know. What gripped the masses-you saw it everywhere in Russia-was the promise of peace. The Bolshevik opportunists dashed right in. They seized the factories and consolidated their revolutionary soviets. Even in our village they were throwing up placards and slogans.
“In Saint Petersburg there was a palace coup. It wasn’t a revolution, it was a ruthless coup-Lenin’s junta unseated the Duma, that was all there was to it. That was November of nineteen seventeen. Kerensky had to flee the country disguised as a sailor.
“Lenin was the dictator of the Bolshevik Party. He wanted to be dictator of the empire, but that took three years.
“In the beginning he did two things-he confiscated all private property and he made a tender of peace to the German Kaiser.”
The Duma’s elections [to form a Constituent Assembly] were scheduled for November 25 and communications in Russia were too slow to enable Lenin to cancel them. They took place, and the non-Communist liberals won by a landslide: they took nearly 60 percent of the more than forty million votes cast in what was, and still is, the only free election ever held in Russia. (The Bolsheviks garnered only some 29 percent of the vote, even on their peace platform, and the bourgeois and conservative parties accounted for the rest.)
“Lenin had lost at the polls but it didn’t stop him. The elected representatives arrived in Saint Petersburg- Lenin was calling it Petrograd by then-and a few hundred of Lenin’s shock troops sealed off the palace. The representatives never got inside and the Assembly never was called to order. Of course we never heard about this until much later.”
Denied their elected place in government, those who opposed the Bolsheviks took up arms. Thus, in January 1918, began the Russian Civil War.
On December 3, 1917, the Red regime signed a temporary cease-fire agreement with the Germans.
For the Western Allies it was a bad time for Russia to defect from the war effort: it meant Germany’s eastern divisions now could be thrown into combat in the trenches against the Allies on the west.
Infuriated, the Allies sought to undermine Lenin’s government by infiltration and sabotage and by lending aid to anti-Bolshevik military movements that sprang up in Poland, in Finland, and within Russia itself, where Lenin’s enemies were forming coalitions under the banner of “White Russia” (a term coined mainly to offer a simple contrast with “Red”; it had little to do with the geographic origins of the movement).
“I have studied this for many years. I think Lenin really wanted to stabilize relations with the West. But he had great danger at home. Only by carrying out the promise of peace could he remain in power. ‘Peace’ was the one promise he could not afford to break.
“One can’t help but observe that this Communist Party, which came to power on its pledge of peace, has been responsible for the brutal massacres of more human beings than any other political organization in history, the Nazi Party included.”
The truce continued but a permanent peace had yet to be signed. Lenin delayed as long as he could: to placate the Western Allies and to salvage what he could from the impending negotiations with the Kaiser’s representatives.
But anti-Bolshevik pressure finally forced Lenin to sign.
Germany’s demands were voracious. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on March 3, 1918, was a horrible blow to Russia. Germany took away nearly half her industries, a third of her population and a quarter of her territory.
The cost of the peace was so harsh that indignation flared up once again and White Russian units everywhere were mobbed with volunteers.
“Whole regiments were defecting en masse to the Whites. They felt Lenin had betrayed the Motherland at Brest-Litovsk.
“The peasants rallied to the White banner because of Lenin’s confiscation of private property. The peasants had never wanted communism, you know. What they wanted was ownership of the land. That was precisely what the Reds denied them. Serfdom was the same whether your master was an aristocrat or the State.”
Military resistance against the Reds flickered into existence all over Russia. It had no central leadership and no governmental structure; at first it was partisan warfare and recruiting contests, with both sides hastily daubing the giant Cyrillic characters of their slogans on walls and barracks.
Then for a while it became more orderly: traditional warfare, great armies drawn up against one another on vast battlefields. The Whites were encouraged significantly by the victory of Mannerheim, who defeated the Reds in Finland, and by the victories of Marshall Pilsudski’s hard-riding Polish cavalry against Trotsky’s ill-supplied and ill- organized Red infantry.
But in 1918 as the Whites spread their enthusiastic forces across a great part of Russia’s acreage, no fewer than nineteen separate White Russian governments came into being in different areas, each claiming legitimate franchise from the deposed Czar. From the very beginning it was this lack of central organization which threatened to destroy the anti-Bolshevik movement in the Civil War.
On the night of July 16, 1918, in a large manor house in the Ural Mountain village of Ekaterinburg, occurred the murder* of the Imperial family: the Czar, the Czarina, the Czarevitch, four grand Duchesses and four servants. Lenin did not want the Whites to have a live figurehead to rally round.
At the same time there was a battle fought at the city of Kazan on the Volga. The White forces won-and captured the city, which unbeknownst to the Reds was the repository of the monetary reserves of the Imperial government.
The gold and treasure had been transferred to Kazan to avoid its falling into German hands in Petrograd. According to most sources its value was estimated at 1,150,500,000 rubles; it was composed of platinum, stock securities, miscellaneous valuables and approximately five hundred tons of gold bullion, each ingot stamped with the Imperial seal.
It may well have been the greatest tonnage of raw gold men have ever moved in one shipment. When the city of Kazan fell into White Russian hands the treasure was loaded onto a train after several episodes reminiscent more of comic than of grand opera (a Red counterattack, misdirected reinforcements, the arrival of a pack of bickering White bureaucrats, the dispatching of confused plain-language telegraph inquiries that were intercepted but not understood by the Reds). Finally the gold train was taken away by members of the [anti-Bolshevik] West Siberian Commissariat. This group seems to have obtained the gold merely because it sent a more numerous delegation than any of the others.
The gold was shipped to the city of Omsk and was parked on a siding in the marshaling yards; it was placed under guard by a flimsy detachment of White Army troops. Before long, everyone-White and Red alike-knew it was there. But neither side seemed to attach very great importance to it and it stayed in the marshaling yards aboard its weather-beaten goods wagons for the next four months without incident. In the meantime both sides suffered for lack of funds.
Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kolchak was born in 1874 the son of a Russian army officer. Why he decided on a naval career was a mystery to his family but-oddly, in the light of forthcoming events-Aleksandr Kolchak became a first- rate naval officer.
During the war against the Central Powers he commanded the Black Sea Fleet. His crews regarded him as a compassionate man; they were among the few who did not mutiny during the March 1917 naval revolts. Kolchak was also courageous (he had led several bold forays of exploration into the Arctic) and even efficient (he had been a key reorganizer of the Russian navy after its catastrophic defeat by the Japanese at Tsushima, a decade earlier).
In June 1917 the revolutionaries finally took control of his Black Sea Fleet. They demanded that Kolchak
