The Penguin History of Modern Russia

international relations. Citizens were being made to feel that they had no inalienable rights. The state could grant favours, and it could just as easily take them away. Even local officialdom developed an uncooperative attitude towards Moscow. As the central political authorities kept on demanding ever greater effort from them, so administrators in the localities were learning to be furtive. They protected themselves in various ways. In particular, they gave jobs to friends and associates: clientalism was becoming a political habit. They also formed local groups of officials in various important institutions so that a locality could present a common front to the capital. They were not averse to misreporting local reality so as to acquire favour from the central political leadership.

Thus many of the elements of the later Soviet compound had already been put in place by Lenin’s Russian Communist Party. But not all of them. At least through to mid-1918 the republic was not yet a one-party, one- ideology state; and the chaos in all institutions as well as the breakdown in communications, transport and material supplies was a drastic impediment to a centralized system of power. The Soviet order was extremely disorderly for a great deal of the time.

Yet the movement towards a centralized, ideocratic dictatorship of a single party had been started. Neither Lenin nor his leading comrades had expressly intended this; they had few clearly-elaborated policies and were forever fumbling and improvising. Constantly they found international, political, economic, social and cultural difficulties to be less tractable than they had assumed. And constantly they dipped into their rag-bag of authoritarian concepts to work out measures to help them to survive in power. Yet their survival would surely have been impossible if they had not operated in a society so little capable of resisting them. The collapse of the urban sector of the economy; the breakdown of administration, transport and communication; the preoccupation of organizations, groups and individuals with local concerns; the widespread physical exhaustion after years of war; the divisions among the opposition: all such phenomena gave the Bolsheviks their chance — and the Bolsheviks had the guile and harshness to know how to seize it.

And they felt that their ruthless measures were being applied in the service of a supreme good. Bolsheviks in the capital and the provinces believed that the iniquities of the old regime in Russia and the world were about to be eliminated. The decrees of Sovnarkom were formulated to offer unparalleled hope to Russian workers and peasants, to non-Russians in the former Russian Empire, to the industrialized societies of Europe and North America, to the world’s colonial peoples. The Russian Communist Party had its supporters at home. Local revolutionary achievements were not negligible in urban and rural Russia. The party was inclined to believe that all obstacles in its path would soon be cast down. It surely would win any civil war. It would surely retake the borderlands. It would surely foster revolution abroad. The agenda of 1917 had not yet been proved unrealistic in the judgement of the Bolshevik leadership.

6 Civil Wars (1918–1921)

Civil war had been a recurrent theme in statements by Lenin and Trotski before the October Revolution. Whenever workers’ rights were being infringed, the Bolshevik leaders sang out that the bourgeoisie had started a civil war. What others might dub industrial conflict acquired a broader connotation. After 1917, too, Lenin and Trotski used class struggle and civil war as interchangeable terms, treating expropriations of factories and landed estates as part of the same great process as the military suppression of counter-revolution.

Increasingly the Bolshevik Central Committee used the term in a more conventional way to signify a series of battles between two sets of armies. Yet the military challenge was still expected by Sovnarkom to be easily surmountable; Lenin and his Central Committee, remembering the rapid defeat of the Kornilov mutiny, assumed that they would quickly win any serious conflict. One substantial campaign had been waged when Bolshevik-led forces invaded Ukraine in December 1917; but otherwise the tale had been of scrappy engagements since the October Revolution. A skirmish with a Cossack contingent in the Don region in late January 1918 resulted in a Soviet victory that was celebrated by Lenin over the next four months as marking the end of civil war.¹ The Bolsheviks began to build a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army from February; but their intention was not merely to fight internal armed enemies: Lenin wanted a vast force to be prepared in time to be sent to the aid of the anticipated uprising of the Berlin working class.²

As he discovered in May 1918, this assumption was erroneous. The Socialist-Revolutionary leadership fled to Samara on the river Volga to establish a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (or Komuch), which laid claim to be the legitimate government of Russia. A socialist Volga confronted socialist Moscow and Petrograd, and fighting could not permanently be forestalled. Komuch as yet had a weaker military capacity even than Sovnarkom. But this was not the case with other Russian opponents of the communists. Generals Alekseev and Kornilov had escaped to southern Russia where they were gathering a Volunteer Army for action against the Bolsheviks. In mid-Siberia a contingent of Imperial officers was being formed under Admiral Kolchak, who had commanded the Black Sea fleet. General Yudenich invited other volunteers to his banner in the north-west. The forces of Alekseev, Kornilov, Kolchak and Yudenich soon became known as the White armies.

The German forces remained the dominant military power in the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire, and were invited by Lenin to help the Bolsheviks in northern Russia (even though, ultimately, Sovnarkom’s declared eventual purpose was to overthrow Kaiser Wilhelm II).³ For the Brest-Litovsk Treaty angered the British into dispatching an expeditionary contingent to Archangel and Murmansk, purportedly to defend Allied military equipment on Russian soil. Other threats, too, were realized. The French landed a naval garrison in Odessa on the Black Sea. The Turks were on the move on the frontiers of the ‘Russian’ Transcaucasus. Japanese forces occupied territory in the Far East, and the American contingent was not far behind them. Russia had been reduced to a size roughly the same as medieval Muscovy. Seemingly it would not be long before a foreign power reached Moscow and overthrew the Bolsheviks.

In the capital the Bolshevik Central Committee members put on a brave face. The Left Socialist- Revolutionaries agitated against them, continuing to put the case against official communist policies. Even leading supporters of Lenin in the Brest-Litovsk controversy began to ask whether the treaty with the Central Powers had brought any benefit. G. Sokolnikov, who had signed the treaty on Lenin’s behalf, declared that it was not worth the paper it was printed on.⁴

The military situation of the Bolsheviks deteriorated in the same weeks. A legion of Czech and Slovak prisoners-of-war was being conveyed along the Trans-Siberian railway to the Far East for further shipment to Europe in compliance with an earlier agreement with the Allies. These troops intended to join the struggle against the Central Powers on the Western front. But there had always been distrust between the Czechoslovak Legion’s leaders and the Bolsheviks. Trotski, who became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs in March 1918, dealt with them abrasively. Then the Chelyabinsk Soviet unilaterally tried to disarm the units of the Legion as their train passed through the town.⁵ The Legion resisted this action, and travelled back to the Urals and the Volga to pick up the rest of its units. By the end of May it had reached Samara, crushing the Bolshevik local administrations on the way. Komuch persuaded it to forget about the Western front and join in the common effort to overthrow Sovnarkom.

In central Russia there was panic. Although there were only fifteen thousand Czechs and Slovaks, they might well prove more than a match for the nascent Red Army. Sovnarkom and the Cheka could not guarantee security even in Moscow. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee was planning an insurrection against Bolshevism. Its other tactic was to wreck the relationship between the Soviet and German governments by assassinating Count Mirbach, Germany’s ambassador to Moscow. Yakov Blyumkin, a Left Socialist-Revolutionary member of the Cheka, procured documents sanctioning a visit to the embassy. On 6 July he met Mirbach in the embassy and killed him.

Lenin, fearing that Berlin might rip up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, visited the embassy to express his condolences. Having carried out this distasteful errand, he instructed the Latvian Riflemen to arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Their preliminary duty was to liberate Dzierzynski from the hands of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries who had taken him hostage.⁶ The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic was clearly not yet a properly-functioning police state if this could happen to the Cheka’s chairman. The Latvians