stacked against them. The Reds always held an area with a hugely greater availability of conscripts and military equipment;43 they also were based at the heart of the country’s network of telegraph, railways and administration. The Reds had high morale and felt certain that they were making a new, better world and that science and social justice were on their side.
Indisputably, luck was with them. The Germans lost the Great War and stopped interfering in Russian affairs; the Allies donated money and guns to the Whites, but never seriously undertook the conquest of Russia themselves. The peoples of the West were in any event ill-disposed to fighting in eastern Europe once Germany had been defeated. Many Western socialists argued that the Bolshevik party should be given the chance to soften its dictatorial rule, and there were plenty of industrialists, especially in the United Kingdom, who wished to resume commercial links with Russia.44 In January 1920 the Supreme Allied Council lifted the economic blockade on the RSFSR. The Whites were left to fend for themselves.
The Bolsheviks had won, and felt that their ideas had helped them to this end. They had become comfortable with the one-party, one-ideology state as the basis of their power. They legalized and reinforced arbitrary rule and had no intention of holding free elections. Dictatorship and terror appealed to them as modes of solving problems. They were convinced that Bolshevism was the sole authentic form of socialism. This internal party consensus contained its own disagreements. A group known as the Democratic Centralists sprang up in 1919 and contended that too few officials were taking too many decisions at both central and local levels of the party, that the party was run inefficiently, that the central party bodies too rarely consulted opinion in the local committees. Another Bolshevik group, the Workers’ Opposition, emerged in 1920; its complaint was that the aspirations of the factory labourers were being flouted. Workers’ Oppositionist leader Alexander Shlyapnikov urged that power should be shared among the party, the soviets and the trade unions and that ordinary workers and peasants should have influence over decisions on economic affairs.
Neither the Democratic Centralists nor the Workers’ Opposition wished to stop the harassment of the other political parties or to end the requisitioning of grain. Their factional disagreements with the Central Committee took second place in their minds to the need for loyalty to the party. While they may have thought of themselves as the conscience of the Revolution, they, too, had given up part of the more idealistic heritage of 1917. At any rate their factions were numerically tiny: they could not hope to beat the Central Committee for votes at the yearly Party Congresses.
A military-style approach to party organization and to politics in general had become customary in the Civil War. Orders replaced consultation. Having served in the Red Army, most Bolshevik officials had acquired the habits of command. Another novelty was the ‘cleansing’ of the party. The Russian word for this,
The political leadership at central and local levels distrusted the various state institutions, and repeatedly called for ‘the most severe discipline’. In 1920 a Central Control Commission was established to eradicate abuses in the party. But the party was not the only institution presenting problems of control. The People’s Commissariats gave even greater cause of concern to the Kremlin leadership, and a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was established in the same year to investigate the reliability and efficiency of the various civilian state bodies in their day-to-day work.
Of all bodies, it was the party that underwent the largest change. Yet the habit of criticizing the leadership remained; and, while the official who counted for most in local party committees was the committee secretary,45 discussion with other committee members was still the norm. Furthermore, the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat lacked the accurate, up-to-date information which would have enabled them to intervene with confidence in local disputes. The Red Army, too, was resistant at its lower levels to tight detailed control. Ill-discipline among soldiers was notorious. There are thought to have been a million deserters and conscription defaulters by the end of 1919.46 Indisputably the Soviet state as a whole increased its internal co-ordination in the Civil War; but chaos remained in all institutions. And the proliferation of bodies such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate had the effect of enlarging the bureaucracy without increasing its efficiency.
This sprawling state ruled a disgruntled society, and there was much to give rise to resentment. The food rations were poor. Disease and malnutrition killed eight million people in 1918–20.47 Political parties other than the Bolsheviks were persecuted or suppressed. ‘Barrier detachments’ were arresting persons carrying food for the black market.48 The workers were angry about such conditions and called for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly of political power. Strikes took place in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula and elsewhere during the Civil War; they became especially intense once the danger from the Whites had been eliminated. The women, girls, boys and residual skilled men in the Russian work-force had just enough energy left to make protest. Mutinies broke out in army garrisons, and by mid-1920 there were hints that the loyalty of the pro-Bolshevik sailors of the Kronstadt naval garrison might be fading.
Peasants clashed with the food-supplies commissars across the country. According to official figures, 344 rebellions are reported as having broken out by mid-1919.49 In 1920, severe trouble was reported from the Volga provinces, especially Tambov, from Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus. The villages were in revolt. They hated the conscription of their menfolk, the requisitioning of foodstuffs, the infringements of customary peasant law, the ban on private trade with the towns and the compulsion of households to supply free labour to the authorities for the felling of timber and the clearing of roads.50 The Bolshevik party assumed that the answer was to intensify repression. Industry and agriculture, too, were to be brought more firmly under the state’s control. Trotski proposed that Red Army soldiers, instead of being demobilized, should be transferred into labour armies; Lenin was firmly attached to the policy of requisitioning foodstuffs through a centrally-assigned set of quotas: the economic programme of the Civil War was to be maintained in peacetime.
The other way out of the emergency for the Russian Communist Party was socialist revolution in Europe. During 1919 they had continued to probe opportunities to link up with the Hungarian Soviet Republic until its collapse in August. The Bavarian Soviet Republic had been overturned in May. Yet the cities of northern Italy, too, were in ferment: as one door closed, another was thought to be opening. The party’s optimism was all the more striking since Red rule in the borderlands of Russia remained under threat. Conflicts with the Poles took place in the course of the year, and erupted into full-scale war when Jozef Pilsudski invaded Ukraine and took Kiev in May 1920. The Red Army gathered support at this conjuncture from Russians in general. The arthritic former Imperial commander Alexander Brusilov came out of retirement to urge his former subordinates to fulfil their patriotic duty by seeing off the Poles; and, by July, Pilsudski’s army was fleeing westwards.
Lenin spotted his chance to carry revolution into central Europe. The Red Army was instructed to plunge into Poland and then into Germany. To his colleagues Lenin confided: ‘My personal opinion is that for this purpose it is necessary to sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too.’51 Italian communists in Moscow for the Second Congress of Comintern were told to pack their bags and go home to help organize a revolution. In fact the other Politburo members were doubtful about Lenin’s judgement; they especially questioned whether the Polish working class would rise to welcome the Red Army as its liberator. But Lenin had his way and the Reds hastened across eastern Poland. A pitched battle occurred by the river Vistula, short of Warsaw, in mid- August. The Reds were defeated. The dream of taking revolution to other countries on the point of a bayonet was dispelled.
The debacle in Poland concentrated minds upon the difficulties at home. Even before the Polish-Soviet War there had been attempts to modify economic policies. The most notable was Trotski’s proposal to the Central Committee in February 1920 that, in certain provinces and with certain restrictions, grain requisitioning should be replaced with a tax-in-kind that would be fixed at a lower level of procurement. He was turned down after a heated debate in which Lenin denounced him as an advocate of
Such disputes demonstrated how hard it was to promote any change of policy; for Trotski’s proposal seemed bold only within a milieu which viscerally detested capitalism. Lenin, too, suffered as he had made Trotski suffer.
