He organised his command into six divisions and certain additional brigades of specialists as army troops. Their number was nothing like sufficient to hold so wide a front, so he had to devise a way to keep his main bodies perpetually on the move from one threatened sector to another. This was in 1918, when the great armies of Western Europe were still drearily footslogging from place to place. ‘Waste of energy,’ declared Voroshilov, ‘and loss of what may be vital time.’ In consequence this civilian soldier was the first man to mechanise an entire army. He commandeered every working motor vehicle in Tzaritsyn and repaired all the old ones so that they could rush his infantry to each danger point in turn, built dozens of armoured cars to support them, converted 39 ordinary trains into armoured trains and made II more brand new ones. It was, perhaps, because he had spent his early life in the machine shops instead of exercising horses that he was able to visualise war from a new angle. The following passages are from the memoirs of Tarassov-Rodionov who was present at the siege.
* * * * *
‘The Soviet Government was not then a year old. Trains hardly crept from one station to another in twenty-four hours. All over Russia rusting factories stood in cold grim silence. The worker families pounded potato peelings and greedily waited for any word from their vanished breadwinners, who were scattered over the innumerable and endless fronts of war. At that time from the walls of houses greyish tatters of newspaper placards frenziedly shrieked the grim news.
‘LOCKHART AND NOLAN’S PLOT AGAINST SOVIET GOVERNMENT…. DORA KAPLAN SERIOUSLY WOUNDS LENIN….GERMANS PLUNDER UKRAINE… FRENCH LAND ARMY AT MURMANSK…. ENGLISH TAKE ARCHANGEL…. CZECHOSLOVAK WHITE GUARDS EXECUTE KAZAN WORKERS.… JAPANESE MOVE ON CHITA…. GENERAL KRASNOV CONCENTRATES ALL FORCES ON RED TZARITSYN.
‘Had you entered the Central Recruiting Depot in Moscow and pushed your way down the dark narrow corridors of that stuffy house through crowds of torn leather jackets, with volunteers awaiting travelling papers for all parts of the country and had you, at last, asked any of the secretaries, “Comrade, which of all these fronts is at present the most dangerous?” you would unquestionably have received this answer: “Tzaritsyn, Comrade. At present it is the sole key to our food supply; without grain we cannot keep on. Tzaritsyn too is the only Red wedge we have thrust into the United Counter Revolution by which our enemies are hemming us in.”
‘In Tzaritsyn the factories were working at full blast turning out the thousand-and-one necessities needed by the army. Middle-class folk huddled in their little homes peering through their windows, constantly saw the newly-formed units of Red Guards marching off from the barracks to the front, repaired armoured cars issuing from the factory gates, wagons taking mountains of bread, bundles of uniform coats, ammunition and casesof water-melon sugar to the Army supply centres.
‘Voroshilov was everywhere. Something went wrong with the dockers who were loading the grain barges; he went down to the docks and settled it. The Mensheviks tried to sabotage our motions in the Soviets; he threw them out. The downhearted elements at the factories talked of throwing up their jobs; he put new life into them.
‘The troops of Krasnov lay like an iron horse-shoe round the town; their flanks resting on the banks of the flooded Volga. The Whites knew that the fall of Tzaritsyn meant an open road to Moscow and victory. They dared not leave it untaken in their rear.
‘In August, Krasnov’s attacks became positively ferocious. He sent his bearded Don Cossacks under Mamontov hurtling against us and his White Officer infantry battalions sometimes came to the assault with the bayonet as often as three times in one day. They pressed us right back on to the Volga and at some points they penetrated to within five miles of the town. Our units, badly armed, half equipped, bleeding, ragged, fought rearguard action after rearguard action. They became so desperate that one night a number of the Commanders met to arrange for a retirement across the river the following morning.
‘That evening an order came from Voroshilov: “Not a step back. We counter-attack at dawn.” He had roused the whole town, equipped a worker regiment to reinforce us, and was forming still further battalions all that night in the French factory, which reached us during the course of the morning. After fierce fighting at Beketovka and Vorontonov the Whites were thrown back and retired with heavy losses.
‘ “Food, food,” came the perpetual cry from the divisions. “Why so little sugar issued? We must have a little meat. Not enough boots—we must have boots!” Somehow, Voroshilov found time to see to everything and yet was always present whenever a sector was seriously threatened at the front. Here are two typical incidents. Riding out to the south of Krivaia-Mouzda one day he saw that the so-called “steel division” commanded by Zhlova, which numbered some 5,000 bayonets, 2,000 sabres, and 25 guns, had been badly shaken by a cavalry attack and that the Cossacks had succeeded in turning the division’s left flank. Voroshilov rode straight at the enemy. The men who were fleeing before the Cossacks rallied immediately upon seeing his well-loved figure. The encircling movement was checked and the White cavalry driven off.
‘On another occasion, the Whites were making a separate attack on Goumrak. The day was silvery with a pale sun. Voroshilov had gone himself to the front to see that his orders given during the night had been carried out. He entered a staff coach on a train at Voroponovo station, a few miles outside Tzaritsyn, for a conference. He took his seat in a corner and bent over the map. Next to him sat black-bearded Koulik, the commander of the Army artillery; on the other side Alyabaiev, commander of the armoured trains, his pale young face propped in his hands from weariness. Khoudiakov, commanding the First Communist Division, which was holding a distant sector, came in unshaven and hoarse from shouting; he dragged a wounded foot, wrapped in a sock and soft slipper.
‘Through the window we could see the trains loaded with goods and refugees from the Don, standing peacefully on the sidings; and other trains with the wounded, some of which were from the previous night’s battle. There were not sufficient engines at this time, and the station was hopelessly choked. As the army commander and his assistants were intently studying the situation there came a sudden wild cry from somewhere near the trucks: “Cossacks!”
‘In an instant the half-naked children and women and old men refugees poured shrieking from the wagons, on to the track, under the wheels, out on to the level grey steppes; and the wounded soldiers creeping round the door jambs tumbled out on to the ground, their bandaged stumps bleeding, groaning and gasping. Some of them tried to grip their rifles and load them with their teeth, though all that hopeless heroism was useless among the helpless mass of fleeing refugees.
‘Voroshilov, Koulik, Alyabaiev and the rest leapt out of their coach in a second, and stood staring towards the south. The wounded Khoudiakov was already running down the station platform; one foot in a boot and the other in a sock only as his slipper had fallen off. He was cursing terribly, waving his revolver in the air, and trying to turn out a dozen Red Army men who had hidden beneath a truck.
‘Voroshilov calmly unslung the carbine he always carried. Against the background of the village orchards to the south could be seen a cavalry column of the enemy making for us across a hollow. Perhaps it was only a few squadrons, perhaps it was a whole regiment, which had broken through. None of us knew, but one thing was clear, there was no force at the station which could put up a defence. In about five minutes the enemy would be on us and cut every man down. Someone beside Voroshilov whispered swiftly: “Your horse is good. Get off at once. Escape! Escape!”
‘The speaker had voiced the thoughts of us all. Our one reaction had been—how can we save our irreplaceable and beloved army commander? Voroshilov turned and looked the man who had spoken up and down with a scornful glance. Next second his eye fell on a machine gun just by the station building, evidently mounted for defence but now abandoned in the panic.
‘He rushed at it, tumbled it into a ditch behind the building, trained it on the enemy, pushed a ribbon of bullets in
to it, and suddenly the angry tattoo of the gun echoed hollowly among the abandoned trains. We all rushed to help him, but the squadron of enemy cavalry, deploying as it came out of the hollow, was already plunging about in disorder as the bullets found their mark. The rearward ranks hastily turned about and galloped off into the distance.
‘Voroshilov left some of the Red Army men posted by the gun and, pulling his map out of his pocket, went back to the train. He took up the conversation exactly where it had been broken off, as though those recent moments, when we were all in imminent danger of our lives, had never happened.
‘He used to say: “We must always be ready to fight in an unexpected position. It is better to perish in an attack than to be killed or wounded while falling back,” and he grafted that idea on the army.
‘Even such chance Allies of the Red Army as Doumenko, the Cossack chief, whom Voroshilov restrained from excesses and showing their brigand natures, who recognised neither party nor the decencies of humanity, who stayed with us only from love of fighting; even these, who would not accept orders from the Revolutionary Council, obeyed Voroshilov with respect—but only Voroshilov.
‘He was always at the front among his lads. Some he would teach quietly, others lecture, and others again give a thorough blowing up, but he would always do it without any fuss. To those who had behaved stupidly he would give a sharp, fixed glance, then smile and say something so simple, but at the same time so much to the point, that the culprit would immediately wish that the earth would open and swallow him up.
‘ “Of course,” he would say later, “we are all partisans. We have had no military schooling, and for lack of that we are paying dearly now. One cannot expect too much, but all will be well as long as the men continue to show such splendid courage.”
‘Sometimes those civilian soldiers were under the fiercest pressure from the trained troops of the enemy, and the bands of gold-epauletted officers nearly broke their way into the outskirts of the city. Then the sirens shrieked the alarm. The workers streamed out of the munition factories and made for the hillocks or a rooftop nearby, with the very rifles which they had been repairing still in their hands. The troops of the Czarist Army could not break them.
‘In the middle of the town the three-storied mansion of a rich mustard manufacturer had been taken over as the headquarters of the Tenth Army.
‘The ground floor held the general offices, where typewriters rattled without cessation, and the telephone exchange. There were lines to all the principal units and a direct one to Moscow. Roukhimovich hung on it night and day without a sign of weariness, except for blinking his eyes which were red from want of sleep. Tall Marochkin also worked there; he could constantly be seen with his Kuban fur papenka on the back of his head running between the office and the factories. Koulik, the ex-sergeant artillery commander, too; he was known as “Granddad” in the army on account of his thick black beard.
‘Voroshilov, wearing a felt cloak, a leather jacket girt round with a strap, and a Mauser pistol at his side, would come storming in from one of his daily tours of the battle front.
‘ “Marochkin!” he would shout. “Are we never to have the girths and traces promised us? Koulik, why are the panoramic gun sights short on the last order? Roukhimovich, get on the telephone to Moscow and hurry them up with the heavy shells. You’re all asleep, damn you!’ and he would curse loud and long.
‘The first floor of the great house contained the ballroom, where sessions of the Army Council were held, and other rooms for the Operations Staff; Efim Shchadenko, an ex-tailor, Maguidov, an ex-watchmaker, and Minin, the son of a priest; all key men in the defence of the beleaguered city. Here also was a big room in which the fluctuations of the battle front were marked off on a large wall map with scrupulous care in coloured wools. Not a single non-Party man was ever allowed inside that Holy of Holies of the War. Young Roudinev guarded it with the jealousy of a tiger, until he was killed on one of his trips to the front; then his place was taken by the new chief of staff, dour, thin Matziletzki, whose sunken eyes glinted darkly from beneath the crumpled forage cap he always wore.
‘On the top floor were the living quarters. In a spacious well-lit dining-room five or six of the Revolutionary Council always fed, and any divisional commanders who had come in from the front. The food was simple and good, but during this time of critical operations Voroshilov would never allow any spirits on the table. Outside was a sort of cupboard, where Voroshilov’s faithful follower, Shchadenko, the Political Commissar of the Tenth Army and special emissary of the Central Military Council of the Revolution, dossed down on a tumbled heap of coats and top-boots. Across the landing was Voroshilov’s room, where his young wife, that stylish elegant woman, Caterina Davydovna, the ballet dancer, spent a good part of her time lounging on a wide mahogany bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette, while the cursing, stamping din went on below.
‘When she was bored she would amuse herself dashing up and down the town in a military motor car, wearing a wide-skirted Persian Iamb coat and a rakish Cossack papenka cocked at an angle on her handsome head. She seemed much too much of an aristocrat for the wife of a workers’ leader; they resented the sight of her beautiful clothes and carefully tended person in that war-scarred city, but Voroshilov had never been a hypocrite. He had never held that because the workers led drab and ugly lives they should always remain drab and ugly. He wanted plenty of culture and beautiful things for all. For many years he had given eleven out of every twelve waking hours to his work for the Revolution, but he reserved his right in the twelfth hours to enjoy himself as he saw fit; and he was a great enjoyer. No man living could accuse him of ever having sold the cause for special benefits. Clim Voroshilov was above reproach and even the revolutionaries, who believed that one could not be a true proletarian without dirty hands, suffered the presence of the beautiful Caterina Davydovna without a murmur.’
All through the summer, Lenin and the Council of People’s Commissars, in Moscow, had been tensely watching Tzaritsyn. They had no troops with which to reinforce it, but among them was one man who was worth an army corps; a round-shouldered, unimpressive-looking individual with a long drooping moustache and a face pitted by smallpox—’Koba’ Stalin.
In the autumn, Lenin asked him to go to the ‘Red Verdun,’ as the Bolsheviks so proudly called Tzaritsyn, and by his presence support Voroshilov. Before his departure, Stalin said in a tired voice to the council: ‘For a long time now I seem to have become a specialist in cleaning up the Augean stables of the Ministry of War.’
That was a sly dig at his irreconcilable enemy, the Jew journalist Trotsky, who was President of the Revolutionary Army Soviet and War Lord of the new Republic. Every general was under him, and all supplies and munitions and army reserves were in his hands. His was supposed to be the final word in all army matters, but whenever his arrangements broke down or a Bolshevik army looked like being smashed-—in fact, at every danger point in turn—Stalin, the incorruptible, would suddenly make his appearance, secure the dismissal of incompetent leaders, weed out the untrustworthy element among the officers, and support the most dependable through his immense power of personal touch with Lenin, and his privilege of going over Trotsky’s head.
Trotsky, as we know, was also now appearing in person on the most important fronts at critical times, and the methods of both these men for strengthening the resistance of the Red troops were the same—merciless cruelty and wholesale executions. Trotsky would also address meetings of the worker masses before the shootings, making speeches of hysterical denunciation against the men who were to be shot, and lengthy exhortations to fighting troops which were meant to go down to history. Stalin, on the other hand, could neither speak nor write well, but he had the nose of a ferret for disaffection and carried out his work in ruthless, sinister silence. The two men hated each other; Trotsky because of Stalin’s interference, and Stalin because he considered Trotsky an incompetent windbag.
Before Stalin left the Kremlin,
Lenin expressed anxiety regarding a revolt of the Mensheviks in the south, but Stalin reassured him in his melancholy voice:
‘You can rest quiet about those hysterical creatures, Vladimir Ilyitch. I’ll have no scruples whatever. Enemies must be treated as enemies,’ and pressing Lenin’s hand he departed.
In dusty Tzaritsyn on the Volga, the dried leaves were fluttering down from the trees and the wind was whistling through the streets with the penetrating cold of the October steppes when Stalin arrived. He knew Voroshilov well, having worked with him as an underground revolutionary at Baku in 1911. They worked together again with complete trust and confidence in each other.
Voroshilov remained the actual army commander responsible for the defence of the town. Stalin was the political agent of the Kremlin; there to stamp out treachery and strengthen Voroshilov’s hand by overawing the civil population into a state of terror which should ensure their not striking the army in the back. They were in communication with Moscow by direct wire and it was in use every hour. It was rumoured that the pair never slept at night. Voroshilov planned and organised. Stalin controlled the personnel and broke traitors without mercy.
With them, in the mustard manufacturer’s mansion, was Cherviakov, the head of the Tzaritsyn Cheka and his executioners. Those arrested on Stalin’s orders were taken to the Volga where, in the middle of the silvery water, lay a long black barge. It was there, almost nightly, that executions took place and the bodies were flung overboard into the river. Stalin was doing his work of clearing out the Augean stable and his name was only mentioned with bated breath. The Red Terror gripped the town.
The siege dragged on. Voroshilov was desperately short of men. Trotsky promised him reinforcements and sent the whole Volskia Division down the Volga. The officers were reactionaries and untrustworthy and allowed the men to desert. Only one brigade reached Tzaritsyn and that did not withstand the first enemy attack. Part of it was taken prisoner and part of it ran away; Voroshilov had to rush up his fighting partisans to fill the gap. These worker-soldiers became so devoted to him that they began to call themselves. ‘Voroshilov Men’, but he refused to allow it, saying that they must regard themselves as ‘Lenin Men’ only.
Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts Page 26
