The next day, on August 1, 1919, Mironov wrote that his slogans were: “Down with the Autocracy of the Commissars and the Bureaucratism of the Communists!”; “Long Live the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, and Cossack Deputies, Elected on the Basis of Free Socialist Agitation!”; and “Down with the Ruthless Extermination of the Cossacks Proclaimed by the Jew Trotsky-Bronstein!” Then a week later, on August 8, he applied to join the Communist Party, citing his belief in Soviet power and the abolition of private property, as well as his desire to dispel “the atmosphere of slander that makes it difficult to breathe.” A few days later, after his application had been rejected by his commissars, Mironov wrote the program of a new party he called the “Party of Workers, Peasants, and Cossacks”:
Listen, all you Russian workers, rouse your conscience and let it tell you if you should continue to support the bloody Communists, who, having finished with the Cossacks, will move on to the middle peasants, because they consider real human beings merely a means to fulfill their program. For them there are no individuals, just class, and no human beings, just humanity, so go ahead and build your commune at the cost of loving your neighbor for the sake of loving the stranger. In short, exterminate present-day human beings for the happiness of the humanity of the future….
If this is socialism, then anyone who still has some conscience should turn away from this horror.
Bent on provoking the Cossacks into counterrevolution by means of arbitrary violence and animated by sheer malice rather than compassion for their ignorance, the Communist Party, or rather, some of its leaders, have set themselves the goal of exterminating the Cossacks.
Having set two categories of people against each other, they are laughing at the Russian, the “goy” who is choking on his own blood.
Is this not why the Russian village has come to hate the Communists?
Is this not why there are so many deserters?
Free speech has died all over Russia.29
On August 15, one of Mironov’s commissars wrote to the Central Committee and to the Southern Front that “the political backwardness and benighted consciousness” of the Cossacks, along with their privileged position before the Revolution, “makes it difficult for them to understand and desire progress toward a better world, toward communism.” As a consequence, “Mironov’s unrestrained agitation is making a big impression on the minds of the Cossacks.” The only solution was to stop the formation of the Don Cossack Corps and “disperse the Cossacks among the other divisions.”30
On the same day, Mironov wrote a personal letter to two friends fighting in the Red Army:
I don’t know what to do. My soul cannot reconcile itself to the thought that if we reconquer the Don area, we will see them begin to exterminate our poor, ignorant Cossacks, who will be forced by the cruelty and ferocity of the new Vandals and new Oprichniks to burn their farms and villages. Will our hearts not break at the sight of this infernal vision? Will we ignore the curses of the tormented people?
On the other side are Denikin and the counterrevolution, who stand for the slavery of the working people, against which we have been fighting for a year and must go on fighting until their final destruction.
And so here I am, like the ancient Russian folk warrior, at the crossroads; if you ride to the left, you will lose your horse; if you ride to the right, you will lose your head; if you go straight, you will lose both your horse and your head.31
Waiting for her ancient Russian warrior, praying for him, and bearing his child was a twenty-one year-old village schoolteacher and Red Army nurse, Nadezhda Suetenkova. Her love poems dedicated to Mironov were modeled on folk poetry:
I love you like the sun
Looking down brightly
Through an open window.
I love you like the wind
Rustling the steppe grass,
Blowing softly on our faces.
I love you like the waves
Gurgling and frolicking
As they wash our feet.
I love you the way we love
Our brightest hopes:
More than happiness, more than life,
Brighter than the flowers in the forest.32
She wrote to him about their love; about his other terrible choice—between her and his wife of many years; and about his sacred mission as a folk warrior and a prophet. “Believe firmly in your destiny and wait patiently for your hour. It will strike.”33
Your path may be arduous,
But for you it is joyous:
You are weary, and your breast is heavy,
But isn’t human happiness the highest of rewards?34
On August 19, a special envoy of the Cossack Department of the Central Executive Committee sent a report to Moscow:
Because Mironov has absorbed all the thoughts, moods, and wishes of the popular and peasant masses at this time in the development of the revolution, one cannot help but see in his demands and wishes that Mironov is the anxious, restless soul of the enormous mass of middle peasants and Cossacks, and that, as a man devoted to the social revolution, he is capable, at this last dangerous moment, of inspiring the hesitating mass of peasants and Cossacks to wage a ruthless struggle against counterrevolution….
On the other hand, … Comrade Mironov gives the impression of a hunted and desperate man. Fearing arrest or assassination, Mironov has started using bodyguards. The commissars are afraid of Mironov. The Red Army men are agitated and ready to defend Mironov with firepower against any attempt on his life by the commissars.35
Two days later, on August 21, one of Mironov’s officers, Konstantin Bulatkin, wrote to his former commander, Semen Budennyi: “Comrade Mironov … is not only a great strategist and military commander, but also a great prophet. He is under political suspicion because he loves the truth…. If he were allowed to form his corps, I swear on my life that as soon as he appeared at the front, the morale would immediately improve and the advantage would be ours.” The next day, Mironov ordered his men to get ready. “Remember, you are not alone. The true soul of the tormented people is with you. If you die on the battlefield, you will die for the truth. Jesus Christ has taught us to love the truth and to be ready to die for it.”36
The following afternoon, Mironov received a call from a member of the Party Central Committee and the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, Ivar Smilga. Smilga was twenty-six years old and the highest-ranking commissar in the Red Army. He was born and grew up in Latvia and joined the Party at the age of fourteen, after his father was executed by a government tribunal. He spent five years studying philosophy and political economy in Siberian exile, before presiding over the October military insurrection in Finland.37 The call he made to Mironov was transcribed:
SMILGA. I categorically insist that you not complicate the situation of our armies with your unauthorized actions….
MIRONOV. If you, Comrade Smilga, think as a true statesman, I also categorically insist that you not prevent my going to the front. Only there will I feel fulfilled. I ask you not to stir up tensions. I have made up my mind, seeing the agony of the revolution, and only death will stop me. I want to give my life to save the revolution, which needs my life right now. I repeat, if I am denied, I will lose all faith in the people in power.
SMILGA. Comrade Mironov, nobody is trying to deny you … [Mironov interrupts]
MIRONOV. But I will not lose my faith in the idea of the popular masses. I never wanted these things that are happening around me, and the atrocities perpetrated against the Urals Cossacks by the Communist Ermolenko and against the Don Cossacks, by the Don Bureau, have made a deep impression on me….
SMILGA. Moscow is calling about your action. In the name of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, I order you not to send any units to the front without permission.
MIRONOV. I am leaving by myself. I cannot live here because I am being badly insulted.
SMILGA. Come to Penza. The Commander of the Special Group Shorin is here, as is T
rifonov. We’ll agree on a common plan. Don’t create confusion.
MIRONOV. I cannot go to Penza because I cannot be sure of my safety. I could bring my division.
SMILGA. Nothing threatens your safety. I state this officially.
MIRONOV. I ask for permission to bring 150 men as my escort.
SMILGA. Fine. Take 150 men and come right away.
MIRONOV. I ask that you inform the 23rd Division that I am being summoned to Penza, so they know what has happened to me. I entrust myself to you, Comrade Smilga, a man I have profound confidence in.
SMILGA. Set out immediately. I am quite certain that we will sort out all the misunderstandings. I have to go answer a call. Good bye.38
Mironov seemed willing to set out immediately, but then changed his mind because someone, he would later claim, had warned him that he was going to be arrested. On August 24, he left for the front at the head of several thousand men, half of them unarmed. “All the so-called deserters are joining me,” he wrote, “and will come together as a terrible force before which Denikin will tremble and the Communists will bow their heads.” Smilga proclaimed him a traitor and called him “Denikin’s lackey.” Trotsky called on all “honest citizens” to “shoot him like a rabid dog” and accused him of spreading “a vile rumor that the Soviet government supposedly wants to exterminate the Cossacks.” After three weeks of evasive maneuvers, minor skirmishes, and mass defections, Mironov and about five hundred of his men were surrounded by Red Army troops. On September 13, Konstantin Bulatkin wrote to the Red Cavalry Commander Budennyi that Mironov was “a true leader of the revolution” and that “the long-suffering, tormented soul of the people was with him.” The next day, Mironov, Bulatkin, and their men surrendered to Budennyi without a fight. Budennyi ordered Mironov’s execution, but Trotsky decided to stage a show trial for “educational” purposes. In a special Pravda article, he agreed with Bulatkin’s characterization but revealed its true sociological meaning. There were the Cossack elites hostile to the proletariat, the Cossack proletarians loyal to the Soviet government, and “the broad intermediary stratum of middle Cossacks, politically still very backward.” Mironov embodied “the confusions and waverings of the backward middle Cossack.”39
One of the first things Mironov did after his capture was to ask the Extraordinary Investigative Commission to legalize his common-law marriage with Nadezhda Suetenkova, “in order to give a name to the child that she is expecting.” In his prison diary, he wrote: “My spirit is floating in space, free; Nadezhda’s free spirit is next to it.”40
One of the first things that Konstantin Bulatkin did after his arrest was to deny his prophet. In a letter to Lenin and Trotsky, he wrote: “Great Leaders of the proletariat and Apostles of the world Commune, I am not a Mironovite, I am the knee over which Mironov tripped before falling, as he himself will confirm. Read my confession that I have submitted to the head of the Political Department of the Ninth Army, Comrade Poluian. For two years now, I have been an armed servant of Yours and of the Commune. I am boundlessly devoted to it and, in its name, beg You not to allow a fateful mistake that would doom my life.” At the trial, according to a newspaper report, Bulatkin “tried to put all the blame on Mironov, whom he had allegedly followed with the only purpose of killing the traitor.” According to the same report, Mironov “conducted himself calmly and with dignity.”41
At Trotsky’s request, the role of public prosecutor was given to Smilga, and that of presiding judge, to Smilga’s brother-in-law, the Kuban Cossack, Dmitry Poluian. Mironov pleaded guilty and cited his state of mind as the reason for his words and actions:
MIRONOV. When, after the October coup, I took the side of the Soviet government, Krasnov called me a traitor, while I, in the Don Area, was tirelessly explaining to the Cossacks the nature of the new order as an order in which all the working people would participate. Listening to me, the Cossacks agreed and eagerly joined the Soviet side. So when I saw all the crimes and atrocities being perpetrated by the Communists in the Don Area, I felt like a traitor to all those people I had talked into serving the Soviet government. I believed that Trotsky was the initiator of such a policy toward the Don Area, and I felt bad that the center viewed the Cossack question in that light, but, when I called Trotsky “Bronstein,” I did not mean to stir up national hatred.
PRESIDING JUDGE. Did you attribute that policy to Trotsky as a political leader or a Jew?
MIRONOV. As a Jew, and I admit my mistake.
The defense of most of the accused was that they had followed Mironov. The defense of Mironov was that he had been blinded by emotion. “Of course I acted irrationally, but do understand my state of mind and the atmosphere that I was surrounded by for seven months. I feel bad that I did not fulfill your order and left for the front, but believe me that I had no ill intentions and that everything I did, I did in order to strengthen the Soviet order.”42
In his speech, Smilga claimed that Mironov was a rooster, not an eagle or a folk hero. Mature leaders understood “the objectives of their class”; Mironov, on the other hand, was a “political runt” who had produced the “most confused and nebulous ideology” in the history of the revolution. Mironov’s vision of the future state was a “semi-Tolstoyan, semisentimental melodrama” because he did not understand that “the path to socialism has to pass through a dictatorship of the oppressed over the oppressor.” The meaning and essence of the revolution was “the struggle between two extremes: the working class, Communist Party, and Soviet Government on the one hand, and the bourgeois counterrevolution, on the other.” Owing to the “inexorable iron logic of things,” all attempts at appeasement and conciliation led to Denikin and counterrevolution. There was only one truth, one true evil, and one force that “would come out victorious from this terrible, colossal struggle.” As for the Communist atrocities, they had, indeed, taken place, but most of those responsible had already been executed and, according to Communist teachings, atrocities as such meant nothing at all:
Recall the French Revolution and the struggle between the Vendée and the National Convention. You will see that the troops of the Convention committed terrible acts—terrible from the point of view of a particular human being. But the acts committed by the troops of the Convention can only be understood in the light of class analysis. They are justified by history because they were committed by a progressive class that was sweeping its path clean of the survivals of feudalism and popular ignorance. The same thing is happening today. You, too, should have understood this. You are talking about Marx, but I dare say you have not read a single line by him. The quotations you use do you no credit. You should be more humble about quoting authors whose work you are not familiar with.
Smilga concluded by saying that “the litter of petit bourgeois ideology must be swept off the road of the Revolution” and that Mironov and his followers must be punished “without pity.” He asked for the death sentence for Mironov and his officers and for the execution of every tenth soldier from Mironov’s personal escort and every twentieth soldier from the rest of the rebel army.43
In his final statement, Mironov accepted the “student”-worker relationship suggested by Smilga and admitted to being “an experienced fighter, but a politically backward person incapable of understanding all the subtleties of politics and Party questions.” He was, it is true, unfamiliar with the works of Marx, but in his prison cell he had read a book about “the social movement in France” and had found a scholarly name for people like him:
People who lack scientific knowledge but seek justice with their heart and their emotions are called “empirical socialists.” That is exactly what I am, that is my undoing, and I ask the revolutionary tribunal to take that into account…. I am not even talking about how I grew up and what my childhood years were like. Wearing a uniform that was not my own and eating dinner from a kitchen that was not my own made me understand the misery and burden of poverty. You can see for yourselves that I spent my whole life trying to help the peo
ple, to ease their suffering. I came from the people myself and I understand their needs very well and have never abandoned the people from the first days of the revolution until now.
Mironov’s last words were: “My life is a cross, and if I must carry it to Calvary, I will, and, whether you believe it or not, I will shout ‘Long live the social revolution, long live the Commune and Communism!’”44
The court, in the person of Poluian and his two assistants, sentenced Mironov and ten of his officers to be shot within twenty-four hours. Mironov asked the court to allow the condemned to spend their last night together. He also asked for some paper and ink. Both wishes were granted.45
Ivar Smilga
Back in prison, Mironov wrote a letter to his former wife, asking her to forgive him and to bless their children “for the hard life to come,” and a long letter to Nadezhda, telling her that he had never betrayed the revolution; that he believed in the Commune and the Communists (“not the kind that spread bile through the body of the people, but the kind that are like a spring in the desert, for which the weary soul of the people is reaching out”); that she had made him “the happiest of mortals—even at the moment of death”; and that his only regret was that he would not get to see their child.46
In his diary, he wrote:
At our request, they have brought us to a common cell, the same one in which we were interrogated. Those sentenced to death are gathered together. The psychology of the condemned has been described in Andreev’s story about seven hanged men. But we have some stronger men among us….
Everyone has been trying to find something else to think about, to banish the thought of our imminent and, from the point of view of the crowd, inglorious end. We have sung songs, one man has danced, etc., but it is the walls that have taken most of the punishment: it is our attempt to justify ourselves in the eyes of the inevitable.
“I have just finished talking to God …”—“Man, prepare yourself for death: in a few hours, you must die. Cleanse your soul and your conscience, and come to Me, so I can ask you—did you fulfill the mission that I gave you when I sent you down to earth?” 7/X-1919 (eight hours before the execution), F. Mironov.
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