Russian Civil War

04: Cossack Revolt in the South

Listen to this post on Youtube or in podcast form

On a sunny day in early June 1918 the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov, who had a habit of being present when history was unfolding, received a telephone call from Lenin. He hurried to the Kremlin where he met Lenin in a well-lit office lined with bookcases and a map of Russia.

‘I sent for you because things are going badly at Novorossiisk,’ said Lenin. ‘The plan to scuttle the Black Sea Fleet is meeting with a lot of resistance from a section of the crews and from all the White-Guard-minded officers. […]  It is necessary, at all costs, to scuttle the fleet: otherwise, it will fall into the hands of the Germans.’

Their conversation would have been incomprehensible to themselves just two or three months earlier. To destroy their own fleet would have seemed like madness. But things had changed radically in a short time.

Raskolnikov writes: ‘Vladimir Ilyich got to his feet and, sticking both his thumbs under the armpits of his waistcoat, went up to the map on the wall. I followed him.’

‘You must leave today for Novorossiisk,’ Lenin continued. ‘Be certain to take with you a couple of carriages manned by sailors, with a machine-gun. Between Kozlov and Tsaritsyn there is a dangerous situation. The Don Cossacks have cut the railway line. They’ve taken Aleksikovo. . .’

You will recall that barely six weeks before, Lenin had declared the civil war over. But now the Don Cossacks were in revolt again.

‘And on the Volga there’s a regular Vendée,’ added Lenin. ‘I know the Volga countryside well. There are some tough kulaks there.’

Lenin had just referred to the two fronts that had opened up in May 1918: the south and the east. Next week we’re going to look at the eastern front, the Vendée (revolt) on the Volga. This week we’re going to look at the south, where the Cossacks and the Volunteer Army had risen from the ashes.

Detail from Russian Civil War Pictorial Wall Map, titled “The Entente Plan to Suffocate Soviet Power”. The map on Lenin’s wall would have shown, in less graphic and colourful terms, this situation. In this map, however, Novorossiysk and Ekaterinodar have already fallen. The lower left-hand corner of the map shows the area between the Black and Caspian seas. The black-green stain is the Volunteer Army, while the black-blue stain are the Don Cossacks. The Blues are the Germans and the Green figures are the Czechoslovaks and their Russian Allies. Note British and Allied intervention in the north, in green. The artists show thus how the Volunteers were Allied-oriented and the Don Cossacks were German allies.

See how dramatically the territory of the Soviets has shrunk and how the southern front is a long, awkward, vulnerable shape. If you zoom in on the Black Sea coast you can see a red arrow that shows the line of march of the Taman Red Army (protagonists of The Iron Flood).

Finally, see if you can spot the killing of the royal family, shown by a symbol on the map. It occurred around this time at Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountains.

*

Raskolnikov set out from Kazan station that evening. The sunshine had given way to rain and the station smelled of wet clothes and cheap tobacco. The fresh evening air contended with the fumes from the locomotive.

Next morning he awoke on a carriage rolling through the warzone of South Russia. It was a struggle of horses and railways, and the frontlines shifted every day. Rumours of battles agitated him at every stop. There were delays; at the next station he might find a battle raging, or Whites ready to shoot him. And every hour’s delay might result in the Black Sea Fleet being handed over to the Germans.

How had this situation come about?

The Bolsheviks had come to power promising to end the war. That meant signing a treaty with Germany. But the German and Austrian governments had demanded the most humiliating concessions. In the first few months of 1918 debates had raged both within the Bolshevik Party and between the various parties of the Soviet over whether to accept these terms. Finally the German government forced the point by going on the offensive. The Red Guards were no match for the advancing German forces. The only way to stop them was to accept even worse terms. The Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3rd, which in essence ceded the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine to the German Empire. It was a gamble, based entirely on the hope that a workers’ revolution in Germany would render the treaty null and void.

In the meantime, there was hell to pay.

Three Bolshevik delegates (Trotsky, Kamanev and Joffe) surrounded by spiky German helmets at Brest-Litovsk

The strength of the German armies combined with the weakness of the fledgling Red Army meant that the Germans might seize any pretext to grab more territory, even to crush the revolution. The situation was so serious that Lenin had a contingency plan for the Soviet government to abandon the big cities and hold out in the Ural Mountains and the Kuznets Basin.

The Brest-Litovsk Peace (US Army)

Three months after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the peace was being violated by all parties without matters yet escalating to all-out war. Now the German government was demanding that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet be handed over to them. They were in a position to seize it anyway. Moscow was determined to defy this order and sink the fleet instead. But the sailors and officers were refusing to carry out this command. That’s where Raskolnikov came in. 

Raskolnikov made it through the war-torn Don and Kuban lands in one piece. Along the way he passed through Ekaterinodar, where Kornilov had been killed two months earlier. Now it was under siege once again. He arrived at the port of Novorossiisk at long last, taking in the view of the sunlit harbour full of destroyers and dreadnoughts.

Map from last week’s post, useful for our purposes here too. Note Rostov (limit of German advance) Novorossiisk (where the fleet was scuttled), Krasnodar/ Ekaterinodar (where the Volunteers failed in April), Tuapse (where the Taman Red Army broke through a Georgian fortress)

On decks and on the shore a fierce debate was raging over whether to obey Moscow’s order.

Raskolnikov addressed a group of sailors: ‘In order that the fleet may not fall into the hands of German imperialism and may not become a weapon of counterrevolution, we must scuttle it today.’

A young sailor demanded: ‘But why can’t we put up a fight, seeing that we have such splendid ships and such long-range guns?’

The young sailor knew well that such a fight would mean certain death. This did not deter him.

As well as those who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, there was a hidden agenda, especially among the officers. Many of them wanted to hand the fleet over to the Germans, in the hope that it would then be used against the Bolsheviks.

Novorossiysk, June 1918. The vessel in the middle distance is setting off for Sebatopol to surrender to the German military, in defiance of orders from Moscow. The crew of the vessel in the foreground watch, no doubt debating whether to follow.
The cover image shows the dreadnought HMS Lord Nelson, anchored at Novorossiysk in 1919

But after long debates, Raskolnikov convinced the sailors to destroy their own fleet. It was a bitter victory. If you have ever wondered what it looks like when a massive war ship is blown up and sunk, you are about to find out. Here is Raskolnikov’s description of the death of a dreadnought named Free Russia.

When the smoke dispersed, the vessel was unrecognisable: the thick armour covering her sides had been torn off in several places, and huge holes, with twisted leaves of iron and steel, gaped like lacerated wounds. […] the ship slowly heeled over to starboard. Then she began to turn upside down, with a deafening clang and roar. The steam-launches and lifeboats fell, smashed, rolled across the deck and, like so many nutshells dropped off the high ship’s side into the water. The heavy round turrets, with their three 12-inch guns, broke from the deck and slid, making a frightful din, across the smooth wooden planking, sweeping away everything in their path and at last, with a deafening splash, fell into the sea, throwing up a gigantic column of water, like a waterspout. In a few moments the ship had turned right over. Lifting in the air her ugly keel, all covered with green slime, seaweed and mussels, she still floated for another half-hour on the grey-green water, like a dead whale. […] the oblong, misshapen floating object shrank in size and at last, with a gurgling and a bubbling, was hidden beneath the waves, dragging with it into the deep great clouds of foam, and forming a deep, engulfing crater amid a violently seething whirlpool.

[…] the sailors, tense-faced and silent, as though at a funeral, bared their heads. Broken sighs and suppressed sobs could be heard.[i]

The Russian Revolution had secured peace at a terrible price. The dreadnought Free Russia was the least of it. In this and in future posts we’re going to see the consequences playing out.

THE DON COSSACK REVOLT

This episode’s cover image: a still from Quiet Don, dir Sergei Gerasimov, 1958

We saw in Part 2 how many of the Cossacks went over to the Reds. Ataman Kaledin shot himself. 18,000 Red Guards held Ekaterinodar, killed General Kornilov, and threw the Volunteer Army back out onto the steppe.

For a few weeks there were Soviet governments on both the Don and Kuban. The Don Soviet Republic had a president, Podtelkov, who was both a Cossack and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary party. But under the surface, things were changing. Most Cossacks never warmed to the Soviet government. They saw it as a government of the ‘aliens’ – their poor, despised tenants – and of the mouzhiks and khokols (insulting terms, respectively, for peasants and Ukrainians). The former frontline soldiers who had supported the Reds now settled back into village and family life, and many fell back under the influence of their elders.

In April the German forces advanced through Ukraine. The Red Guards made a stand in the Donbass. In a moment that was later celebrated in paintings and novels, Kliment Voroshilov led the courageous defence of a bridge, allowing many to escape capture or death.

The survivors fled east on a long march to Tsaritsyn on the Volga. The Don Cossacks must have watched these events with keen interest; the Donbass was in German hands, and its Red Guards were out of the picture.

More immediately, thousands of ill-disciplined and armed soldiers wearing red armbands were now streaming across Don Cossack lands. Some looted, killed perceived enemies, or assaulted women. Down in the Kuban region there was a similar crisis with soldiers returning from the Turkish front. The same Cossacks who had shunned Kaledin earlier in the year now took up arms against these intruders.

On May 8th the Germans took Rostov-on-Don; two days earlier, right-wing Don Cossacks had already risen up and seized Novocherkassk. On May 11th Podtelkov was captured on an expedition. They hanged him and shot the seventy-plus Cossacks who were with him. From there, the revolt snowballed.

The victories of the Red Guards were undone at a stroke. In April it had seemed that Civil War was over. But by mid-June the Don Cossacks had seized a vast territory and mustered an army of 40,000, with 56 artillery pieces. The resistance of the Reds was feeble; they were deprived of their base in the Donbass and distracted by the Volga revolt and the German threat.

BACK IN THE SADDLE

In earlier episodes we saw how the Volunteer Army was formed in the Cossack lands from officers who were determined to stop the revolution.

At the start of May 1918 the Volunteer Army was becalmed in the Kuban Country to the south. In February they had broken with the Don Cossacks and gone out on the Ice March; in April they had been defeated at Ekaterinodar. Now their leader Kornilov was dead and they were encircled in the wilderness.

The German advance and the Don Cossack uprising changed the situation utterly. The Germans and the Cossacks now held all the north-south railways, forming a great wall protecting the Volunteer Army from the revolutionary power that resided in Moscow.

Volunteer Army members, all officers. January 1918

The Volunteers at this point numbered just 9,000. The original 3-4,000 had been bolstered first by Kuban Cossacks and second by General Drozhdovtskii and his troops, who had marched all the way from Romania. We have noted the extraordinary number of generals that were in this small army; but these generals were not afraid of combat or hardship, and they dropped like flies (Markov, Drozhdovskii, Alexeev, and of course Kornilov). General Anton Denikin, bald-headed and white-bearded, the author of the memoirs we quoted in Episode 2, succeeded Kornilov as leader. Under Denikin, the Volunteers exploited the new situation.

Although the Kuban was now cut off from Moscow, the Volunteer Army still faced an enemy numbering 80-100,000 – the two Red Armies of the Caucasus and the Taman Red Army. Denikin was outnumbered ten to one. But these early ‘Red Armies’ were in fact loose coagulations of ‘detachments,’ undisciplined and untrained. Their only link to Red territory was by the Caspian Sea. Later, when ice made the sea impassable, their lifeline was a long camel train through wilderness. They were connected to Moscow by a long, thin line, via Astrakhan and then Tsaritsyn – an outpost of an outpost of an outpost. Bands of Terek Cossacks and guerrillas from Dagestan operated in their rear. Typhus raged in the ranks. And just across the Caucasus Mountains were the Turks, the British, the French, Menshevik Georgia and the forces of various nationalist parties.

And now the Kuban Cossacks rose up against the Soviet power, and flooded into the Volunteer Army. Generals who had been commanding platoons soon had companies, regiments and divisions under them again. A massacre of ‘aliens’ and ‘Bolsheviks’ began. This massacre is recorded in the novel The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich.[ii] The ‘aliens’ were like survivors of a sudden apocalypse stricken with terror at the pace and fury of the revolt, as seen in this reputedly accurate account:

Slavyanskaya village has revolted, and so too have Poltavskaya, Petrovskaya and Stiblievskaya villages. They have built gallows in the squares before the churches, and they hang everybody they can catch. Cadets have come to Slavyanskaya village, stabbing, shooting, hanging, drowning men in the Kuban […] They’ve run amuck. All of Kuban is in flames. They torture those of us who are in the army, hang us on trees. Some of our detachments are fighting their way through to Ekaterinodar, or to Rostov, but they are all hacked down by Cossack swords…’[iii]

Red Guards and their families from the Kuban Country gather to hear news of the Cossack revolt. A. Kokorin, one of the very fine illustrations from The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich, 1973 edition

The Volunteer Army grew to at least 35,000 by September. A long and brutal struggle began. The Reds were usually on the defensive and unable to bring their numbers to bear. Still they fought hard.

The courage of these early Red formations was extraordinary. They fought for Soviet power even though it seemed they were on a sinking ship. They were poor people, each revolting against a lifetime of humiliation and toil, fighting for a better world. They had gone too far now to go back. They had to fight on through or die.

WHITE VICTORY IN THE SOUTH

Because of the numbers and dogged resistance of the Reds, the Volunteers and Kuban Cossacks were stuck fighting them for the second half of 1918 and into 1919. The rest of Season One will deal with events from May to the end of 1918 in other parts of Russia. The reader should bear in mind that this struggle at the feet of the Caucasus Mountains was grinding on relentlessly in the distance. By the time this bitter struggle finally came to an end, most White units had suffered at least 50% casualties. One cavalry unit had suffered 100%.

Volunteer Army recruitment poster (1919)

In a series of terrible battles Denikin and his Volunteers seized town after town. In August they seized Ekaterinodar. What was left of the Red Kuban government fled to Piatigorsk. In the autumn Novorossiisk, the bed of its harbour still strewn with the corpses of dreadnoughts and destroyers, fell to the White Guards.

In January-February 1919 a cavalry unit – the same one that suffered 100% casualties over the course of the campaign – broke through the Red lines. After that, the White forces overran the Caucasus pocket so quickly that many of them caught typhus from the Reds.

Not a whole Red Army but a whole Red Army Group was destroyed: the two vast Caucasus armies, and the smaller but brilliant Taman army – in all, 100,000-150,000 soldiers. The Whites took 50,000 prisoners, 150 artillery pieces, 350 machine-guns. Fewer than one in ten of the Reds escaped. They crossed steppe and desert in winter to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, where commissars traded recriminations over the catastrophe.[iv]

I have jumped ahead of the main narrative. Let’s return to the summer of 1918.

DENIKIN’S KUBAN STATE

General Anton Denikin had been campaigning for a military dictatorship since the summer of 1917. Now, probably to his great surprise, he found himself in charge of one. The Volunteer Army set up a militarised state in the Kuban Cossack lands. They were just to the south of the new Don Cossack Republic, though relations were not neighbourly.

General Anton Denikin

Denikin’s politics were close to Kornilov’s. After the Reds were defeated, he promised, elections to a National Assembly would be held and the military dictatorship would end.

For Denikin there could be no question of restoring power to the Constituent Assembly. It ‘arose in the days of popular insanity, was half made up of anarchist elements.’ My impression is that Denikin and the officers would not have considered any election legitimate unless a knout-wielding Cossack glowered over every ballot box.

Denikin did not like to admit he was a reactionary. On occasion he spoke of self-determination, but he spoke far more often of ‘Russia, One and Indivisible.’[v] Jonathan Smele makes the fair point that Denikin and Kolchak (Kolchak was another key White leader) were ‘far from the clichéd caricatures of pince-nez-adorned, sadistic fops’ of Red propaganda. Kolchak, Denikin, Kornilov and Alexeev were not aristocrats. Denikin’s father had been born a serf.

But a few lines later Smele concedes that the camps of these generals were heavily-populated with nobles and the wealthy (and many of them, in accordance with the values of Tsarist military discipline, would absolutely have been sadistic fops wearing pince-nez). As stated in Part One, a fifth of the Volunteer Army’s personnel came from noble families. British officers, invited to a great banquet in Denikin’s territory, were embarrassed when the orchestra began to play ‘God Save the Tsar.’ The request had come from a member of the royal family who was present.[vi]

The non-military sphere of Denikin’s government was limited – war was ‘not the right time for solving social problems’ – but it was dominated by members of the Constitutional Democrats, a party with a wealthy support base. Perhaps Denikin was chosen as leader partly because of his humble background and the sympathetic, ‘democratic’ face he could show to the world. But as we saw in Part 2, he was as determined a counter-revolutionary as any officer in Russia.

The Volunteer Army was composed of men for whom war was a vocation. They expressed this in an elaborate system of uniforms and badges. The ‘colourful’ regiments were named after dead generals and wore distinctive uniforms. The Kornilovtsii, for example, wore black tunics with red caps, and wore a shoulder badge with a skull, crossed bones and crossed swords. Veterans of the Ice March wore a badge with a crown of thorns on it.[vii]

The Kornilovtsii: an officer, a cavalry soldier

In 1919 Denikin’s army would go on a huge offensive against Moscow. By then it had grown so much that the Kornilovtsii had turned from a regiment into an entire division. The terrible struggles of 1919 will have to wait until Season Two of this series. For now, the reader only has to keep in mind that for the rest of 1918 and into the early part of the following year, Denikin and his army were engaged in a merciless and brutal struggle in the South.

KALEDIN TO KRASNOV

Can a single individual change the course of history?

In the years before the revolution the socialists of Russia had meditated on just this question. ‘The role of the individual in history’ (1898) was a pamphlet by George Plekhanov, a founder of Russian Marxism. This text argued that leaders and supposed ‘great men’ were in fact mere conduits for the great impersonal forces of history.

Plekhanov himself had, by 1918, long since broken with his past politics and was firmly on the right of the Menshevik party. He cursed the Bolsheviks and the revolution as ‘a revolting mixture of Utopian idealists, imbeciles, traitors and anarchist provocateurs.’ ‘We must not only crush this vermin, but drown it in blood.’ ‘If a rising does not come spontaneously it must be provoked.’[viii]

Meanwhile a Bolshevik artillery piece in Ekaterinodar had proved the point he had argued in his pamphlet twenty years before. The shell that killed Kornilov showed the limits of the role of the individual in history. The movement Kornilov led survived in spite of his death, produced a new leader in the form of Denikin, and carried on from strength to strength.

The same thing happened in the Don Cossack country. Kaledin had committed suicide in February. By May his supporters had returned to power, and they produced a new leader in the form of General Piotr Krasnov.

This Krasnov had tried to seize Petrograd in November 1917 but was defeated and captured. These were the magnanimous early days of the revolution, so he was not put up against a wall and shot, or even locked up. He was released on his word of honour that he would never again raise a hand against the Soviet power. July found Krasnov leading an army of 40,000 Don Cossacks against the Soviet power.

Krasnov did not just break his word to the Reds. He betrayed the cause he had served during the World War. During the war against Germany he had commanded a brigade, then a division, then a corps. I don’t know how many lives he spent on the frontlines in the struggle against the Kaiser. Now his Don Cossack Republic owed its existence to the German army, received arms and aid from it, and paid it back with loyalty. Krasnov even became pen-pals with the Kaiser.

Denikin remarked, ‘The Don Host is a prostitute, selling herself off to whoever will pay.’

The Don Cossack officer Denisov retorted: ‘If the Don Host is a prostitute, then the Volunteer Army is a pimp living off her earnings.’

It was easy for those posh officers to act all high-and-mighty, but they owed their survival to the German intervention. The Volunteer Army even got weapons from Germany, via the Don Cossacks.

The Cossacks knew that the Volunteer Army saw them as petty and provincial, as diminutive Kazachki. For their part, Denisov spoke for the Don Cossacks when he called the Volunteer Army ‘travelling musicians.’ This obscure remark seems to mean that the Volunteers were not an army of the people, rooted in the soil as the Cossacks were, but an army of the intelligentsia and upper classes.

Badge of the Kornilovtsii

But for now each of these forces was busy in its own backyard, and there was no cause for them to clash. While the Volunteers were grinding the hundred thousand Reds of the Caucasus to dust, the Don Cossacks were on the offensive eastward to Tsaritsyn, and northward to Voronezh.

The Reds could only watch from a great distance as the Red Armies of the Caucasus went down fighting. On the Voronezh and Tsaritsyn fronts, they could only react, not take the initiative. They were distracted by the fighting on the Volga, by the German threat, and finally by a revolt at the very heart of Soviet power. These events, respectively, will be the focus of the next two parts in this series.

Audio credits: Music from Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky

Clip from Blackadder Goes Forth, e3 ‘Major Star’, dir Richard Boden

Opening clip from Tsar to Lenin, 1937, dir. Herman Axelbank

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

[ii] Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War, 1987 (2017), Birlinn Limited, 129

[iii] Serafimovich, Aleksander. The Iron Flood, 3rd Edition. Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut. 1973 (1924), p 13

[iv] These commissars included Shlyapnikov, whom we met in Part One. He was based at Astrakhan and held responsible for the disaster. He replied that the Soviet government had neglected the Red Army Group in the Caucasus, which was true.

[v] Mawdsley, p 132

[vi] Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, Hurst & Company, 2015, pp 106, 302

[vii] Khvostov, Mikhail. Illustrated by Karachtchouk, Andrei. The Russian Civil War (2) White Armies, Osprey 1997 (2007), pp 12, 14-15

[viii] It has become routine to call Plekhanov and his party ‘moderate socialists’ even though they were as violent as any other force in the Civil War. Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, p 98

02: White Guards

‘My heart is heavy. My feelings seem to be split in two: I hate and despise the savage, cruel, senseless mob, but still I feel the old pity for the soldier: an ignorant, illiterate man, who has been led astray, and is capable both of abominable crimes and of lofty sacrifices!’

Anton Denikin, The Russian Turmoil; Memoirs: Military, Social and Political, 1920, Chapter xxxii

January 1918. Four thousand armed men had gathered by the Don River to begin a counter-revolution that would shake Russia for years to come. This week we’re going to take a closer look at the White Guards, those who rose up in arms against the October Revolution. Then we will examine how things went down when they had to face the Red Guards for the first time.

Anton Denikin first met Lavr Kornilov on the plains of Galicia at the start of the World War. The two Tsarist generals served side-by-side on the same front in what Denikin called ‘incessant, glorious and heavy battles’ as their thousands of soldiers fought their way over the Carpathian Mountains and down into Hungary. Denikin was impressed by Kornilov’s ability to train up ‘second-rate’ units into ‘excellent’ condition, by his scrupulousness and by his personal prowess. Later in the war Kornilov became a celebrity after he broke out of an Austrian prison.Denikin was big and avuncular and Kornilov thin and severe, but both came from humble backgrounds and both were utterly dedicated to the army as an institution, and these facts helped them to see eye-to-eye.

Military officers saw themselves as a caste removed and above society. Around 1898 a cavalry lieutenant had explained his perspective on the world: at the centre, highest in his regard, were his own regiment. Next came other cavalry units, then the rest of the army. Beyond – the ‘wretched’ civilians. First came the relatively ‘decent’ civilians, then ‘the Jews’, then ‘the lower classes’ and last of all the socialists, communists and revolutionaries. In regard to the last group, ‘Why these exist nobody knows, and the emperor really is too kind. One ought to be able to shoot them on sight.’ A lieutenant in 1898 might be a colonel or general by 1918.

Back in the old days, Russian military officers were generally noble or at least bourgeois in origin. Each generation of officers dated the ‘good old days’ to a decade or two earlier, but already by the 1870s a third of officers hadn’t even finished primary school.

But in these latter days, according to Denikin, the gates of the officer training schools had been flung open to ‘people of low extraction,’ with the result that the officer corps had ‘completely lost its character as a class and as a caste.’[1] (Denikin apparently subscribed to the principle of Groucho Marx: ‘I don’t want to be part of any club that would have me as a member.’) The old bonds that had held the army together – the church, the monarchy – grew weak. What was to blame for this weakening – the decay of the moral fabric of society? The corrupting influence of city life? Workers were now motivated by base material desires rather than spiritual riches; the ikon in the corner of the workshop no longer satisfied them.

Russian soldiers in World War One

The war with Japan in 1905 and its attendant revolution were disasters for the prestige of the Russian state. It appeared few lessons were learned for the Great War. In 1914-15 the old army – what was left of it ‘as a class and as a caste’ – was broken under the German, Austrian and Turkish guns. There were crippling shortages of rifles, uniforms and shells. Over two million soldiers of the Russian army perished in the war. The civilian deaths, the wounded, prisoners of war – each of these categories also numbered in the millions.

Many officers fought with great courage. But they saw their gains thrown away through incompetence, corruption, stupidity and shortages. They grew angry with the government.

According to General Denikin, ‘It is hardly necessary to prove that the enormous majority of the Commanding Officers were thoroughly loyal to the monarchist idea and to the Tsar himself.’[2] Accordingly, they blamed the Tsar’s German wife, and they obsessed about Rasputin, blamed everything on his ‘corrupting influence.’

General Denikin (the guy in the middle with the beard) during World War One.

Mutiny

The February Revolution came. The high-ranking officers, blindsided, suffered a tumult of emotions. They were disappointed in themselves – they should have engineered a ‘palace coup’ in order to head off this movement. They were angry at the moderate politicians who had stepped into the void – these scoundrels had abolished the monarchy. They were mortally afraid of the tidal wave of workers and of the mutinies in army and navy. The peoples of Finland, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Central Asia and the Caucusus were ‘Russian in spirit and in blood’[3] – but now, for some reason, they wanted self-determination. This amounted, in the eyes of the officers, to the dismemberment of holy Russia.

Something good might yet come out of the Revolution, and it was no use in any case trying to swim against the stream. It could perhaps be guided into safer channels. Denikin would carefully distinguish between ‘the real Democracy,’ by which he meant ‘the bourgeoisie and the civil service’ and the ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ – the socialist parties, whose supporters were ‘semi-cultured’ and ‘illiterate.’ If the ‘real Democracy’ could get the upper hand over the ‘Revolutionary Democracy,’ things might yet be salvaged.

But the portents were not good. Chapter VII of Denikin’s memoirs describes his reunion with his old comrade-in-arms Kornilov at a dinner in the house of the War Minister in late March. Denikin found him tired, morose and pessimistic. The condition of the Petrograd garrison was beyond comprehension to Kornilov: they were holding political meetings, engaging in petty trade, hiring themselves out as private guards. He spoke of ‘the inevitability of a fierce cleansing of Petrograd.’ Already the highest-ranking officers were contemplating coups and civil war. During the street demonstrations of April, Kornilov proposed to disperse the crowds with artillery and cavalry – and even though the government rejected this idea, he made practical preparations to do so.[4]

Soon, thanks to a Soviet decree, officers had to answer to elected committees of the rank-and-file. This was an incredible humiliation for men born and raised and trained to value rigid hierarchy. The death penalty was abolished; the officer no longer held power of life and death over the men. The men, it appeared, now held that power over the officers. This was confirmed when sailors massacred over forty officers in one incident.

The officer corps hated the new Provisional Government for pandering to the Soviet, and they loathed the Soviet itself. The soldiers’ delegates were, they complained, a bunch of clerks and shiftless rear garrison men. The proceedings of the Soviet were a display of ignorance and coarseness that embarrassed Russia before the whole world. 

And there were too many ‘foreigners.’ Pointedly, Denikin in his memoirs listed by nationality the personnel of the Presidium of the Soviet Central Committee:

1 Georgian

5 Jews

1 Armenian

1 Pole

1 Russian (if his name was not an assumed one)

To him, this was proof that the Soviet was dominated by an ‘alien element, foreign to the Russian national idea.’[5]

This quote from Denikin gives us a good insight into how the White Guard officer saw the world. When members of the minority groups held high office, they were suddenly no longer ‘Russian in spirit in blood,’ but ‘foreign,’ ‘alien.’

When the officers spoke of the socialist leader Trotsky, they always called him ‘Bronstein’ or ‘Bronstein-Trotsky,’ as if they were thereby making an important point.

Kornilov

The Constitutional Democrat party was a bastion of Denikin’s ‘real Democracy:’ it was a party of business-owners and bureaucrats. After the July Days, a near-revolution in Petrograd, the Constitutional Democrats and the top brass of the military deepened their collaboration.

The figurehead of this movement was General Lavr Kornilov. At a conference in August 1917 the Constitutional Democrats carried him on their shoulders and cheered him to the rafters.

General Lavr Kornilov

General Kornilov made his move in August. But the attempted coup was not just a failure; it backfired and strengthened the Bolsheviks (China Miéville’sOctober, published by Verso Books in 2017, contains a lively account of this episode).

Denikin was one of Kornilov’s co-conspirators. After the failed coup, Denikin ended up in a cell seven foot square. In early mornings, soldiers would cling to the bars of the window to curse and threaten him:

Wanted to open the Front […]’

‘[…] sold himself to the Germans […]’

‘[…] wanted to deprive us of land and freedom.’

‘You have drunk our blood, ordered us about, kept us stewing in prison; now we are free and you can sit behind the bars yourself. You pampered yourself, drove about in motor-cars; now you can try what lying on a wooden bench is, you ——. You have not much time left. We shan’t wait till you run away—we will strangle you with our own hands.

Denikin covered himself with his cloak. In that moment all he could think was: ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

He thought back over his life – humble origins, promotion on his own merits, valour in combat. By the standards of the institution he served, he had always been relatively kind to the men under his command, in that he declined to beat them up.

As he thought over it all, his rage mounted. He rose, throwing aside his cloak.

‘You lie, soldier! It is not your own words that you are speaking. If you are not a coward, hiding in the rear, if you have been in action, you have seen how your officers could die.’

His tormentors, awed by his words and unable to contradict them, retreated.

Not all the soldiers were hostile. ‘On the first cold night, when we had none of our things, a guard brought [General] Markov, who had forgotten his overcoat, a soldier’s overcoat, but half an hour later—whether he had grown ashamed of his good action, or whether his comrades had shamed him—he took it back.’

But Kornilov was not daunted. The attempted coup and its aftermath represent the germinating seeds of the White Armies. He and all his co-conspirators ended up imprisoned at Bykhov monastery. Bykhov was just down the road from the general staff HQ. There Generals Alexeev and Dukhonin kept in close contact with him. So Kornilov, through proxies, was able to carry on his work and to build an underground league of officers and cadets. Another co-conspirator, the Don Cossack General Kaledin, was along with Alexeev preparing a base for counter-revolution in the Don Country in the South.

Kornilov and friends. Still from the documentary Tsar to Lenin.
Red Guards rally to resist the Kornilov coup. Still from the documentary Tsar to Lenin.

The Politics of the Kornilov Movement

Kornilov and his supporters opposed the Soviet, but what was their own vision for the future of Russia and its Empire? They were in favour of a military dictatorship, but it would not remain in power forever. Its task would be to ‘restore order.’ Once order was restored – in other words, once all the working-class leaders were dead or imprisoned and their parties crushed, once the Soviet was liquidated and all weapons taken out of the hands of workers, once the soldiers had been forced back into the trenches, and all the national minorities induced to temper their demands – then, and not until then, the power would be handed to a legitimate government. Perhaps it would be led by another absolute monarch like Nicholas. But some of the officers were for a constitutional monarchy, and some even for a republic. There could be elections once order was restored. As soon as the masses were put back in their place and there was no chance of the socialists winning, it would be safe to have an election.

It is sometimes said that the White movement embraced the full spectrum of political opinion from monarchist to social-democrat. There were in reality no leftists among the Kornilovite officers; the entry of ‘moderate socialists’ into the White camp was a later (and a brief and unhappy) development, which we will deal with in later chapters.

But the White officers themselves placed very little stock in all these political questions. They uttered the ‘p’ word with the distaste they otherwise reserved for ‘Bronstein.’ The political questions could be settled after order was restored. They were mere soldiers and not politicians – thank God! They had neither the right nor the desire to pre-determine the results of some future election.

From Denikin’s memoirs, the reader can see that what really mattered was not the form of government that was to follow; what mattered was the ‘fierce cleansing.’

But these plans were left bobbing in the wake of history. The October Revolution struck. The Provisional Government and its few defenders were, as we have seen, hapless. The Kornilov movement took belated action.

The cadets, officers and Cossacks rose up in Moscow and in Petrograd in a bloody series of episodes over several days. It was in Moscow that the counter-revolutionaries first received the nickname ‘White Guards’ from their enemies. It was a reference to the French Revolution; white was the colour of the Bourbon monarchy. If it was supposed to be an insult, it backfired. The White Guards wore the name with pride. But in both cities they were defeated. In Petrograd their leader, General Krasnov, was released on parole. In Moscow the surrendered White Guards were all allowed to walk away, some still carrying their arms. Even Antony Beevor, whose book Russia: Revolution and Civil War paints an ugly picture of the revolutionaries, acknowledges the magnanimity of the Reds on this occasion.

After defeat in the two great cities, Generals Kornilov and Alexeev decided to play a longer game. They gave the order to rendezvous in the far south of Russia by the river Don, where they had reportedly stockpiled 22,000 rifles.[6]

Thousands of individual officers began the journey south. Peasants and soldiers did not show the same clemency as the authorities in Petrograd and Moscow. ‘The fugitive officer en route for the south became an outlaw figure for the soldiers, to be killed on sight.’[7] But they persevered. Many survived the journey by throwing aside the red shoulder-boards that marked them out as officers. Others disposed of their uniforms entirely, and went on to fight in civilian clothes.

Kornilov simply rode out of his prison and set off for the Don. His ‘guards’ had joined him. They fought their way across the land. When Kornilov reached Novocherkassk by the Don he found General Alexeev and four hundred volunteers already mustered. The weeks passed and four hundred grew to four thousand as more officers, cadets and students arrived.

THE COSSACKS

These southern lands, north of the Caucusus mountains and between the Black Sea and the Caspian, had in living memory borne witness to a war more fierce and total than the Civil War. In the Nineteenth Century the Russian Empire had massacred and exiled the Muslim Circassian people. The Cossacks settled on rich black soil stolen from the Circassians. They adopted the style of the vanquished: long narrow-waisted coats and silver-inlaid daggers. Non-Cossack immigrants flooded in later, and they were despised by the Cossacks and called ‘aliens.’

Painting by Mitrophan Grekov. A lone rider, probably a Cossack, returns to his homestead in winter.

The Cossacks fought on horseback with swords and lances and carbines. Again and again the state had sent them in to crush protests. Now, true to form, the Don Cossack leaders had given a safe haven to the Volunteer Army.

But the Cossack lands were not a single conservative block. For many the supposed privileges were a burden. One-third of the Cossacks were poor, and equipping themselves for war put them in permanent debt. The Cossacks were outnumbered by their poor tenants – the so-called aliens – and oppressed by the big landlords. In the cities and towns there were artisans and workers influenced by the left-wing parties.

For the young Cossacks, the experience of the World War was shattering. For three years, ‘Russian soldiers were sent into battle without rifles or were deliberately shelled by their own when, in their trenches, they were understandably reluctant to go over the top.’[8] The young Cossacks witnessed all this, and they shared trenches and bivouacs with town folk who talked of revolution. By 1917 the refrain of the young Cossacks was: ‘We must saddle our horses and go to the Don; the war is pointless.’[9]

So they made the long journey home through lands teeming with revolution. At the frontlines, officers had kept order by beating and killing the rank-and-file soldiers. Now, as an army of nine million men collapsed, many an officer was shot by the railway stations and roadsides. When the Cossacks came riding back into their villages, the old men called them cowards and traitors, and said they had been bought off by the Reds or by ‘the Jews.’ But the young Cossacks had met and talked with these Reds, these Bolsheviks. The Revolution promised them an end to this war and to the military obligations, and a settlement of the land question. The young frontline veterans, the frontoviki, were uneasy at the presence of the Volunteer Army, at the sight of officers in their distinctive shoulder-boards mustering in the Don country for counter-revolution.

THE STRUGGLES ON THE DON AND KUBAN

Even before the October Revolution, local Soviets had taken power in eighty different towns. After October, the dam burst. Workers and peasants rose up in town after town, village after village, and bands of Red Guards took to the railways to spread Soviet power to wherever the old regime held on.

There were workers’ uprisings in Rostov and Taganrog, two towns by the Don. Counter-revolution soon followed: Volunteers and Cossacks crushed the risings ‘and [shot] the captured Bolshevist members of the Rostov Soviet.’[10]

The leader of the Don Cossacks was Ataman Kaledin, a cavalry general who had commanded an entire army in the Great War. He had been part of Kornilov’s coup attempt, though the Provisional Government had never dared to come after him for fear of kicking the Cossack beehive.

In spite of their common struggles and their successes in Rostov and Taganrog, Kornilov found Kaledin less than welcoming. The Volunteers were forbidden to carry arms in the Cossack capital Novocherkassk. Kaledin must have known that his Cossacks were not all of one mind, and that too open an allegiance to the White Guards could provoke a reaction. He declined to deepen the collaboration, and the Volunteer Army were packed off to the nearby town of Rostov.

Kaledin and Kornilov faced a favourable situation. To the east the Orenburg Cossacks had risen up. To the west a Rada or parliament had taken power in Ukraine. This was a nationalist movement which opposed the Bolsheviks. The Volunteer Army would make uneasy bedfellows with Ukrainian nationalists, whose claims to autonomy they rejected, but the Rada had given the officers free passage over their territory while arresting Red Guards. The task, therefore, was to strike out over Ukraine and link up with the Rada in Kyiv and form a solid front of counter-revolution in the south.

Kaledin led his Cossacks in an invasion of the Donbass region of Ukraine. This was, as we mentioned in Part One, the area where Kliment Voroshilov had worked as a miner, farm labourer, shepherd and metalworker before his sixteenth birthday.

Rodzianko, a representative of the ‘real [bourgeois] Democracy’, with Kaledin and Kornilov. Still from the documentary Tsar to Lenin.

Now workers like Voroshilov took up arms and barred the path of the Cossacks. There was no shortage of arms: rifles and machine-guns poured into the region from Moscow and Petrograd, and in every mining and factory town Red Guard units sprang up – here a few hundred fighters, there a few thousand. Armoured trains thundered in bearing Siberians, Latvians, sailors and Red Guards from the big cities. The Cossacks fled back to the Don.

We have now reached the moment at which we began, with thousands of Red Guards taking the railways south to the Don Country as 1917 turned to 1918. When they reached the Donbass, the Reds divided their forces. Most rolled on to Kyiv to overthrow the Rada, led by a former Tsarist officer named Muraviev who had reinvented himself as a revolutionary and was most likely an adventurer. The battle in Kyiv was bloody, with atrocities on both sides and Muraviev indulging in an early excess of terror, driven by ugly prejudices against Ukrainians.

Meanwhile about 16,000 went south to the Don to face Kornilov and the Volunteer Army.

A 1920s poster showing the economic importance of the Donbass region, in red. I think it says ‘Donbass: Heart of Russia’ – which would obviously be a controversial, even chauvinistic thing to say today

Detail from a pictoral map of the Caucusus issued by a USSR tourism agency in the 1930s. The names I have added ae underlined in red. Places to note here are the Don and Kuban rivers, Taganrog, Rostov and Novocherkassk, and finally Ekaterinodar.

The Cossacks decide

In a movie or a videogame, the Red Guards would no doubt have met the White Guards in a field somewhere and fought a single decisive clear-cut battle. In that situation the Whites would have won. The four thousand Volunteers knew how to fight, and the Cossacks were numerous and fierce. The Reds were far from home, poorly-organised and barely trained.

White Guards (as depicted by a Red artist)

But there was no straight fight. These were not extras or NPCs, but human beings with doubts and fears. Each side met the other in a halting, hesitating way, one small detachment blundering into another; one outflanking and the other retreating, each unsure of the ground it stood on politically and tactically, with frequent ceasefires and negotiations. The fight would jump back and forth from one railway junction or small town to the next.

The Red Guards were more in their element behind enemy lines. Small numbers were sent ahead into the Cossack lands armed not with rifles but with documents such as the Soviet government’s December 1917 appeal to toiling Cossacks, promising a settlement of the land question but guaranteeing that they would not touch ‘simple soldier Cossacks,’ and declaring them free of the old military obligations that had put the poorest into permanent debt.[xi]

All this work paid off. On January 10th a Congress of Cossacks met at Kamenskaya. It was the birth of a movement of Red Cossacks. Enraged, Ataman Kaledin sent troops to arrest the delegates. But these troops went over to the Soviets. From this point on, Kaledin lost more and more soldiers every day – not to shells or bullets but to political arguments. The Don Cossacks had suffered a decisive split between rich and poor, old and young, village and frontline.

The Volunteer Army was still superior in discipline and training. On January 15th near Matveyev Kurgan, the burial mound of a legendary outlaw, a Red force of 10,000 suffered a bad defeat. But Matveyev Kurgan is a few hours’ walk from the town of Taganrog. The workers there had risen up before and been crushed by Volunteers and Cossacks. Now they struck again as soon as they heard the Reds were nearby. There followed two days of street fighting that ended on January 19th when the Whites were chased out. Reportedly, fifty captured cadets were brutally massacred by the workers. The revolution had returned to Taganrog, a day’s march from Rostov. Meanwhile a second Red force of 6,000 was advancing on Novocherkassk. Kaledin’s loyalists were not numerous enough to stop them. All they could do was retreat, burning railway stations and tearing up tracks as they went.

Reds triumph over Whites (from the same poster as above)

Kornilov could see that the game was up for Ataman Kaledin and his Don Cossacks. On paper, the Don Host numbered tens of thousands. But politics had intruded into military calculations. Many had gone over to the Reds, and of those who had not, most would not answer when Kaledin called.

But to the south across the steppe was the country of the Kuban Cossacks. The Whites hoped that the Kuban Cossacks might prove more solid. Kornilov and his Volunteer Army packed their bags, shouldered their rifles and marched out onto the steppe. The Don Cossacks were incensed at this betrayal. There were shots fired at the White Guards as they fled the Don Country.

The Volunteers had escaped out of the reach of the Red Guards from Moscow and Petrograd. But, as we will see below, wherever they went the revolution was close behind, or even lying in wait.

Ice March

Kornilov could see that the game was up for Ataman Kaledin and his Don Cossacks. On paper, the Don Host numbered tens of thousands. But politics had intruded into military calculations. Many had gone over to the Reds, and of those who had not, most would not answer when Kaledin called.

But to the south across the steppe was the country of the Kuban Cossacks. The Whites hoped that the Kuban Cossacks might prove more solid. Kornilov and his Volunteer Army packed their bags, shouldered their rifles and marched out onto the steppe. The Don Cossacks were incensed at this betrayal. There were shots fired at the White Guards as they fled the Don Country.

The Volunteers had escaped out of the reach of the Red Guards from Moscow and Petrograd. But, as we will see below, wherever they went the revolution was close behind, or even lying in wait.

ICE MARCH

The time was out of joint. In February, the Soviet government changed the calendar so that it was in step with the rest of the world. Overnight Russia leapt ahead by two weeks. In South Russia, time was passing quickly in more ways than one. Ataman Kaledin, who had commanded a whole army under the Tsars, could now call on only 100-140 men.

He blamed Kornilov.

‘How can one find words for this shameful disaster?’ he said in a speech before the Cossack assembly. ‘We have been betrayed by the vilest kind of egotism. Instead of defending their native soil against the enemy, Russia’s best sons, its officers, flee shamefully before a handful of usurpers. There is no more sense of honour or love of country, or even simple morality.’[xii]

After this speech, Kaledin retired to his rooms in the Ataman’s Palace and shot himself in the heart.

By the end of February Novocherkassk and Rostov had fallen to the Reds. A Don Soviet Republic was founded, with an SR Cossack named Podtelkov as its president. The last supporters of the late Kaledin galloped out into the wilderness, praying for better days.

General Kornilov and his Volunteer Army, meanwhile, had marched out onto the Kuban Steppe, several thousand officers and civilians burdened with heavy artillery and carts full of the sick and wounded. Their journey went down in history as the First Ice March.

…a long column of soldiers wound its way out of Rostov, marching heavily over the half-melted snow. The majority were wearing officers’ uniforms […] Behind the numerous wagons of the baggage train came crowds of refugees: elderly, well-dressed men in overcoats and galoshes, and women wearing high-heeled shoes. […]

‘Have you anything to smoke?’ a lieutenant asked Listnitsky. The man took the cigarette Eugene offered, thanked him, and blew his nose on his hand soldier-fashion, afterwards wiping his fingers on his coat.

‘You’re acquiring democratic habits, lieutenant,’ a lieutenant-colonel smiled sarcastically.

‘One has to, willy-nilly. What do you do? Have you managed to salvage a dozen handkerchiefs?’

The lieutenant-colonel made no reply. Tiny green icicles were clinging to his reddish-grey moustache.

From And Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, 1929; trans Stephen Garry 1934, Penguin Classics 2016, pp 495-496

The officers were facing this bleak expedition in the hope that they could link up with the Kuban Cossack Host.

But the Revolution made its way to the banks of the Kuban river while the Volunteers were still toiling over the steppe. When they reached the Kuban Cossacks, they found the same thing they had left behind: a Cossack host that had mostly gone over to the Reds. And beyond lay the Caucusus Front, where hundreds of thousands of veterans had mutinied and were coming north to join the revolution.

February turned to March and spring did not come. Rain gave way to snow and cold winds, and the Volunteers’ clothes were crusted with ice. Under pursuit, forced to avoid railways and settlements, they fought forty battles in fifty days.

‘Take no prisoners. The greater the terror, the greater will be our victory.’[xiii] To judge by these words of Kornilov, the suffering only made them more determined.

In April their fortunes seemed to turn. They joined up with a force of White Kuban Cossacks, bringing their total fighting strength to 6,000 and adding two more generals to their already impressive collection. They decided to march on the Kuban capital, Ekaterinodar (now Krasnodar), a city of 100,000 people.

They had escaped from the Red Guards of Petrograd and Moscow. They needed the resources of a city; but where there were cities there were workers, and where there were workers there were Red Guards.  

From April 10th to 13th the Volunteer Army attacked Ekaterinodar. But 18,000 Red Guards were waiting for them. The vast numbers of people who flooded into the Red Guards whenever the Whites raised their head was a sign of the popularity of the Revolution. The fact that the Whites could at first only muster a few thousand is a reflection of their narrow – though very determined – support base.

Hundreds of Whites were killed the fighting. Kornilov had made his HQ in a farmhouse on the edge of town; on the morning of the 13th a shell scored a direct hit on the roof. Kornilov was killed. The Volunteer Army gave up the fight and once again fled out onto the steppe.

The End of the First Wave of Civil War

Another one of those pictorial maps showing the flame of revolution spreading outward from the central cities.
In finer detail. Clockwise from top: The Finnish Civil War begins. The Yellow flag shows the rising of Dutov at Orenburg. The blue line shows the front with Turkey and the soldiers returning radicalised from that front. The Green and Yellow flag is planted in T’blisi and probably represents the Georgian independence movement. Lots of pointy arrows, flames and contrasting dark and fiery colours around Ekaterinodar and Rostov. Flames too in the Donbass and further into Ukraine. The Green arrow is the rising of the Polish Corps. The blue arrows represent German attacks – of which more next week.

On April 23rd the Soviet leader Lenin declared victory: ‘It can be said with certainty that, in the main, the civil war has ended… on the internal front reaction has been irretrievably smashed by the efforts of the insurgent people.’

Even before the Volunteer Army’s defeat at Ekaterinodar, Lenin had sounded a similar note: ‘A wave of civil war swept over all of Russia, and everywhere we won victory with extraordinary ease.’[xiv]

There had been serious fighting on every point of the compass. A Tsarist army corps made up of Polish soldiers revolted in Belarus. A street battle erupted in Irkutsk in Siberia. A warlord named Semyonov raided and rampaged beyond Lake Baikal. Cossacks in the south of the Ural Mountains rose up and seized Orenburg.

Everywhere the result was the same. In response to these challenges, local workers and poor peasants volunteered for Red Guard units, usually in their thousands or tens of thousands. There was no Red Army yet. This was the time of the otryad, the informal ‘detachment’, some formed on local initiative, others sent out from Moscow or Petrograd; numbering anything from a few dozen to thousands; armed with anything from a few rifles to an armoured train (or even, in the case of Irkutsk, bows and arrows[xv]). Just like on the Don, everywhere political appeals were decisive. The Red Guards knew how to disarm the enemy with class politics. When that failed, they had their rifles.

Victor Serge, a communist who later criticised his own side for excessive use of violence, wrote that this wave of struggle was won ‘with neither excesses nor terror.’[xvi] It’s clear that he means terror directed and sanctioned by the Soviets; elsewhere he makes no secret of the fact that rogue bands of sailors and soldiers were killing officers and carrying out massacres like in Sebastopol. Important outliers in Kyiv and Kokand, both in February 1918, should be noted. But when two right-wing figures were murdered in their hospital beds by sailors in January 1918, the Soviet press condemned this atrocity. In general the noises from key Bolshevik leaders indicated that they believed the Russian revolution, unlike the French, could avoid terror and mass executions.

At this point the Soviet regime was still a democratic one. The government was a coalition between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs. The Third Congress of Soviets met on January 15th, around the time the Don Cossacks split. At this congress we see not just Bolsheviks and Left SRs but also Right SRs, Menshevik-Internationalists and Anarchists. It’s striking that the Right SRs were tolerated even though they had taken part in the uprisings in Moscow and Petrograd.

This was how things stood in the military situation and the political regime in early Spring 1918. The violence appeared to be over.

That spring, a renewal of the war with Germany seemed far more likely than a new wave of civil war. At the end of April the forces of the White Guards consisted of several thousand men, encircled and leaderless, on a blasted steppe on the very edge of Russia. At that moment the first Red army units had been formed, but they did not face the Don or the Volga; they faced the German armies to the west.

But with hindsight we know that the real Civil War had not even begun. Starting in May, a chain of catastrophes would fan the dying embers of armed struggle to an inferno that would not die down until the end of 1920, and that would still be blazing in parts of Russia as late as 1923. What the Red Guards had just endured was nothing compared to what was coming down the line. A bloody summer lay in wait. The war of irregular ‘detachments’ that had triumphed by the Don and Kuban rivers would fall far short of the challenges. To survive, the Soviet republic would need to build a regular professional army.

< Back to Contents

Back to Home Page

The cover image for this post is by A. Kokorin, one of the very fine illustrations from The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich, 1973 edition.

Transitions, sound effects, music and dialogue on the video and audio versions of these podcasts are not my property but are included under fair use. Credits for the audio version of this post are as follows:

Music from Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Prokofiev.

Intro from Anastasia (1997, dir Don Bluth and Gary Goldman)

Dialogue from Fall of Eagles, Episode 12 (1974, Elliot & Burge, BBC)

Transitions from Battlefield 1: In the Name of the Tsar (2017, Dev. Dice)

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43680/43680-h/43680-h.htm Chapter VII

[1] Denikin, Anton. The Russian Turmoil. Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political, 1920. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43680/43680-h/43680-h.htm. p 17

The cavalry lieutenant is quoted in Reese, Roger, Red Commanders, Press of the University of Kansas (2015), p 15 and the detail about primary school completion among officers in the 1870s comes from the same source.

In addition to the sources listed here as direct citations, I have constructed the narrative drawing heavily from Smele (The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars), Mawdsley (The Russian Civil War), Smith (Russia in Revolution) and Serge (Year One of the Russian Revolution).

[2] Denikin, p 16

[3] Denikin, p 21

[4] Trotsky, LD, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume I, Gollancz, 1932, Chapter XVII, p 353-358

[5] Denikin, 91

[6] Kirienko Yu. K. KrachKaledinshchyna. Accessed and translated at Leninism.su. Another document from the same website to which I have referred is AM Konev, Red Guard on the Defense of October [sic; Google translate] https://leninism.su/revolution-and-civil-war/4142-krasnaya-gvardiya-na-zashhite-oktyabrya50.html. The documents on this site are extracts from works by Soviet scholars, but they are abridged and edited in suspicious ways – ellipses cover the defeat at Matveyev Kurgan, for example. Accordingly I have relied on these documents only for secondary matters, for the odd detail or quote, not for major questions.

[7] Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, p 123

[8] Carleton, Gregory. Russia: The Story of War, Harvard University Press, 2017, p 146

[9] Kirienko

[10] Serge says the Cossacks refused to take part, but Kirienko names the Cossack leader Nazarov as the one who crushed the Rostov uprising. The detail about the Rostov Soviet members being shot comes from a timeline at the end of Wollenberg’s book The Red Army: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1937/wollenberg-red-army/append02.htm

[xi] Carr, EH. The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 1, Pelican Books, 1950. p 300-301

[xii] Serge, 125

[xiii] SA Smith, Russia in Revolution, ‘Violence and Terror,’ beginning p 196

[xiv] Mawdlsey, The Russian Civil War, (Birlinn, 1982, 2017) p 29, 38

[xv] According to AM Konev, the Reds took out White machine-gunners using ‘well-aimed arrows from among the indigenous Siberian hunters’.

[xvi] Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin, Pioneer Publishers, trans Ralph Manheim, 1937. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1937/FromLeninToStalin-BW-T144.pdf.&nbsp; p 28.

01: Red Guards

Listen to this post on Youtube or in podcast form

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.

To get a notification when that post drops, leave your email address here:

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

00: Introduction

Revolution Under Siege: Civil War in & Beyond Russia, 1918-1920

In October 1917 the working class of the Russian Empire was the driving force behind the first socialist revolution in history. They overthrew a centuries-old empire in February 1917. After a nine-month interregnum during which a liberal-democratic regime failed to deliver on their most pressing demands, they took power through democratic councils known as Soviets. The new Soviet power hardly had a chance to draw breath, much less to build socialism, before it was plunged into a war of terrible scope and fury. Those who had made the revolution were now drawn in their millions into the armed struggle to defend it. They were the essential core around which the new Red Army was built.

Before the war many workers in the Russian Empire would have worked their ten-hour days with the heat of a blast furnace on their skin. Now they carried its promethean fire to the Arctic Circle and the deserts of Central Asia. They fought from the streets of Moscow to the Siberian taiga and the Mongolian steppe. In the north they were supplied by sleds, in the south by camel caravans. It far from a merely Russian affair – but we call this struggle, for want of a better name, the Russian Civil War.

One relatively small episode in this war was dealt with in The Iron Flood, a 1924 novel by the Soviet writer Alexander Serafimovich. In the summer following the Revolution, the Cossacks rise in revolt against the Soviet power. The flood of the title is a vast mass of men, women and children, supporters of the Soviet regime, whose home villages become enemy territory overnight. They must break out and join up with the Red Army.

South Russia is like a furnace under the summer heat. Behind them, their brothers and sisters are hanging from gallows. Cossacks on horseback pursue them. Some sailors join the column; they are revolutionary but hot-headed. Twice they attempt to lynch the commander of the column. The Iron Flood must keep moving, up mountains and across wastelands. It is bombarded by the guns of several nations, from land and sea. The children die from shrapnel, thirst and hunger. The Iron Flood breaks through an enemy fortress, surviving against terrible odds. But in the moment of victory the author forces us to confront the fact that these enemies were human beings too.[1]

The specific story told in The Iron Flood – the march of the Taman Red Army – is true.[2] More than that, it sums up in an authentic way the chaos, cruelty and heroism of the Civil War. The molten-metal flood of humanity cools, solidifies and triumphs under the column commander, “whose face, jaws, eyes and voice are repeatedly described as being made of iron and steel.”[3] The potent metaphor of flesh turning to metal describes the transformation wrought on the Revolution and the people who made it – for better and for worse – by the furnace of war.

Civil War-era weapons and posters, from a museum in Taganrog, Russia

This is Revolution Under Siege, a new series from The 1919 Review that tells the story of the Russian Civil War. The dramatic events of the year 1918 are the focus of Series One, which adds up to ten parts. Series Two will deal with 1919, and a third Series will explore the events of 1920 and later dates. Podcasts based on these posts will go up on Spotify, Youtube, Google Podcasts and other platforms. Soon the existing podcasts will be updated so as to have a human voice.

So you don’t miss any of it, make sure to put your email address in the subscriber box below. Visit us on 1919review.wordpress.com.

*

Under the name “Russian Civil War” we neatly file away a range of conflicts that encompassed one-sixth of the land surface of the earth. Only 44% of the people living in this collapsing empire were Russian in the strict sense. There are over fifteen states in Eastern Europe, in Central Asia and in the Caucusus which include this war as a chapter in their national histories; a Civil War-era flag became a symbol of protest in Belarus in 2020. When, in Series 2, we come to deal with events in Ukraine, the place names will echo the news reports from the current war.This and the involvement of other countries made it “a world war condensed.”[4] Japan, Britain, France, the United States and Germany were some of the countries which invaded Russian lands on every point of the compass. In 1918 the most effective units in the Red and White forces, respectively, were Latvian and Czech. Often, Reds fought directly with Allied soldiers; in 1920, Russian sailors skirmished with the Ghurkhas of the British military on the coast of Iran.

Rather than say that the Russian Revolution spilled over into other countries, it’s more accurate to say that Russia was the most advanced front in a global revolutionary offensive by the labour movement and its allies. Italy had its biennio rosso, “two red years,” Spain its triennioBolshevico, “three Bolshevik years,” Ireland its “Soviet” movement. In Germany and Hungary, there were Soviet Republics in 1919. It’s impossible to draw lines on the map to mark the limits of this war. The title of this series says 1918-1920, but it will be impossible to avoid dealing with events from earlier and later.

In all this complexity there is nonetheless a key and central axis of the war: the struggle between the Red Army and the White Armies. In October, having chosen the Bolshevik Party as their political instrument and flooded into it in their hundreds of thousands, and into the Soviets in their millions, the working class took power. The White Armies came together to destroy this new order. The Red Army was forged in the heat of the struggle to defend it.

This was fundamentally a struggle between classes.

Industrial workers formed the core support base of the Reds. White-collar workers, poor peasants and artisans were drawn to their banner.

On the other side, under the White banner, were big business owners, landlords and the church. The core of the White fighting strength was made up of officers of the old army, cadets and students – the sons of the middle and wealthy classes.

In the Russian empire in 1917 there were 3.6 million factory and mine workers, among 18.5 million wage workers of all kinds. This was a vast and diverse mass of people. But the Russian Empire contained between 150 million and 180 million people. So the working class made up a large minority.[5] The wealthy made up another minority, obviously a much smaller one. Most of the population fell into neither category, but different elements were magnetically attracted to the Red or White poles. Let’s take a brief look at thee of these intermediate social forces: the peasants, the Cossacks and the intelligentsia.

A map from the late 1920s attempting to explain the Russian Civil War. If you find the complexity daunting, I’ve got something to tell you: this is only one map from a series of ten. Available on Wikimedia Commons and Library of Congress.

Peasants, those who worked in agriculture, made up two-thirds of the population. 80% of the total population of the Russian Empire lived in the countryside. The peasants were a diverse category – very different income levels, nationalities and social forms existed. Over the course of the war, peasant attitudes toward the Reds embraced two extremes of enthusiasm and hostility, and everything in between. But there was a consistent attitude of sullen hostility to the Whites, the faction of the hated landlords.

The Cossacks were a privileged military caste, several million people settled on the borders of Russia. Without them, the White Armies would simply not have been viable. Only one-fifth of those who fought did so under the Red flag. But from the point of view of the White leaders, they could be unreliable.

The professional middle classes made up another large minority. These were doctors, lawyers, etc, known in Russia as the intelligentsia. They had always seen themselves as the leaders of the revolution. But when the revolution happened, they were afraid of the factory workers and soldiers who had taken control. Some of the intelligentsia were Red, more tended toward the Whites early on; some changed sides as the war went on.

One of the repeating themes in the Civil War is that these intermediate forces again and again attempt to organise some third force, and to break the bipolar struggle of White and Red. All these attempts ended in failure. Early on, they tended to be subsumed into the White camp, later into the Red. The various ‘third forces’ generally ended up acting as transmission belts into Red or White.

There is a reason why some of the most well-known novels to come out of the Civil War focused on the intelligentsia (Doctor Zhivago) and the Cossacks (Quiet Don). These were the social layers caught in the middle of the Civil War, tortured by their split loyalties. However painful such conflict is for human beings, literature thrives on it.

This fact hints at why, in spite of the complexity, most scholars continue to regard this as a single war. It is because a single overriding question was at issue: whether the October Revolution would stand or fall.

An Armenian woman in the Red Army, stationed in a frontline trench in 1918.

*

The Russian Civil War doesn’t look anything like the First or Second World War. We usually don’t get to see clear frontlines, or two sides neatly differentiated by crisp mass-produced uniforms. Usually in popular military history, officers and politicians are making all the decisions –human agency is a monopoly of the top brass. Barring the catastrophic defeat of such-and-such a corps or such-and-such a division, we expect it to remain qualitatively the same from month to month and even from year to year.

In this war, none of this could be taken for granted. A White general wrote of

‘those real moral and material coefficients, which alone determine the combat value of any unit, its stability, reliability and effectiveness. [These coefficients are] determined by the sum of the qualities of superiors and cadres […] and the conditions of service of the unit, its fatigue, lack of supplies, etc., etc. Before the revolution, these coefficients were on average more even and were less subject to various fluctuations; now absolutely – they have gone deep down, and relatively – they have become very diverse and capricious.’

Diary of General Budbreg, June 10th 1919

It was not rare for a regiment to decimate itself overnight in a bloody mutiny, and go over to the other side. The bold coloured arrows on maps were frustrated, on both sides, by train cars falling apart, fuel shortages, mutinies, mass desertion and guerrilla warfare.

We expect revolutionary war to be unconventional. But the Russian Civil War also defies what we expect to see in an unconventional war. Those who have read about the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions are primed to think that revolutionary war is guerrilla war. But long before Mao and Che, it was the White Guards who retreated to remote areas, carried out raids, sent agents into the enemy rear, and perished in terrible numbers on heroic ‘Long Marches.’

So did the Reds, at times, as The Iron Flood will attest. But the Reds won the war by building a regular and professional army, albeit an army of a kind never seen before or since.

This war is unique in history. Unlike in Cuba, China or Vietnam, the revolutionary war in the former Russian Empire was worker-based and not a rural guerrilla struggle. Unlike in Eastern Europe after 1945, it was a mass popular movement and not largely a bureaucratic ‘revolution from above.’ And unlike the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War, this working-class, popular revolutionary war was victorious.

*

By the end of summer 1918 it was total war, desperate and cruel. But it was fought in the wake of the First World War, against a backdrop of exhaustion and collapse. In World War One the Tsarist army had placed 300,000 cavalry in the field; by 1920, the Reds were proud to have a First Cavalry Army numbering just 16,000.[6] The Civil War was fought with the improvised human and material leftovers of the World War, and there was something post-apocalyptic in its aspect.

The Russian Revolution was a belated rupture between medieval and modern. This fault line is visible in the striking image of the tachanka, a type of weapon used by the Reds and the Anarchists: a horse-drawn cart with a Maxim machine gun bolted onto it. Reds and Whites alike tallied up their armouries not just in rifles but in swords. Armoured trains with naval guns dominated the railways. In some places, metalworkers forged pikes when no rifles were to hand.[7] Men and women fought for a classless, stateless, high-tech future society, while wearing boots made from the bark of a birch-tree. 

Painting of a Civil War-era tachanka by Mitrofan Grekov

A greater number of Russians died in combat in World War One than in the Civil War. But years of Civil War compounded the famine and epidemics that had already come to the boil during the World War. In 1917 factory owners began on a huge scale to close down, lock up or sabotage their premises and equipment; from the end of that year White Armies blocked Russia’s internal supply lines. The harsh winters of 1918, 1919 and 1920 were hell in the cities, and Saint Petersburg was literally half-deserted. Millions perished in rural areas during the famine of 1921-2. This mass mortality consumed the people with every day that the Civil War ground on. By the end, it added up to a yawning demographic gulf. Terror, practised by all the contending forces, made its contribution to the death toll, and it was not a small contribution.

*

On the eve of the October Revolution, writes a worker who would soon be marching in the Red Army, ‘We certainly did not understand the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. Quite the contrary. We were looking for allies, for other parties willing to go with us along the path of building soviet power […] NovaiaZhizn’, the newspaper of the Menshevik-Internationalists, enjoyed even greater success at our factory than Pravda. So we were by no means pure sectarians, for whom party truth was higher than the truth of reality.’ [8]

This account will trace how the conflict ground down this democratic attitude. The Civil War created several necessary conditions for the rise of Stalinism – that is, for the establishmentof a dictatorship which, two decades later, claimed the lives of most of the political and military leaders of the Revolution.But for Stalinism to arise, other vital conditions were necessary too. An account of the Civil War which works backwards from Stalinism, or worse, which recognises no essential difference between the Lenin and Stalin eras, will have huge blind spots. Supporters of the Reds were fighting for control of the land they tilled, for their rights as women or members of minority groups, for socialism or for democracy. They accepted the need for emergency wartime measures – which included violence and the curtailing of democratic rights, as in the belligerent countries during the World Wars. But if they had been asked to fight for a repressive one-party state they would not have done so. To portray them as dupes of the Bolsheviks is to do a disservice to them – and to the Bolsheviks.

On the other hand, the promise of a better future helped the workers and poor to endure the horrors of war and hunger in the short term. This was not a false promise. The conquests of World War One were to be Istanbul or parts of Poland. The conquests of the Russian Civil War were:

The promise of a better future helped people to endure the horrors of war and hunger in the short term. And it was not a false promise. The conquests of World War One were to be Istanbul or parts of Poland. The conquests of the Russian Civil War included:the eight-hour working day;free healthcare and social insurance;vastly expanded access to education; housing costs reduced to a pittance; the redistribution of noble and church land in favour of tens of millions of people; the right to divorce, abortion and contraception; the de-criminalisation of homosexuality; and language rights and autonomy for ethnic and national minorities.

It is only possible to dismiss these gains if one first dismisses the interests of working-class people, poor peasants, women and minorities as beneath consideration. Of course, we would be naive to think that no historian has ever implicitly made this dismissal. Hence we have many ‘doom and gloom’ accounts of the Revolution and Civil War which withhold any hint of vindication from the protagonists. Hence, even, accounts which explicitly place the Russian Revolution side-by-side with the Nazi holocaust (See the relevant chapter in Rayfield, Stalin’s Hangmen, Viking, 2004).

The massive hunger and violence were not a necessary sacrifice or a means to an end. There was nothing necessary about it. Violence and suffering accompany all wars and revolutions, but in this case the worst of it could have been averted.The Civil War could have ended in April 1918, or in January 1919, if the Whites and the interventionists had been willing to take that course. On the other side, Soviet leaders admitted to serious mistakes, such as clinging to food policies which, certainly by 1920, were doing more harm than good. Mass mortality was not in any sense necessary. It damaged the Revolution, placed limits on its gains, and, along with other factors, helped lay the foundations for Stalinism with all its calamities and crimes.

*

I see in the Russian Civil War a pressing relevance for the 21st-century.The war in Ukraine is the most obvious example. It is of course a fundamentally different war. It has stable frontlines, and neither Kyiv nor the Kremlin have any interest in the labour movement or social revolution. But the echoes are insistent. Belarussian railway workers delayed and diverted Russian soldiers in the first days of the war. Putin in 2005 spoke at the re-interment of the remains of the White general Denikin, attended by thousands; Putin in 2022 levelled cities in the name of the same ‘Russia, One and Indivisible’ for which Denikin waged war. When the Russian armed forcesfailed in early 2022 despite their numbers and equipment, one is reminded ofBudbergand his ‘coefficients.’Kolchak’s big mobilisation, like Putin’s, failed to translate into reliable units. When mass graves were discovered in liberated areas, the disturbing details seemed straight out of the history books. With Azov and Wagner and Kadyrov, and when the Ukrainian government armed Russian fascists and sent them on a raid into Russia, we saw something like the array of irregular and dangerous forces, generously fed by state sponsors, which sprouted during the Civil War. Like the White Guards, YevgenyPrigozhin had Rostov-on-Don and South Russia as his base; like so many unstable and inscrutable atamans of the Russian Civil War, like Kornilov, Gajda, Muraviev and Hrihoriiv, he blazed a searing trail across the world before burning up rapidly.[9]

But the relevance of the Civil war to our time goes deeper. Twenty-five years ago liberal capitalism seemed like the only show in town. But now with pandemics, polarisation, climate change, economic crises and war, the bourgeois liberal utopia seems a lot further away than it did a quarter-century ago. Revolution, reactionand civil war are realities of our time.

No adult with political opinions can read about the Russian Civil War and remain un-invested and dispassionate. I won’t pretend to be neutral. But my sympathy for the workers and poor does not preclude criticism, or a sincere attempt to understand the other side. You know where I’m coming from, and these events are rich and complex enough that, provided I do them justice, different people will take away different things.

M Lenihan

August 2021

Updated September 2023

< Back to Contents

The cover image for this post is by A. Kokorin, one of the very fine illustrations from The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich, 1973 edition.

The cover image for the series is a painting by M. Plinzner, “Kosaken auf der Wacht an der Mandschureibahn,” from Wikimedia Commons.

[1] Serafimovich, Aleksander. The Iron Flood, 3rd Edition. Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut. 1973 (1924)

[2] Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930 (Haymarket, 2015), p 343

[3] Hellebust, Rolf. “AlekseiGastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body.” Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1997, pp. 500–518. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500927. Accessed 18 June 2021.

[4] Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-1926, Hurst & Company, London, 2015

[5] Smith, SA, Russia In Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890 to 1928, Oxford University Press, 2017, p 39

[6] Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920, Orbis, 1983. P 120

[7] Serge, Year One, p 343

[8] Dune, Eduard, Memoirs of a Red Guard, University of Illinois Press, 1993, eds Koenker, Diane and Smith, SA.,p 56

[9] Prigozhin’s ‘March of Justice’ followed the line of march of General Sidorin and the Don Cossacks in 1919, but further, and got about as close to Moscow as Denikin.

Review: The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer

Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg was a cavalry officer who hacked a bloody path through revolutionary Russia, drove a Chinese occupation out of Mongolia, and aimed to become a new Genghis Khan.

This biography by James Palmer gives an engaging and hair-raising account of Ungern’s life. A child of the Baltic German nobility, raised in an atmosphere of contempt for the Estonian peasantry whose labour sustained his family, he was expelled from every educational institution he set foot in, generally for violence. He only settled down to a steady life when the battlefield gave his brutality an outlet during the 1905-6 Russo-Japanese War. He joined the ranks and received rapid promotion to the officer corps in a Cossack unit. Later during World War One he displayed near-suicidal bravery, and off the battlefields he was prone to duelling and to administering drunken beatings to servants.

The young Ungern-Sternberg

Revolution & Civil War

As the war ground on, claiming millions of Russian lives, Ungern became part of a military scheme to recruit a unit of Buriats, a Mongolian people living within Russia. So when the Revolution and Civil War came they found Ungern on the Mongolian border commanding a large force of Buriats.

Ungern was a close collaborator of a Cossack officer named Semyonov. With the outbreak of Civil War, Semyonov became a key figure in the White Armies. He was a bandit on a large scale, a warlord whose cavalry forces dominated an area larger than many European nations, both an asset and an embarrassment to the Whites. Ungern was his right-hand man.

In 1920 when Admiral Kolchak’s White armies collapsed and the Red Army advanced across Siberia, Ungern and his thousands of fighters crossed the border into Mongolia.

From a pictorial map of the Russian Civil War, available at Wikimedia Commons and Library of Cognress. The three dark figures on horseback represent Semyonov’s forces. The single rider to the left is captioned ‘Ungern’s Detachments.’ He has fled across the border into Mongolia.

After a harsh winter in the wilderness Ungern marched on the then-capital, Urga/ Ikh Khuree, and drove out the Chinese occupiers in early 1921. The height of his power followed: the Mongolian Buddhist church officially recognised him as the god of war and as the reincarnation of an eminent religious leader from the early 19th century. However, inside of a few months Ungern was being challenged by socialist Mongolians led by Sukhbaatar and Chaibalsan, who, with major Soviet supplies and aid, seized the border town of Kiatkha. Ungern marched north to fight them, and met with a terrible defeat. Then, as Soviet forces advanced into Mongolia, Ungern led a straggling army through desolate swamps and hills until his own soldiers, horrified by his wild plan to invade Tibet, mutinied and turned him over to the Reds. 

Ungern after his capture by Red forces

If you want to read more about the Russian Civil War, keep an eye out for my upcoming series, Battle for Red October. Subscribe for free to receive an update by email for my weekly post.

Violence

Throughout his career as a White leader, Ungern killed every communist he encountered, and their children too, so that nobody would be left to seek revenge. He also believed that he could sense, by staring intensely at a prisoner, whether they were secretly ‘a Jew or a commissar’, and if he divined that they were he would kill them too. Palmer details Ungern’s sadistic and disgusting methods of execution and torture, and the horrific scale on which he employed them.

During the heyday of the White Armies Ugern ruled the border town of Dauria, which became ‘The gallows of Siberia’, where the hills outside town became stained red with the blood of prisoners. These victims were sent to Ungern by other White leaders such as Kolchak who liked to pretend they didn’t know what he was doing.

Ungern had strange views about military discipline. Almost everyone close to him seems to have been on the receiving end of horrific beatings. A hundred blows to each part of the body was a standard punishment. Forcing a victim to shiver naked on a frozen lake was another. Execution and torture were normal.

Ungern, colourised. In battle in the later part of his career he preferred to wear a bright yellow Mongolian robe.

Palmer has travelled extensively in the lands which Ungern trod, and he conveys a real sense of the setting. He is an engaging narrator, capable of capturing the imagination, very self-assured, with footnotes that delve into his own interesting anecdotes and meditations. His description of Ungern’s seizing of Ikh Khuree is very vivid and will stick in my mind for a long time. He does a great job of conveying Ungern’s character, and of explaining the complex political-religious influences that operated on him. The book is very clearly aimed at British readers; while I’m not sure he always shows sufficient respect to the Mongolian people in his remarks about them, I’ll extend him the benefit of the doubt.

In general, Palmer doesn’t pull his punches on Ungern, but towards the end of the book he seems to go a little soft on him, claiming that ‘the Soviets… made him look like an amateur’ when it came to killing. Of course, he’s talking about events over a decade later after Stalin had seized power; there was no figure remotely comparable to Ungern on the Red side during the Civil War, and on his own smaller scale he gave Yezhov and Beria a run for their money. Palmer himself notes that the early Soviet regime in Mongolia was not marked by terror or coercion. They even kept in power the corrupt, murderous and utterly selfish priest-king of Mongolia, the Bogd Khan. It’s frustrating how an author can fail to notice the profound contrast between the early years of the Soviet Union and the later Stalinist regime of terror. Instead, as is the common practise of British writers, he telescopes it all together – the idea being that Stalin and the political tradition he exterminated were fundamentally the same. Far from looking like an amateur, Ungern’s violence gives us an insight into the form of proto-fascism that would have enjoyed a bloody reign over a disintegrating Russia if the Whites had been victorious.

The final paragraphs of the book left me with a bad taste in my mouth, as Palmer decided it would be a good idea to end this long horror story by telling us about a Mongolian woman he met who praised Ungern. ‘It would have pleased him,’ Palmer concludes with complacent magnanimity.

The Mongolian Steppe near Ulan Baatar.

Beliefs

While Ungern seems at first like a disturbing freak of nature, the truth emerges that he was in every respect part of broader trends, and that every facet of his weird amalgam of beliefs was connected to his lived experience and the institutions that shaped him.

To begin with, Ungern was a Baltic German aristocrat, conditioned from his earliest days toviolent, elitist and racist. To him it was obvious that ‘Slavs’ couldn’t rule themselves, and must be ruled by the firm hand of the Romanovs, or as a second preference by German nobles, if they didn’t want to be ‘led astray’ by ‘the Jews.’ But Ungern’s racism was awkward and unusual: he inverted the ‘Yellow Peril’, believing that Europeans were degenerate while ‘the peoples of the East’ were strong and warlike. His violence fell foremost on Jewish people, next on Europeans and Chinese, and least of all on Mongolians.

This bleeds over into his anti-revolutionary paranoia. He believed that the Communist Party was founded 3,000 years ago in Babylon and that it was a cosmic, satanic evil. The standard form of anti-communist bile in the 1920s was to explain that communism and revolution sprang from the ‘barbarity’ of ‘Asiatic’ Russia, but for Ungern Marxism was a product of modernity, of the degenerate ‘West’ engulfed in a ‘revolutionary storm.’ Other White leaders, who touted a constitutional monarchy or even a republic, disgusted him. For Ungern, only a new Genghis Khan could save the world. It appears that he couldn’t really tell the fundamental difference between, say, Lenin and Sun Yat-Sen: they were all evil ‘revolutionaries’ in his eyes.

Both Ungern and his collaborator Semyonov were mass-murdering sadists. But Semyonov was extraordinarily corrupt and luxurious, with a weakness for orgies and drink, while Ungern was intense and ascetic.

Ataman Semyonov

Ungern was a bore on the subject of how Mongolian medicine could supposedly cure diseases which ‘western’ science could not, and his religious beliefs mixed Buddhism with Lutheranism and Orthodox Christianity. The esoteric mysticism associated with Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists also informed his religious convictions. It appears that he absorbed a whole lot of ‘occult’ and ‘magical’ readings before the war. The same basically confused, shallow ‘spiritual’ eclecticism was of course a feature of Nazi ideology, particularly in the case of Himmler.

Lastly, Ungern’s sadism and obsession with war were part of the wider tradition at the time of seeing war as something noble and ‘virile’, the antidote to a vaguely-defined ‘degeneracy’; and these attitudes were obviously further fed and fattened every day of his life by the brutality of Tsarist military discipline and by the trauma of the battlefield.

As opposed to a historical curiosity or mystery, the more I read about Ungern, the more I saw him fitting right into his historical context. His racialism and mysticism, far from being just eccentricities, were 100% of his time. His violence was the violence of counter-revolution. His orientalism was not ‘ancient wisdom’ – it was a very modern delusion, and he was an essentially modern figure, in so many ways emblematic of 20th century fascist and reactionary thought. He was on the edge of the White cause both politically and geographically – but the old regime and the White cause created him, and behind the ‘democratic’ facade carefully projected for the benefit of the Allies, beasts like Ungern lurked.

Trotsky (2017) – is it accurate? [Spoiler: lol, Jesus, no] (Premium)

I hit ‘Play.’ Within three minutes, Trotsky and Larissa Reissner are having sex on a train. She’s naked and he’s clothed head to toe in leather. She’s in the throes of passion and he wears a blank, pitiless expression; he doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself. The train plunges phallically through the Russian countryside. Reissner’s voiceover chants a poem about death.

Read this article – and many more – for just €5

Some of my posts are set aside as a special thanks to paying supporters. This is one of them. You can get access to this article – and the full archive of The 1919 Review for an entire year – for just €5.

Subscribe