8. Trotsky reviewing the Red troops during the civil war, 1917

fate of SR attempts to create a 'third way' between the dictatorships of right and left was sealed on 18 November 1918 when Cossack officers arrested the SR members of the Omsk Directory and proclaimed Admiral Kolchak 'Supreme Ruler'.

Henceforward the civil war resolved into a conflict between Reds and

Whites. The Whites stood for 'Russia, One and Indivisible', the

restoration of state-mindedness, law and order, and the values of

Orthodox Christianity. They strove to redeem the profaned honour of

Russia's armed forces and presented themselves as being 'above class'

and 'above party'. In fact, they were not a class movement in any strict

sense, since they were slow to develop programmes that could have

assisted landowners and industrialists to regain their property and

power. So far as the political regime for which they were struggling

was concerned, there was little unanimity concerning the shape it^

should take. Some such as General Wrangel of the Volunteer Army?.

с

were committed monarchists; but most favoured some type of militaryg.

dictatorship, possibly paving the way for a new Constituent Assembly.|'

In an effort to keep political differences at bay, the Whites advanced^

the principle of 'non-predetermination', i.e. the postponement of all?>

policy-making until the war was over. What kept them united in theg-

meantime was little more than detestation of the Bolsheviks and^

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outrage at the 'German-Jewish' conspiracy inflicted on the Russian|-

people.

After a gruelling conflict, it was clear by spring 1920 that it was only a matter of time before the Reds triumphed. Historians differ in their assessment as to why the Reds won: some emphasize the weakness of the Whites; others insist that the Reds had positive advantages, but differ as to whether these were exclusively military in nature or political as well as military. If one compares the armies of the Reds and Whites, it becomes clear that the Reds had certain military advantages. Their army was larger: by autumn 1920 it had grown to over 5 million - although there were never more than half-a-million troops in the front

51

9. Baron Wrangel leaves Russia

52

line - compared with a combined total of 2 million White troops by spring 1920. Moreover, although the quality of both armies was evenly matched - both, for example, suffered from massive levels of desertion - the Reds had the edge so far as leadership was concerned. The Volunteer Army was formed around a core of 4,000 experienced officers; but this ceased to be an advantage once the Reds compelled 'military specialists'to enlist; and over time, the Reds proved able to nurture officers of talent such as V. K. Bliukher and M. Ы. Tukhachevsky. In addition, the Whites were riven by personal animosity, principally between Denikin and Kolchak and Denikin and Wrangel; the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin proved less damaging since the Bolsheviks had a binding ideology and a recognized leader. Finally, the Bolsheviks were dearly superior in the organizational sphere. The Red Army had a unified centre of command in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, and was supported by such institutions as the Defence

Council, which fused the civilian and defence sectors, the Cheka, and an underground party network in White-occupied areas.

Perhaps the greatest advantage enjoyed by the Reds was strategic: their possession of a centrally located and compact territory. This meant that they could send forces from one front to another without great difficulty since railways radiated outwards from Moscow. By contrast, the Whites were strung out along the periphery of European Russia. The Don base of the Volunteer Army was nearly 1,000 kilometres from Moscow; Kolchak's base in Omsk was almost 3,000 kilometres from Petrograd. Any advance into the heartland of soviet power created a problem of long supply lines and communication difficulties. Moreover, the possession by the Reds of the core territory, where the majority of the population and resources were concentrated, gave them control of key industrial centres as well the stocks of the tsarist army. The Whites, by contrast, had control of only secondary centres of the defence industry in the Donbas and Urals, although they were better supplied with coal. As against that, they had an abundance of food, especially in Siberia and the Kuban region, so soldiers in the White armies were generally better fed than their Red counterparts, whose ration norm of 410 grams of bread per day was lower than in the tsarist army.

Some see the military advantages of the Reds as overwhelming, but that is to make too much of hindsight. A military victory for the Whites was by no means an impossibility: if Kolchak and Denikin had advanced on Moscow simultaneously in 1919, rather than five months apart, or if Kolchak had struck a deal with the Finnish general Mannerheim (both of which were on the cards), the Red Army might well have gone under.

If military and strategic factors are paramount in explaining the White defeat, socio-political factors cannot be ignored. By 1919 all the White administrations recognized that they could not simply shelve the thorny issues of land reform, national autonomy, labour policy, and local government. The policies they concocted, however, offered too little,

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too late and exposed deep division in White ranks. First, with regard to the land, all White administrations accepted that there could be no return to the status quo ante, yet there were enough cases of officers returning former landowners to their estates to fix in peasant minds the notion that a White victory would bring about the return of the landlords. Whenever the Whites threatened, therefore, peasants swung behind the Reds. Second, the Whites had to deal with non-Russian nationalities; yet their hatred of what Denikin called the 'sweet poisonous dreams of independence' prevented them from making serious concessions. They would not recognize the independence of Finland and the Baltic states; they would not negotiate with J. Pilsudski, President of Poland from November 1918; they would not recognize a 'separatist' Ukrainian state. By contrast, the Bolsheviks, however much they alienated nationalists at times, were willing to grant a measure of self-government. Finally, despite trumpeting

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