Russian Revolution

08: The Fight for Kazan

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The Fall of Kazan (5 to 7 August)

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

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

Kazan’s White Kremlin, seen from the Volga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resistance at Sviyazhsk (8 to 28 August)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature of the Red Army

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Army soldiers under shell fire during the struggle for Kazan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trotsky and the poet Damian Bedny near Kazan

Red Cohesion

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

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

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

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

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

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

A panorama of modern-day Sviyazhsk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For this I vouch before the whole Red Army.

Raids (28-30 August)

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

Raid by Land

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

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

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

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

Reissner describes the eight-hour battle which ensued:

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

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

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

Mutiny

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

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

A Bolshevik sailor named Nikolai Markin acted fast.

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

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

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

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

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

Raid by Water

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

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

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

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

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

The Recapture of Kazan (1 to 9 September)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is victory.

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

The Red Cavalry enter Kazan
Komuch troops fleeing from Kazan

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

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

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

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

< Back to Contents

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

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

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

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

[iv] Serge, Year One, p 320

[v] Serge, Year One, p 332

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

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

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

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

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

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

[xii] Mawdsley, 268

[xiii] Reissner

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

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

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

[xvii] Serge, Year One, p 339

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

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

What if the Russian Civil War was averted? Part 2 (Premium)

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Controversies: Terror (Premium)

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07: How Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad (Premium)

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Controversies: Foreign Intervention (1)

Indulge me for a minute and imagine the Russian Civil War superimposed on the United States of America. For the sake of a thought experiment whose purpose will be clear by the end of this post, let’s brush aside the obvious objections and perform whatever mental gymnastics are required. This is the first of several “Controversies” posts on the theme of foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War. I’ll return to the main narrative of the war next week but at some point I’ll follow up on Foreign Intervention.

Let’s get the mental gymnastics out of the way first. Maybe it’s 1968 in an alternate history in which the US has emerged as one of several losers in a nuclear war. Maybe it’s 2038 and the US has been defeated in, we’ll say, Taiwan. The defeat is devastating. The vast US military is in a state of collapse. An alliance of South and Central American states (we’ll call them ASCAS) is invading the south-west.

In this defeated country, a rebellion takes place, led by the military top brass and law enforcement. We can leave aside politics for the purposes of this experiment. If you are a liberal, you can assume the rebels are a cabal of right-wingers with ties to foreign powers. If you are a conservative, you can assume they are deep-state liberal coastal elites. If like me you are a socialist, you can assume that a US revolution has taken place and that the rebels represent the last-ditch resistance of capital and the old state machinery.

Still from the intro video to Red Alert 2, dev Westwood Studios, 2000

Let’s run through a timeline of the first year and a half of this Second US Civil War.

Year One

  • March: US is forced to sign a peace treaty with the ASCAS, handing over control of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
  • May: The states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas secede from the union. They are in an uneasy alliance with the neighbouring ASCAS occupation forces.
  • A rogue army made up of officers and led by General Smith takes control over Alabama and Georgia.  Smith claims to be the head of the legitimate US government.
  • North Korean forces land in Alaska, and begin taking over the whole state.
  • An army of Kurdish fighters has been serving in the US military in exchange for the promise of an independent Kurdish state. They are currently in transit across the Midwestern United States. They are approached by Iranian intelligence. The Iranian government promises support for an independent Kurdistan if the Kurdish Corps will rise in revolt against the US federal government. Tens of thousands of Kurdish fighters seize control over St Louis, Kansas City and Omaha.
  • June: thousands of Russian soldiers land in Maine and set up a puppet government there. Thousands of Chinese soldiers land in California and Oregon. Iranian forces take control of Seattle.
  • Half-a-dozen new governments seize control in various parts of the United States, some declaring independence, others claiming that they are the legitimate government of the US.
  • Warlords cross the border from Canada and seize control over Montana and North Dakota.
  • July: A series of armed revolts erupt in cities within Federal Government territory, including Washington DC. All are defeated due to lack of popular support but cause destruction and suffering. Foreign intelligence agencies are linked to most of the revolts.
  • Chicago falls to the rebels.
  • By this time, the following states are still fully controlled by the US federal government: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the Virginias, North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. All other states are controlled, in whole or in part, by rebels or by foreign armies. The East Coast is under a blockade by the Russian and Chinese navies.
  • September: the federal government seizes back control over Chicago.
  • September-November: the rebel governments in the Midwest are consolidated in a series of coups. Admiral Garcia, in control of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains, declares himself supreme ruler of the United States.
  • November: revolution sweeps Latin Anerica. The ASCAS is no longer a factor. The occupation of California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona ends. For the next two years, rebels and the federal government will vie for control of these states in a series of bloody conventional and guerrilla wars. Dallas, Texas will by the end of Year Three have changed hands nine times in three years.

Year Two

  • The various rebel forces go on the offensive.
  • General Smith, having spent many months crushing the resistance of federal forces in the south-eastern United States and taking control over rival rebel factions, now controls more or less the old territory of the 1860s Confederacy. His armies march on Washington DC. They reach as far as Norfolk, Virginia, roughly 400 kilometres from the capital.
  • General Anderson, in control of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, advances on New York City. They reach the outskirts of the city proper, supported by the Russian Navy.
  • The rebel forces in the Midwest, led by Admiral Garcia, invade the Rust Belt.
  • 14 foreign governments at this point have troops on US soil, controlling key port cities and securing the rebels’ rear. In places, they fight directly against US federal troops. Their total forces may add up to as many as 300,000 pairs of boots on the ground, including 70,000 North Korean troops in Alaska battling a pro-Federal guerilla movement and the 30,000-70,000 Kurdish fighters in the Midwest.
  • The offensives of Williams, Anderson and Garcia are bankrolled by the foreign powers. The three rebel leaders receive weapons and ammunition adding up to the total output of munitions for that year in the areas still controlled by Washington DC.
  • General Anderson’s forces in New England literally wear Russian uniforms, and every bullet fired from the rifles of Admiral Garcia is of Chinese manufacture. Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Korean officers and agents are a ubiquitous presence in the rebel zones. In short, this offensive would be impossible without their support.

We have now reached the most intense point of the Second US Civil War. It is unnecessary for our purposes to pursue these imagined events any further, though readers are free to do so in the comments below. Readers are also free to tease out all the various improbabilities in the above scenario. I’m well aware of them but they may be interesting to discuss.

(Of course, the US entertainment industry has imagined such scenarios many times: off the top of my head I can think of Red Dawn, Homefront, Red Alert 2 and 3, the Call of Duty franchise and Chuck Norris’ Invasion USA. The US has never suffered such an onslaught in reality. But it is a fascinating case of projection. The US has inflicted such onslaughts against other countries too many times to count, often right down to the specific tactics depicted, without irony, in movies and games.)

Still from the intro video to Red Alert 2, dev Westwood Studios, 2000. I’m not from the US and I don’t live there. But I am familiar with its geography, politics and culture. That’s why I picked the US and not, say, China, India or Brazil, for this thought experiment.

We have not touched on the horrible human suffering that this war would entail. How would a military-law enforcement alliance in control of the Deep South treat minorities in the areas it controlled? What kind of humanitarian disasters would unfold in a war-torn and blockaded United States? What kind of severe police state would exist in the territories of all the contending forces, including that of the Federal Government?

I’ll ask you to imagine one more thing: that one hundred years after the events just described, Chinese, Russian and Iranian historians are busy ignoring, denying, downplaying and minimizing the significance of foreign intervention during the Second US Civil War.

When did the Russian Civil War begin and end? (Premium)

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05: Czech Revolt in the East

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

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

THE ALLIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Revolt will be short lived”!

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

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

Without hesitating he replied, ‘The Germans.’

‘Have you ever been in Russia?’

‘No.’[iii]

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

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

THE ALLIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CZECH LEGION

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

A Czechoslovak scout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Czechs on the railways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KOMUCH

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

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

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

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

Cathedral in Samara, some time around 1918

FAILURES OF THE RED ARMY

How was the new Red Army coping with all this?

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

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

Trotsky, Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs

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

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

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

KOMUCH IN POWER

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

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

Czech Legion members, later in 1918

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAMARA AND OMSK

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

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

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

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

The Iron Bridge, Omsk

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

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

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

Smele writes:

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

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

Would things turn out the same way for Komuch?

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

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

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

[ii]Silverlight, 10

[iii]Silverlight, 19

[iv]Silverlight, p 33

[v]Silverlight, p 35

[vi]Silverlight, p 36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[viii] Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, 64

[ix] Mawdsley, 82

[x] Serge, Year One, 311

[xi] Serge, 496

[xii] Mawdsley, 90

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

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

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

[xvi] Smele, 70

[xvii] Smele, 72

03: The SR Time Bomb

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In May 1918 the simmering civil war in Russia went suddenly to boiling point. The working class was looking west to the danger of German imperialism, not south to the Cossacks or east to Siberia. But in May twin explosions of revolt occurred in the South and in the East. In a few months, the Soviets lost control over two-thirds of the territory of Russia.

These revolts were brought about by three major forces. The first is familiar to us, their motivations obvious: the officers and the Cossacks, who were involved both in the south and in the east. The second is the foreign interventionists; German invasion in the south triggered the revolt there, and Allied intervention played a key role in the explosion in the east. The third, active in the east but not in the south, was the Socialist Revolutionary Party. This surprising new addition to the White cast of characters will receive the most attention from us in the coming episodes.

But to understand the motivation of the SRs, we have to back-track to a profound humiliation they suffered in January of 1918.

Down at the Depot

At this moment, in the early days of the year, the calendar had not yet been changed and the struggles in Kyiv and on the Don were not yet concluded.

By a quiet canalside in Petrograd stood a naval depot, and inside the sailor Raskolnikov was arguing until he was hoarse. His real name was Ilyin – his alias ‘Raskolnikov’ suggests the Russian word for ‘heretic’ and is also the name of the killer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov was in his late 20s, an ‘Old Bolshevik’ by the standards of his comrades. He had known the inside of Tsarist prisons, and was a respected leader among the Kronstadt sailors. 

The scene inside the depot club was one familiar to those who had lived through the revolutions of 1917: a mass meeting of sailors in the dim light of electric lamps, orators on the low platform inciting them to revolt against the government. But the speakers on the platform were not Bolsheviks. They were leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary party.

A parliament called the Constituent Assembly was due to open in a few days’ time, and in that assembly would sit a decisive majority of right SR deputies. They planned to wrest control from the Bolsheviks and from the Soviets, and they would need a few thousand armed sailors and soldiers to give physical force to whatever moral force their parliamentary majority could command.

‘You Bolsheviks have blood on your hands,’ an SR speaker growled from the platform of the sailors’ club, shaking his finger.

But Raskolnikov was there to answer their arguments. His memoirs do not record what exactly he said, but it worked. The SRs were defeated in the depot, as they were in every unit of the garrison.

They settled for calling a street demonstration on January 4th, the day the Constituent Assembly was due to meet. Also, they still had their majority in the Constituent Assembly. How had they managed to win this majority in the first place?

The cover image is an election poster for the SR party

THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

Before 1917, the Socialist Revolutionary party were a presence in the revolutionary milieu. Their members took pride in their roots in the terrorist movement which had claimed the lives of Tsars and ministers. But the party was changing. In 1904 the SR Maximalists, a group of around a thousand members, split away. They were dissatisfied that the party was becoming moderate, respectable, middle-of-the-road. But as we will see, the SR tradition never really let go of terrorism.

During the year 1917, the Socialist Revolutionaries were a key force in the Provisional Government. Along with the Mensheviks, they were the ‘moderate socialists’ who continued the war, dragged their feet on the land question, insisted on coalition with the right, and presided over an economic crisis that threatened the cities with mass unemployment and famine.

There was trouble in the ranks of the party. In the words of Smith, ‘From May [1917] left-wingers in the SRs began to crystallize as an embryonic party, by virtue of their support for the peasants’ seizure of landowners’ estates, their hostility to the ‘imperialist’ war, and their backing for a pan-socialist government.’ The party now had 700,000 members, and ‘by autumn most party organizations in the provinces had come out in favour of power to the soviets.’[i]

The leader of the Left SRs was Maria Spiridonova whom we met in Part 1, whose brutal treatment in prison had shocked the world.

Bryant writes: ‘An All-Russian Peasants’ Conference was held in Petrograd shortly after the [October Revolution]. The majority of the delegates came right Socialist Revolutionists–in three days they had joined the left wing; had elected Spirodonova president and gone over to the Soviets, marching in a body to [the Soviet headquarters]. There were two All-Russian Peasants’ assemblies–both did the same thing.’[ii]

A peasants’ congress in 1917

Unlike Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the SRs had a severe aversion to splits. As late as the October Revolution itself, the Left and Right SRs were still formally in one party, even though they were on opposite sides of the barricades. Kerensky, the last leader of the Provisional Government, was a Right SR; he sent Krasnov and his Cossacks to attack Petrograd a few days after the October Revolution. An officer named Murav’ev defeated the Cossacks and captured Krasnov – and this Murav’ev was a Left SR. The Left and Right SRs were literally shooting each other in the streets. But they were doing so under the same banner and with the same party membership card in their pockets. The split did not happen until December 1917.

ELECTIONS

Elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in the weeks after the October Revolution. The Constituent Assembly Elections were yet another thing the Provisional Government had promised but had kept delaying, and which the Bolsheviks delivered a few weeks after taking power. The irony was that Bolsheviks believed that the Soviets were a superior form of democracy to any parliament.

Voters in Petrograd consider the election posters – far more artistic and political than, for example, modern Irish election posters

They won a very impressive vote in the cities and the armies. But the SRs were the hands-down winners of the election. Here are the results by percentage of votes cast.

  • SRs: 39.5 per cent
  • Bolsheviks: 22.5 per cent
  • Constitutional Democrats: 4.5 per cent
  • Mensheviks: 3.2 per cent
  • Minority nationalist parties (including Ukrainian SRs & Ukrainian social democrats): 3.3 per cent[iii]
A selection of posters from the 1917 election

The SRs had by now finally split into Left and Right. But in a time of poor literacy and terrible communications – there was a shortage of paper for ballots, never mind leaflets – the split was not widely understood. Even those electors who fully understood it faced a head-scratching question of who to vote for, because in the vast majority of electoral districts the Left and Right SRs, who were shooting each other in the streets, were still on the same electoral list!

The system of voting for a party list as opposed to an individual candidate operates today in many countries, such as Sweden. It places the emphasis on programme rather than individuals (Note the appeal to vote for “list 3” on the SR election poster above). But because the Left SRs had been so reluctant to split, they had walked into a terrible trap. The electoral lists had been drawn up by the leadership of the SRs back in September, and favoured candidates of the right.

If the Left SRs had split much earlier and had time to develop their profile as an independent party, they might have won the Constituent Assembly election. In the few areas they did stand independently they performed badly. The SR party had a reputation as fighters for the peasantry, a reputation mostly earned by Left SRs. As it was, votes cast for the Left SRs’ programme and record went to elect people diametrically opposed to them.

The Right SRs’ majority did not impress the Bolsheviks or the Left SRs They saw the whole thing as basically a re-run of the Provisional Government, the same tired bankrupts seizing the chance to impose themselves on the country all over again. The farce of the electoral lists was an additional proof of the superiority of Soviet democracy.

 ‘THE GUARD IS TIRED’

On the day when the Constituent Assembly met, deputies from left and right alike arrived with pistols in their pockets. The Right SRs dominated the proceedings numerically. There were 230-240 on the right of the Assembly, against 130-140 on the left – a hundred or so Bolsheviks, and only 40 Left SRs.

It was an ugly day, marked by booing and heckling and tense manoeuvres. The Bolsheviks and Left SRs initiated ‘Whistling, uproar, shouts of ‘Get down!’, rattling and banging of desks… a fearful, inhuman roar and din […] a frenzied racket and loud, piercing whistles.’[iv]

Meanwhile a demonstration organised by the Right SRs filled the streets outside. During the day tensions would mount, and at one point sailors opened fire on the crowd, killing several. The crowd melted away.

The left put forward Spiridonova as their candidate for president, but she was easily defeated by the candidate of the right, Viktor Chernov, former agriculture minister.

Next the Bolsheviks proposed their position: that the Constituent Assembly could assume some authority on the condition that it recognised the supremacy of the Soviet. This was the mirror image of the Right SR position: that the Soviet could assume some authority as long as it recognised the supremacy of the Constituent Assembly.

The Bolsheviks’ proposal was defeated by a wide margin, and they and the Left SRs walked out. 

The meeting went on without the left. For a few hours, the Right SR deputies in the hall could fantasise that they were governing and shaping the new Russia, laying the foundations for an orderly constitutional capitalist republic. They elected as president Viktor Chernov who was a Right SR, but who had a ‘left-ish’ profile because he had criticised coalition during 1917.

But as 5am approached a sailor walked up to the podium and asked them to close the meeting, ‘Because the guard is tired.’

On the surface the remark seemed trivial, but it was rich in possible meanings. The Right SRs for their part took it as a veiled threat (it probably was) and quit the building without uttering a word of protest.

The Constituent Assembly never met again. It sank like a stone into murky water and the ripples appeared to settle at once. Workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors – those who, throughout 1917, had answered any undemocratic moves with mass resistance – did not lift a finger. They did not give a damn about the Constituent Assembly, did not accept its right to rule. If it demanded they choose between it and the Soviet, it was no contest. Tens of millions had voted for a party with ‘socialism’ and ‘revolution’ in the name, and socialist revolution it would be.

But the Right SRs and their supporters never forgot the humiliation of that day. Parliamentary democracy had been brushed aside with contempt by Soviet democracy, which got on with its work as if the Constituent Assembly elections had never taken place.

The chaos that began in May 1918 would give the Right SRs an opportunity to take revenge for this humiliation, and to make another bid for power. In this, the aid of the western Allies would prove to be of more practical use than their dubious parliamentary majority. But as we will see, the name of the Constituent Assembly would be quite literally inscribed on their banners.

<Back to Contents

[i] Smith, S. A. Russia in Revolution, p. 110

[ii] Bryant, Louise, Six Red Months in Revolutionary Russia, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bryant/works/russia/ch09.htm

[iii] Smith, 155

[iv] Raskolnikov, FF, Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1918/raskolnikov/ilyin/ch01.htm

04: Cossack Revolt in the South

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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