The Lacuna is a 2009 novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a young Mexican-American man, Harrison Shepherd, growing up in the early 20th Century. During his fictional life, spent back and forth between Mexico and the USA, he encounters real events and people, such as when he sees the Bonus Marchers beaten and gassed off the streets of Washington DC in 1932, makes friends with Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo in Mexico City, and back in the US finds himself in the firing line of the McCarthy Red Scare.
It’s a great novel that deserves all the praise and prizes that it got. In this brief post I want to zoom in on one interesting feature: its depiction of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, who lived in exile in Mexico city from 1937 until his murder in 1940, occupies a prominent place in the story. His depiction is something I’m going to praise but also criticize.
Kingsolver, who cut her teeth writing about miners’ strikes, treats the workers’ leader Trotsky with great sympathy. He appears to Harrison as a short, strong man with the dignified appearance of an older peasant, who is passionate about animals, nature and literature as well as politics. He employs Harrison as a secretary and, when he stumbles upon the young man moonlighting as a writer, gives him precious encouragement. An exile from Stalin’s Soviet Union, Trotsky is more melancholy than angry. Harrison is a witness to Trotsky’s murder and is haunted by the experience.
As an example of how she depicts Trotsky, in his affair with Frieda Kahlo (they did the dirt on their respective partners, Natalia Sedova and Diego Rivera), Kahlo comes out looking a lot worse than him. Harrison is Kahlo’s friend and confidante, and he judges her more harshly, probably because he knows her better; Trotsky is up on a pedestal and largely escapes judgement.
Trotsky, Natalia Sedova arriving in Mexico, escorted by Kahlo
Kingsolver is interested in Trotsky but far more interested in Kahlo. We see Kahlo’s sharp edges, we are invited to judge her at times. But I guess this is because the author decided to make her a central character, to spend more time and energy on her. Trotsky gets comparatively less attention from the author, so we get a simpler picture of him. This is all fair enough. But this leads the novel into some avoidable missteps.
Self-portrait by Frida Kahlo
Funerals
It’s not impossible that Trotsky would have employed Harrison as a secretary. Harrison is a veteran of the Bonus March, a supporter of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ (understood by him to mean democratic workers’ power) and a member of the leftist artsy milieu in Mexico City. Harrison is also young, and Trotsky was more politically tolerant toward younger comrades. But Harrison is, for all this, not very knowledgeable about or active in politics. I think Trotsky would have sooner entrusted such a key role to members of his own organisation, the Fourth International.
The 1932 ‘Bonus March.’ Jobless veterans camped out in Washington DC were subjected to a violent military crackdown.
So it’s a very strange moment when Harrison asks how Stalin and not Trotsky ended up in charge of the Soviet Union. This should be something which Harrison already knows about and has developed opinions about, if he’s living and working in a trusted position in Trotsky’s household.
It’s a problematic moment in a bigger way, too. The real Trotsky wrote entire books about Stalin’s rise to power, so we know what he would have said. The explanation he gives in The Lacuna is wide of the mark. Trotsky, earnest and visibly pained by the memory, tells Harrison that he missed Lenin’s funeral because of a devious prank by Stalin. And so Stalin took centre stage at the funeral, and so, in this version of events, he became the sole possible successor to Lenin. I remember being told this by my school history teacher as an aside, as a touch of pop-history anecdote material, but I haven’t come across it anywhere since. Maybe it’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t answer the question.
And it’s definitely not the first answer Trotsky would give. In real life, Harrison would want to put the kettle on and pull up a comfortable chair before he asks Trotsky how Stalin ended up in power. Trotsky would not have spoken of personal intrigues; he was far more partial to grand socio-economic analysis and theoretical debates. If you open up his key book on the subject, The Revolution Betrayed, you can see this in the title of the first chapter; it’s not ‘Stalin: Devious Bastard’ but ‘The Principle Indices of Industrial Growth’.
A mural by Diego Rivera depicting Tenochtitlan. Harrison’s stories are set in the same era as this painting
Yeoman farmers
In another strange scene, Trotsky laments the latest news from Russia: now Stalin is going after the ‘Yeoman farmers.’ But Stalin had started in on the ‘Yeoman farmers’ (kulaks) in earnest from 1929, and this conversation is happening around ten years later! In the early 1930s forced collectivisation and the ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ led to famine and terror on a huge scale. It was one of the most traumatic episodes in Soviet history and Trotsky wrote about it at the time. It wouldn’t have been news to him by the time he was in Mexico. In any case by then there were no kulaks left.
Trotsky in The Lacuna seems to regard these ‘Yeoman farmers’ as a key constituency whom nobody should mess with. This wasn’t the case. While Trotsky condemned Stalin’s onslaught on the peasantry and national minorities, he would still have used the derogatory term ‘kulaks’ rather than ‘Yeoman farmers.’ He saw the kulaks as a problem (though he advocated gradual and peaceful solutions) and earlier (in the mid-1920s) he condemned his opponents, including Stalin, for enacting policies that enriched and empowered this social layer.
‘pedantic and exacting’
In 1938 Trotsky’s son and close comrade Leon Sedov died in Paris, likely poisoned by Soviet agents during a routine surgery. In a powerful obituary, Trotsky expressed regret over his own often difficult personality:
I also displayed toward him the pedantic and exacting attitude which I had acquired in practical questions. Because of these traits, which are perhaps useful and even indispensable for work on a large scale but quite insufferable in personal relationships people closest to me often had a very hard time.
A more rounded novelistic portrayal of Trotsky would show us this ‘pedantic and exacting’ side, which was not a figment of Trotsky’s imagination – and perhaps his own occasional pang of regret over it. As his secretary, transcribing his extensive writings, Harrison would not only experience on occasion this ‘very hard time’ but would read practically every word Trotsky wrote. Someone as raw and open as Harrison would (rightly or wrongly is of no concern here) see some of Trotsky’s writings as ultra-principled or hair-splitting. This would especially be the case in the late 1930s; the extermination of all his allies and supporters back in the Soviet Union left Trotsky isolated, debating with the few survivors over questions which had no easy answers.
Trotsky with Ramón Mercader moments before the assassination. From The Assassination of Trotsky (1972, dir. Joseph Losey)
It’s believable and accurate that Harrison would encounter Trotsky and see a kind, curious, haunted man. But since he lived with him for a few years, he would see that like many great leaders and writers, Trotsky had his more negative personal traits. A more nuanced Trotsky, like the multi-faceted Kahlo we come to know in The Lacuna, would be all the more sympathetic for our having seen various sides of him.
But that doesn’t mean they did nothing wrong. For the first half of this post we’re going to look at the question of terror. Finally, we’re going to ask whether the Civil War led to Stalinism.
Cover art for a 1920s Soviet board game called ‘Red vs White: War Game’
Terror
The most disturbing part of the Civil War is the use of terror by the winning side. ‘After the outbreak of Civil War,’ writes Fitzpatrick, ‘the Cheka became an organ of terror, dispensing summary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages.’ According to Fitzpatrick, terror encompassed ‘not only summary justice but also random punishment, unrelated to specific guilt […].’ [1]
Deutscher sums up the violence in a vivid phrase: ‘terror and counter-terror inexorably grew in a vicious and ever-widening spiral.’ But he does not elaborate much beyond saying that the Reds ‘did not shrink from the shooting of hostages’. [2]
Smith writes that ‘the extent to which the new [Soviet] regime relied on violence is now much clearer than it once was’ – for example, in Deutscher’s time. But he adds that it is also better understood to what extent all sides relied on violence. [3]
My own reading bears this out. There’s no indication that Red Terror was in any sense worse than White Terror. All sides, from Makhno to Piłsudski and from the Soviet regime to peasant insurgents, used terror as a weapon. These were the grisly rules of this war.
The question is: Who wrote the rulebook? Who were the instigators of the unconstrained use of violence?
Late in 1917 White Guards massacred Red Guards within the walls of the Kremlin. Even before the start of Civil War proper the two foremost leaders of the White armies, Alexeev and Kornilov, defended the practise of shooting all Red prisoners. Kornilov was public and outspoken, calling for as much terror as possible and declaring that he was ready to kill most of the population if necessary.
From May, we have the Civil War proper. Unrestrained terror against ‘Bolsheviks’ was the rule during the White risings of Spring-Summer 1918. At Omsk, according to a Right SR witness, 2,500 captive Red soldiers and workers were massacred. At the hands of Ataman Dutov, hundreds were buried alive. These are just a few examples of many to show that the Whites got a big head-start on terror. White terror was decentralized and unsystematic throughout the war, but practically every faction engaged in it.
The White head-start on terror is an obvious and clear fact to me when I look at the timeline. But none of my sources talk about it.
The Soviet regime’s violence was not premeditated. It was a response to a crisis not of its making. Most of the country’s territory had been seized – not by a popular revolt against ultra-left excesses, but by a well-armed minority and by foreign armies. The insurgents were killing Soviet-aligned soldiers and civilians by the thousand long before the Soviets responded in kind.
The case for Red Terror was made openly. The Communists justified it by pointing to the crimes of their enemies, and promised it would be set aside as soon as possible:
The proletariat who strive for equality of all human beings, have no longing for dictatorship with terrorism, and do not themselves choose that tactical course. As soon as the situation permits of it they will forego it. In the process of the Socialist revolution they will always seek to discover whether this or that section of the bourgeoisie can be induced to join with them in the exercise of power, whether the circle of those possessing equal rights is not capable of extension, and they will greet the day with ringing of bells and shouts of joy in which all chains will disappear […]
Radek also emphasized that the curtailing of soviet democracy and the security measures in his own country were not a model for other countries to follow.
Two dreadful massacres early in 1918, at Kokand and Kyiv, were outliers: carried out by non-Bolsheviks in peripheral places far from central oversight. But it is a problem that they are neglected in any Soviet sources I’ve come across.
Some of the worst excesses, including the above, occurred in regions that were not predominantly Russian – such as Astrakhan and Crimea. The Bolsheviks took an inspiring stand on the question of national liberation – but the age-old racism and chauvinism of the Russian state found expression in the severity with which some of the agents of the Revolution acted when surrounded by non-Russians.
Revolutionary movements in the future must not take the same road. Terror had a brutalizing effect on the Soviet state and on its supporters. The Red side never endorsed torture – but there is evidence that it happened in some places. Can that be a surprise, when the Communist paper in Petrograd in September 1918 literally called for blood? On the pretext of deterring counter-revolutionaries, violence could be used maliciously. It was often counter-productive, triggering revolt. All this is on top of the cruelty and waste, which go without saying.
‘Ideas learned under fire’ included many negative and paranoid ideas – in other words, trauma. The idea learned from Baku or Omsk in 1918 – that one must take ruthless measures against any stirring of counter-revolution – was a very harmful idea when applied generally.
The Soviet regime was under unimaginable threats and pressures. This popular and progressive government had a right to fight for its survival. Ultimately these pressures and threats caused it to stoop to inhumane and counterproductive measures when it should have held firm to a line which might have better balanced security concerns with humanitarian principles.
Red Armoured Train No. 17, named ‘Victory or Death.’ From the US labour paper The Toiler, shared online by a great page called Revolution’s Newsstand
Did the Civil War lead to Stalinism?
Repression dismantled
Some accounts narrate the executions in Crimea and after Kronstadt in a way that leaves the reader believing that the repressive apparatus built up during the Civil War was kept in place afterwards. In fact, the Cheka was radically cut down, most of its staff let go and its powers curtailed. The use of executions ‘diminished into insignificance.’ The system of prison camps used during the Civil War was shut down; there is no direct continuity between it and the notorious Gulag system. The Cheka, renamed OGPU, was left in charge of only a small number of prisons.
The criminal justice system in the Soviet Union in the 1920s was progressive and lenient. Exile was abolished, prison sentences cut down, crimes caused by poverty judged lightly, non-custodial sentences preferred. Prisoners were paid for work, educated, and often allowed to live outside the prison. The imprisoned population in the whole Soviet Union was under 200,000 in 1927 – likely an overcount as many sentences were shorter than a year.
In other words, repression actually was a Civil War emergency measure.
There were also around 8,500 people in harsher OGPU-run facilities. In 1929, the year Stalin’s regime began its notorious campaign of forced collectivization, 60,000 were transferred from the prisons to new OGPU unpaid labour camps. ‘[T]he network of camps grew to embrace 662,000 by the middle of 1930, and it was to grow within another couple of years to nearly two million.’ [4]
From 8,500 to two million in a few years – that’s a historic rupture.
This leads us on to the second main point of this post. The society which emerged from the war fell a long way short of, say, what Lenin envisaged in The State and Revolution. But it fell even further short of totalitarian Stalinism. The devastation of the war was only one condition, and not by itself a sufficient one, for the descent into the totalitarian nightmare.
A Red Cossack. Again, from The Toiler
Red Army demobilised
As early as the start of 1920 the Red Army started demobilizing. ‘Lenin and the majority of the party’s leadership were obsessed with the recovery of the economy,’ (not fanatical world conquest) so 90% of the Red Army was sent home. There were 5.3 million personnel in 1921 – and just 562,000 by 1924, structured as a territorial militia.
This was very much army of a new type – commanders and rank-and-file soldiers were drawn from the same social classes; their uniforms were nearly identical; ranks were abolished; revolutionary discipline forbade corporal punishment and appealed to conscience. [5]
This army was wrenched away from its egalitarian and liberatory origins – but again the rupture came in the 1930s, not in the Civil War era.
The Red Army changed radically in the Stalinist period. Ranks were reinstated. Commissars were abolished, only to return later in a more inquisitorial form. Forced collectivization stunned the rank-and-file soldiers; the Great Terror decimated and terrorized the officers. The Soviet Union entered World War Two with a severely demoralized and fundamentally changed Red Army.
From The Toiler – A Red Army soldier
Living conditions
In 1921, after fighting on several fronts throughout the Civil War, Eduard Dune returned to the factory where he had been working when he first became a Bolshevik in 1917. The place was silent and shuttered. A handful of the old workers were minding the place, living off potatoes they grew on the grounds. But on the inside, the factory was perfectly preserved in the hope of economic recovery. [6] This is an image of promised renewal and reconstruction.
The promise was fulfilled. Contrary to the clichéd fatalistic aphorisms about how socialism only ‘shares out misery more equally,’ ‘runs out of other people’s money’, etc, in the 1920s working-class people saw huge benefits. City dwellers could now avail of free healthcare and far cheaper housing. Workers had a generous social insurance scheme. The countryside was far less penetrated by new social services, but appreciated the absence of landlords. A generation of worker and peasant youth benefited from much wider access to education. Smith (Russia in Revolution, p 320 and following) emphasizes the achievements in healthcare, in spite of scarce resources.
It is significant that, as soon as the Civil War was over, economic recovery began. This backs up the idea that war conditions, not Bolshevik policies, caused economic crisis.
Soviet democracy
The regime in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War was far more pluralist than one might expect in a country utterly devastated by war. It was a rich period culturally – Soviet youth experimented with free love; nudists jumped onto trams in Moscow; Esperanto speakers organized themselves; Soviet artists were at the cutting edge globally.
Contrary to another cliché, the Communists never actually abolished workers’ control in the factories. What emerged by the end of the Civil War was a compromise (there’s that word again). Some factories were run by elected committees, others by a centrally-appointed manager (a communist, a former manager, a chief engineer, or even in some cases the former owner), others still by a worker or group of workers from the plant appointed to run it. The latter was ‘often the most successful’ arrangement. [7] In other words, where workers’ control functioned well, it was kept. Where it turned out badly (and there are many reasons it might, in a context of economic collapse and war), the state stepped in and either modified it or ended it.
In practically every ‘democratic’ country at the time, poor people, minorities and women were excluded from voting. By contrast, the Soviets were elected by all men and women over 18. Those deemed to be exploiting others were denied the vote; this amounted to a tiny percentage of people.
The Soviet regime is sometimes accused of lacking ‘checks and balances’ necessary to prevent tyranny. In 1917-18 it was nothing but checks and balances. However, it’s true that the state which emerged from the Civil War was authoritarian and dysfunctional.
The Mensheviks had by this stage positioned themselves as a loyal opposition. Lenin and his old comrade, the Menshevik leader Martov (according to Tariq Ali in The Dilemmas of Lenin) were warmly reconciled before their deaths. Nonetheless the Soviet state subjected the Mensheviks to a severe crackdown in 1921, with thousands of them arrested. There was a parallel crackdown against oppositionists inside the Communist Party – Shlyapnikov and Kollontai were not arrested, but their faction was shut down. These measures were supposed to be temporary, to be reviewed after the Soviet Union had put a few years of urgent reconstruction behind it. But as the 1920s went on the Left Opposition, which included many of the most prominent Old Bolsheviks, found itself having to campaign for a restoration of democracy, amid increasing crackdowns from the party apparatus.
Though Lenin supported the crackdown on Mensheviks and the ban on internal party factions, he sounded the alarm early about the Soviet state and, in his final writings, took a democratic turn – for example on Georgia and on cooperatives. In 1920 he cautioned: ‘ours is a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.’ ‘Later,’ writes Faulkner, ‘alarmed at the influence of former Tsarist officials and newly appointed careerists in the government apparatus, he posed the question: ‘This mass of bureaucrats – who is leading whom?’ [8]
The bureaucrats included the former Mensheviks Beria and Vyshinskii. Beria would later serve as the notorious head of Stalin’s secret police. Vyshinskii, as prosecutor in the Moscow show trials later in life, would call for the ‘mad dogs’ (the defendants) to be shot.
Be conscious of how much heavy lifting is being done by this word ‘later.’ Here as with other topics, the decisive break came not in the Civil War but after 1928.
We have to note, however, that with the political regime, the curve is less dramatic, the rupture less obvious. Terrible damage was done in the Civil War, and the cost of economic recovery in the 1920s was a growth of bureaucracy and ‘NEPmen’, develoments which helped Stalin’s rise to power. Faulkner writes: ‘The revolution had been hollowed out. And, in one of history’s most bitter twists, another species of counter-revolution […] was growing, a malignant embryo, inside the revolutionary regime itself.’
Today’s cover image. Caption copied directly from WIkimedia Commons: ‘Russian_Revolutionary_Poster,_Red_Cavalry kiev Russian Revolutionary Poster Mount your horses, workers and peasants! The Red Cavalry is the guarantee of victory. Designer unknown, 1919.’
To be or not to be
We can’t hope to understand the Soviet Union without understanding that it was engulfed in its formative years by a cataclysm not of its making. This, alongside the country’s underdevelopment and isolation, created the authoritarian and bureaucratic tendencies, personified in Stalin, which would later seize power. So if people want to know where the Soviet Union’s siege mentality came from, they should probably read up on the siege.
We can’t hope to understand how the Soviet Union survived this cataclysm without appreciating that the October Revolution was genuinely popular.
It might be objected that if the Red soldiers could have seen the future, the cynicism and brutality of Stalinism, they would have lost the will to fight.
Maybe, maybe not. People at the time did consider the possibility of something like Stalinism; they had historical precedents in Cromwell and Bonaparte. In Victor Serge’s novel Conquered City, written in the 1930s but set during the Russian Civil War, two characters discuss the possibility that the Revolution might one day be hijacked by a dictator.
‘It wouldn’t be worth it, no…’ says Kirk. ‘It would be better, for the Revolution, to perish and leave a clear memory.’
Osipov responds: ‘No, no no, no! Get rid of those ideas, comrade. They’ve been beaten into us with billy clubs, I mean with defeats. No beautiful suicides, above all!’ [9]
I reckon western opinion of the Russian Revolution would be kinder if the revolutionaries had had the decency and good sense to be defeated and to die horrible deaths. The memory of the Soviet regime would be ‘clear.’ What’s not clear is what great service would be rendered to humanity by another epic of popular revolt and cruel defeat – another Paris Commune, Finnish Soviet, Spanish Republic, Indonesia 1965-66, or Chile 1973.
Osipov’s phrase ‘No beautiful suicides!’ brings to my mind the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – ‘to be or not to be…’ In Malcolm X’s reading, the Danish prince was deciding, in that speech, whether to suffer in silence or to risk death and damnation by resistance. [10] The Russian Revolution was a moment of liberation and creativity when humble working people exercised real power. They were brave to take arms against a sea of troubles, to defend their new socialist republic by every means consistent with that end.
The Revolution lit a beacon of liberation and creativity. Revolution Under Siege set out to trace what happened to this flame. It is not surprising that the Revolution fell short of its promise. What is surprising is that even after the years of hunger, typhus, shellfire and blood, there survived still a spark emitting the light of social justice and the warmth of human solidarity.
Osipov, in the trenches before Petrograd in 1919, continues his debate with Kirk:
‘We’re here to stay, by God! to hold on, to work, to organise […] To live, that’s what the flesh-and-blood working class wants, that great collection of hungry people behind us whom we seem to be leading but who in reality are pushing us forward. Whenever there is a choice – give up or continue – they continue. Let’s continue, let’s get into the habit of living.’
References
[1] Fitzpatrick, 77-78
[2] Deutscher, Stalin, 192
[3] Smith, 383
[4] Solomon, Peter H. ‘Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation.’ Slavic Review, Vol 39, No 2. Jul 1980. P 199, 202, 210.
On the Cheka being cut down, see Smith, Russia in Revolution, p 296: ‘At the end of 1921 there were 90,000 employees on the official payroll of the Cheka, but by end of 1923 only 32,152 worked in OGPU. In the same period the number of those working clandestinely for the political police fell from 60,000 to 12,900, and by late 1923 the total number in the internal troops, border guards, and escort troops had fallen from 117,000 to 78,400.’A
A note on the structure of the post-war Red Army:
In 1921 Trotsky argued for the replacement of the standing army by a territorial militia – a more traditional socialist position which had been favoured until the military emergencies of 1918. What emerged was a compromise: a small Red Army backed up by a large territorial militia. In 1934, at the height of this hybrid system, 74% of personnel were in the territorial militia. Men were drafted to serve for five years, during which time they would be soldiers for a few days a month, or a month or two in the summer. After their five years, they would be subject to recall in wartime.
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It is May 1920, and the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov is on the deck of the destroyer Karl Liebkencht, watching as 1,500 Red sailors land on the coast of Iran. Black plumes of shellfire erupt on the shore as the guns of the Red fleet bombard the British Empire’s elite Ghurka soldiers.
It is 1921, and the ‘mad Baron’ Ungern-Sternberg, having seized Mongolia’s capital and received the blessing of its priest-king, is setting out for war against the Soviet regime.
It is 1922, and the last White Guard regime still clings to power in Vladivostok in the Far East. General Horvath has given up all pretenses and pretensions at democracy, and rules over an openly monarchist regime, backed by the Japanese military.
It is 1923, and the last White Army, now abandoned by the Japanese, still clings to existence in remote and barely-habitable reaches of the Pacific coast.
It is 1926, and the Red Army is once again fighting the Basmachi in Central Asia.
The conclusions of the Russian Civil War were even messier and more manifold than its beginnings. As with the question of when it started, it’s helpful to think of two civil wars – a broad period of violence in the Tsarist Empire and its successor states lasting from 1916 to 1926 or from 1917 to 1923, and a narrow and more defined struggle between the Red Army and the White movement initiated by Generals Kornilov and Alexeev.
Revolution Under Siege never set out to be a comprehensive history of the ‘broad’ Russian Civil War, but I’m glad I paused the main story to write four or five posts about Central Asia and the Basmachi. This was a way of paying indirect homage to all the theatres of war which my main narrative has been obliged to neglect, such as North Russia, the partisan war in Siberia, the Caucasus and the Baltic States. To this we must now add the Russian Far East and Mongolia, which were very significant after 1920.
Rather than write another three or four seasons of Revolution Under Siege dealing with a period when the Revolution was, in fact, no longer under siege, I’m going to sum up as much of it as I can in one post. These are all things I’d write whole episodes about, if I had infinite time and if the scope of this project were just a few degrees wider.
North Russia
In the Arctic Circle Red forces battled with British and American troops directly from 1918 through to 1920. This was a small and slow war fought in extremely harsh conditions. Each side proved capable of landing heavy blows on the other, but by 1920 the Reds had the upper hand on the frozen battlefields and the tide of political opinion in the Allied nations was turning decisively against the Russian adventure. The Allies pulled out at last, and the Reds retook Murmansk and Archangel’sk in early 1920.
Coat of arms of the Far Eastern Republic. Not the corn, anchor and tool representing peasants, fishers and workers.
Siberia & the Far East
The Reds led an uprising in Vladivostok in January 1920 – a time when the ground was splitting under the feet of Kolchak’s regime. But this uprising was put down by the Cossacks of Semyonov, assisted by the Japanese military. Its leaders, including the noble-born Bolshevik Sergey Lazo, disappeared to an unknown fate.
A few months later the Reds took Irkutsk and set up the Far Eastern Republic in coalition with Mensheviks and SRs. The Far Eastern Republic had its own Red Army and its own emblem. For the next few years it made slow and steady advances against Semyonov’s Trans-Baikal fiefdom and finally, after the Japanese withdrawal, took Vladivostok from General Horvath in 1922. The last major city in the hands of the Whites was now in Red hands.
Territory of the Far Eastern Republic at its height
Mongolia
The Russian Civil War spilled over organically into Mongolia: White Russians fled there, some to settle peacefully, others to raid over the border.
When Baron Ungern moved his forces from the Trans-Baikal into Mongolia, terror seized the Chinese forces occupying the country. According to the White soldier Dmitri Alioshin, the Chinese set about slaughtering every White Russian they could find. The White Russians, who despised the Chinese with intense racism, responded in kind. The White Russians were mostly skeptical of the unhinged Baron and would have avoided him in the normal course of events, but they were driven into his arms by the actions of the Chinese military.
Ungern and his forces endured the steppe winter of 1920-21, and in February they marched on the Mongolian capital city (known variously as Urga, Ikh Khuree, Ulan Baatar). They seized it from superior numbers of Chinese soldiers and began several days of intense slaughter and looting.
Meanwhile the Reds had made an alliance with Sukhbaatar and Chaibalsan, two more left-wing Mongolian leaders who opposed Ungern. A joint Soviet and Red Mongolian army crossed the border. Ungern hastened to meet it. His luck ran out. After defeats, he fled with small numbers, who turned against him and abandoned him in the wild. A Soviet Mongolia was established, and Ungern was captured, tried and executed in Russia.
The Caucasus and Persia
Victory in South Russia spilled over into a string of major gains in the Caucasus. In Azerbaijan the local communists overthrew the Musavatists, the nationalist forces supported first by Turkey and then by Britain. Neighbouring Armenia also contained many pro-Soviet elements and like Azerbaijan it was soon its own Soviet Republic. So secure were the Caucasus that Baku, which had been in enemy hands mere months before, was chosen as the venue for the September 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East.
Meanwhile the Whites had withdrawn their Caspian Fleet, consisting of 17 ships along with 50 guns, to the British-occupied port of Enzeli in Persia (Iran). Raskolnikov led a Red striking force on a surprise raid, took and held the town for days, and returned the ships, munitions and materiel to Soviet Azerbaijan and Soviet Russia. In Persia itself, the Russian Revolution produced its shockwaves in the form of popular guerrilla leaders. The Enzeli raid, meanwhile, embarrassed the British so badly the Persian parliament rejected a proposed treaty that would have utterly subordinated the country to London.
The Daghestanis had troubled Denikin’s rear at a key moment. In 1920 some Daghestanis revolted against the Soviet power, though as many remained neutral and as many again were pro-Soviet. The Red Army suffered around 5,000 fatalities in tough battles over mountains, defiles and villages perched over sheer cliffs.
Georgia did not come into the Soviet orbit until 1923. The manner in which this was achieved was extremely controversial. It was the subject of Lenin’s final political struggle before his death. Though in extremely poor health, he waged a campaign against Stalin and his ally Ordzhonikidze. The latter pair were guilty of the premature entry of the Red Army into a Georgia that was not quite ready to accept it, and for the heavy-handed manner in which they dealt with the Georgian communists.
Makhno
Makhno and his Anarchist Black Army had been making open warfare against the Soviet power. But during the campaign against Wrangel the Anarchists agreed to a truce, sent some forces to help deal with Wrangel and, more importantly, stopped raiding in the rear of the Red Army.
Even taking into account how deep the hostility was between the Red Army and the Black, and how shallow their cooperation was, there’s something shocking about the Michael Corleone-like speed and ruthlessness with which the Anarchists were dealt as soon as Wrangel was out of the way. The commander of the Anarchist detachment which had fought in Crimea was summoned to Red Army HQ, but it appears it was a trap. He didn’t make it out alive.
After this, Makhno’s fortunes spiraled. He ended up with a couple of dozen companions fleeing across the Romanian border with the Red Cavalry hot on his heels. A humble life as an exile in Paris awaited him.
Internal Revolts
We have traced the fronts of the Civil War clockwise from Murmansk to the Black Sea. Now we return to the heart of European Russia. In late 1920 and into 1921, Tambov Province saw a rural revolt against Soviet power which far exceeded any peasant unrest during the Civil War. Soviet officials and their families were slaughtered out by furious insurgents, who organized into an army along regular lines.
Early 1921 saw a general strike of workers in Petrograd demanding better rations and fewer restrictions on political rights and economic activity. After the end of the strike, in March, the Kronstadt sailors revolted with a mix of similar demands and more far-reaching demands. Suppressing the Tambov and Kronstadt Revolts required serious military operations.
Smele says ‘it has been estimated that’ 2000 sailors were executed after the suppression of the revolt. If so, the scale of the reprisal was truly shocking. On the other hand Marcus Hesse, drawing on Paul Avrich, paints a different picture:
Of those who didn’t flee, several hundred were sentenced to death, although most were then amnestied. Others were imprisoned in camps intended for prisoners of war — some later ended up in the Solovetsky prison, which opened in June 1923 and later became part of the notorious ‘GULAG’. Several years later they were released under a general amnesty.
Leftists have been arguing about Kronstadt for a hundred years, and rather than wade in here I will just make one observation. Each year of the Civil War began, for the Soviets, with a promise of peace that was soon dashed. Spring would invariably bring with it new White and interventionist offensives. The familiar cycles of revolt and foreign intervention would repeat themselves with what must have become a dreadful and crushing sense of inevitability. The Kronstadt Revolt took place only a few months after the defeat of Wrangel, and precisely on the cusp of the Spring campaigning season. Sure, the Kronstadt sailors were raising democratic demands; the Don Cossacks and Right SRs, too, had raised democratic demands but had ended up spilling their blood for the White militarists. With the benefit of hindsight we know that the war, in European Russia at least, was over. The Communists did not have that benefit. We can hardly understand Kronstadt without an appreciation of the fear they had, a fear based on lessons learned in blood, of another year of war.
These revolts would not have taken place during the struggle against the White Armies, because neither the Tambov peasants nor the Kronstadters wanted to see a return of the landlords. But once Wrangel was defeated, the floodgates were opened for many serious grievances to find expression in armed revolt. The horrific conditions endured by both civilians and military during the Civil War meant there was widespread anger. Much of this was directed at the Soviet power and the Communist Party, as they were the regulators and arbiters in this austere armed camp. From both the factories and the naval base of Kronstadt, the leading elements from 1917 were absent: dead like Markin at Kazan, commanding fleets like Raskolnikov, or serving in the state apparatus.
The Kronstadt Revolt in particular, which took place during the Party Congress, served as a warning to the Soviet government that the Spartan wartime regime had been maintained for far too long, and must be dismantled as a matter of urgency.
So, when did the Civil War end? One answer would be 1922, with the conquest of Vladivostok from the Whites. Another would be 1926, with the defeat of the Basmachi. Antony Beevor ends with sailors being shot after the Kronstadt Revolt – a suitably depressing scene for his narrative purposes. But in these three cases we are losing sight of the big picture.
So I’m going to say November 1920.
The former Russian Empire was at war between Spring 1918 (the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the Cossacks) and Autumn 1920 (the treaty with Poland and the defeat of Wrangel). This was an all-out war with profound geopolitical importance, fought between irreconcilable and defined adversaries, with clear criteria for the victory or defeat of each side.
This war was the most important of a complex of armed struggles which engulfed the collapsing Russian Empire in what we could call a ‘Time of Troubles’ lasting from 1916 to 1926 in Central Asia and from 1917 to 1923 in Russia itself. It is the narrow Civil War rather than the broad ‘Time of Troubles’ which has been the focus of Revolution Under Siege. But the two are of course not neatly separable.
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Full-scale war breaks out between the young Polish Republic and the young Soviet Union. This is Episode 25 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War. We are approaching the half-way point in the fourth and final series.
The Bloodless Front
Readers will remember the young Red Cossack Vasily Timofeich Kurdyukov, whose father was a White Guard but who himself joined the Reds along with his brothers. Vasily – I hope Isaac Babel, who recorded this story, changed the names, but let’s call him Vasily – was a witness to the murder of one brother by the father. Is this ringing a bell yet? He was there too when, after the defeat of Denikin, he and his brothers tracked down their father in Maikop and killed him in retaliation despite the protests of the ‘Yids’, by which Kurdyukov meant the Soviet officials.[1]
April 1920 found VasilyKurdyukov on the move. Denikin was, along with Timofei Kurdyukov, vanquished. So Vasily, his older brother Semyon, and 16,000 other members of Budennyi’s First Red Cavalry Army had left South Russia, going from Maikop through Hulyaipole. They were making their way across Ukraine to take part in another campaign, covering 1200 kilometres in 30 days. Compared to the epic struggle against counter-revolution that was behind them, nothing too serious or historic appeared to lie ahead. The war was over, bar the fighting in parts of Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The political regime seemed to be opening up, loosening up. The Allies lifted the blockade in January. The death penalty had been abolished. The leaders in the Kremlin were discussing post-war reconstruction, not the starting of new wars. Back east in the Urals, Third Army had laid down their rifles and turned to chopping down wood as the first Labour Army. 7th Army, after routing Iudenich near Petrograd, began digging peat. ‘Communiques from the bloodless front’ announced the rebuilding of this bridge or that railway line, the numbers of locomotives repaired, etc. And throughout the Red Army, literacy classes were a day-to-day reality, with thousands of mobile libraries in operation. As Kurdyukov rode, he would have been able to read educational letter-boards on the backs of the riders in front of him. [2]
For most Red Cossacks and for the large minority of worker-volunteers in the Red Cavalry, we can assume that peace couldn’t come soon enough. The fields of the Don and Kuban had been tended largely by the women and the old men since 1914. But we can easily imagine that for some Cossacks who had been at war for six years, life in the saddle with a sabre was the only life they had known as adults.
The First Red Cavalry Army was going west to join up with the Red South-Western Front under Egorov. They would then grab a few Ukrainian towns from the Polish Army, so that when the Soviets and Poland finally got around to signing their peace treaty, the line on the map would be a little further west and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that bit bigger.
So far, the Poles had been having their own way – defeating the Ukrainian Nationalists in Galicia and seizing from them the city of L’viv (which they called Lwów and the Russians called L’vov, and which is today part of Ukraine); and to the north, beyond the Pripet marshes, the Polish forces had been chipping away at the Soviet border for a year, seizing one Belarussian town after another. But now that Denikin and Kolchak were finished, it was time to hit back. In a few weeks or a month – if peace with Poland hadn’t been signed by then – the Red Army would be ready to launch an offensive, to hammer that border into a more agreeable shape.
But on April 24th 75,000 Polish soldiers invaded Soviet Ukraine. 11,000 fighters lately incorporated into the Red Army mutinied, led by their commanders, and went over to the Poles. The Polish government had signed a treaty with Petliura, the leader of the late Rada, and he and two divisions of Ukrainian soldiers were aiding the invasion. To make matters worse, Makhno chose this moment to strike the Reds: on 25 April his guerrillas massacred a regiment of the Ukrainian Labour Army at Marinka on the Donets. They also blew up bridges around the Kyiv area, crippling transport.
The Polish invasion made swift progress. This was no border skirmish. They were well-armed. Motor trucks infiltrated Red lines on small country roads. 150 planes supported them from the air with devastating attacks on armoured trains and on flotillas on the Dnipro river. There were 82,847 Red Army personnel on the whole South-West Front – but only 28,568 of them had weapons, and they were in disarray. Egorov pulled back his troops rapidly. The Poles gained 240 kilometres in two weeks. On May 7th they took Kyiv, and soon they had bridgeheads east of the Dnipro River. Since April 24th they had suffered only 150 fatalities.
Less than one month later, the White Guards who had found refuge in Crimea began an assault on Ukraine’s mainland. Wrangel’s 35,000-strong ‘Russian Army,’ which contained many of the same officers and Cossacks who had been fighting Soviet power since 1917, had rejoined the fray. Two new fronts had opened up, and the prospect of peace had receded to the very distant horizon.
Petliura (left) and Pilsudski on April 9th, not long before the invasion
At War Again
We can imagine the dismay and fear now felt by people in the Soviet Union, from the Kurdyukov brothers in Budennyi’s ranks to their mother back in South Russia. Just when the country was escaping, at long last, from the realm of war, here was another massive foreign intervention. It would set off the dreadfully familiar cycles of confusion, fear, revolt, hunger, disease, red and white terror. The death penalty was soon restored. The railways were militarised.
In the words of John Reed:
The cities would have been provisioned and provided with wood for the winter, the transport situation would have been better than ever before, the harvest would have filled the granaries of Russia to bursting – if only the Poles and Wrangel, backed by the Allies, had not suddenly hurled their armies once more against Russia, necessitating the cessation of all rebuilding of economic life – […] the concentration once again of all the forces of the exhausted country upon the front.
In the words of Trotsky: ‘Ahead of us lie months of hard struggle… before we can cease to weigh the bread-ration on a pharmacist’s scales.'[3]
This time there was also a strong element of patriotic indignation. A repeat of the Polish invasion of 1612 was widely feared. The famous tsarist General Brusilov came out of hiding and volunteered his services as an advisor to the Red Army.
Communists, from the Politburo in the Kremlin down to the volunteer in the trenches, found themselves trying to rein in patriotism whenever it threatened to spill over into the familiar Tsarist channels of imperialistic contempt for the Polish people. Trotsky and Lenin were scrupulous about never speaking of ‘The Poles’ or ‘Poland’ but only ‘The White Poles’ or the ‘Polish landlords.’ ‘Do not fall into chauvinism,’ urged Lenin. One Red Army paper, Voyennoye Dyelo, got into big trouble. Officers were sacked from the editorial board and the paper was suspended over the use of the phrase ‘the innate jesuitry of the Polacks.’
Trotsky affirmed that ‘defeat of the Polish White Guards, who have attacked us will not change in the slightest our attitude concerning the independence of Poland.’
Ukrainian communists, too, made appeals for the defense of Ukraine as a nation. A common charge was that Petliura was the chosen caretaker of the Polish landlords, to mind the Ukrainian estate which they had their eyes on. [4]
The rest of this post will explore the background to the invasion from the perspective of the Polish Republic, then describe the initial Soviet response.
A Soviet poster from this time. The caption says, ‘This is how the Polish lords’ invasion will end up.’
Intermarium
With the defeat of Germany in November 1918, a strong Polish military force emerged. Four of the combatant empires had large Polish units in their armies – not least a 35,000-strong Polish unit that had been raised in France and was now sent back into Poland. Also important was the Polish unit in the Austrian military, which was led by a man named Józef Piłsudski. The strength of the Polish military is probably what led to the emergence of a bourgeois capitalist Poland instead of a proletarian socialist Poland (though we will look next week at how close Poland came to a socialist revolution).
Let’s dwell for a minute on Józef Piłsudski. A Pole from Eastern Lithuania, he grew up under the heavy hand of Tsarist oppression, became a socialist but in his own words he dismounted from ‘the socialist tramcar at the stop called independence.’ He was not a leader of masses but a back-room conspirator and bank robber. [5] Service as an officer in the Polish unit in the Austrian military during World War One promoted him to the front rank of national leaders. In 1920 he was head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. His huge moustache belonged to the flamboyant 19th Century, but his glowering eyebrows and cropped hair gave an impression of urgency and severity.
Józef Piłsudski
Piłsudski had a vision of what he called Międzymorze, ‘Between the Seas,’ also known as the Intermarium. Without understanding Międzymorze we can’t understand the Polish-Soviet War. The idea was that Poland should lead a federation of countries stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic – which meant taking over, or at least installing pliable governments in, Ukraine and Lithuania. This idea harked back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of centuries past.
But in Poland as in Russia and Ukraine, grand plans had to be put on hold, as famine gripped the countryside and there were years of misery and want. Poland was not torn apart by war as Russia and Ukraine were, but the new Polish state battled with Germans, Czechs and, as we have seen, Ukrainians. Unlike in the Soviet Union, vast amounts of American aid alleviated the situation – in 1919-1920 the American Relief Administration fed and cared for 4 million Poles. By the end of 1919 a strong Polish state was in existence with a population of around 20 million and armed forces numbering 750,000. [6]
The time was ripe for Międzymorze. And the territories of the new Polish empire would be wrestled from the small Lithuanian republic and from the war-weary and ragged Soviet regime.
The communists, as imagined in a Polish wartime poster
Toward War
The revolutionary tradition, and most especially those trends around Lenin, had long supported Polish independence, and the Soviet government never made any territorial claim over Poland. An independent capitalist Poland, like Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would be accepted by Moscow.
Of course, the Soviet Union was in favour of world revolution. But this amounted to supporting communist revolutions and parties in other countries. Military intervention, even in the form of support for indigenous movements, was controversial. As the Brest-Litovsk episode showed, the Bolsheviks’ confidence in world revolution could in the right circumstances make them more amenable to signing a peace treaty, not less, because future revolutionary events would render an unfavourable treaty void.
The issue was where to draw the Soviet-Polish border – where, in the ‘300-mile band of polyglot territory between indisputably ethnic Poland and indisputably ethnic Russia,’ [7] would one state end and the other begin? This question had not been on the agenda since the 18th Century, and there was no recognised border. While Soviet Russia was busy fighting against the White Armies in 1919, Poland was settling this question at the point of a bayonet, making steady gains in a small-scale but one-sided war. Galicia was theirs by July 1919.
So the Polish and Soviet armies had been skirmishing for a year before the Polish invasion in 1920. Since the first clashes between Polish and Red troops took place as early as February 1919, the historian Norman Davies accuses other historians of ‘ignoring’ the ‘first year’ of the Polish-Soviet War. [8] It is Davies who here ignores the qualitative difference between the low-level conflict of that ‘first year,’ and the all-out war which began in April 1920 (This is a flaw in his generally great book).
The borderlands between Poland and the Soviet Union can be divided roughly into a northern area around Belarus and Lithuania, and a southern area, Galicia and Ukraine. The Pripet marshes lay in between the northern and southern areas. Polish, Russian and Jewish people lived in both, Belarussian and Lithuanian farmers in the north, Ukrainian farmers in the south.
The possibility of a peace settlement was there. The Soviets had no shortage of competent Polish supporters, some of whom they sent to Poland to try to negotiate peace from late 1918 right up to the eve of the invasion. One typical offer was of territory and plebiscites in exchange for peace. These got off to a bad start when a joint delegation of Soviet diplomats and Red Cross officials visited the Polish Republic soon after its foundation. They were immediately arrested and deported. During their deportation, Polish police dragged them out into the woods and shot them, killing three and leaving one who survived by playing dead. Nonetheless the Soviets kept up their peace efforts through 1919 and into 1920.
Frustration and alarm gripped Soviet diplomats and politicians in early 1920. They were still at the ‘talks about talks’ stage, and the Polish negotiators were stubborn and demanding. They would only agree to meet for peace talks in Barysaw (Borisov), a town recently captured by the Poles. It was not acceptable to the Reds as it was in a zone of active military operations. The Soviets proposed Warsaw, Estonia, Moscow, or Petrograd, all of which the Polish side rejected. Meanwhile Soviet leaders had accepted six out of seven conditions presented by the Poles as a basis for talks, but balked at the seventh – it demanded that they never attack the Ukrainian Nationalist leader Petliura. [9] When Moscow pushed back, Piłsudski broke off talks.
Beevor characterises all this as Piłsudski ‘playing for time.’ The time, from the first Soviet peace mission, was nearly 18 months. Piłsudski ‘s stubbornness is explained by the fact that he did not seek to make peace, but sought a pretext to invade.
‘When diplomatic moves failed,’ writes Robert Jackson, ‘the Reds launched a series of small attacks along their western front; the Poles beat them off and held their positions.’ [10]
The Soviet leaders were not naive, so they understood that a Polish attack was likely. They developed their own plans for a strategic offensive as far as Brest – hence Kurdyukov and 16,000 other riders hurrying over from South Russia. The limit of the Red Army’s ambition was to seize a few more towns before the signing of a peace treaty, and to foil any plans the Poles might have of doing the same.
Unfortunately, some writers highlight a few facts out of context – a troop build-up here, a local offensive there – and paint a picture of a savage communist horde massing to trample and enslave Poland. Piłsudski’s grandiose imperial ambitions, his deliberate wrecking of peace talks, and his very ambitious and large-scale invasion of Ukraine feature only as minor details, if at all. [11]
The Allies
The Soviet leaders were convinced that the Polish invasion was the work of the Allies. It was characterised as ‘The Third Campaign of the Entente’ in an article written by Stalin in Pravda on May 25, 1920. We can say with hindsight that this impression was wrong.
The Allies did not egg on the Poles to attack the Soviet Union. In fact they were shocked and dismayed by the attack. The Allied leaders had learned that the Soviets were not to be trifled with, and they were getting cold feet on the question of intervention. On the more liberal end, Lloyd George thought the Poles had ‘gone rather mad’ and were behaving as ‘a menace to the peace of Europe.’ [12]
The Allies had rejected schemes proposed by Polish leaders which involved the Allies bankrolling a Polish march on Moscow. In addition to their growing wariness toward the Red Army, the Allies still held out hope that the Soviet regime would collapse, and they didn’t want to big up the Poles too much in case it offended a future conservative regime in Russia. Ideally, they wanted Poland to act as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ protecting Germany from the influence of revolutionary Russia – much as Stalin would use it later as a defensive glacis against the west. To that end the Allies began arming Poland in earnest from January 1920: rifles captured from the Austrians, planes and pilots, 5,000 French officers to train them. It was not much compared to the total resources of the Allies. But for a Polish army severely overstretched by its recent conquests, it was a game-changer [13].
In that very important sense, the Soviets were right. The Allies had backed (and still backed) the Reds’ opponents up to this point, and although they did not push Poland into war, in the months and years leading up to the war they backed Poland, armed its soldiers, gave equipment, lent advisors – in short, made the war possible. People on the Soviet side could not have known the ins and outs of Allied policy, and would have been innocent to believe any verbal reassurances along the lines of, Yes, we are bankrolling the army that’s invading you, and we got some other people to invade you a few months ago, but we didn’t actually want this army to invade you right now.
So the Soviets treated it as a seamless continuation of the Civil War. But the fact remains that their strategic understanding of the situation was wrong on a fundamental point. The initiative had come from Piłsudski, not from the Allies.
Moscow: volunteers for the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War
The Soviets Rally
This was one of several mistaken ideas with which the Soviets were burdened as this war began. But it would take time for these mistakes to have their fatal effects.
The Poles had made their own strategic mistakes in counting on Petliura and the Rada. After a month in Kyiv, things were not going well. Their ally (or ‘caretaker’) Petliura could not rally the Ukrainian people to his cause. It did not help that the price of the alliance was for the Rada to sign away Lviv and West Ukraine to Poland, which demoralised many Ukrainian Nationalists. This was on top of the basic point that Petliura was acting as an ally to the Polish landlords and business owners who had oppressed and exploited Ukrainians.
On May 25th the Reds began their general counter-offensive. At first, the Red Cavalry tried advancing directly on Polish trenches. They rapidly discovered that wild Cossack charges would not work as well as they had against Denikin, and the first few days of the offensive saw little progress. The Poles were experienced at trench warfare, and it was futile to attack them head-on. The Red Cavalry commanders refined their tactics. They would dismount close to the enemy, use artillery, use small striking forces to take strong points; or find gaps in the enemy line, turn enemy flanks, wreak havoc in the rear.
This Budennyi did personally on June 5th. He spent a sleepless night worrying about the following day’s attack, and rose to bad news about one of his divisions being forced to retreat during the night. He personally joined 1st Brigade of 14th Division and led the unit into marshy ground shrouded in early morning mist. They ran into some Polish cavalry, known as uhlans, and gave chase. One uhlan fired at Budennyi and missed. Budennyi caught up to him, knocked him from his horse. The dismounted uhlan fired again, and the bullet whined past Budennyi. The Red Cavalry commander used the flat of his sabre to disarm the uhlan, and brought him in for questioning. This encounter bore fruit: Budennyi learned of an ideal place to cross the Polish trench lines, and even found good places to fire directly down the trenches. The brigade passed through into the Polish rear.
This cavalry infiltration tactic saw widespread success. The area was too large for Great War-style trenches to cover it fully. Zhitomir, far behind Polish lines, was recaptured by the Reds on June 8th. On June 10th the Poles, threatened with being surrounded, evacuated Kyiv. Two or three days later the Reds marched in – this was, Mawdsley points out (p 348) the sixteenth time that the city had changed hands during the Civil War. Fortunately for the residents of the city it was also the last time.
Egorov’s South-West Front had been evacuated quickly enough that they did not suffer major losses during the Polish advance. It showed lessons learned from 1919: let the enemy advance run out of steam, then hit back hard. A Polish veteran summed it up bluntly: ‘We ran all the way to Kiev, and we ran all the way back.’ [14]
As the South-West Front covered the distance between Kyiv and Lviv, the Reds felt the wind at their backs. The insolent invaders were on the run. They might run all the way back to Warsaw. The Polish army appeared to be weak.
Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Soviets, predicted that the defeat of the Polish Army by the Red would deal the first blow to the Polish bourgeoisie, but that the Polish people themselves would deal the second and fatal blow. Likewise Trotsky ‘assumed that Poland would be liberated by her own people… His only recognisable war aim was to survive.'[15]
The Polish defeat, like the Tsar’s, might lead to revolution at home. A fraternal Soviet Poland might help alleviate the horrible suffering in the Soviet Union, might push Germany into revolution, might ignite Europe. The Reds had entered into the conflict with a notion of a struggle over the borderlands. Now they were being tempted by the idea, to use a modern phrase, of regime change.
[3] On the numbers on South-West Front, Makhno, and mutiny of East Galicians, see Davies, p 108. Quote from Reed, ‘Soviet Russia Now.’ Quote from Trotsky, ‘Speech at a meeting in the Murom railway workshops,’ June 21st 1920. In How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
[4] Davies, p 115, Smele, p 357, Trotsky quote from ‘The Polish Front and Our Tasks’ in How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
[5] Davies, p 63
[6] Davies, p 93; Smele, p 153-154
[7] Smele, p 153
[8] Davies, p 22
[9] Davies, p 71-73
[10] Jackson, Robert. At War with the Bolsheviks, Tom Stacey, 1972, p 229.p 230
[11] See Beevor, The Russian Civil War, Chapter 36; and Read, The World on Fire, p 110-111. Trotsky in May 1920 said: ‘[T]the most double-dyed demagogues and charlatans of the international yellow press will be quite unable to present to the working masses the irruption of the Polish White Guards into the Ukraine as an attack by the Bolshevik ‘oppressors’ on peaceful Poland’ How wrong he turned out to be. ‘The Polish Front: Talk with a representative of the Soviet press.’ How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
The 1919 Review 