L – E – N – I – N again and again. And yet to Lenin he keeps returning, as though the revolution revolved around one man.

Food

He ridicules Lenin’s claim that wealthy people were sabotaging food supplies. But this sabotage was taking place. First, there was speculation, or in other words the hoarding of food to drive up prices. Second, there was the strike of government employees, which was creating a humanitarian crisis, the sharpest edge of which was a food shortage. This strike was financed by rich people and big companies, and collapsed when they withdrew their support.

In a context of looming famine, when Lenin calls wealthy people ‘parasites’ and calls for a ‘war to the death’ against them, Beevor says this is ‘tantamount to a call to class genocide.’

The blind spots Beevor reveals are interesting. In this passage he talks about two things: 1) rich people starving poor people to death, and 2) Lenin making an inflammatory speech. If you asked me which of those two things could best be described as ‘class genocide,’ I know which one I’d pick. But for Beevor, it’s the first-class upholstery all over again. He gets upset about dangerous words and not about empty stomachs.

The food supply crisis, naturally, he blames on the Bolsheviks – even though the food crisis had been getting worse since 1915 and the Bolsheviks had been in power for all of five minutes.

Kornilov

The author turns his attention to the right-wing General Kornilov, who broke out of prison and rode across Russia to the Don Country where he met up with thousands of other officers and set up a rebel army to fight the Soviet government. His descriptions of Kornilov in this chapter make him sound like a fearless adventurer whose only fault is that maybe he’s too brave. There were ‘innumerable skirmishes.’ No doubt if it had been Lenin fighting his way across the country Beevor would pause to describe the blood and guts of his ruthlessly slaughtered victims. Instead of this, he compares the whole thing to Xenophon’s Anabasis (That’s The Warriors to you and me).

Lenin is portrayed as plotting to start a civil war. But Beevor never ventures to speculate that maybe Kornilov is plotting to start a civil war. Apparently Kornilov is fighting his way across the country and raising a rebel army for some other purpose.

Beevor’s version of Lenin can only retain power by achieving ‘tabula rasa through violence’ – as opposed to retaining power by democratic means. Meanwhile what was Kornilov doing, and why does it not come in for any scrutiny?

Lenin’s power rested on the active support of many millions of people through the Soviets, which were at this stage still a robust participatory-democratic system. Meanwhile Kornilov’s power rested on the support of several thousand men who gathered by the Don river at the end of 1917. They were united in the conviction that no elections were possible in Russia until the country was ‘purged’ and ‘cleansed’ of the soviets, along with nationalist movements and minorities.

In other words, they wanted to achieve tabula rasa through violence. But, at least in this chapter, it does not occur to Beevor to present them in this way.

Anti-Semitism

The most dishonest part of the chapter comes with Beevor’s remarks on anti-Semitism. He relates two local episodes in which soldiers and sailors attacked Jewish people. These incidents are supposed to prove that the Soviets tolerated or even encouraged anti-Semitism. We read: ‘Soviet authorities tacitly condoned violence against Jews’!

But just a few pages earlier, Beevor writes at length about the foundation of the Cheka. Somehow he fails to mention that one of the main purposes for which the Cheka was founded was to combat anti-Semitic pogroms. The very incidents he describes may have been those which the soviets responded to by setting up the Cheka.

Nor does he mention the outlawing of all racist discrimination, including anti-Semitism, by the new government.

The Cheka

The Cheka during November-December 1917 was a security organisation with only a few dozen full-time staff. But Beevor writes of it as if it were already the feared and controversial instrument of terror that it became over the year 1918. No, scratch that, he writes about it as if it were already the NKVD under Lavrentiy Beria.

For example, he quotes a poem which he says was ‘later’ published in a Cheka anthology. This is a disgusting, psychopathic little poem which celebrates killing. What Beevor doesn’t mention is that this poem was published a lot later, 1921 at the earliest. The entire Civil War took place between the point we’re at in the narrative and the date when the Cheka published this unhinged poem. Four years is an age in times of revolution and civil war. This poem was not written or published in December 1917 and could not possibly have been. The brutality it reflects was a product of the Civil War. Beevor presents it as if it were a cause of that war, part of the ‘infanticide’ of democracy, as if that mindset was there from the start, was in the DNA of the Cheka.

After the Civil War, by the way, the Cheka was radically downsized. Its role, under different names and big organisational changes, as Stalin’s executioner was yet another even later development.

By jumping around in time like this Beevor doesn’t just present a misleading account. He tells a dull story, a smooth and frictionless history of the Russian Revolution. Stalin’s totalitarian state is already there, fully-formed, in November 1917.

The Bolsheviks were initially humane and even magnanimous. Utterances from revolutionary leaders in which they speak in military metaphors can be easily found. But it is just as easy to find them expressing the hope that the Russian Revolution would be a lot less bloody than the French (so far, it had been). Krasnov was paroled after attacking Petrograd. Many Whites who fought in Moscow were let go and allowed to keep their weapons. Lunacharsky was so horrified by the fighting in Moscow he resigned as a minister. Lenin was the victim of an assassination attempt in January 1918, but it was hushed up at the time so as not to provoke reprisals. But 1918 saw Kornilov and his successors, along with foreign powers and the Right SRs, create a terrible military, political and humanitarian crisis in a bid to crush the soviets. This was the context for the development of the Cheka into what it became.

But in the monotonous world in which this chapter takes place, there is no change, no development of characters or institutions. A is always equal to A. The Cheka is always the Cheka. This way of looking at the world may pass muster in a book where, for example, Guderian’s Panzer Corps remains for a long period a dependable, solid and unchanging entity. But it is ill-suited to talking about revolutions and civil wars, in which institutions can pass through a lifetime of changes in a few months.

It’s not just that he gives a misleading, flattened account. It’s that he misses an opportunity to tell a far more interesting story.

The Left SRs

To minimise the significance of the coalition, Beevor treats the Left SRs as a bunch of ineffectual idiots and claims that the Bolsheviks always got their way. In fact, many of the key early leaders of the Red Army and Cheka were Left SRs; all Soviet institutions were shared between the two parties, for long after the coalition broke up in March 1918, and even after the Left SR Uprising of July 1918. But here Beevor treats the Left SRs just as he treats the Cheka: by jumping around in time as if context does not matter.

It’s real Doctor Manhattan territory. It is December 1917, and the Bolsheviks and Left SRs are making a coalition; it is March 1918, and they are breaking up over the Brest Treaty; it is July 1918, and they are shooting at each other in the streets of Moscow.

It gets worse. We are informed that ‘Leading Left SRs also fought for the distribution of land to the peasants, against what they now suspected was the Bolshevik plan of outright nationalisation.’

They ‘fought’, did they? Against whom?

Collectivisation, let alone ‘outright nationalisation,’ of land was not attempted, and it certainly was not an issue in the Bolshevik-Left SR split. Local experiments in state farms, and certain ultra-left policies in Ukraine and the Baltic States, are the only thing that comes close to what Beevor is suggesting. Stalin’s policy of forced complete collectivisation, meanwhile, was ten years away, and was never even contemplated by Lenin.

When Beevor writes that Lenin ‘had shamelessly copied’ Left SR policy on land, he is committing a double absurdity. First, because Lenin’s own position on the land question, consistent over twenty years or so, was broadly the same. Second, because the rules of plagiarism and copyright do not apply to policies. Adopting the policy of another party is a concession to that party.

But that wouldn’t do for Beevor. He cannot show Lenin being agreeable in any way. He insists that Lenin was like an icebreaking ship, that he was a worse autocrat than Nicholas II. Whenever Lenin’s actions contradict the extreme characterisations, Beevor cooks up a sinister motivation, rather than just reassessing his views, or admitting that politics and history are complex. The coalition with the Left SRs? A nasty trick. The Constituent Assembly elections? ‘Lip service.’ Soviet democracy? He claims it was ‘sidelined’ even though Soviet Congresses continued to meet and to decide key questions of policy well into the crisis of summer 1918.

Every narrative trick in the book is on display in this chapter. For example, Beevor describes the Left SRs getting in on the ground floor of the Cheka in a way that would leave an unattentive reader with the impression that they had been excluded. He describes up as down and black as white.

Persia

I’m disappointed. I was actually interested in reading Beevor’s account of the Civil War. I did not expect to agree with all or even most of what he said. But I thought he’d have something to say, and that it would enrich my own ongoing series on the Russian Civil War. Instead we get this monotonous, unbalanced condemnation that we’ve heard so many times before from so many sources: school, TV, and books with gushing quotes in their blurbs. The same old story is invariably described in these gushing blurbs as fresh and challenging.

Two-thirds of the way through, the chapter changes tack. It follows the critic Viktor Shklovsky as he runs off to Persia at around this time. This was horrifying reading, but at least I learned something I hadn’t already known. The Tsarist army was in occupation of a part of Persia, which was a major contributor to the fact that a third of Persia’s population died of famine and disease during the First World War. The Russian soldiers shot civilians for fun, abducted women and sold them in Crimea. Beevor notes that there was a different going rate for women who had already been raped and for those who had not.

Horrified, I read an article going deeper into this. Here – it seems by accident – the title ‘The Infanticide of Democracy’ earns its place. The Persians had a democratic revolution in 1909. Russia and Britain could not tolerate the possibility of an independent Persian Republic. They invaded, supported the reactionaries, and slaughtered thousands.

The horrors of the Tsarist occupation of Persia should give Beevor pause for thought. Was Lenin really ‘a worse autocrat than Nicholas,’ if this is what Nicholas did to Persia? These killers and slave-traffickers were many of the same officers and Cossacks who staffed the White Armies. If the Reds were fighting against such a heavy legacy of oppression, shouldn’t even a consistent liberal historian cut them some slack?

Beevor does not mention (at least in this chapter) that the Soviets renounced any Russian claim on Persian territory, and withdrew what was left of the Russian army. I had to learn that from the article linked above. But if he did mention it, no doubt he would find a way to twist it into something sinister and evil.

Conclusion

A lot of this chapter is taken up with abstract little sermons like the following: ‘This summed up the Bolsheviks’ idealised ruthlessness, elevating their cause above any humane concern such as natural justice or respect for life’ – or upholstery.

I don’t want the reader to think I have it in for Beevor just because I disagree with him. My shelf and my devices are full of titles whose authors I disagree with. Take the following remark by Laura Engelstein from her introduction to Russia in Flames: ‘there were no halcyon days of the Bolshevik Revolution. There was no primal moment of democratic purity that was later betrayed.’ I disagree with this statement, but at least there’s something there with which to disagree. It’s not a strident condemnation, let alone the third or fourth strident condemnation on a single page.

Evan Mawdsley’s book answers all kinds of fascinating questions about the Russian Civil War. It does so in a way that’s biased toward the Allies, but which leaves space for the reader to disagree, which often gives the other side the best lines, etc.

I have no problem, obviously, with polemical or agitational or partisan writing. But Beevor batters us over the head with his opinion and leaves us no space to interpret what he tells us. He writes in a ‘take it or leave it’ manner that does not invite debate. If he’s writing about 1917 and can’t find the evidence he needs to shock you into submitting to his point of view, he’ll go as far as 1921 to get it, then neglect to tell you where it came from.

I don’t know whether it’s complacency – he believes that he has a water-tight case, so he makes it with maximum force – or anxiety – he has serious doubts about what he’s writing, so he leaves no room for the reader to make up their own mind.

To sum up, the first part of the chapter was about a government that was trying to end World War One, share land with the peasants, and give power to workers’ councils. The author could hardly contain his rage and disgust. The end of the chapter was about a Tsarist army mass-murdering Persian people for eight long years. Here the author suddenly dropped the sermonising, the angry tone, the condemnations. Without his stranglehold on the narrative it was easier to read, in spite of the horrors he was describing. But the sudden shift in tone – oh man, it spoke volumes.

I have a sinking feeling that the whole book is going to be like this.

Go to Revolution Under Siege Archive

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My Sources

All my sources in one place.

An asterisk (*) signifies a source which I have used but not read cover-to-cover.

Books

Ali, Tariq. The Dilemmas of Lenin, Verso, 2017
Bryant, Louise, Six Red Months in Revolutionary Russia, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bryant/works/russia/ch09.htm
Carleton, Gregory. Russia: The Story of War, Belknap, 2017
*Carr, EH. The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 1. Pelican, 1950 (1969)
Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920, Orbis, 1983
*Denikin, Anton. The Russian Turmoil; Memoirs: Military, Social and Political, 1920
Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Outcast, Oxford University Press, 1963
Faulkner, Neil. A People’s History of the Russian Revolution, Pluto, 2017
Khvostov, Mikhail. The Russian Civil War (1) The Red Army. Osprey Publishing, 1997 (2008) Illustrations by Karachtchouk, Andrei
Khvostov, Mikhail. The Russian Civil War (2) White Armies. Osprey Publishing, 1997 (2008) Illustrations by Karachtchouk, Andrei
*Konev, AM. The Red Guard in the Defence of October, extracts available on the website Leninism.ru
LeBlanc, Paul. Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Haymarket Books, 1993
Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War, 1982 (Birlinn, 2017)
Raskolnikov, FF. Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin, 1934 (New Park, 1982), https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1918/raskolnikov/ilyin/index.htm
*Ransome, Arthur. The Truth About Russia. 1918. https://www.marxists.org/history/archive/ransome/1918/truth-russia.htm
*Rayfield, Donald, Stalin and his Hangmen, Viking, 2004
Read, Anthony. The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism. Pimlico, 2009
Serafimovich, Aleksander. The Iron Flood, 3^rd Edition. Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut. 1973 (1924). Illustrations by A. Kokorin.
Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930 (Haymarket, 2015)
*Serge, Victor. Memoirs of a Revolutionary. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1945/memoirs/ch01a.htm
Service, Robert, Trotsky: A Biography, Belknap Press, 2009
Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-1926, Hurst & Company, London, 2015
Smith, S.A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890 to 1928, Oxford University Press, 2017
Smith, S.A. The Russian Revolution and the Factories of Petrograd, February 1917 to June 1918. Unpublished dissertation, 1980. University of Birmingham Research Archive, e-theses depository.
*Taylor, A.J.P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. Penguin, 1963. (1982)
*Trapeznik, Alexander. The Revolutionary Career of Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1873-1952). Masters’ thesis, University of Tasmania, 1988
*Trotsky, L.D. How the Revolution Armed. 1923. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/military-pdf/Military-Writings-Trotsky-v1.pdf
Trotsky, L.D. My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 1930 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/index.htm
Ulam, Adam B, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, 1965
Valtin, Jan. Out of the Night, 1941 (1988), Fortress Books.
Westerlund,Per-Åke. The Real Lenin, A Socialist Party Publication (Australia), 2018
Wollenberg, Erich. The Red Army. 1937. https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1937/wollenberg-red-army/index.htm
*The USSR: A Short History, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1975

Articles

Argenbright, Robert, ‘Red Tsaritsyn: Precursor of Stalinist Terror,’ Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 4, No. 2, December 1″991,, pp.757-783
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
Hafner, Lutz, ‘The Assassination of Count Mirbach and the “July Uprising” of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in Moscow, 1918,’ The Russian Review , Jul., 1991, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 324-344
Hellebust, Rolf. “Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body.” Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1997, pp. 500–518. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500927. Accessed 18 June 2021.
Kollontai, Alexandra. ‘Women fighters in the days of the Great October Revolution,’ 1927. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1927/fighters.htm
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.
Reissner, Larissa. ‘Svyazhsk.’ Republished in Fourth International, June 193. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol04/no06/reissner.htm
Serge, Victor: ‘Once More: Kronstadt’, April 1938. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1938/04/kronstadt.htm.
Trudell, Megan. ‘The Russian Civil War: A Marxist Analysis.’ International Socialism, Spring 2000. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2000/isj2-086/trudell.htm#f39
Smirnov, M. I. “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.
Topwar.ru, no individual writer credited, ‘The personal file of General Snesarev,’ Dec 12 2012. https://en.topwar.ru/21778-lichnoe-delo-generala-snesareva.html

Film

Axelbank, Herman (dir.), Tsar To Lenin, 1937

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