A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

dictatorship'.⁹⁸ But in fact it was a highly fitting building, even a symbolic one, and not just because the Bolsheviks behaved like the new 'tsars' of Russia. For the civil war regime on which they now embarked was set in many ways to take Russia back to the customs of its Muscovite past.

Part Four

THE CIVIL WAR AND

THE MAKING OF

THE SOVIET SYSTEM

(1918-24)

12 Last Dreams of the Old World

i St Petersburg on the Steppe

In his wonderful novel, The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov describes the surreal life of Kiev during the spring of 1918, when the city became filled with refugees from the Bolshevik north.

Among the refugees came grey-haired bankers and their wives, skilful businessmen who had left behind their faithful deputies in Moscow with instructions to them not to lose contact with the new world which was coming into existence in the Muscovite kingdom; landlords who had secretly left their property in the hands of trusted managers; industrialists, merchants, lawyers, politicians. There came journalists from Moscow and Petersburg, corrupt, grasping and cowardly. Prostitutes. Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service department chiefs; inert young homosexuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres.¹

Kiev was not the only city to be overrun in this way. Bulgakov's description could have been applied to almost any major city in the south. But the presence of the Germans and their puppet Ukrainian government headed by the Hetman Paulo Skoropadsky, which pledged to protect the property of the refugees and gave them employment, certainly made Kiev the place to go. Every house was filled to bursting point. Russian princes slept on floors and divans. The city had an atmosphere of frenzied excitement, with everyone living as if there was no tomorrow. People dined in vast numbers at expensive restaurants, gambled away fortunes at clubs and casinos, and indulged in wild affairs. Cafes did a brisk business selling cocktails and women. Cabarets and theatres were packed out every night, as people laughed away their fears. Shop windows were crammed with French perfumes and silks, great slabs of sturgeon and caviar, and vintage bottles of Abrau champagne with the double-headed eagle on their labels.

These refugees hated the Bolsheviks with a passion. But very few were inclined to fight them. 'Their hatred', wrote Bulgakov, 'was not the kind of aggressive hatred that spurs the hater to fight and kill, but a passive and cowardly type of hatred.'² They muttered words of outrage as they sat in their restaurants over lunch and read about the latest horrors in the north. But they had no intention of giving up these comforts to go off to war. This was a bourgeoisie on the run.

Only the officers — the landowners' sons and students whose studies had been broken off by the war — hated the Reds with the sort of hatred that made them want to fight. These young men had fled their shattered regiments at the Front and risked their lives crossing the country to reach the cities of the south. By day, they roamed the streets penniless and unshaven; at night they slept on people's chairs and floors, using their greatcoats as blankets. This was a dispossessed generation who had nothing to lose in a civil war. Many of them had already seen their families lose their landed estates to the peasantry, or had had their own careers, their hopes and expectations, ruined as a result of the revolution. They drank too much, seethed with anger and thought only of revenge.

One of these student officers, Roman Gul', was passing through Kiev on his way to join the White Guards on the Don during the winter of 1917. In October he had received a telegram from his father: 'The estate is destroyed, ask for leave.' Since then he had been on the run from the Bolsheviks. Travelling through Russia in a third-class railway carriage, Gul' was disgusted by the malice and mistrust on the faces of the peasant troops around him. 'These are the people who smashed our old mahogany chairs,' he wrote to a friend from the train; 'these are the people who tore up my favourite books, the ones I bought as a student on the Sukharevka;* these are the people who cut down our orchard and cut down the roses that mama planted; these are the people who burnt down our home.' It was partly in order to avenge this loss that Gul', like so many young men of his class, had resolved to join the Whites. 'I saw that underneath the red hat of what we had thought of as the beautiful woman of the Revolution there was in fact the ugly snout of a pig. My heart was full of doubts and hesitations, but I convinced myself that in the end, to put all this right, one had to take responsibility, one even had to be prepared to commit the sin of murder.'³

Gul's destination, Novocherkassk, was the headquarters of the fledgling Volunteer Army led by Alexeev and Kornilov. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, and Kornilov's release from the Bykhov Monastery, both men had fled to the sleepy town on the steppe, where the Don Cossacks, thought by the

* A large flea-market in Moscow.

Whites to be stalwart supporters of the old order, had recently elected General Kaledin as the Ataman of their traditional assembly, the Krug. Taciturn and gloomy, Kaledin was a typical Cossack general of the old school. During 1917 he had sided with Kornilov against the Soviet and at the Moscow Conference in August had called forthrightly for the abolition of all the democratic army organizations.

The Don Krug had declared its independence on 20 November. The basic concern of the Don Cossack leaders was to defend this, but the Volunteers had persuaded them that this could only be achieved by joining forces with them against the Bolsheviks. The latter had mobilized the support of much of the non-Cossack population in the Don — among the Russian peasants (inogorvdnye), the industrial workers and the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet — for an offensive against Rostov, the major city of the Don. Hence, to begin with, Kaledin welcomed the arrival of the Volunteers — a mere forty officers, calling themselves Alexeev's Organization — on 17 November. His own forces had been fast disintegrating, as the younger and more radical Cossacks, who were in no mood to fight the Reds, returned from the Front and began to campaign against his leadership. Many local Cossacks were afraid that the presence of the Volunteers might make Novocherkassk, the Don capital, a target for the Bolsheviks. Because of this Cossack mistrust of the Whites, Alexeev's officers had had to be hidden in a hospital at first. But as the Reds approached, and it became clear that the Don could not be defended without their support, Kaledin was able to deploy them without serious Cossack objections. At the beginning of December the Red Guards finally captured Rostov. Kaledin imposed martial law and called on the Volunteers to retake the city (his own Cossacks had refused to fight). Alexeev's army, which by this stage had grown to a force of some 500 officers, was quite sufficient to defeat the more numerous but hopelessly indisciplined Red Guards. The six-day battle began on 9 December — St George's Day, the patron saint of Russia. It was the first major battle of the civil war.⁴

The battle for Rostov was typical of the fighting that characterized the first twelve months of the war (October 1917 to September 1918). There were no fixed 'fronts', as such, since neither side had enough men or channels of supply, and the movement of the fighting was extremely fluid. Large towns could be captured by tiny armies hardly worthy of the name. Most troop movements were by rail, and for this reason these early confrontations have become known as 'the railway war'. It became a question of loading a handful of men and some machine-guns on to a train and moving off to the next station — which would then be 'captured' along with the town. The 'fighting' in these battles was often farcical, since many of the rank-and-file soldiers, especially on the Red side, were reluctant to fight at all (many of them had only joined up in order to get an

army coat and a daily