Red Advance, White Defeat

Civil War in South Russia 1919–1920

Peter Kenez

• Publisher: New Academia
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781955835176
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

The second of a two-volume history and analysis of the Russian Civil War, this volume covers events spanning 1919 to 1920. "The republication of Professor Kenez's classic volumes is to be warmly welcomed. Based on copious archival research and a close reading of published memoirs and mixing careful narrative with judicious analysis, they still provide the definitive history of the anti-Bolshevik movement in South Russia. Their original publication provided an inspiration for a generation of scholars of the Russian Civil War; the new edition will certainly inspire another. The armchair historian too, as well as all those interested in the fate of contemporary Russia, will find much to admire and much to ponder upon in this well told tale of one of the most bloody and tragic episodes in recent European history." —Jonathan D. Smele, University of London "The profession will be delighted to learn that this classic study of the Russian Civil War (1917-21) on its most crucial battleground is again available. Kenez's work was the first in any language to cut through the rhetoric of partisan memory and historiography in order to present a complicated and balanced view of both sides. While demythologizing Soviet historical explanations, Kenez is especially keen in displaying the enormous variety of the "White, " or anti-Communist, movement and analyzing the causes of its defeat." —Richard Stites, Georgetown University Second edition with an updated bibliography.

CHAPTER 1

The Bolsheviks

Reds and Whites competed against one another in building an administrative structure, in formulating policies which would appeal to large segments of the population, and, of course, on the battlefields. In order to place the White movement in proper perspective, let us begin our survey with a brief description of the Bolsheviks’ organizational principles, their social and economic policies, and the strengths and weaknesses of the young Red Army.

Soviet historians have always given the Bolshevik Party a major share of the credit for winning the Civil War. Indeed, the Party gave an inestimable advantage to the Reds over their enemies: it provided organization and discipline at a time when these qualities were in short supply. As circumstances changed, the organization was able to meet new situations and satisfy new requirements. It was meant to be an association of professional revolutionaries, but it was transformed into an instrument of rule. However, the fact that the Bolshevik Party was originally created for tasks which were very different from those which it was forced to play during the Civil War was of relatively small significance. What mattered was that Leninist ideas, principles, and attitudes, as they were embodied in the Party, turned out to be very timely.

The central feature of Leninist political theory was the stress on organization. No revolutionary before Lenin had paid comparable attention to the mundane needs of building a party machinery. Lenin always struggled against the anarchic element in Russian socialism, and he feared and distrusted spontaneous action. In his opinion the success of the revolution depended not so much on the workers themselves as on the cohesion and skill of the Party.1 From their experience in revolutionary underground work against the tsarist regime, the Bolsheviks had learned the same lesson: in order to succeed, the Party needed discipline and tight organization; In a period of anarchy and confusion a small group of dedicated people can accomplish remarkable tasks. In Russia, it was only the Bolsheviks who were predisposed by their intellectual and political traditions to act on the basis of this understanding.

Of course, the Party was not yet afflicted by Stalinist conformity. The Bolsheviks were members of the international socialist community, and their theoretical heritage, together with autocratic elements, included a commitment to democracy. Later, when the requirements of democracy and the need for discipline collided, the Bolsheviks would again and again choose discipline. But at the outbreak of the Civil War the Party was still creating itself, and its future was far from predetermined. In the period of underground struggle, Lenin had frequently removed those comrades who dared to disagree with him on important matters. However, the ever-pragmatic leader realized that the needs of the Party in 1917 were not the same as when it had been a small band of revolutionaries. He knew that even the occasionally unruly followers could make important contributions, and was therefore willing to overlook “errors” and forgive past “mistakes.” The chaotic circumstances of the Revolution also loosened discipline. As a result, the Bolshevik Party of 1917-1921 was a more heterogeneous organization than at any other period of its history. It was faction-ridden, and its leaders held personal grudges against one another. The control of the center over party cells in outlying provinces was often only tenuous. Ambitious and strong-minded leaders could easily defy directives from Petrograd or Moscow. However, no one can fail to recognize that compared to their enemies, the Bolsheviks were disciplined and united.

Both the composition and the functions of the Party went through enormous changes in the years of the Revolution and Civil War. The growth of membership was so great that within a short time the new members completely submerged the old cadres. No reliable data exist for membership figures, but the magnitude of the growth is beyond doubt. The party had 23,600 members at the time of the February Revolution.2 According to the most widely accepted estimates, in November 1917 the figure grew to 115,000. During the Civil War the Party experienced stages of fast expansion and purges, and at the end of the conflict, there were close to three quarters of a million Communists.3 The periodic purges and recruitment drives were the result of the two conflicting purposes of the leadership. On the one hand, the Party wanted to attract talent to help to win the war, and to increase its influence among the workers and peasants; on the other, it did not want to be held responsible for the uneducated, irresponsible careerists who infiltrated the organization.

Indeed, many people who joined embarrassed the Party by anti-Semitic agitation, crude careerism, and corrupt practices. There is no doubt that in general, the original twenty thousand underground activists were more selfless, courageous, and dedicated revolutionaries than the new Communists. But it would be a mistake to emphasize only the political and human weaknesses of the new members. Many of the peasants and workers who acquired their membership cards at this time could really reach their fellow Russians, even though they had only the haziest notions about Marxist theory and the goals of the socialist revolution. They were able to influence the public mood; they agitated for the immediate goals of the Party; and they carried out policies made in Moscow. One of the most significant accomplishments of the Party, and a main reason for its ultimate victory, was the mobilization of large pools of talent, never previously tapped. The Party found uneducated but able men and women who acquired political experience in the Civil War. Many of them later occupied important posts in the economic and political life of the Soviet Union. The Party could be regarded as a recruitment agency; the Whites possessed no comparable instrument.

The new Party member received intangible yet important psychological rewards with his membership. He came to regard himself as a member of the elite, a fighter in the avant garde. Joining implied a serious commitment. Even if a person entered the Party for less than selfless motives, when the enemy threatened the region, he would participate in the organization of a defense because he knew that the Whites treated all Bolsheviks alike. The short-sighted White policy of immediately executing Communist captives greatly benefited the Red side in the Civil War.

It is hard to describe the functions of the Party since it was involved in every aspect of public life. It was a policy-making body, which developed the strategy for winning the Civil War; it was a recruitment agency, which brought forward cadres for important positions; it was responsible for reporting on the mood of the people, and it organized propaganda both for the distant goal of socialism and for pressing everyday tasks. Most important, it supervised the work of government, and of social organizations such as trade unions and cooperatives, and watched the loyalty of technical experts and officers who had been cajoled and coerced into Bolshevik service.

The Party’s previous experience in underground work now proved especially useful. In areas controlled by the enemy the Bolsheviks quickly reorganized their secret network. The fact that the Bolsheviks had trusted agents in major cities and factories was very beneficial; underground activists printed newspapers, carried out sabotage, and in general undermined the people’s confidence in the stability of the White regime. This was dangerous work, for capture meant summary execution. The Whites possessed no comparable network. When they tried to organize underground work it was usually amateurish and readily exposed without significant accomplishments.

The fact that the functions of Party and government frequently overlapped often led to confusion. The chief ailment was a lack of authority. But two sets of institutions, functioning inadequately and sometimes at cross purposes, were still better than no control at all.

The organization of the Party resembled that of an army. Although in the confusion of the Civil War discipline was sometimes violated, it was normally enforced. Democratic centralism, in which local organs would select the higher ones and in turn be bound by their decisions, remained a meaningless phrase. In practice, local leaders were almost always appointed from the center.

Although the Party was inundated by new members the central apparat remained in the hands of old Bolsheviks, who were bound to Lenin by a tradition of personal loyalty.4 The pre-revolutionary members may have made up only a small minority of the Party, but their influence remained crucial.

In addition to the Central Committee at the top and the local cells in the villages, factories, and army units, there were a number of intervening organizations at the provincial, district, and city levels. Naturally, the strength of the Party ultimately depended on the local cells. Some of these in factories and villages contained no more than four or five members. In the beginning of the Civil War, Bolshevik strength was almost entirely concentrated in the army and in the cities. The majority of villages did not have a single Bolshevik. As the war progressed, the position of the party in the countryside gradually improved. However, Bolshevik strength among workers remained far greater than it was among peasants. The crucial and difficult task was to control the countryside, and unfortunately for the Bolsheviks, it was precisely in this aspect of the work that the Party was weakest.

The new constitution of 1918 did not mention the most distinctive political institution of the country, the Bolshevik Party.5 It did have, however, much to say about the other novel political organizations, the Soviets.

Workers created the first Soviets in 1905 to take care of the immediate problems of revolutionary action. With the suppression of the revolutionary movement, Soviets disappeared to emerge again twelve years later. In April 1917, when Lenin issued his famous slogan, “All power to the Soviets,” his party was in a small minority in almost every one of them. However, as the Bolsheviks gained strength in the course of 1917 their representation increased, and in September they acquired majorities in the two most important Soviets, those in Moscow and Petrograd. These political victories were the prerequisites of the November Revolution, which was carried out in the name of the Soviets and acquired a certain degree of legitimacy when the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met on November 7 and passed a resolution approving Lenin’s revolution.

At this time the Soviets were loosely organized bodies lacking any clearly defined sphere of competence. They were useful to the Bolsheviks because they extended the reach of the Party when it very much needed this help. In theory, the Congress of Soviets, which elected an Executive Committee to which the Council of Commissars was responsible, was the supreme power of the land, and the local Soviets practiced self-government. However, as time went on the Soviets were subverted. The Bolsheviks gradually removed their socialist competitors, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The Executive Committee and the Government came to be directed by the same leaders who ruled the Party. The local Soviets, on the other hand, took on themselves the functions of local government and in practice became indistinguishable from prerevolutionary organs. In many villages nothing changed but the nomenclature; the village elder or Ataman, on Bolshevik victory, became the chairman of the village Soviet. The independence of local organs was not the result of devotion to the principle of self-government, but a manifestation of anarchy; as soon as they could, the Bolsheviks imposed control and central direction.

The purpose of political institutions is to carry out policies. Obviously, the success or failure of institutions depends not on organizational skill alone but also on the nature of the social and economic policies which they attempt to introduce.

The most difficult task for the social historian of the revolutionary period is to describe how central policies actually affected people. Obviously, many of the decrees remained dead letters, and some of the most significant social changes occurred independently of or even in spite of the wishes of the nominal rulers. Since it is relatively easy to study resolutions, proclamations, and minutes of meetings, the historian may be tempted to believe that these materials will enable him to reconstruct the full story of the period. But they cannot; the main outlines of the social history of the Civil War are clear, but the details remain elusive. It is particularly hard to appreciate what the peasants experienced in Russia’s thousands of villages.

The social revolution which was sweeping the villages began in 1917, independent of the Bolsheviks. Russia was an agricultural country with a large surplus agrarian population, which the weakly developed industry could not absorb. The peasantry was ignorant of modern methods, crop yields were low, and the population was never far from the danger of famine. The peasants were rebellious; they resented the landlords, who seemed representatives of an alien culture, and coveted their lands. Some historians argue that the reforms which Prime Minister Stolypin introduced shortly before the outbreak of the First World War might have solved the problems of the country; but no one can maintain that the problems had been solved.

In the light of the experience of the peasant revolution of 1905– 1906 no great foresight was needed to anticipate that the demise of tsarism in 1917 would bring new peasant disturbances. It is not so much that the war increased the misery of the peasants. Indeed, where industry had failed, the army succeeded in removing the surplus population from the villages, and the supply situation deteriorated far more rapidly in the cities than in the countryside. But the collapse of traditional authority tempted the peasants to use the opportunity to satisfy their desire for land and vengeance. In the late spring and early summer of 1917 peasant disturbances began in the form of small acts of non-cooperation, such as refusal to pay rent, but these soon escalated into violence. Insurgents burned down manors, forcibly occupied land, and even killed some landlords. “Good” and “bad” landlords suffered alike.

The attitude of the Provisional Government to this incipient social revolution had all the elements of the later policies of the White regimes. While the Provisional Government accepted in principle the need for a thorough-going land reform, in practice the moderate politicians wanted to postpone action until revolutionary passions had cooled. The government considered that land reform undertaken during the war would disrupt the already precarious supply situation in the cities, and would encourage peasant soldiers to defect in order not to miss their share. At the same time the government had neither the force nor the determination to punish the rebellious peasants. The government which could not suppress the revolutionary and anarchist acts nor satisfy the desire of the peasants found its authority undermined.

The Bolsheviks in 1917 had nothing to lose and much to gain from the spreading anarchy. They did not have to worry about the economic consequences of the expropriation of the land and so they could give verbal support to the peasants. Yet they, too, had to pay a price. As revolutionary Marxists, the Bolsheviks in the past had not approved of land distribution for fear that it would strengthen the peasant’s consciousness of private property, making the creation of socialism all the more difficult. Lenin, unlike most contemporary revolutionary socialist leaders, fully appreciated the strategic importance of gaining peasant good will at the time of making his revolution. With the advantage of hindsight it is safe to conclude that without the Bolsheviks’ concession to the peasants on the issue of land reform, the November Revolution would have been doomed.

The Bolsheviks knew how to take advantage of the inability of the Provisional Government to satisfy the people’s craving for land and peace, and they succeeded in November in removing the liberal democratic regime. Lenin was determined to avoid the “errors” of his predecessors and on November 8 he simultaneously called for peace negotiations with all belligerent powers and issued his decree abolishing ownership of land without compensation.

The decree merely legalized and completed the peasant revolution. In name the land became national property, but the peasants regarded the nationalized land as their own. Their assemblies, which had experience in these matters from the days of the peasant commune, distributed all the available lands of landlords and frequently even lands belonging to the rich peasants or kulaks. The kulaks who had spent years saving money to buy an extra desiatina (2.7 acres) now found that their labors had been in vain. In villages where land was plentiful the peasants received generous allotments, while in neighboring villages there might be little or nothing to distribute. Outsiders received nothing. It would be wrong to imagine that such a land reform could have solved the age-old problem of the Russian peasantry. The landlords, who as a class had been losing their lands to the peasants for decades in any case, did not possess enough lands to satisfy the needs of the overpopulated Russian villages. In the majority of provinces an individual peasant did not receive more than a half a desiatina.6 However, the political significance of the land reform did not depend on economic considerations. The peasants hated the landlords, and the new government unequivocally took their side in the class struggle.

The peasants and the Bolsheviks allowed one another to carry out their revolutions. However, within a few months the Bolsheviks realized that they needed more from the countryside than mere to...