A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924
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He is undoubtedly neurotic, quick to lose his temper, and very stormy . . . He is a pure idealist, slavishly devoted to his sense of duty and the idea of serving Russia, of saving her from Red oppression .. . Thanks to this idea he can be made to do anything. He has no personal interests, no amour propre, and in this respect is crystal pure . . . He has no idea of the hard realities of life, and lives by illusions and received ideas. He has no plans of his own, no system, no will: he is like soft wax from which his advisers and intimates can fashion whatever they like.40
All these characteristics were reflected in Kolchak's behaviour during the overthrow of the Directory. He was a passive — almost accidental — figure in the coup. He merely happened to be in the right place at the right time, giving the conspirators a figurehead. At the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power Kolchak was on a military mission to the United States. After a year in Manchuria he made his way back to Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway,
reaching Omsk in mid-October, where Boldyrev persuaded him to become the Minister of War. There is no evidence to suggest that Kolchak played a direct role in the overthrow of the Directory, although historians to this day still refer to it as 'Kolchak's coup'. From what we now know of this murky episode, it seems that the Rightists in Omsk engineered the coup without Kolchak's knowledge to force him into taking power. Earlier that day several Rightist officers had pleaded with him to become dictator. Kolchak was hardly averse to the idea of dictatorship: his trips to the Front had convinced him of the 'complete lack of support for the Directory'. Nor was he unaware of the general plans for a coup d'etat: the salons and barracks of Omsk were full of talk about the need for an iron fist; they even talked about it in the offices of the Directory. Kolchak's close ally, General Knox, head of the British military mission in Siberia, also supported a dictatorship.* At first, on 17 November, the Admiral refused to take power: Boldyrev, he said, was the head of the army; and it was not clear if he could win the support of the Siberians and the Allies. But once the officers had taken power for him, Kolchak changed his mind. It seemed to him on the morning of the 18th that some dictator had to fill the vacuum if street violence was to be avoided. At the Council of Ministers he suggested Boldyrev for this role, but Boldyrev was absent and the ministers, in any case, preferred the Admiral to the 'socialist' Boldyrev. Urged by Knox to do his duty, Kolchak agreed and accepted the title of Supreme Ruler.41
* * * This was the end of the Right SRs and their 'democratic counter-revolution', as Ivan Maisky called it. Kolchak had the SR leaders imprisoned and then escorted to the Chinese border, where they were deported. Some of them made it back to Western Europe, where they lived a life of comfortable but regretful exile. Others returned to Russia, where they continued to organize themselves underground, adopting a stance of equal hostility to Reds and Whites. For several weeks after the coup, Kolchak's police carried out a series of bloody reprisals against SR activists. Hundreds were arrested — many as 'hostages' to be executed in the event of SR acts of terror against the dictatorship. Among the hostages in Omsk were twenty SR deputies of the Constituent Assembly, ten of whom were shot in December following a workers' uprising in the town. Kolchak, meanwhile, defined his regime's purpose in strictly military terms. Like Denikin, he was a narrow soldier: politics were beyond him. Apart from the overthrow of Bolshevism and the 'salvation of Russia' he had no real idea of what he was fighting for. He made some vague pronouncements about
* It is doubtful, however, whether Knox played any part in the preparations for the coup. This was the mischievous contention of the French at the time — that Kolchak had been installed by the British as 'their man' in order to build up their influence in Siberia.
the restoration of law and order and the Constituent Assembly, although, judging by his own views, this last was clearly not to be restored in the democratic form of 1917.* But otherwise all politics were to be abolished in the interests of the military campaign. Denikin was to make the same mistake. Politics were themselves a crucial determinant of the military conflict. Without policies to mobilize or at least to neutralize the local population, his army was almost bound to fail. Moreover, by failing to make his own policies clear, Kolchak allowed others to present them for him: both from the propaganda of the Reds and from the conduct of his own Rightist officers, the population of eastern Russia gained the fatal impression that Kolchak's movement aimed to restore the monarchy.
The middle ground between the Reds and the Whites was thus eroded and eventually disappeared. The whole of the country was now engulfed in the civil war. There was no place in it for the fragile democracy whose roots had been laid down in 1917. Russia was too polarized, and the mass of its people too poorly educated, to sustain democratic institutions against enemies on both extremes. The anti-Bolshevik movement would not reassume a democratic form until the autumn of 1920, by which time it was too late to unseat the new autocracy. The tragedy of the Russian Revolution was that the people were too weak politically to determine its outcome.
* As Kolchak later acknowledged at his interrogation in 1920: 'The general opinion . . . was that only a government authorized by the Constituent Assembly could be a real one; but the Constituent Assembly which we got. . . and which from the very beginning started in by singing the "Internationale" under Chernov's leadership, provoked an unfriendly attitude ... It was considered to have been an artificial and a partisan assembly. Such was also my opinion. I believed that even though the Bolsheviks had few worthy traits, by dispersing the Constituent Assembly they performed a service and this act should be counted to their credit.' (Varneck and Fisher (ed.), Testimony, 106-7.)
13 The Revolution Goes to War
i Arming the Revolution
It was five years since Dmitry Os'kin had last been in Tula. Then, in 1913, he had been a simple peasant boy fresh from the countryside to sign up as a soldier of the Tsar. Now, in the spring of 1918, he was returning to the same town, a commissar in Trotsky's army, to put steel into the revolution.
The years of war and revolution had been kind to Os'kin. He had risen through the ranks, winning four St George's Crosses on the way, as the old caste of officers was destroyed. During 1917 his fortunes rose as his politics moved to the Left: he rode on the tide of the soldiers' revolution. His SR credentials won him command of a regiment, followed by election to the Central Committee of the Soldiers' Soviet on the South-Western Front. In October he went as an SR delegate to the Second Soviet Congress — one of that grey mass' of unwashed soldiers in the Smolny Hall whom Sukhanov had blamed for the Bolshevik triumph. In early 1918, when Trotsky began to build the officer corps of the new Red Army, he turned first to the NCOs, like Os'kin, who had learned their trade in the tsarist army. It was a marriage of convenience between the ambitions of the peasant sons and the military needs of the regime. As Napoleon had once said, every soldier carried in his knapsack the baton of a field-marshal: that was the making of an armee revolutionnaire.
One hundred miles south of Moscow, Tula was the arsenal of the revolution. After the evacuation of Petrograd it became the hub of the Soviet Republic's munitions industry. At the height of the First World War its factories employed over 60,000 workers, although by the time of Os'kin's arrival, with the general flight to the countryside, only 15,000 were left. The new military commissar took up his office in the Soviet building, housed in the former Peasant Bank, which, as if to symbolize the new social order, was surrounded by metal factories.1
The local Red Guards, which Os'kin had come to reorganize, had been mostly set up by the workers during 1917 to defend their factories against the threat of a 'counter-revolution'. After the Bolshevik seizure of power there had been a great deal of talk about using them to form a new type of 'proletarian army' rather than retaining the remnants of the old (and mainly peasant) one.
The Bolsheviks did not like the idea of a standing army. They thought of the army as a tool of oppression wielded by the old regime against the revolution. A workers' mil
itia would be more egalitarian, and the Red Guards were to be the basis of such a force. They made up the units of the new Red Army, whose establishment was decreed on 15 January. Apart from their ideological objections to the idea of a standing army, the Bolsheviks also had practical reasons for favouring the volunteer principle at this stage: the disintegration of the old army and the complete absence of any apparatus to carry out conscription left them no choice. The only real troops they could rely on were the three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, which stood alone between them and disaster during the first months of their regime.
At this time, when the workers were fleeing the cities, the new Red recruits were largely made up of unemployed former soldiers, and all those 'vagabond, unstable elements that', in Trotsky's words, 'were so numerous at the time'. Some of them had no doubt come to like the army way of life, or at least preferred it to post-war civilian hardships. But most of them had nowhere else to go — the war left them without home or family. They were stranded in towns like Tula, half-way between the Front and their long-abandoned homes. Many of these migrants signed up with the Red Guards simply to receive a standard-issue coat, or a pair of boots, before running off to sell them and start the whole process over again in some other town. The new Proletarian Militia was a rag-and-bone trade for the down and out.2
Naturally, such an army was virtually useless on the battlefield. The image of the Red Guards as disciplined crack troops is the stuff of Soviet mythology. The Red Guards were irregular detachments, motley-clothed and armed, poorly disciplined and very heavy-drinking. The 'committee spirit' of 1917 lived on in their ranks. Officers were elected and their primitive operational plans were usually voted on by a show of soldiers' hands. The military consequences were disastrous. Attacks were launched without proper scouting, often using no more than a school atlas. The soldiers fought in a wild and undisciplined manner, all too frequently breaking up in panic at the first sight of the enemy. Crushing defeats by the Germans in February and March, followed by the Czechs in May and June, made it clear to Trotsky that such methods would not do. With the Soviet regime on the brink of defeat, the Red Army would have to be reformed on the model of the old imperial army, with regular units replacing the detachments, proper discipline in the ranks, professional officers and a centralized hierarchy of command. That reformation was to be Os'kin's task in Tula.
One of Trotsky's first measures was to call on the services of ex-tsarist officers. They were called 'military specialists' rather than officers to dissociate them from the old regime (for the same reason soldiers were now called 'Red
Army servicemen'). Some 8,000 ex-tsarist officers had volunteered to fight for the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power. The soldiers and their committees, for whom the revolution meant above all the ending of officers' authority, greeted them with much hostility. But the shortage of NCOs, as well as the so-called Red Commanders, whose training had only just begun, ensured that brute military needs won the day over revolutionary zeal. Now Trotsky sought to extend the principle with the mass conscription of the ex-tsarist officers, brushing aside the soldiers' objections by simply abolishing their committees. On 29 July he issued his famous Order Number 228, calling up all officers. By the end of the year, 22,000 ex-tsarist officers had been recruited; and in the course of the civil war the number rose to 75,000, not including doctors, vets and other officials. By the end, three-quarters of the senior commanders in the Red Army were drawn from the tsarist officer corps.3
What motivated these officers? Some, like Brusilov, who was to join the Red Army in 1920, were moved by a sense of patriotic duty: the country, for better or worse, had chosen the Reds, or so it seemed to them, and their duty was to serve it. Many were also driven by an inbred sense of military duty: these were 'army men' who would serve that institution regardless of its politics. Perhaps some junior officers were also attracted by the prospect of a more senior command in the new army than they might have expected in the old one. But the most common motivation was the simple need to find a job: it was survival, not self-advancement, which drew the officers to the Soviet cause. Most of them had lost their military pension, often their only means of livelihood, and were thus much worse off than the other ruined classes of Old Russia. Amidst the terror of 1918, moreover, they were well advised to make themselves useful to the regime. For as Trotsky was to put it in a memo to Lenin, by employing the ex-tsarist officers 'we shall lighten the load on the prisons'.* The officers who joined were closely supervised by the commissars, like Os'kin, and warned that any acts of betrayal of the Red Army would lead to the arrest of their families. 'Let the turncoats realize', read Trotsky's special order of 30 September, 'that they are at the same time betraying their own families — their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.'4
There was a storm of opposition to the recruitment of these officers. Many soldiers saw it as a return to the old military order, and as a betrayal of Order Number One. They particularly resented the reintroduction of pay differentials based on rank, of compulsory saluting, and of special badges and uniforms, not to speak of rations and privileges, for the officers. The party workers in the army saw it as a challenge to their power, while the NCOs and the Red
* At that time (October 1918) there were 8,000 officers sitting as 'hostages' in the Cheka prisons (Revvoensovet Respubliki, 36).
Commanders were jealous of the 'men with golden epaulettes' and feared that they might block their own promotion. Os'kin himself was in two minds about the tsarist officers. As a military man, he could see the desperate need for competent commanders. Military efficiency had to be placed before revolutionary equality. The antics of the Left SRs and the Anarchists in Tula — teenage fanatics of the militia principle — had caused enough chaos to convince him of the need for Bolshevik discipline and organization (he joined the party in July 1918). And yet, at the same time, as a peasant-NCO and a man of some ambition, he also resented the privileges of the ex-tsarists. Where he had earned his rank through courage under fire, most of them had gained theirs through birth and education. He felt that their attitudes were unchanged — 'their facial muscles winced whenever they were addressed by the soldiers as "comrade commander" ' — and feared this might lead them to revolt.'"'
The military setbacks of the summer were quickly blamed by Trotsky's critics on the ex-tsarist officers. The loss of Simbirsk to the Komuch in July had indeed been partly brought about by the mutiny of M. A. Murav'ev, a lieutenant-colonel in the tsarist army and the Left SR Commander of the Eastern Front. During the following months a concerted campaign was launched within the party against Trotsky's policies. Two articles in Pravda were the catalysts of this conflict. Sorin, a member of the Moscow Party Committee, accused Trotsky of vesting 'too much power' in the ex-tsarist officers, while unfairly making the commissars 'answer with their lives' when the soldiers refused to obey their orders. A commissar named Panteleev had indeed been shot on Trotsky's orders after his detachment had fled from the battle for Kazan. The case became a cause celebre for those determined to defend the independence of the party and its commissars against the commanders. Kamensky, a commissar in Voroshilov's army on the Southern Front, claimed in the other Pravda article that the ex-tsarist commanders acted like virtual 'autocrats', while the commissars were merely there to 'append a decorative signature' to their orders.6
Kliment Voroshilov, an Old Bolshevik and Red Guard commander, was the leading figure of this Military Opposition, as it soon came to be known. Based in Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov refused to carry out the orders of Trotsky's central command organ, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (RVSR) and its Commander on the Southern Front, the ex-tsarist General Sytin based at Kozlov. Stalin backed Voroshilov, although he always denied belonging to the-Military Opposition. This direct challenge to Trotsky's authority from such a senior party comrade was the origin of much of the personal animosity between Trotsky and Stalin in the years to come.
Trotsky turned t
he criticisms of his policies into a question of the party's general confidence in himself as Commissar for War. He demanded that the editors of Pravda be censured for publishing the articles by Sorin and
Kamensky. He also demanded Stalin's recall from the Southern Front, where the Georgian was shooting dozens of officials and creating havoc as a special commissar for food supply. This was a dangerous game for Trotsky to play. The sentiments of the Military Opposition, like those of the Left Communists, from which it had in part originated, were widely shared among the rank and file who had joined the party since 1917. As they saw it, the whole purpose of the revolution was to replace the old 'bourgeois specialists' with proletarians loyal to the party. Theirs was a communism of careerists — one that combined an egalitarian rejection of the old authorities with the demand that they, as Communists, should enjoy a similar position of power and privilege within the new regime. In their eyes, comradeship and class were the only necessary qualifications for military advancement. Battles would be won by the 'revolutionary spirit' of the comrades and their men, not by the outmoded science of the tsarist Military Academy.