The Penguin History of Modern Russia

the Reds.³¹ This was not defeatism but a temporary ploy. His thoughts were still directed at the ‘European socialist revolution’. A rising of far-left German socialists, the Spartakists, occurred in Berlin in January 1919; it was suppressed, but successful insurrections took place in March in Munich and Budapest. In the same month Lenin summoned communist and other far-left parties from around the world to the First Congress of the Communist International (or Comintern) in Moscow.

Kolchak was defeated by the Reds in April 1919. Perm was back in their hands in July, Omsk in November. Kolchak himself was captured and executed in the following year. The Volunteer Army in southern Russia which had been founded by the anti-Bolshevik Generals Alekseev and Kornilov was taken over by General Denikin, who moved his forces into Ukraine in summer. Denikin seized Kharkov in late June and Kiev and Odessa in August. Orel, only 350 kilometres from the capital, fell to him in mid-October. His strategy was expressed in a Moscow Directive ordering a rapid advance into central Russia. Yet the Red Army had been able to regroup after seeing off Kolchak. A devastating counter-attack against the Whites was organized which, by mid-December, resulted in the capture of Kiev and the re-establishment of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Luck was again on the side of the Reds; for it was only in October that General Yudenich had crossed the Estonian frontier in the direction of Petrograd. There was no co-ordination between him and Denikin. By the middle of November, Yudenich’s army was retreating in tatters to Estonia. The Civil War in Russia, including Siberia, and Ukraine had been won by the Reds.

This outcome of the war between the Reds and the Whites determined the result of most of the many armed conflicts elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. In the Transcaucasus, the Georgians contended against the Armenians; the Armenians also fought the Azeris. And each state in the region had internal strife. For example, battles and massacres occurred in Georgia between Georgians and Abkhazians.³² Consequently the armed struggle in the lands of the Romanov dynasty was never merely a ‘Russian’ Civil War. Indeed it was not just one Civil War at all: there were dozens of civil wars after 1917, wars in which the Red Army was able to intervene after its defeat of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich.

The communists aimed to make their task easier by offering various concessions to non-Russians. This policy had already been implemented in the RSFSR itself. Lenin established a People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), headed by Stalin, to realize the official commitment to native-language schools and to cultural autonomy. Stalin and his subordinates did not merely allow non-Russians to exercise their freedom: they actively propelled them in this direction. Politically-compliant representatives of these nationalities were introduced to Narkomnats. Propaganda was prepared in each of their languages. Enquiries were put in hand to ascertain the boundaries of the territories inhabited mainly by these nationalities.³³ The Russian Communist Party bent over backwards to appease non-Russians — and towards the end of the Civil War the Russian Cossacks in the North Caucasus were ejected from their farms in favour of the local Chechens, whose land had been seized by the tsars and given to the Cossacks in the nineteenth century.

Both Lenin and Stalin, moreover, committed themselves to introducing a federal mode of rule once the Civil War had ended. From 1918, as proof of their intent, they started to set up internal ‘autonomous’ republics in the RSFSR wherever the Russians constituted a minority of the population. The first plan to set up a Tatar-Bashkir Republic within the RSFSR collapsed in some measure because Tatars and Bashkirs refused to collaborate with each other. There were also difficulties because ethnic Russians, too, lived among them, and the major towns had a Russian majority: not all Russians, by any means, felt that non-Russians should receive such apparent indulgence. Representations were made to Moscow that Russians were being done down. But the communists persisted and founded both a Tatar Republic and a Bashkir Republic.³⁴ As Soviet-occupied territory was expanded, so the number of autonomous republics rose.

Certain outlying regions had experienced years of independent statehood in the course of the Civil War, a statehood that in most cases was unprecedented for them. It would therefore have been difficult to incorporate them without further ado into the RSFSR. Ukrainians in particular did not take kindly to their resubjugation to Russian rule. Consequently Ukraine, once reoccupied by the Red Army, was proclaimed as a Soviet republic in its own right. This device was repeated elsewhere. By the time of the completed conquest of the Transcaucasus in March 1921, Soviet republics had been founded also in Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. And the RSFSR had bilateral relations with each of them.

This had much cartographic importance. In January 1918, when the creation of the RSFSR had been announced, the assumption had been that each piece of land conquered by Soviet forces would be incorporated in the RSFSR through a federal arrangement of some kind. But the pressing need of the Bolsheviks to win support in the non-Russian borderlands had led to the creation of several Soviet republics. The RSFSR was easily the largest, the most powerful and the most prestigious; but formally it was only one Soviet republic among all the others. Quite what constitutional settlement there would be at the end of the Civil War had not yet been decided. But one thing had been resolved: namely that there was a place called ‘Russia’ which would occupy a defined territory on the map, a territory which was considerably smaller than the former Russian Empire. The RSFSR was the state that governed this Russia and the vast majority of its population consisted of Russians.

Yet a distinct ethnically-based sense of Russian statehood could not develop. For the boundaries of the RSFSR were not set exclusively by considerations of national and ethnic geography. In particular, there was no Soviet republic in central Asia on the model of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Instead the lands of the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Tajiks and Uzbeks belonged to ‘the Turkestani Region’ and were included in the RSFSR. A so-called ‘Kirgiz (Kazakh) Republic’ was at last established in 1920, but only as an autonomous republic within the RSFSR.³⁵

At any rate, the fundamental reality was that the entire RSFSR was subjected to highly centralized authority and that both the RSFSR and all other Soviet republics were ruled by the Politburo. This was done in several ways. The most effective was the stipulation in the Party Rules drawn up in March 1919 that the communist organizations in the various Soviet republics were to be regarded merely as regional organizations of the Russian Communist Party.³⁶ Thus the central party bodies of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks in Kiev were strictly subordinated to the Central Committee in Moscow. Party centralism was to prevail. Lenin and his colleagues also drew up a confidential instruction to republican governments to the effect that republican people’s commissariats were to act as mere regional branches of Sovnarkom.³⁷ In addition, the new Soviet republics on the RSFSR’s borders were disallowed from having ties with any other republic except the RSFSR.³⁸ The aim was not to reinforce the RSFSR but to consolidate the Politburo’s capacity to control all the republics, including the RSFSR, from Moscow.

Yet enough concessions were being made to the sensitivities of non-Russians to make the Civil War easier for the Reds than for the Whites in the non-Russian regions. Jews in particular were terrified by the anti-Semitic mayhem perpetrated by the Whites.³⁹ Yet the advantage held by the Reds was helpful without being decisive. Invading troops misbehaved in all the armies. The Reds frequently committed butchery against religious leaders. Twenty-eight bishops and thousands of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were killed; and the other Christian sects as well as Islam and Judaism were also subjected to a campaign of terror. Lenin’s policy was to introduce atheism by persuasion; but he, too, instigated the mass murder of clerics.⁴⁰ For most people, religious belief was entwined with their national or ethnic identity. The rampaging of the Red Army — and especially its cavalrymen — undid much of the good done for Sovnarkom’s cause by the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities.

Nevertheless the Whites had lost. The dispirited Denikin, as he retreated to Crimea, resigned his command to General Vrangel; Yudenich and his forces faded into inactivity. The Whites were in a hopeless position. Vrangel belatedly appreciated the damage done to their campaigns by their refusal to leave the peasants with the land taken by them since the October Revolution. Kolchak had given farms to landlords at the peasantry’s expense even in places where the landlords had not owned estates.⁴¹ By announcing their faith in ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, the Whites alienated those non-Russian nationalities who recognized the slogan as thinly disguised Russian imperialism. By hanging trade unionists, they made workers think twice before turning against the Russian Communist Party.

Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich had rested their hopes in a military knock-out blow, and refused to fight a ‘political’ war. They were contemptuous of the Kadets who organized the civilian administration for them.⁴² Lip service was given by the White commanders to the ultimate goal of re-convoking a representative assembly of some kind; but their officers were hostile to this: their fundamental aim was a right- wing military dictatorship. Kolchak and Denikin came within striking range of Moscow; Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss their calculations out of hand. But they had the odds