Red Army

01: Red Guards

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

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

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

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

A member of the Red Guards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Reds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolution & Reaction

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

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

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

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

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

The first Red Guards – workers at the barricades in 1905

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

WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Guards

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

Red Guards in Autumn 1917

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Guard unit from the Vulcan factory

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

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

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

After the Revolution

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

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

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

Red Guards on sentry duty

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

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

<Back to Contents

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

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

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

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

[1]Dune, p 96

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

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

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

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

Dune, pp 11-12

[5] Dune, pp 15, 19

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

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

[8] Dune, pp 36-7. 47

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

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

[11] Dune, 51

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No land beyond the Volga

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

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

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

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

Not one step backward

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘old’ Red Army and the new

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad

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

How the Steel was Tempered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tukhachevsky’s Flying Tank

The Antonov A-40 Flying Tank prototype

The striking image above shows a glider-borne tank, tested unsuccessfully by the Soviet Union in the 1940s. The genesis of this idea was even stranger, like something out of a Command and Conquer game:

‘Tuchachevsky likewise paid particular attention to the Air Force. For some years he had studied the problem of combining the functions of aeroplane and tank in a machine to be known as the ‘flying tank,’ i.e., an armoured car which automatically or by a few turns of a handle could be transformed into an aeroplane and then changed back again into a tank that was ready to go into action as soon as it landed. There is also a compromise solution of this problem in the form of large-sized aircraft which can transport a tank by air and land it behind the enemy’s lines.

‘The study of the ‘flying tank’ led to successful experiments in the large-scale employment of special shock troops that could be dropped behind the enemy’s lines by parachute. It is no mere chance that this idea of aerial infantry originated in the brain of Tuchachevsky, the Commander-in-Chief of the first Red Army of workers and peasants.

‘The idea of dropping such detachments in the enemy’s rear presupposes that this area is peopled by inhabitants in sympathy with the aerial invaders, for otherwise such aerial shock troops as survived the attentions of the enemy’s anti-aircraft batteries would be wiped out by mechanized units hastily despatched to deal with them. The conception of a parachute corps is therefore closely connected with the idea of an international Socialist Revolution.’ 

From Erich Wollenberg’s book The Red Army – which is great as well as free to read online.

The genius of Tukhachevsky was such that even when he was preoccupied with a bizarre idea, like a plane that could turn into a tank, he ended up stumbling on a great idea – parachute soldiers. It’s also fascinating that the original inspiration for the idea of paratroopers was Tukhachevsky trying to figure out ways to help socialist revolutions in hostile countries.

Images from Aircraft Wiki and Wikimedia Commons