by Victor Serge
Finland and Estonia
The Finnish frontier is 25 miles from Petrograd, the Estonian frontier 75. In Finland the murderous Mannerheim holds power, after having barbarically crushed the Communist rising in 1918. His White Guards number 120,000 battle-hardened and extremely well-armed men. The Germans, formerly called on for assistance by the President of the Republic, Svinhufvud, left behind them when they departed stocks of arms and ammunition. French officers from the Etiévant mission are organizing their general staff. But above all Finland is concerned to ensure its national independence. It does not forget that Kerensky appointed a governor-general over it, and notes that the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, recognized its right of self-determination. A decisively clever move, as we shall see. Class interest, hatred of the “Reds,” drives White Finland to co-operate with the capture of Petrograd. But after that? What power will be established in the Russian capital? Monarchists and gentlemen like Kartachev and Kuzmin-Karavaev, Yudenich’s advisors, refuse, like Admiral Kolchak, to recognize Finland’s independence, although it is recognized by France, Italy, Britain and the United States. The “democratic” Paris conference makes the same refusal. “The future pan-Russian Constituent Assembly will alone be empowered to grant independence to states bordering on Russia”; such is the polite, diplomatic formulation of an unyielding refusal. Shameless looters, the Finnish bourgeoisie have confiscated, contrary to all legal rights, Russian ships in their ports, Russian property (even that of the Red Cross) on their territory. That is what they mean by respect for private property. Any bourgeois government established in Petrograd would call them to account. Isn’t it better for them to let Russia be consumed by internal struggles and then take advantage of its weakness? This policy is considered to be the wise one, and is challenged only by those industrialists and merchants who used to live on trade with Russia, to which they sold paper and from which they bought grain which America is now selling them at high prices. So Finland is perplexed. It also has good reason to fear its own working class, defeated but still formidable. It hesitates to engage in all-out war against the Bolsheviks, but in Karelia it gives free rein to its adventurers, its imperialist students, and the gangs of Elven Greye which are regularly beaten by the Communists.
The situation is the same in Estonia. Here the republic owes its existence to Britain—and it almost had to pay dear for it. “Without vigorous interventions by Clemenceau, the British would have grabbed the islands of Oesel [Saare Maa] and Dagoe [Hiiu Maa],” writes Kirdetsov. The Social Democrats are influential in the coalition cabinet. One of them, Mr. Rey, is chair of the constituent assembly. Estonia, speaking in the voice of statesmen it has just discovered—Tennison, Piip, Poska—is worried by the reluctance of the Paris Conference and of Yudenich’s advisors. It is asking for guarantees of peace and autonomy after the fall of the Bolsheviks. Nobody among the White émigrés would dream of granting them. The Populist Socialist Chaikovsky one day said brutally to the Estonian plenipotentiaries: “Russia needs Tallinn.”
The bourgeois reactionary bloc, cobbled together against Bolshevism, is therefore undermined by irresoluble internal contradictions. The Estonian and Finnish petty-bourgeoisies cannot renounce national independence, and the large and small bourgeoisie in Russia cannot renounce their imperialist ambitions. The conflict between British and French influence in the Baltic, and the clumsy inflexibility of the Russian reactionary leaders completely compromise the cohesion of the Whites.
The British General Marshl
These contradictions are too deep to be resolved by negotiations. The Reds, on the other hand, are hard at work, and the situation at the front is becoming desperate.
Then the British General Marsh intervenes.
Until this moment Yudenich has exercised unchallenged power. At the request of the political conference at Helsinki, France is putting pressure on Finland, to which she is sending tanks and airplanes. From New York, Mr. Hoover is supplying the Russian army of the northwest on behalf of the future provisional government while reserving to himself the control of the distribution of supplies. But everything is in danger. So they have to act quickly—capture Petrograd—for the Estonians are not concealing the fact that they will make peace with the Bolsheviks (who are offering it to them) rather than fight another winter campaign.
General Marsh has decided to resolve all difficulties, just as he would do in the Sudan or in Persia, but according to good old democratic traditions. On August 10, he convenes at his headquarters—one hour in advance!—some leading Russian figures from Tallinn and gives them forty minutes to form a democratic government. These gentlemen accept. The north western government is formed. Mr. Lianozov, a large industrialist and oilman, is the president; around him are intellectuals and socialists (two Mensheviks, two Social Revolutionaries). Yudenich becomes Minister of War.
To this government, the British military man dictates his program: democratic government (of course!), a solution to the land question by the Constituent Assembly, social legislation and the eight-hour day (!), democratic freedoms, recognition of Estonian independence. Moreover, the ministers write to the soldiers in the army:
“We are not a government of capitalists and landlords. We represent all classes in society. We shall not tolerate a return to the old order”; which proves that Communist propaganda is having an effect, even on this side of the front. Kolchak and the Paris conference will not be happy. But General Marsh and the Estonians are satisfied, and for the time being that is the most important thing.
Meanwhile at Pskov, the British Captain Peary-Gordon is organizing a democratic conference. The Russians must be emancipated!
A democratic government
Nothing is more distressing than the sight of the northwestern government. It has no territory, or virtually none: the scrap of Russia occupied by the White army is a military zone governed by Commander-in-Chief Yudenich. He doesn’t have a halfpenny; he cannot do anything at all. His ministers have to hand out their appeals to the soldiers themselves, and they are happy to be tolerated despite their liberal language.
The story of his finances is altogether woeful. Kolchak granted to Yudenich—before the formation of the government which he did not want to know about—a sum of 900,000 pounds sterling, deposited in a bank in London. Yudenich hastened to issue banknotes worth 500 million roubles. The government let it be understood that these notes were guaranteed, not by funds deposited in Britain, but by the British government itself, and got a sharp repudiation from the Foreign Office. Then it lived on its notes, while Yudenich spent the money—so imprudently that when the collapse came, he had only 250,000 pounds left in the till (and the arms, ammunition and supplies were provided by the Allies on credit, to be paid for by the future Russian regime). The Yudenich notes were sold, at the end of the adventure, for the price of waste paper, to an Estonian papermaker.
And what was happening in the territory of the northwestern government? We can hear it described by Mr. Kirdetsov, who was in the confidence of the ministers in Tallinn. In a country liberated from the Bolsheviks, they applied the laws in force in wartime in occupied enemy countries. “It’s an orgy and it is virtually total ruin. Everywhere, it is the arbitrary rule of bandit leaders.” The army was selling American flour at high prices to the starving population—flour which did not belong to it, since it had been bought by a council of state. At Pskov, Bulak-Balakhovich was forging Kerensky government banknotes. At Yamburg, Pskov and Gdov, they were executing in the streets people who were suspect of sympathizing with the Reds; these were dying in their hundreds, tortured and then hanged. In the countryside, they were requisitioning grain, potatoes, cattle.
A national army
How about the army? It was destitute, wretched, looted by quartermasters who were all of them thieves and imbeciles. Clothing, supplied in abundance by the Allies, was going to the dodgers behind the lines; at the front, half the men were in rags. For 18,000 fighting men, they had 109,000 pairs of boots, six times mo
re than were needed. But half the soldiers didn’t have any. At the rear, the food stores were full of tins, but the soldiers went hungry. A crook, or the willing tool of crooks, General Ianov, head of the supplies department, demanded food for 200,000 men, when he had a total of 70,000 mouths to feed. For as against 18,000 ill-fed fighting men, there were more than 50,000 “conscripts” or idlers eating well at the rear. Transport was bad. This was due to negligence: they had bought motor lorries, but no gasoline! Then they bought gasoline at Copenhagen, too late and at ruinous prices. Likewise they bought airplanes that were paid for, but never delivered. All these abuses were subsequently discovered by a commission inspecting the accounts, which, when the army’s debts had been paid, had only five million Estonian marks left in its possession.
This small army of the robbed and this large army of robbers had fifty-three generals on active service, among them the former ataman Krasnov, Glazenap and the typical figure of Vladimirov (his real name was Novogrebelsky). The latter, a very influential figure, was the head of the political police and of counter-espionage. He sometimes published forged manifestos in the name of the revolutionary council of the Red Army. He drew up in advance a list of undesirable elements who would not be allowed to enter Petrograd, and he advised Yudenich to include the entire government on it. He formed teams of reliable men, with motor cars, who would be responsible, as soon as the Whites entered Petrograd, for the small but necessary bloodletting.
Victory and collapse
The offensive began on September 28 with an attack using tanks, and was crowned with victory (the British had sent six tanks). On 6 October, after an uninterrupted victorious march, the Whites arrived at the gates of Petrograd, at Gatchina. Then they took Tsarkoe Selo. Yudenich, confident of victory, ordered supplies to be sent urgently to Petrograd.
Already a horde of speculators and predators were settling on the outskirts of Petrograd. The representative of a British consortium of banks had arrived to set up an Anglo-Russian issuing bank in the capital. Buildings on the Nevsky Prospect were being bought and sold. Business was booming. The Estonian mark was falling and the Yudenich currency was rising.
At this very time Denikin was arriving at Orel, threatening the arsenals of Tula, the last bulwark of Moscow. Anxious to get its share in the impending rush for spoils, Finland was about to join in. The Social Democrat Horn, member of the northwestern government, was there whipping up public opinion. Finland asked only for the reimbursement, guaranteed by the Allies, of its campaign expenses, namely fifty million francs: business is business.
Then suddenly, from one day to the next, on October 20, after the successes of the previous day, there was a collapse.
“The Bolsheviks revealed the diabolical cunning whereby they get themselves out of the most difficult situations by intensive propaganda and vigorous military actions; while our army was never ready. Contrary to Yudenich’s predictions, there were never any disturbances or strikes in Petrograd, because neither the workers nor the supporters of liberal democracy in the city were really convinced that the northwestern government would bring them Freedom, Bread and People’s Power. On the other hand, Trotsky immediately succeeded in bringing together reserves from all over the place, and formed enthusiastic battalions of worker Communists. According to the evidence of Yudenich’s general staff, these battalions, the sailors and the trainee officers, fought like lions.” Kirdetsov, from whom I have quoted these lines, also speaks of “Trotsky’s consuming energy.” On October 20, the Reds went on to the offensive at Pulkovo, a few miles from Petrograd.
“After our first successes,” Kirdetsov goes on to say, “we had the feeling that victory would now be easy. There was general rejoicing. At the first setbacks, on the other hand, the command was completely demoralized.” Co-ordination was deplorably inadequate. Yudenich did not know where his different units were to be found. Defeat caught him unawares.
The Reds began a double movement turning to the north through Krasnaia Korba and to the south through Dno. On November 8 Gdov was taken. On November 14 Yamburg fell. Yudenich left the front, handing command over to Glazenap. The Estonians, who definitely wanted peace with the soviets, disarmed what remained of the White army, which was broken down, starving and demoralized: 14,000 victims of typhus filled the isolation hospitals and the cemeteries. The healthy ones were dumped in concentration camps, without shelter, in twenty degrees of frost, or sent to work in the forest, with conditions like slave plantations.
The causes
Why this collapse? Our authors complain of the inactivity of the British fleet and the unexpected activity of the Red fleet; of Yudenich’s improvidence; of the attack by the Russo-German monarchist mercenary Bermont-Avalov on Riga, an attack which obliged the Estonians to turn against the new enemy; of the rivalries between White generals. They refer to the case of General Vietrenko who, when given the job of cutting the railway line between Petrograd and Moscow at Tosno, preferred to march on Petrograd in order that nobody else should get there before him; he thus left the road clear for the reinforcements called for by Trotsky.
Doubtless all these factors have some importance. But we know enough to recognize other immediate causes which were much more important, as well as other deep underlying causes which led to the collapse of the Whites.
It was mad to believe in the victory of a small army representing a caste (a military caste) led by the men of the old order who were not even trusted by the bourgeoisie, led by an aged imbecile with long military experience, invested with unlimited authority; an army which brought back the gallows of the old order and which reinstated its detested police force, its senile bureaucracy and its customs made intolerable by the distortions and exaggerations of wartime; an army which was facing a great working-class city where thousands and thousands of poor people were conscious of fighting simultaneously for their lives and for their ideals.
Yudenich’s army had behind it nothing but Estonia, tiny and hostile. Petrograd had behind it the vast expanse of Red Russia. There were adventurers, mercenaries, a caste, a grey herd of soldiers driven to the slaughter. On the other side was a conscious revolutionary class. On one side was the old Yudenich, the hangman Rodzianko, mediocrities like Glazenap and Vladimirov; on the other the likes of Trotsky and Avrov who embodied youth and energy, the Communists.
Finally, through its internal divisions, through the inner rivalries inherent in capitalist society, through all the faults of the old regime with which it was weighed down, the Russian counter-revolution, at the gates of Petrograd as elsewhere, was inevitably condemned in advance. Moreover, it was facing the greatest material and moral force of the century: the interests and the consciousness of a class to which the future belongs. The British fleet did not intervene because British working class opinion would not have tolerated its intervention.
All this is rich in lessons. We draw attention to the total powerlessness of bourgeois democracy within the counter-revolution, as well as the participation and role of “Socialists” in the northwestern government.
The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution
Preface
The following study, which is excessively brief and schematic, was written in great haste in 1920, after long and vigorous arguments with militants who had come to Russia for the Second Congress of the Communist International, in particular with comrades Lepetit, Vergeat, Pestaña and Armando Borghi. I’m sure that all these comrades were more or less in agreement with me on the whole set of ideas presented below. Since then, other less well-known French and Spanish libertarians who have visited Red Russia have had the opportunity of expressing their approval. So much so that it now seems to me to be a general principle: foreign anarchists who come to Russia, especially those who are active in the labor movement in their native country, immediately endorse the principle of the revolutionary dictatorship and accept its implications.
As far as the Russian anarchists are concerned, several well-known militants have to
my knowledge clearly endorsed this principle: in particular the anarcho-syndicalist comrade Grossman-Roshchin, of Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor); Gordin, an anarchist-universalist; and Perkus, a Russian anarchist who was repatriated from America. Obviously there is no need to mention here those who actually joined the Russian Communist Party.
Since these pages were written, the awesome experience of the first social revolution of modern times has continued to develop with relentless logic. Today we are the witnesses of the tragedy of a social revolution being contained within national frontiers, as a result of the passivity of the peoples of Europe faced with intelligent and well-armed reactionary forces. It is thus stifled and reduced to playing for time with the enemy within and without. We have seen many mistakes made, many errors revealed, and from the libertarian point of view many precious truths have been confirmed. It seems to me that libertarian thought emerges further strengthened from this experience of an additional year—on condition that having revised traditional ideas, we are willing to look at things from the standpoint of historical realism,1 to take account of the needs of the masses and of the major factors of international economic and psychological life, the course of which depends much more on actual events than on our dreams and aspirations.
