A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  As an army of Russian officers, the Volunteers were always bound to have a problem with their Cossack hosts. The White leaders had made the Don their base because they had presumed the Don Cossacks to be stalwart supporters of the old order. But this owed more to nineteenth-century myths than to twentieth-century realities. In fact the Cossacks were themselves divided, both on regional and generational lines. In the northern districts the Cossacks were smallholders, like the local Russian peasants, and generally supported the ideas advanced by the younger and more democratic Cossack officers for a socialist republic that would unite them with the peasantry. The northerners resented the southern districts, both for their wealth and for the pretensions of their

  elders to speak for the territory as a whole. The younger and war-weary Cossacks from the Front — influenced by the officers risen from their ranks — were more inclined to find some accord with Bolshevik Russia than to fight against it. Thus it was really only in the southern Don — where the Cossacks were more wealthy and more determined to defend their historic landed privileges against the demands of the Russian peasants for land reform — that the Cossacks were prepared to fight the Bolsheviks. Most of the Cossacks of the northern Don, by contrast, rallied behind the Military Revolutionary Council in Kamenskaia led by the officer, Philip Mironov, who had organized the Don Cossack revolt of 1905—6. Mironov's aim was an independent socialist republic uniting the Cossacks with the Russian peasants. But in effect his MRC was to serve as a fifth column for the Bolshevik troops as they invaded the Don from the eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the Don's industrial cities the mainly Russian workers, who were generally supportive of the Bolsheviks, staged a number of protest strikes against the presence of the Volunteers. The workers massacred suspected supporters of the Whites — which in effect meant all the burzhooi — while the Whites carried out equally savage reprisals, putting out the eyes and cutting off the noses of hundreds of strikers. In short, there was a spiral of increasing terror as the cities of the Don descended into civil war.

  To a growing number of the local Cossacks, all this appeared to be an alien conflict imported from Russia. The younger Cossacks who had spent the past three years at the Front were especially hostile to the idea of fighting for the Whites. So there was a growing split between Cossack fathers and Cossack sons, as the readers of Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don will recall, and Kaledin's forces fell apart as the younger Cossacks turned their backs on war. The defence of the Don was thus left to the Volunteer Army and a dwindling number of mainly older Cossacks who remained loyal to Kaledin. Without proper supplies or finance — the Rostov middle classes were reluctant to support the Volunteers — they had little chance of holding off the Reds.12

  On 8 February, six days after a workers' uprising in the city, the Reds captured Taganrog. They were now less than fifty miles from Rostov. Kaledin's government was doomed. The Volunteers, seeing no reason to sacrifice their army in the defence of Rostov, prepared to abandon it and march south to the Kuban, where the Cossacks, worried by the Red advance, might be persuaded to join them. Kaledin resigned as Ataman. The same day he shot himself. Ten days later, on 23 February, the Red Army captured Rostov for the second time in three months. Novocherkassk, the Don capital, fell on the 25th. With the conquest of the Don, the Soviet control of Russia was virtually complete. Only the Kuban remained as a major pocket of resistance. Lenin pronounced the civil war over. But in fact it had only just begun.

  The Ice March, as the Volunteers' retreat from the Don to the Kuban came to be known, was the heroic epic of the Russian civil war.* The drama of the Ice March became a legend among the Whites and was later retold in countless emigre memoirs. This was the defining moment of the White movement, the moment when the Volunteers became a real army, as if their very survival, against all the odds, bound them together and gave them a strength that far transcended their actual numbers.

  On 23 February, as the Soviet forces entered Rostov, Kornilov led off his Volunteers, some 4,000 highly trained soldiers and officers, armed with no more than a rifle each and a few cannons, across the frozen steppelands of the Don. They marched in single file, a thin black line in the vast snow-covered steppe. Their long civilian tail — bankers, politicians, university professors, journalists, nurses and the wives and children of the officers — slowed them down. This was the bourgeoisie of Rostov on the run. They preferred this cruel journey to staying behind and running the risk of falling victim to the Bolsheviks. The Ice Marchers marched by day and night avoiding the railways and the settlements, where the population was likely to be hostile. The wounded and the sick were left behind. Many of them shot themselves rather than run the risk of being captured by the Reds.

  General Lukomsky, whose group separated from the main column, was taken captive by the Russian villagers of Guliai-Borisov and brought before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Lukomsky tried to convince the villagers that he was a travelling businessman, but this was hardly likely to win him any friends, and they called for the burzhooi to be shot. But Lukomsky was able to escape in the confusion, when just before his scheduled execution the villagers beat to death two Volunteers and began to fight among themselves for their boots. Whilst waiting to be executed, Lukomsky had seen his own grave being dug, and had taken some cyanide pills which he had had with him since his imprisonment in the Bykhov Monastery. Luckily for him, they had no effect.13

  The deeper the Whites moved into the steppe, the more they resorted to terror against a hostile population. Their Ice March left a trail of blood. It was perhaps unavoidable, given the Volunteers' desperate need for food and the reluctance of the peasants to give it to them. The Whites were stranded in a Red peasant sea. But there was also an element of sheer class war and revenge in their violence, as in so many acts of the White Terror, which was a mirror image of the class resentment and hatred that drove the Red Terror. Terror lay

  * There was nothing to compare with it on the Red side — except perhaps the long march of the Taman Army, trapped by the White forces in the Taman Peninsula, during August and September 1918. This epic story formed the basis of Serafimovich's famous novel The Iron Flood. The Taman Army had a heroic status under the Soviet regime. All the more ironic, then, that Yeltsin should have used it to bombard the parliament building in October 1993.

  at the heart of both regimes. The Whites were the avengers of those who had suffered at the hands of the revolution. As Wrangel later wrote, 'we had not brought pardon and peace with us, but only the cruel sword of vengeance'. Most of the officers were landowners' sons, who, like Gul', had lost their inheritance to the peasantry. They had every reason to seek vengeance — not just against the despised peasantry but against the 'Bolshevik' Jews and intellectuals who had stirred them up. One of the worst White atrocities during the Ice March took place in the village of Lezhanka. It was inhabited by Russian peasants well known for their revolutionary sympathies. Roman Gul' watched in horror as his fellow officers brutally slaughtered sixty peasants, many of them old men and women, in a reprisal for the Red Terror in Rostov. Hundreds of peasants were stripped bare and whipped while the Volunteers stood around and laughed. Gul' met one poor peasant woman — she cooked him breakfast in her hut — who had lost her husband and three sons. All of them had been shot as 'Bolsheviks'. This was a rude disillusionment for Gul', who had joined the White movement under the illusion that it was fighting for democratic ideals betrayed by the Bolsheviks. He began to wonder if 'the Whites were in fact any better than the Reds'.14

  After several weeks wandering across the steppe, fighting off the Reds with their last ammunition, Kornilov ordered the Volunteers to attack Ekaterino-dar, capital of the newly established North Caucasian Soviet Republic. On 23 March they had been joined by the Kuban Army, some 3,000 Cossacks led by General Pokrovsky, which had fled Ekaterinodar and somehow stumbled across the Don marchers in the nearby Circassian Hills. At a surreal summit meeting in the hillside village of Shendzhii, with all the formal protocol of the o
ld regime, Kornilov and Pokrovsky united their armies for the recapture of the Kuban. On 10 April, Kornilov, acting as the overall commander, ordered the combined force of 7,000 men to begin the attack on the capital. They met fierce resistance from the Reds, some 18,000 troops in all. Kornilov soon realized that the siege was doomed to fail, threatening the destruction of the whole army, yet still refused to retreat. That, after all, was not in his nature. 'If we do not take Ekaterinodar,' he told Denikin on the 12th, 'there is nothing left for me to do but to put a bullet through my head.'15

  In the event, Kornilov did pay with his life for his suicidal venture. Early on the following morning a chance shell landed a direct hit on his farmhouse headquarters, burying him in the rubble.* General Denikin, who immediately took over the command, tried to keep the news of his death from the men. Kornilov, to them, was not just a commander, but the very symbol of their cause, and it was bound to shatter their morale at this critical point in the

  * The Reds later claimed that they had been informed of the whereabouts of Kornilov's headquarters by a defector from the Volunteers.

  battle. The great White hero was buried in a modest churchyard in the village of Elisavetinskaya. But the Reds later found the grave and carried off his rotting corpse to Ekaterinodar, where they paraded it through the town before burning it in the main square.

  Ironically, Kornilov's death was probably the salvation of the Whites. Had he lived, he would undoubtedly have ordered a final attack on Ekaterinodar, which was almost bound to end in complete defeat. The night before his death, he had refused to heed the advice of his generals to leave the farmhouse, which had been heavily shelled for several days, because it was 'not worth the trouble; tomorrow we'll begin the final assault'.16 Denikin, who had never been keen on the idea of the siege, ordered the army to retreat quickly to the north, leaving behind some 200 wounded to speed up their march. If the Reds had made a serious effort to pursue them, instead of dancing on Kornilov's grave, they might have won the civil war there and then. But the Volunteers were allowed to flee back to the Don, from where they had launched their grim march. Four thousand set out and at least that number returned. More importantly, they came back with their fighting spirit strengthened.

  * * * The Don to which they returned had, in the ten weeks of their absence, been terrorized by the Bolsheviks. The Don Soviet Republic managed to achieve what Kaledin had always tried but failed to do — to turn the Cossacks against the Reds. After the Bolsheviks captured Rostov, the Red Army rulers instituted a reign of terror over the Don. Soviets were imposed on the Cossack settlements and foodstuffs were requisitioned from them at gunpoint. Punitive levies were extorted from the burzhoois and hundreds of hostages were shot at random. The Red Guards, retreating from the German advance towards Taganrog and licensed by the Bolsheviks to 'loot the looters', roamed through the stanitsas, or Cossack settlements, reaping bloody havoc. Churches were attacked, priests were executed. One priest had his nose and ears cut off, and his eyes pulled out, in front of the worshippers at an Easter service.

  The result was a wave of Cossack uprisings — as much out of fear of what the Reds might do as anger at what they had already done — starting in the villages near Novocherkassk. These had always been the richest in the Don and were thus the most exposed to requisitioning and the terror. The Cossacks were driven to revolt by the image of the 'Bolsheviks' as the incarnation of all their worst fears and prejudices about ethnic outsiders and the Russian state. Each stanitsa had its own insurgent army, usually organized by the officers and equipped by the Cossack farms. During April these converged on the stanitsa of Zaplavskaya, near Novocherkassk, where there was a strong force of officers and men, to prepare for the liberation of the capital. By the end of April, they had 10,000 cavalrymen. With the Reds distracted by the German advance from

  Taganrog to Rostov at the start of May, the Cossacks retook Novocherkassk without serious resistance from the exhausted Reds. There they elected a Krug for the Salvation of the Don, led by General Krasnov, their new Ataman, who had led the expedition against Petrograd to restore Kerensky's rule during the October Days.17

  Krasnov looked every inch the Cossack Ataman. He came from a famous Cossack family and, being a great impresario of the 'Cossack cause', often played on this lineage. He had been a journalist before the war, and later, in exile, he would make a living as a novelist. Both personae were available to Krasnov the politician. There were no bounds to his historical imagination. He filled his speeches with archaic terms, designed to create the illusion of an ancient Cossack nationhood stretching back to the Middle Ages. By focusing on the glories of the Cossack past, he aimed to unite the Cossacks around the idea of their struggle against the Bolsheviks as a war of national liberation. It was a fancy-dress nationalism, based more on myth than on history, but it was powerful all the same. The All-Great Don Host', a title which had not been used in official documents since the seventeenth century, was restored on Krasnov's orders. The personal rule of the Ataman, as well as the Cossacks' rights and privileges over the non-Cossack population (now condemned as 'Bolsheviks' to a man), were upheld by the Don Krug's Basic Laws. It was a kitsch attempt to return to the Cossack Golden Age of Russian fairy tales. Public buildings hung out the Cossack flag; schoolchildren were ordered to sing Cossack hymns; there was even a special Cossack prayer.18

  With the Cossacks in control of the Don, supported by the Germans to the west and the Volunteers to the south, the stage was set for the anti-Bolshevik forces to consolidate their military hold over the whole of the region; this they did between May and August.

  By the middle of June, Krasnov's Don Army numbered 40,000 soldiers. It was armed by the Germans in exchange for Cossack wheat. With the Reds stretched on the Volga, it successfully completed the reconquest of the Don and created buffer zones in the north towards Voronezh and Tsaritsyn. Meanwhile, the Volunteer Army was reinforced by the arrival of 2,000 troops from the Romanian Front led by Colonel Drozdovsky. It was now in a position to launch a new offensive: but in which direction? Alexeev and Krasnov both wanted Denikin to strike north towards Tsaritsyn on the Volga: Alexeev to link up with the Czechs and the Komuch forces further up the Volga in Samara; Krasnov to lift the threat on the Don from the Red forces based in Tsaritsyn. Had this been done, the combined forces of the Volunteers, Krasnov's Cossacks, the Czechs and the Komuch might have won the civil war by advancing on Moscow from the vital bridgehead of the Volga. But Denikin stubbornly refused and marched his Volunteers southwards into the wilderness of the Kuban steppe. He

  wanted to strengthen the White rear by building up an army of Kuban Cossacks. By doing so he missed a vital opportunity to link up with the other anti-Bolshevik armies. Krasnov's Cossacks attacked Tsaritsyn on their own later in the autumn; but they could not take it. By the time Denikin finally reached the Volga, during the following summer, his eastern allies were in full retreat and the chance to combine forces had passed for ever.

  On the face of it, the Volunteers should never have had the slightest chance of victory in this Second Kuban Campaign. There were only 9,000 of them, as opposed to 80,000 Reds at the start of the campaign in June. But the Reds were cut off from their depots in the north, surrounded by a largely hostile population, and as a consequence their conscript troops were demoralized. The Volunteers, by contrast, were highly disciplined and spurred on by the memory of the Ice March. One-third of their troops at the start of the campaign were exiled Kuban Cossacks fighting for the liberation of their homelands. This proportion grew as the Volunteers advanced into the Kuban, where the local Cossacks, who had suffered under the Reds, either joined the Volunteers or formed their own detachments to fight alongside them. On 18 August, after several weeks of fighting, they finally captured Ekaterinodar. The Reds fled south to Piatigorsk, in the Caucasian mountains, while the Whites extended their control throughout the northern and western Kuban. By November, they had seized control of Stavropol too. From a tiny force of officers during the Ice
March, the Volunteers had grown to an army 40,000-strong with a rich territorial base the size of Belgium from which to launch their crusade against the Bolsheviks.19

  * * * General Denikin could not have expected to find himself supreme ruler of these territories. He had only been the Volunteers' commander since Kornilov's death — and Alexeev had remained the political leader of the movement. 'Alexeev's Army' was how the Volunteers were still known. But Alexeev was a sick man, and he died in October, leaving Denikin the undisputed military and political leader of the counter-revolution in the south. The constitution of the Volunteer Army, drawn up after the occupation of Ekaterinodar, gave him the powers of a military dictator: Kornilov's dream had been realized at last. But Denikin was no Kornilov: he lacked the character to play the part of a Generalissimo; and that partly explains the Whites' defeat.

  Denikin was a military man: he came from a soldiers' family, and had spent all his life in the army. Politics was a foreign country to him, and he approached it from a narrow military perspective. The Academy of the General Staff had not encouraged him to think beyond the three basic articles of faith: Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationalism. 'For the officers', he recalled, 'the structure of the State was a preordained and unshakeable fact, arousing neither