In the short post that follows I will be discussing large numbers of fatalities, and I want to ask readers to keep in mind that these are not ammunition for social media debates but real people who died horrible, untimely deaths.
How many were killed in Red and White Terror? Any estimate you read in any book will be flatly contradicted by the next book you pick up. I have seen claims that the total number killed by both sides was in the millions, but I don’t credit this. It could be argued back and forth whether either side had motive or opportunity for deliberate killing on such a scale. (For the record, I think the Reds had opportunity but not motive, and the Whites had motive but not opportunity.)
But neither side had the murder weapon. The only weapons capable of inflicting death on such a horrific scale are strong and efficient state institutions. Neither side had the institutional capacity for such killing, any more than they had the capacity for major humanitarian operations to tackle hunger and epidemics.
I’ve read a good few primary and secondary sources, and a death toll in the millions just doesn’t seem likely to me. I’ll try to explain why below.
We read that 2,500 Red prisoners were killed after the Whites took Omsk. It is rare that we get such a high death toll from one incident. Did ten massacres with a similar or higher death toll occur during the Civil War? Yes – unfortunately I could think of ten on the spot, split between various factions. Did a hundred incidents with a death toll in the thousands occur? I’m pleased that I can say a flat no. If there were five or six or seven hundred incidents in which thousands were killed, then a death toll in the millions would be plausible. Since there were not, it is not.
This still allows for the possibility that there were hundreds of thousands of individual executions and smaller-scale massacres, but I think that possibility is remote. Life was cheap in this era. But if there were enough small-scale violence going on to add up to the millions, the memoirs and novels that came out of that time would have to have someone being shot or sabred on every page (to be fair, Asian Odyssey by Alioshin comes pretty close to that at times!).
The mass death is terrible enough without exaggeration. My educated guess is that the real number for Red and White combined is greater than 100,000 but less than 500,000. Add in terror campaigns waged by various nationalist forces and interventionists (such as the contribution of Ukrainian Rada forces to the pogroms of 1919, or the massacre of Armenians by Turkish-aligned forces in Baku in 1918) and the total might well be pushed some way north of half a million.
A death toll in the low hundreds of thousands would put the Russian Civil War in the same territory as the Spanish Civil War. Spain had a smaller population, but there terror was pursued in a more determined and systematic way by an efficient military. It seems that in relation to Spain it’s been possible to do some serious homework and settle on a good approximation of the numbers (see Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust). In relation to Russia’s Civil War, I have seen nothing but rough estimates. And, to be brutally honest, this is the case for mortality throughout the revolutionary period: partial data, ambiguity in how it can be interpreted, and politically-motivated spitballing about the total.
Access to this article is limited to paying supporters. If you already subscribe by email, thank you. But if you want to become a paying supporter, please hit ‘Subscribe’ below.
Give me less than the price of a coffee, and you can access everything on this blog for one year.
On March 17th Bono wrote a poem about the Ukraine war. Without even proofreading it, he sent it to a top US politician, and she read it out at a public gathering. Then he decided to post it on Twitter,
‘It wasn’t written to be published, but since it’s out, here it is,’ he tweeted. No, he didn’t want it to be out. He just sent it to a luncheon involving top political elites in the most powerful country in the world.
The poem was so bad it was a shock to the senses. But now that a few weeks have passed we should take a closer look. What are the specific features that make it so bad?
It’s on the nose
Usually poems weave in symbols and imagery and metaphors. For example, a poem about a vicious invasion might use snake imagery to signify evil. It might weave the metaphor into various vivid images.
Instead of doing that, Bono simply tells us what his poem’s symbol is: ‘For the snake symbolises/ An evil that rises…’
From this we can surmise that if Bono had written ‘The Road Not Taken’ he would have begun, ‘A fork in the road symbolises a major life choice…’
But that’s not quite it. We need more comparisons to really do it justice. If Bono had written ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he would have begun, ‘This Greek vase is a symbol of stuff not getting old.’
Or ‘This Greek vase is like a wife who you’ve married but haven’t had sex with yet.’
It’s a textbook case of Irish narcissism
How are we to read the line ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine’? It seems that he’s saying Ireland had sorrow and pain in the past, and now Ukraine is getting a taste. As if Ukraine was some kind of bucolic hobbit village during the twentieth century – as opposed to a land ravaged by two world wars, famine, terror, the Nazi Holocaust, nuclear disaster and looting by oligarchs.
In this poem, Bono responds to the horror in Ukraine by talking about Ireland. There are grounds for empathy in our shared history of national oppression. But can’t Irish people engage with global events with a bit of taste, without making it all about us?
It’s largely babble
Let’s repeat that phrase; ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine.’ Sometimes in long complex sentences, we mistakenly switch between the singular and the plural. But what excuse does Bono have here, in a phrase eight words long?
Even if he had written ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ ARE now the Ukraine,’ what would that phrase even mean? I struggle to put it into words. Our emotions have been transferred to another country? …have been transformed into another country?
An updated version of the poem reads ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now in Ukraine.’ Did we put our sorrow and pain on a container ship and send it over to the port of Odesa?
‘And they [saints] struggle for us to be free/ From the psycho in this human family.’ Us? But Bono is already free from Putin! Putin doesn’t control any territory in which Bono or his offshore money reside.
‘For the snake symbolises/ an evil that rises/ and hides in your heart/ as it breaks.’ What does this line mean? You, Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of US politicians, have got evil hiding in your heart. I’m not entirely sure that’s what Bono meant to say. And what’s this about hearts breaking?
All these musings are a waste of time, because later we are told that ‘the evil has risen my friends [sic, no comma] / From the darkness that lives in some men.’ All of a sudden, the evil is not something that rises in the hearts of Bono’s heartbroken friends in the US political elite. It is an outside force that threatens us. From context we can guess that it is Putin.
More examples of this incoherence are nailed down here.
It’s banal
When the poem is coherent, it is usually not saying anything worth saying.
What does itactually say about the war in Ukraine? Only that from time to time ‘sorrow and fear’ come along, because of evil. In this poem, evil is a category which includes (presumably amongst other things), paganism in Fifth Century Ireland and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But evil no longer hides in Nancy Pelosi’s broken heart. The source of the evil is now ‘the darkness that lives in some men.’
How unfortunate that darkness lives in the hearts of some men. If only it had taken up lodgings in some more convenient place. Then this war wouldn’t have happened.
It’s absurd
When the poem is coherent and not banal, it’s absurd.
It is entirely possible to write a poem paying tribute to the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people and to the resilience of civilians and aid workers under the bombs. But Bono does not go down that route; instead he singles out the politician who happens to be in charge of Ukraine at this time, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And not only does Bono praise this politician, and not only does Bono compare him to St Patrick. No, at the end of his poem Bono says that Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick.
Because this is the image that comes to mind whenever I hear the name ‘Volodymyr Zelenskyy.’
So St Patrick was personally brave. And yes, it appears Zelenskyy is also personally brave. But there the similarity ends, because (A) St Patrick was never an actor. And (B) he didn’t have a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group on his payroll.
But even if the comparison fit… So Putin is a snake and Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick. Zelenskyy is banishing Putin. But… why? Why say this?
It’s tasteless
In his tweet Bono explains that every year he sends a funny limerick to US politicians for their St Patrick’s Day luncheon. As you do.
This year, he explains, instead of sending a cheeky little rhyme, he felt compelled to send a serious and heavy limerick. Yes, a heavy limerick. Because this year things are different. There’s a war on. People are dying.
Not like all those other years, when there was no war on and nobody was dying. And if there were any wars happening, the US politicians who chuckled at Bono’s funny Irish limericks certainly had nothing to do with any of those wars.
But even leaving all that aside, maybe you shouldn’t write a limerick about a war. Maybe you shouldn’t try to discuss the nature of evil in a limerick. You see, the limerick genre has certain limits.
But as Bono admits, it’s an ‘irregular’ limerick. You can say that again. Limericks are disciplined, with a tight rhyming scheme and rhythm.
For example, ‘There once was a singer from Dublin/ Whose tax situation was troubling…’ etc.
Limericks have to scan well, or else they sound contrived. And they are short, like five lines.
It’s not a limerick
When I first read Bono’s poem, it scanned so poorly I didn’t even realise it was a limerick. There were words that I didn’t realise were supposed to rhyme with other words. I only learned that it was a limerick because Bono said so. Then I went back and read it in the sing-song jokey rhythm of a limerick. It sounded so much more tasteless and bizarre. In other words, it’s not an irregular limerick, it’s an atrocious limerick.
If Bono had written something like the following, it wouldn’t have been quite as bad:
A snakey old psycho named Putin
Escalated the bombing and shooting
But Zelensky had tactics
Because he is St Patrick
And so for Ukraine I am rooting.
It’s absurd, offensive, tasteless, baffling. But it’s brief, and it’s actually a limerick.
And it says everything Bono takes fifteen lines to say. That’s it. All the essential points are there. But to create the impression that he’s saying something deep and heartfelt, he ties the poem up in knots with vague phrases that mean nothing. He does not succeed in covering up his poem’s essential banality and absurdity, only in adding a layer of incoherence.
The 1919 Review 