Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  In the east, the White forces were commanded by forty-three-year-old Alexander Kolchak, the youngest rear-admiral in the Tsarist navy and an Arctic explorer often called ‘Kolchak of the Pole’. Two metres tall, clean-shaven, he was an ill-humoured martinet – ‘a man of extraordinary valour and patriotism, but like a big, sick child…a slave to the idea of serving Russia but irritable and impetuous. He lives in a world of mirages and borrowed ideas.’ He styled himself, a shade optimistically, Supreme Ruler of Eastern Russia and Siberia, but one of the observers at Kolchak’s ‘capital’, Omsk, reported that ‘in the army there was disintegration, at the headquarters illiteracy and hare-brained schemes, in the government moral decay, panic and graft’. In Omsk, Kolchak lived with his twenty-something mistress while his wife was in exile in Paris with their son. According to his chief aide-de-camp Kolchak’s favourite reading, which he kept by his side, was the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There was desertion from both armies on a massive scale – more than a million in 1918 alone from the Red Army, and four million overall during the war. But about 80 per cent of Kolchak’s conscripted peasant army deserted, by far the highest proportion of any unit in the conflict from either side. Eventually, in January 1920, he was betrayed by his own side, who handed him over to the Bolsheviks to face a firing squad.

  The 3rd Army in the north-west was the smallest, led by Nikolai Yudenich, fifty-five, son of a minor court official. During most of the First World War he was commander of Russian forces against the Turks – ‘a man of 157 centimetres, weighing 127 kilos, his body was shaped like a coupe, with unnoticeable legs’. He was probably the most liberal politically of the three and accepted Russia should be a free democratic republic. Neither of the other two had any higher opinion of democracy than Lenin did: Denikin described the Constituent Assembly as ‘something from the time when Russia was insane’.

  None of them recognised independence claims by any of the nations within the empire; all agreed that Russia was ‘whole and indivisible’. Kolchak was pressed by Britain, the US and France to pledge independence to Finland and Estonia. He refused. ‘History would never forgive me if I give up what Peter the Great won.’ The Baltic states and Finland stayed neutral in the Civil War – a great help to the Bolsheviks.3

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  The Western Allies bankrolled the Whites with large amounts of money and arms, and lied about it. They supported the Whites’ side, but so half-heartedly that their intervention made no difference. They had no clear policy on how to deal with Lenin’s new regime, and no conviction.

  They felt entirely justified in doing something. The Brest-Litovsk peace had broken treaties with Britain and France. The Germans had moved regiments that were based in the east to the Western Front. The Bolsheviks had seized foreign assets, including dozens of companies owned by American companies, from Singer Sewing Machines to mining interests. They had confiscated individual Westerners’ property. They were refusing to pay loans taken out by the Tsarist government. They were threatening to spread revolution everywhere, with campaigns of propaganda and subversion. They were seen as dangerous, but the Allies could not agree on what to do about them.

  Within weeks of the October Revolution the British had decided they would help the Whites. ‘It is of particular importance to us, even if we cannot ultimately prevent it, to delay as long as possible, the establishment of…[Bolshevik] authority,’ Lord Milner told Prime Minister Lloyd George. ‘Civil War [in Russia] or even the continuance of chaos and disorder would be an advantage for us.’

  The British had a few thousand troops in the ports of Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia, who had been there since the start of the First World War to supply the Russian military and to help as advisers. After the Bolshevik coup they remained for most of the Civil War, occasionally skirmishing with the Red Army, but now supplying Kolchak and Denikin. Officially they claimed they were neutral and denied they were helping the Whites, but they were fooling nobody, certainly not Lenin. The British were by far the biggest financial backers of the Whites. Altogether they gave them more than £100 million, a vast sum at the time, and sent several spies to help mount plots to undermine the Bolshevik government.

  The Americans lied too, principally to hide the truth from their own people, rather than to deceive the Russians. The US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was a passionate anti-Communist, a Cold Warrior before the term was invented. ‘Bolshevism is the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived,’ he said. ‘It finds its adherents among the criminal, the depraved and the mentally unfit.’ He wanted to help the Whites, but secretly and semi-legally. American law forbade the government granting loans to independent armies or mercenaries. Lansing wrote to Walter Page, American Ambassador to Britain, on 13 December 1917 with a scheme to get around the US Congress: ‘The only practicable course seems to be for the British and French governments to finance the…enterprise, in so far as it is necessary, and for this Government to loan them the money to do so. In that way we could comply with the statute and at the same time strengthen armed opposition to the Bolsheviks.’4

  But the American President and Lloyd George were reluctant to commit themselves too far while there was still a war to win against Germany. And when the First World War was over, it was too late. They approved money for the Whites, and they encouraged the Czech Brigade to fight the Bolsheviks, whose original mission was supposed to be crossing Russia eastwards on its way back to Europe, to fight the Austrians. The Americans were not prepared to go further. One of the hypotheticals of history is: how would Russia have progressed if the Whites had won the Civil War? But the Allies were never prepared to fight a full-scale war against the Bolsheviks – the only way a White victory could have been achieved.

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  There was savage barbarity on both sides, partly because neither Red nor White could depend on the loyalty of the people under their control. For the most part the civilian population, mostly peasants, had a ‘plague on both your houses’ view. They hated the Bolshevik grain requisitions and the war against the kulaks, but the Whites never accepted that there had been a revolution on the land and wanted to turn the clock back and restore the estates to the old landowners. Both sides were forcing civilians to join their armies, but the peasants didn’t want to fight. Millions voted with their feet and deserted, risking death and hard labour sentences if they were caught.

  Lenin followed events anxiously from his map room in the Kremlin. ‘If we don’t conquer the Urals by next winter [1919] we will lose the Revolution I’m sure,’ he told Zinoviev, and he wrote frequently in a similar worried tone. He deluged commanders and provincial Communist Party bosses with directives and telegrams designed to motivate or terrify. When things went well he would occasionally celebrate. Simbirsk was captured by the Reds while he was convalescing after being shot by Kaplan. ‘The seizure of Simbirsk, my home town, is the most health-giving and best bandage for my wounds,’ he told Trotsky on 10 September 1918. ‘I felt an unprecedented surge of courage and strength.’

  But on the whole the cables were fearful, violent and demanded an ever-increasing use of terror. They make the grimmest of reading. The word ‘shoot’ was one he used casually. In September 1918 he told the Party boss in Saratov ‘temporarily to appoint your own army commanders and shoot conspirators and waverers without asking anyone or idiotic red tape’. A few days later he wrote to the leaders of the Soviet in the Caucasus: ‘if there is an offensive in Baku [where there were big oil refineries]…make preparations to burn Baku down totally’. When Kazan was besieged a month later he cabled Trotsky: ‘There must be no question of taking pity on the town and putting matters off any longer…merciless annihilation is what is vital once it is established that Kazan is enclosed in an iron ring.’ He ordered a commander that ‘the taking of hostages from the bourgeoisie and from officers’ families must be stepped up in view of the increased instances of treason’. Another was told a few days later: ‘It would be a
disgrace to fail to punish by shooting, absence from duty and evasion of mobilisation orders.’ There were scores in a similar tone.5

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  Lenin faced a series of skirmishes inside his own Cabinet which were to develop into a major split in the Communist Party after he was gone. Immediately after the Revolution Lenin quickly saw how Trotsky and Stalin loathed each other; their rivalry soon burst into the open in the Civil War. Lenin’s tactic was to play them off against each other.

  Their mutual feelings were clear from the first Sovnarkom meeting at the Smolny immediately after the coup. Both of them had arrived early and behind a wooden partition overheard ‘a conversation of a rather tender nature’ between Pavel Dybenko and Alexandra Kollontai, almost twenty years his senior, who had recently started an affair which had become the gossip of the Bolshevik Party. Stalin and Trotsky looked at each other, surprised. Stalin was amused but Trotsky, not exactly prudish in his own behaviour, was shocked. As Trotsky later recounted, the Georgian, ‘with a kind of unexpected jauntiness and pointing his shoulder towards the partition, said smirking, “That’s him, with Kollontai, with Kollontai.” ’ Trotsky was offended. ‘That’s their affair,’ he snapped. ‘Stalin sensed he had made a mistake…His gesture and laughter seemed out of place and unendurably vulgar, especially on that occasion and in that place…he never again tried to engage me in conversation of a personal nature. Stalin’s face changed. His yellow eyes flashed with the glint of malice.’

  The first sign of major friction came when Stalin was despatched to Tsaritsyn in June 1918 to supervise the campaign against the kulaks in the southern Russian region. It was a Party post and technically he wasn’t supposed to interfere directly in the Red Army, Trotsky’s sphere. But within days he wrote to Lenin complaining that in Tsaritsyn, an important army base, there was ‘a bacchanal of profiteering’. He demanded military powers to deal with the ‘disaster’ of the Southern Front so he could be more rigorous about appointments. ‘If Trotsky will thoughtlessly hand out credentials right, left and centre…you may be sure that within a month everything here in the north Caucasus region will be lost to us indefinitely.’ He wanted authority to dismiss commanders, ‘and the absence of a piece of paper from Trotsky won’t stop me’. When Trotsky heard, he was enraged. ‘I categorically insist on Stalin’s recall,’ he cabled the Kremlin. Lenin patched up the quarrel for a while. But it flared up regularly. At one point a few months later Stalin tried to get the Communist Party’s Central Committee to dismiss Trotsky as head of the Red Army. He lost and Trotsky was given a vote of confidence. It was a temporary blow to Stalin, and Lenin attempted again to make peace.

  Another time Trotsky complained that Stalin had been drinking wine from the Tsar’s Kremlin cellars. Stalin was summoned by Lenin to a triangular showdown. ‘If the rumour got around at the Front that there was drinking at the Kremlin it will make a bad impression.’ Stalin tried to laugh off the matter. ‘How can we Caucasians get along without a bit of wine?’ he protested. Lenin on this occasion backed Stalin. ‘You see, the Georgian cannot do without an occasional glass of wine.’ That ended the discussion and, as Trotsky said later, ‘I capitulated without a struggle.’ Lenin knew that the squabbling between the two rivals would one day scar the Party he founded, but he did nothing to settle the issue once and for all. Lenin believed he needed them both.6

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  At one point in the late summer of 1919 Denikin’s Volunteer Army was 350 kilometres from Moscow. But that was the high point of their success. They were overstretched, could not maintain their supply lines, and when they faced a counter-attack they were forced to retreat. To supporters such as Marina Tsvetaeva the Whites were the ‘youth and glory of Russia’, the only real hope of defeating the Bolsheviks.*2 But to most Russians they seemed as savage as the Bolsheviks. Their defeat was political as well as military; they never received enough support to defeat a regime that was ably, if ruthlessly, led. Terror was a weapon Lenin was always prepared to use, but he operated through guile, acumen and sound judgement too. He had a clear goal and could inspire others towards reaching it. The Whites, as an American observer of the war put it, ‘seldom rose above anarchic warlordism’. Kerensky agreed. He said in the summer of 1919, ‘there is no crime the…[White armies] would not commit. Executions and torture have been committed in Siberia…and elsewhere and often the populations of whole villages have been flogged, including the teachers and intellectuals.’

  In one village, Lezhanka, near Rostov, officers slaughtered sixty peasants in cold blood, including old men and women, in reprisal for an earlier attack on White Guards by the Reds. Hundreds of villagers were stripped and whipped while other groups of Volunteer Army officers stood by and watched, many of them laughing. It was a routine attack; there were scores of incidents like it. ‘We had not brought pardon and peace with us, but only the cruel sword of vengeance,’ admitted Pyotr Wrangel, one of the most senior White commanders.7

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  As so often in Russian history, it was the Jews who were directly targeted. As Denikin’s army retreated from Moscow it launched an orgy of bloody pogroms. The commander did nothing to stop them while his political officers spewed out anti-Semitic propaganda: all Communists were Jews, it was the Jews who murdered the Tsar. Trotsky – ‘real name Bronstein, the Jewish mass killer’ – was singled out as the arch criminal.*3 Bolshevism was blamed on Jews so it was entirely legitimate to slaughter them, the White propaganda seemed to argue.

  There were hundreds of pogroms and Volunteer Army officers were enthusiastic participants. Between 1 and 5 October 1919 Cossack soldiers attacked the Jewish quarter of Kiev, demanding money and killing and raping while their officers urged them on; ‘Yids are killing our people, and they all support the Bolsheviks,’ one officer told his men.

  Even Vasily Shulgin, the anti-Semitic Duma member who witnessed the Tsar’s abdication, was shocked. ‘At night the streets of Kiev are in the grip of medieval terror. In the midst of silence and deserted streets suddenly there begins a wail that breaks the heart…whole streets, seized with fear howl.’ An eyewitness described the horror: ‘The Cossacks divided into separate groups, each of three or four men. A group would break into a Jewish home and their first word would be “money”…They would demand the head of the household and put a rope around his neck. A Cossack would take one end of the rope and another take the other end and begin to choke him. If there was a beam in the ceiling they would begin to hang him. If anyone burst into tears or begged for mercy – even a child – they beat him to death. Of course the family handed over every last kopeck. When there was no money the Cossacks choked the victim until he lost consciousness and they loosened the rope. The victim would fall to the floor, then the Cossacks would…pour cold water on him and bring him back to his senses. Then they would start again. Sometimes this would be repeated five or six times.’

  In Chernobyl Jews were herded into the synagogue and the building was set on fire. In Charkan they raped hundreds of girls and forced their families to watch. As they were being defeated by the Bolsheviks, the Whites slaughtered about 150,000 civilians.

  There were a few pogroms by the Reds, though an almost insignificant number compared to the Volunteer Army’s orchestrated savagery. Reports reached Lenin in early 1920 that in Zhytomyr, capital of Volyn Province, ‘a new wave of pogroms has swept the district…Divisions of the First Cavalry Army [a Bolshevik corps] have been attacking the Jewish population, killing and looting.’ He received news from Ukraine that Red detachments had killed ‘in Rogachov more than thirty Jews, in Barakopva fourteen. The district of Berdichev has been sacked…Gorashki and Cherniakov have been completely plundered.’

  Lenin ordered a full investigation and tried to speak out against anti-Semitism, though he knew that would probably do the Bolshevik cause little good. When he made sixteen three-minute propaganda gramophone records to be played in villages and town halls he chose as one of them ‘On Pogroms’ and another ‘The Persecution of the Jews�
��. ‘It is not the Jews who are the workers’ enemies,’ he said. ‘It is the capitalists of all the countries. The great majority of Jews are themselves workers…They are our brothers being oppressed by the capitalists, our comrades in the struggle for socialism. The Jews have their kulaks, their exploiters and their capitalists, just like the Russians. Just like all nations…It is the capitalists who inflame hatred against the Jews.’8

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  One leading figure among the Allies was honest enough to admit that the West was helping the White forces – and wanted to support them more effectively. Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, said Bolshevism ‘should be strangled in its cradle’ and he continually urged for a full-scale military intervention alongside the Whites to oust Lenin. To him, Communism ‘was not a creed, it is a pestilence. Bolsheviks are the enemies of the human race and must be put down at any cost.’ Never one to exaggerate, he said that Russia ‘is being reduced…to an animal form of barbarism. Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas while Bolsheviks hop and caper like…ferocious baboons.’

  He had slightly increased the number of British troops in Murmansk and Archangel to 3,000, though the Cabinet decided they should not take part in combat operations. But he upped the supply of weapons to the Whites. At his instigation, amid much secrecy, a consignment of M Weapons, poison gas canisters, was despatched to Russia to be used by White forces. Fifty thousand were sent, along with the equipment to fire them. A total of 2,717 were used against Bolshevik forces, though civilians became collateral damage too. ‘Fullest use is now to be made of gas shell with your forces or supplied by us to [White] forces,’ Churchill wrote to the commander of British forces in Russia.