Yet there were still some Bolsheviks who were not even prepared to concede this. It was ironic that the foremost among these were two Georgians, Ordzhonikidze and Stalin, whose own Bolshevism had become mixed in a complex way with a sort of Great Russian chauvinism. The conflict rumbled on beneath the surface until 1922, when it suddenly erupted on to the Moscow scene. But that is the story of Lenin's last struggle.
* * * Brusilov rejoiced in the reformation of the Russian Empire, albeit under the Red Star rather than the Cross. It reconciled him to his own decision to join the Reds and ensured his continued support for them after the war with Poland, when they turned their attention to the Whites in the Crimea. Brusilov was furious with Wrangel for attacking Russia during the war against Poland. It showed, in his view, that the Whites were prepared to betray Russia for their own narrow political ends. Patriotism was Brusilov's main motive for siding with the Reds against these last guardians of the Old Russia. It must have aroused curious emotions; for Brusilov was helping to destroy his own class.
It was fitting that the Whites should make their last stand on the picturesque Crimean peninsula. This Russian riviera, with its palms and cypresses, its vineyards and mountains, had been the playground of the aristocracy, whose summer palaces lined its southern coast. In their noble minds the Crimea was a place of childhood summers, a symbol of the good life in Old Russia, where it was thought the sun would never set. Now, in the summer of 1920, it was the last bit of Russian soil that had not been taken by the Reds. It was the last resort of fallen dukes and generals, of provincial governors and bishops, of landowners without estates, of industrialists without factories, of state officials without appointments, of lawyers without jobs and of actresses without a stage. The bourgeoisie had nowhere else to run to.
At the head of this forlorn cause stood Baron Peter Wrangel, a six-foot scion of the old military aristocracy, who had risen through the elite Imperial Guards. Unlike the 'army man' Denikin, Wrangel was well aware of the need to fight the civil war by political as well as military means. 'It is not by a
triumphal march from the Crimea to Moscow that Russia can be freed,' he told his first press conference in April, 'but by the creation — on no matter how small a fragment of Russian soil — of such a Government with such conditions of life that the Russian people now groaning under the Red yoke will inevitably submit to its attractions.' The Whites, Wrangel realized, could never come to power as long as they were seen to be fighting for the restoration of the old regime. They had to pledge their support for radical reforms capable of winning the support of the peasantry, the workers and the national minorities. Wrangel called it 'making leftist policies with rightist hands'."
This was not just an opportunistic response to the weak military position which Wrangel had inherited. It stemmed from a genuine realization that the defeat of Denikin's regime had been brought about as much by its own outdated bureaucratic methods and failure to adapt to the new revolutionary situation as by its military difficulties. But the aim was contradictory: the rightist hands in Wrangel's regime would never make genuine leftist policies and pretending that they would was, in Miliukov's phrase, 'a clumsy attempt to cheat the world with liberal catchwords'. The government and military circles in Sevastopol were filled with figures from the old regime. Krivoshein, the last tsarist Minister of Agriculture, was placed in charge of the interior. His police carried out a massive witch-hunt against suspected 'Bolsheviks', which meant anyone who opposed the regime. Hundreds of liberal journalists and politicians were arrested, while the zemstvo organs were harassed as 'hotbeds of Bolshevik activity'. One zemstvo official complained to Krivoshein — only to be told that 'all the leftists were the same', whether they were Bolsheviks or liberals. Krivo-shein's police force was filled with officials from the old regime who used their positions to reap a savage revenge against the peasantry for 1917, or else make themselves rich through bribes and requisitions. The proximity of the Front, which meant that most of the Crimea was placed under the jurisdiction of military field courts, served as a pretext for this White Terror. Thousands of ordinary peasants and workers were imprisoned, and hundreds shot, as suspected 'spies'. Terror by the soldiers — mainly in the form of looting and pogroms — was a major problem, souring relations with the local population, not least because the White officers tolerated and sometimes even encouraged such actions in order to secure the loyalty of their men. After three years of fighting in the field, the White, or Russian Army, as it was now called, had developed a strong caste spirit. Many of the officers saw themselves as an occupying army in a foreign land, and acted with impunity towards the Crimean population. Rather than acting as a model government to promote the White cause in the rest of Russia, Wrangel's 'rightist hands' did more to advance the Red cause in the Crimea.100
As with Denikin, the land issue was crucial here. Wrangel recognized
the need to pass a land reform capable of winning peasant support. 'The question had to be settled for an important psychological reason: we had to tear the enemy's principal weapon of propaganda from him,' the Baron recalled in his memoirs. 'We had to allay the peasants' suspicion that our object in fighting the Reds was no other than to restore the rights of the great landed proprietors and to take reprisals against those who had infringed these rights.' But the committee which Wrangel appointed to draw up the land reform was dominated by such landed interests. The result was a Land Law, passed on 25 May, that still fell far short of the peasant demands. Its basic aim was to create a class of peasant proprietors by giving them a small plot of land as private property. It was another 'wager on the strong'. Like Stolypin's land reforms, it was to be linked to the establishment of a volost-level zemstvo in which the peasants would be dominant. But the law was full of complex regulations which would have taken years to implement; and there were far too many bureaucratic loopholes which allowed the squires to hold on to their land. The district zemstvos, for example, which set the amount of land to be transferred to the peasants, would still be dominated by them. There was also the problem of compensation: the peasants were to pay for the gentry's land by giving them one-fifth of its harvest (in the three-field system this was equivalent to 30 per cent of the annual harvest). After the revolution and the civil war, when the peasant farms had been severely weakened, this would have been a heavy burden, and would have kept the peasant farmers economically dependent on the squires for perhaps a generation — and that had probably been its aim.101
Wrangel's Land Law was a paternalist solution to the peasant question, not a revolutionary one. In the nineteenth century it would have been considered progressive; but after 1917 it was reactionary. It proved that Wrangel's regime was just as caught up as Denikin's in the bureaucratic methods of the past. Nothing better symbolized this than the decision to sell the Land Law for 100 roubles in booklet form (it was assumed that if the peasants had to pay for it, they would value the law more). Compared with the Bolsheviks' simple land decree, which they publicized in millions of leaflets and gave away free to the peasantry, it betrayed a dismal failure to comprehend the propaganda purpose of such laws. Wrangel's regime, like Denikin's, failed to understand that to win the civil war it had to adopt revolutionary methods.102
The price the Whites paid was widespread peasant indifference to their cause and, in the districts nearest the Front, where the burden of food and transport requisitioning was at its heaviest, even outright hostility. It meant they could never recruit enough troops to break out from their Crimean base. Even the wealthy farmers of the Tauride region, the first area the Whites would have to cross on entering the mainland, looked upon us', in the words of one of their officers, 'as an army of old Olympians, titled generals and their cronies,
puffed up with pride and arrogance'. The problem was made all the more acute by the fact that the Cossacks, the mainstay of the Whites, were showing growing signs of disaffection, looting the villages and demanding to return to their homelands. According to one officer, the Don A
rmy had become no more than 'a mob of people, who thought only of their own salvation and material welfare, but certainly not of a struggle with the Reds'. The left wing of the Don Krug, now dominated by younger Cossacks from the front-line units, was actively campaigning for a break with the 'reactionary' Wrangel and for peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks, in the naive hope of securing from them a promise of autonomy for the Don.103
To begin with, Wrangel had rejected the idea of an offensive. The British refused to support one and he himself preferred to build up his base on the peninsula. But with the Polish attack on Russia, Wrangel saw his chance. On 6 June he landed troops by boat on the coast of the Azov Sea and during the next few days pushed more land troops north into the Tauride region. This established a bridgehead on the mainland, doubling the size of Wrangel's territory, and gaining in the Tauride a much-needed source of agricultural produce for the swollen population of the Crimea. During August and September Wrangel tried to push north, into the Don and the Kuban. But his forces, hastily conscripted from the Tauride peasants, soon fell apart (it was harvest time) and the Cossacks had to spend most of their energies chasing deserters. By October, with the Polish war completed, the Reds were ready to concentrate on Wrangel. On the 20th they launched their counter-offensive: it took six days for the 130,000 Reds to force the 35,000 Whites back into the Crimea. Makhno's partisans did most of the fighting and took the brunt of the heavy losses on the Red side — for which Trotsky then rewarded them with an order for their capture and execution.104
The Whites held off the Red advance into the Crimea, building fortifications at the Perekop Isthmus, whilst preparing to evacuate. No one had any illusions about their ability to hold out for long and virtually everyone who had any connections with the White movement wanted to get on board the Allied ships. There was a mad rush to buy foreign currency: on 28 October 600,000 roubles would buy £1 in Sevastopol; by I November the rate had risen to one million roubles; and by the 10th, when the embarkation began, to four or even five million. Given the huge numbers of people involved, the evacuation was a model of good planning. There was none of the panic and disorder that had accompanied the evacuation of Denikin's forces from the Kuban in March. The troops retreated in good order, holding off the Reds for long enough for nearly 150,000 refugees to board a fleet of 126 British, French and Russian ships that took them to Constantinople. Wrangel was among the last to embark
on 14 November. His ship was suitably called the General Kornilov: the man who had started the White movement took its last leader into exile.105
For Brusilov the defeat of the Whites had a tragic end. Shortly before the evacuation he had been approached by Skliansky, Trotsky's Deputy Commissar for Military Affairs, who claimed that a large number of Wrangel's officers did not want to leave Russia and might be persuaded to defect to the Reds if Brusilov put his name to a declaration offering them an amnesty. Skliansky offered him the command of a new Crimean Army formed from the remnants of Wrangel's forces. Brusilov was attracted by the idea of a purely Russian army made up of patriotic officers. It would enable him to Russify the elite of the Red Army, as he had always set out to do, and possibly to save the lives of many officers. He agreed to Skliansky's proposal and prepared, despite his injured leg, to depart for the Crimea. Three days later he was told the plans had been cancelled: Wrangel's officers, Skliansky told him, had not proved willing to defect after all. Brusilov later found out that this was not true. During the final evacuation at Sevastopol the Reds had distributed — dropping by aeroplane in fact — thousands of leaflets offering an amnesty in Brusilov's name. Hundreds of officers had believed it and stayed behind to surrender to the Reds. All of them were shot.
Five years later Brusilov still found it hard to live with his conscience. In 1925 he wrote in his (as yet unpublished) memoirs:
God and Russia may judge me. The truth I do not know — can I blame myself for this atrocity, if it in fact happened? I have never discovered if it really happened as it was related to me: how true is the story? I only know that this was the first time in my life that I had ever met such fanatical evil and trickery and that I fell into such an unbearably depressed state that, to tell the truth, whoever found themselves in it would find it incomparably easier simply to be shot.
If I was not myself a deeply religious person, I could have simply killed myself. But my belief that every individual is responsible for the consequences of his voluntary and involuntary sins forbad me from doing that. In the revolutionary storm, in the mad chaos, I could not always act logically, foreseeing all the twists of fate: it is possible that I made many mistakes, that I will admit. But I can say with a clear conscience, before God Himself, that I never thought of my own interests, or my own safety, but thought only of my Fatherland.106
Nine months later the old General died.
15 Defeat in Victory i Short-cuts to Communism
After his adventures in the civil war Dmitry Os'kin took over the command of the Second Labour Army in February 1920. Formed from the surplus troops of the Second Red Army after Denikin's defeat, it was set the task of restoring the devastated railways on the Southern Front. Instead of rifles the soldiers carried spades. 'There was a general feeling of anti-climax not to be involved in the fighting any more,' Os'kin later wrote. 'It was a dull life in the railway sidings.' The only compensation for the commissar was the knowledge that the work was essential for the restoration of the economy after the ravages of the revolution and the civil war. The southern railways carried vital supplies of grain and oil to the industrial cities of the north. During the civil war some 3,000 miles of track had been destroyed. There were huge cemeteries of broken-down engines. Travelling from Balashov to Voronezh, Os'kin noted the general ruination: 'The stations were dead, trains rarely passed through, at night there was no lighting, only a candle in the telegraph office. Buildings were half-destroyed, windows broken, everywhere the dirt and rubbish was piled high.' It was a symbol of Russia's devastation. Os'kin's soldiers cleared up the mess, and rebuilt tracks and bridges. Military engineers repaired the trains. By the summer the railways began to function again and the operation was declared a great success. There was talk of using the troops to run other sectors of the economy.1 Trotsky was the champion of militarization. On his orders the First Labour Army had been organized from the remnants of the Third Red Army in January 1920. After the defeat of Kolchak, the soldiers had been kept in their battle units and deployed on the 'economic front' — procuring food, felling timber and manufacturing simple goods, as well as repairing the railways. The plan was in part pragmatic. The Bolsheviks were afraid to demobilize the army in the midst of the economic crisis. If millions of unemployed soldiers were allowed to congregate in the cities, or join the ranks of the disenchanted peasants, there could be a nationwide revolt (as there was in 1921). Moreover, it was clear that drastic measures were needed to restore the railways, which Trotsky, for one, saw as the key to the country's recovery after the devastations of the civil war. In January 1920 he became the Commissar for Transport: it was
the first post he had actually requested. Apart from their chronic disrepair, the railways were dogged by corrupt officials, who were like a broken dam to the flood of bagmen who brought such chaos to the system. Petty localism also paralysed the railways. Every separate branch line formed its own committee and there were dozens of district rail authorities competing with each other for scarce rolling stock. Rather than lose 'their' locomotives to the neighbouring authority they would uncouple them before the train left their jurisdiction, so trains would be held up for hours, sometimes even days, while new locomotives were brought up from the depot of the next authority. Despite the best efforts of the railway staff, it took a whole week for one of Trotsky's senior officials to travel the 300 miles from Odessa to Kromenchug.2
But at the heart of Trotsky's plans there was also a broader vision of the whole of society being run on military lines. Like many Bolsheviks in 1920, Trotsky envisaged the stat
e as the commander of society — mobilizing its resources in accordance with the Plan — just as a General Staff commanded the army. He wanted the economy to be run with military-style discipline and precision. The whole population was to be conscripted into labour regiments and brigades and despatched like soldiers to carry out production orders (couched in terms of 'battles' and 'campaigns') on the economic front. Here was the prototype of the Stalinist command economy. Both were driven by the notion that in a backward peasant country such as Russia state coercion could be used to provide a short-cut to Communism, thus eliminating the need for a long NEP-type stage of capital accumulation through the market. Both were based on the bureaucratic fantasy of imposing Communism by decree (although in each case the result was more akin to feudalism than anything to be found in Marx). As the Mensheviks had once warned, it was impossible to complete the transition towards a socialist economy by using the methods that had been used to build the pyramids.
After its triumphs in the civil war it was no doubt tempting for the Bolsheviks to view the Red Army as a model for the organization of the rest of society. Po voennomy — 'in the army way' — became synonymous with efficiency in the Bolshevik lexicology. If military methods had defeated the Whites, why could they not be used to construct socialism? All that had to be done was to turn around the army so that it marched on the economic front, so every worker became a foot soldier of the planned economy. Trotsky had always argued that factories should be run on military lines.* Now, in the spring of 1920, he outlined this brave new world of Communist labour, where the 'headquarters' of the planned economy would 'send out orders to the labour front' and 'every
* The same idea was expressed at this same time by Gastev and the other pioneers of the Taylor movement in Soviet Russia (see pages 744—5).
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 Page 111
