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

by Orlando Figes

  Despite the SRs' expectations, the Volga peasantry proved no more supportive of their government. Had the SRs been willing to support the peasant revolution, things might have been different. But that would have meant recognizing the peasant Soviets — and the Komuch leaders were not prepared to go that far. They were determined to replace the Soviets with the volost

  zemstvos, in which all the rural classes, including the nobility, were represented on an equal basis. But as in 1917, the zemstvo elections were boycotted by the mass of the peasants, who were already committed to their Soviets as organs of direct village self-rule. Even where the zemstvos were elected, it was often difficult for them to function because the rural intelligentsia and officialdom had largely disappeared from the villages since the revolution, while the peasant communes refused to pay their taxes. In some villages the Soviet remained in power but referred to itself as the 'zemstvo' in communiques with the Komuch.* The Komuch was powerless to stamp out this charade, even when it sent in troops. The peasants were too firmly committed to the Soviets as the guarantors of their revolution on the land.

  The Komuch was equally reluctant to sanction the peasants' seizures of the gentry's land. True, it upheld the land reform passed at the first and only session of the Constituent Assembly which had recognized the abolition of all landed property. But a subsequent decree, passed on 22 July, enabled the former landowners to reclaim any winter fields which they had sown. This in effect meant reversing one-third of the peasant requisitions of arable land. Troops often had to be called in to enforce the decree. Its aim had been to 'reinforce the rule of law' after the 'anarchic' peasant land seizures during the previous winter and spring, but instead the impression was created, especially among the poorest peasants, who had been given most of the gentry's fields, that the Komuch wanted to restore the old regime on the land. They could be forgiven for this interpretation since some of the local squires saw the decree as a licence to take the law into their own hands. With the help of an army brigade, or their own private militia, they would seize back their property; sometimes they even had the peasant leaders flogged in public to 'teach them a lesson'.32

  * * * Of all the Komuch's policies, none was more unpopular than the call-up for the People's Army. In any civil war the success of the contenders depends on their relative abilities to mobilize the local population. This test the Komuch failed in no uncertain fashion.

  During the summer, the Komuch and Czech forces were able to conquer territory almost at will. The Reds were chronically weak, without food supplies or a proper army. Ufa fell to the Czechs on 6 July; Simbirsk, Lenin's birthplace, on the 22nd; and Kazan, with its huge tsarist gold reserve, on 6 August. Two days later the munitions workers of Izhevsk, 150 miles to the north of Kazan, rose up against the Soviet and declared their sympathy for the Komuch. It was the biggest ever workers' uprising against the Bolsheviks — and a major

  * Such deception was facilitated by the fact that in 1918 most of the Soviets were still using the old zemstvo stationery.

  embarrassment for the regime. The revolt soon spread to the neighbouring countryside, where many of the workers' families still lived. Volunteer detachments were formed to fight the Reds. This was the height of the Komuch's fortunes. It now controlled an area the size of mainland Italy, with a population of fourteen million people.

  But the Komuch's military potential was always very fragile. The Czech Legion was unwilling to fight in Russia indefinitely. Its soldiers were tired and wanted to go home, and their morale declined further as the Reds became better organized. By the middle of August, the Czech units were falling apart. Some of the soldiers were socialists and they went over to the Reds, who barraged them with propaganda; others simply gave up fighting and sold off their supplies to the local population. The Czech Legion broke down into bands of petty profiteers.

  It was all the more essential, then, that the Komuch should raise its own troops from the Volga population. One of its first acts had been to appeal for volunteers. In the towns some 8,000 people — most of them students and cadets, but also refugees and the unemployed without other means of support — responded to the call. But in the countryside the number of volunteers was tiny: the majority of the peasantry wanted nothing to do with the 'fratricidal' civil war. Whilst they were willing to defend the revolution in their own localities — and for this they formed their own peasant companies — most of them looked on the war as a remote struggle between the urban parties. 'The mood of the peasants is indifferent,' declared a recruiting officer of the People's Army; 'they just want to be left to themselves. The Bolsheviks were here — that's good, they say; the Bolsheviks went away — that's no shame, they say. As long as there is bread then let's pray to God, and who needs the Guards? Let them fight it out by themselves, we will stand aside. It is well known that playing it by ear is the best side to be on.' At the Samara peasant assembly, organized by the Komuch in September, the delegates declared that they would 'not fight their own brothers, only enemies'. They 'refused to support a war between the political parties' and urged the Komuch 'to come to an agreement with the Bolsheviks'. One delegate proposed that 'the continuation of the civil war ought to be decided by a referendum, and until we know the opinion of the whole population we do not have a moral right to vote on this resolution [to support the war]'.33

  To the mass of the peasants, whose political horizons were limited to the narrow confines of their villages, the national goals of the Komuch were quite alien. The restoration of the Constituent Assembly meant little to them when they already had the land and their freedom. The Komuch's call for the renewal of the war against Germany, six months after the fighting had ceased, clashed with the peasantry's parochial pacifism. 'The war with Germany and all wars are bad,' resolved the peasants of one village. 'If we do not fight, then the

  German soldiers will not take our territory,' reasoned the peasants of another. The district police chief of Samara concluded that 'the population is poorly enlightened about the aims of the People's Army... The idea has taken root that the "bourgeois" have started a new war because the "peace" signed by the Bolsheviks is unfavourable to them; but that the peasantry "has suffered no loss" and will not do so if it allows the bourgeoisie to fight by themselves.'34

  Such class antagonisms were worsened by the attitudes of the People's Army officers. The fate of the Komuch would have been different had it been able to find its own loyal corps of democratic officers; the army commissars of 1917 would have fitted the bill perfectly. But very few of them were now left: some, like Linde, had been engulfed by the revolution; others, like Os'kin, had joined the Reds. There were no more citizen-patriots of the type who had rallied behind Kerensky; the idea of the 'democratic officer' was now merely oxy-moronic* The Komuch had no choice but to make do with the officers who volunteered for it. Colonel Galkin, a typical military bureaucrat of the tsarist era, was placed in charge of the People's Army. His headquarters became a stronghold of Rightist and monarchist officers, a Trojan horse of White counterrevolution inside the democratic citadel. The Komuch leaders were fully aware of this but, as Klimushkin put it, 'we were so sure of the force of democracy that we were not afraid of the officers' plans'. Under Galkin, the tsarist system of military discipline was restored. Officers even wore a scaled-down version of their epaulettes. Many of them were the sons of local squires and sometimes wreaked a violent revenge on the villages that had seized their familes' estates.35 No wonder the peasants were not keen on the so-called People's Army.

  The poor response to the appeal for volunteers forced the Komuch to resort to conscription at the end of June. Fearful that the older peasants would be infected by the Bolshevism which had swept through the army in 1917, it called up those aged under twenty-one. Yet even they showed the familiar symptoms of insubordination. Only one in three of the conscripted men turned up at the recruiting stations: the rest were 'deserters'. The appearance rate was lowest in the western districts bordering the Front, which says a gr
eat deal about the reasons for the Bolshevik victory. In contrast to their opponents, the Bolsheviks were usually able, at least at the critical moments of the civil war, to mobilize the peasantry just behind the Front. However much the peasants disliked the Reds, they feared a restoration of the old landed regime much more. Neither the Komuch nor the Whites were ever able to penetrate the central zone of Soviet power, where the peasant revolution was most firmly rooted.

  All the civil war armies suffered from chronic problems of desertion, but the People's Army suffered more than most, largely as a result of having to

  * The Komuch did make an effort to recruit the services of Brusilov; but this came to nothing.

  improvise an army at the Front. Whereas the Bolsheviks had been in power for ten months before the major fighting began, the Komuch was barely ten weeks old when it faced the first Red onslaught. There was never enough time to build up a proper military infrastructure. Too often there were no uniforms or guns for the new recruits. Soldiers received little proper training before being put into battle, so that panic often broke out in the ranks at the first moment of danger. During August and September, the height of the harvest season, thousands of soldiers ran back to their farms, just at the moment when the Reds were launching their offensive. The Komuch tried to stem the desertions by sending punitive Cossack detachments into the villages. Military field courts, reminiscent of Stolypin's notorious tribunals in 1905—6, were given sweeping powers to punish the deserters and their families. Peasant leaders were publicly flogged and hanged; hostages were taken to force the deserters out of hiding; and whole villages were burned to the ground when soldiers failed to give themselves up. To the peasants, all this must have seemed like a return of the old regime with a vengeance.

  The effect of repression was merely to strengthen the peasantry's resistance and drive many of them into the arms of the Reds. Villagers formed brigades, often organized by the Soviet, in order to resist the People's Army and its punitive detachments. These village 'armies' went to war with rusty guns, pitchforks and axes, and odd pieces of artillery mounted on peasant carts. Some fought as partisan units alongside the Red Army and later became regular detachments of it. The Domashki village brigade was a classic example. It fought against the Cossacks on the southern steppelands of Samara before becoming the nucleus of the 219th Domashki Rifle Division, a regular detachment of the Fourth Red Army. The Pugachev, Novouzensk, Krasnokutsk and Kurilovo Regiments had similar origins. The soldiers in these regiments were relatives and neighbours. In the Kurilovo Regiment there was a father and six sons. This cohesion was unmatched by any other fighting force in the civil war, with the exception of the Cossack detachments, which were similar in many ways.36 This was the stuff of the legend of Chapaev, the main Red commander of these partisans, upon which three generations of Soviet children were to be brought up.

  * * * Without an effective army, it was only a matter of time before the Komuch lost its hold on the Volga region. During the summer the Reds had gradually built up their forces for a Volga campaign: it was here that the Red Army took shape as a regular conscript army. Worker detachments were raised in Moscow and the other towns of the central Soviet zone and despatched to the Eastern Army Group on the right bank of the Volga. On Lenin's orders, 30,000 troops were transferred from the anti-German screens in the west. He gambled (correctly, as

  it turned out) that the Central Powers were too stretched in Europe to exploit the gap. By the beginning of September 1918, the Reds had amassed 70,000 troops on the Eastern Front — an advantage of two to one over the forces of the Komuch. This was the start of the real fighting of the civil war. Up to now only minor units, none numbering more than 10,000 men, had been involved. Kazan was taken by the Reds on 10 September. Colonel Vatsetis, who led the attack, was rewarded by being made the main Commander-in-Chief of the whole Red Army. Defeat would have brought its own kind of reward — Lenin had ordered him to be shot if the crucial city was not taken. Two days later the First Red Army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky broke through to Simbirsk. From this point, the resistance of the People's Army was effectively broken; the Czech forces fell apart. Samara fell on 7 October.

  The SRs dissolved the Komuch and fled to Ufa. There they found themselves at the mercy of the White counter-revolution sweeping in from the east. Under the protection of the Czechs several rival power centres had emerged in Siberia: the Eurasian land mass was a patchwork of regional regimes. A Urals Government was based in Ekaterinburg and claimed jurisdiction over Perm. The various Cossack voiskos, Orenburg and Ural'sk the most westerly of them, formally recognized the Komuch but conducted themselves as independent 'powers'. The Bashkirs and Kirghiz also had their own 'states', while within the Komuch territory there was also a national government of the Turko-Tatar Tribes. Of all these rival power centres, by far the most important was the Siberian Government based in Omsk. It had been formed by Kadet and SR politicians in the Tomsk Duma before the coming of Soviet power; and reformed by them in Omsk in the wake of the Czech revolt. P. V Vologodsky, the jurist and advocate of Siberian autonomy, became its head of government on 23 June. Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who passed through Omsk in early July, took a dim view of its new leaders:

  Omsk is dusty and dirty. The government leaders have neither intellect nor any conscience. There is nothing positive or hopeful in the composition of the 'Siberian Government'. Its so-called 'ministers' are nothing but question marks. Talking with them it is clear that they neither believe in themselves nor in the success of their own undertaking.''7

  The Omsk government soon fell under the domination of the Rightist and monarchist officers in the Siberian Army. Lacking a close relationship with the Czechs, it none the less relied on them for military support. By September, the Siberian Army had 38,000 mainly peasant conscripts. Under the flag of Siberia — green for its forests and white for its snows — it had the support of those older Siberian settlers who favoured independence from the rest

  of Russia. Rightist officers from the Volga also flocked to it as an alternative to the 'socialist' Komuch. The domination of these Rightist elements in Omsk was enough to prevent the Siberian Government from reconvening the Duma. The Rightists wanted nothing less than a dictatorship.

  The rivalry between Samara and Omsk had always been intense. It broke out in a customs war and a series of territorial disputes. But there were also growing pressures to find agreement: the military position of the Komuch was steadily weakening; and the Allies were concerned that such petty conflicts should not prevent a combined effort to repulse the advancing Reds. Such an agreement finally materialized at the State Conference held in Ufa from 8 to 23 September. There the Komuch leaders found their voice increasingly drowned out by the Rightists on their own side, who were calling for the sort of dictatorship favoured by the Siberians. The Kazan industrialist Kropotkin called for a 'strong and united military power to save Russia from those politicians [i.e. the socialists] who have ruined it'. According to V N. Lvov, the power-broker in the Kornilov fiasco, another 'military dictator' was essential.38

  To appease the Komuch leaders a compromise of sorts was struck. The ultimate sovereignty of the Constituent Assembly, provided it could find a quorum of 250 members, was recognized by the Ufa Conference. But in the meantime the Komuch lost its claim to be the legal government of all Russia. In its place a five-man Directory was set up as the executive arm of the Provisional All-Russian Government based in Omsk. It was an alliance of two SRs (Avksentiev and Zenzinov), two Siberian liberals (Vologodsky and Vinogradov) and General Boldyrev, close to the SRs, who also acted as the Commander-in-Chief. Although the SRs thus had a nominal majority in the new government, they were the real losers. In the fragmented politics of the civil war it would be a Sisyphean task to raise the quorum needed to restore the Constituent Assembly. To all intents and purposes, their citadel of liberty was in ruins.

  The Directory was a pale reflection of the French revolutionary government after which it was named. This wa
s a government only on paper. It had no proper structure or means of financing itself. Until near the end of its eight weeks in power, it was accommodated in a railway carriage in a siding a few miles from Omsk, hardly a prestigious 'capital' for what claimed to be the only legal government of Russia. Avksentiev, its chairman, was a dilettante who played at politics. He 'surrounded himself with aides-de-camp, brought back the old titles', and, according to one contemporary, 'created a buffoon sort of pomp behind which there was nothing of any real substance'. It was a throwback to the last days of Kerensky. This Directory had even less authority than the Provisional Government. It did not even command the confidence of the factions it represented. Both the SRs and the Rightist circles plotted against it from the start. Each thought the alliance gave too much power to the other side. Omsk

  was full of intrigues and rumours of a coup. 'Mexico amidst the snow and ice', was how Boldyrev described it.39

  The Rightist officers struck first. On 17 November a Cossack detachment broke into a meeting of the SRs in Omsk and arrested several of their leaders, including the two Directors, Avksentiev and Zenzinov. They were accused of plotting the overthrow of the Directory. It is true that the Chernov group had plotted against it from the start. But so too had the Rightists, and they now used the SR plot as a pretext for their own coup d'etat. The next morning the Directory's Council of Ministers gave its blessing to the coup and invited Admiral Kolchak to become the Supreme Ruler. There were hardly any forces prepared to defend the Directory. The Czechs had lost the will to fight since the declaration of Czech independence on 28 October. All they wanted was to go home. As for the People's Army, it was in a state of advanced decay.

  For the next fourteen months Alexander Kolchak was the paramount leader of the counter-revolution, along with Denikin. It is somehow fitting that an admiral without a fleet should have been the leader of a government based in a town 4,000 miles from the nearest port; for Kolchak was one of history's misfits. Small but imposing with dark piercing eyes, he was an oddity, a mining engineer and an Arctic explorer in a tsarist Naval Staff dominated by the landed nobility. In 1916, when he was appointed Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Kolchak, at only forty-one, was young enough to be the son of most of the other field commanders. In 1917 he refused to go along with the fleet committees and, in a dramatic resignation which made his name politically, broke his sword and threw it overboard. General Budberg described Kolchak as a 'big sick child':