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

Perhaps the Whites' intransigence was a blessing in disguise: the Cossacks' nationalism in action was not a very pretty sight. The Kuban Cossacks drove out thousands of non-Cossacks (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) from their farms and villages, expelled their children from the local schools, and murdered many hundreds of them as 'Bolsheviks'. The Krug even debated the idea of driving all the non-Cossacks out of the Kuban altogether.* It was a sort of 'ethnic cleansing' based on the idea that the Cossacks were a superior race to the non-Cossack peasantry. The Cossack leaders frequently expressed the opinion that their people were the only Russians of any value and that all the rest were 'shit'. The Krug did nothing to stop the persecutions. In one village a group of Cossack soldiers seized the school mistress, an immigrant Russian who had taught the local Cossack children for over twenty years, and beat her to death.

* One Cossack delegate thought this was too kind and said it would be better simply to kill all the non- Cossacks.

None of her Cossack neighbours tried to save her. The Whites had an obvious interest in protecting the non-Cossacks: they represented 52 per cent of the Kuban population. If the Cossacks were left to their devices, the others would be driven into the arms of the Reds. Yet the Whites' intransigence on Cossack independence merely fanned the flames of this racial hatred and led to the steady worsening of relations with the Kuban government. If only the Whites had made some gesture towards the idea of Cossack autonomy, albeit conditionally upon the defeat of the Reds, they might have stopped the rot. But they failed to seek a compromise. Trapped in the nineteenth-century world of the Russian Empire, they were as insensitive to the national aspirations of the Cossacks as they were to all nationalisms other than their own.²³

The Kuban Cossacks were just as unsuccessful in their campaign to establish an independent army. From a military point of view, this would have been disastrous for the Whites, for the Kuban Cossacks made up most of their troops and virtually all of their cavalry. The Don Cossack Army, moreover, which was independent, was hardly an encouraging example. Its loose detachments, each organized by a separate Cossack settlement, were outside the control of the central command. They fought bravely to defend their own local homelands but were reluctant to move away from them. This became a critical problem as the Whites advanced into central Russia during 1919. The Cossacks did not much care who ruled in Moscow so long as they were left to themselves. 'Russia is none of our business' — thus Denikin summed up their attitude. The failure of the Don Army to take Tsaritsyn, despite a two-month siege at the end of 1918, had already shown the limits of the Cossacks' morale outside their homelands. Once they were let loose on Russian peasant soil, they were always inclined to degenerate into looting; and in Jewish settlements they often indulged in pogroms. This was to be a major reason for the White defeat: the plundering and violence of the Cossack cavalry in 1919 did more than anything to rally the population of central Russia behind the Reds. It was also why Denikin resisted Cossack demands for an independent army. He would not even consider separate Cossack units.²⁴

The Whites manifested the same inflexibility towards the demands of the national minorities. A Russia Great, United and Indivisible' was the central plank of their ideology. Without any clear social alignment, the Whites relied on the idea of the Russian nation and the Empire to draw together their disparate elements. Their imperial policies owed as much to the ideas of the Kadets and the Octobrists as they did to the values of the old regime. Miliukov and Struve now defended a Great Russia as firmly as the most reactionary monarchist. This commitment to the Russian Empire was a fundamental weakness in the White movement, because its armies were based mainly in those territories (the Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Baltic) where the non-Russian

population favoured at the very least more autonomy and perhaps complete independence from Russia. The Whites failed to see that a compromise with these national aspirations was essential if they were to build a broad base of support among the non-Russian peoples. Instead of making the nationalists their allies, they turned them into enemies.

As an army staffed mainly by sons of the gentry, the Volunteers were even more at odds with the peasants. Although himself the son of a former serf, Denikin never saw the vital need to accept the revolution on the land if his army was to conquer peasant Russia. The Whites assumed they could win the civil war without the support of the peasantry; or, at any rate, they seemed to think that the whole question of land reform could be put off until after victory. Their view of the civil war — that its outcome would be decided by military force alone — ruled out the need to present popular policies as part of their campaign. Not that their agrarian policies could ever have been popular: the dominance of the landowning class among Denikin's followers made it impossible for the Whites in south Russia to advance a programme on the land capable of winning mass peasant support. The two commissions set up by Denikin to make proposals for land reform both stressed the sale of the gentry's surplus land (and then only three years after the end of the civil war) but ruled out any compulsory expropriation. This was basically the minimalist Kadet land programme of 1917. It refused to recognize the fact of the rural revolution and continued to defend — probably as much preoccupied with the sanctity of the law as with the interests of the gentry — the formal property rights of the landowners. Statisticians calculated that if a programme was introduced on the basis of the commissions' proposals, the peasants would have had to give back three-quarters of the land they had seized from the gentry since 1917. Thus the vast mass of the peasantry had every reason to oppose the Whites.²⁵

All the more so, since Denikin's armies and his local officials were notorious for helping the squires to reclaim their land in the territories which they reconquered. The policy was often justified on the grounds that gentry- farmed estates were more productive, but this was a flimsy excuse for the restoration of the old order. In any case, most of the land returned to the ownership of the gentry was rented back to the peasantry (usually at a fixed rate of one-third of the harvest). The system of local government in so far as there was one, as opposed to military rule and terror, was turned over to the local squires and the former tsarist police and officials acting in the name of district captains. The inescapable conclusion was that the Whites were seeking to restore the discredited local apparatus of the old regime. The district captains, for example, were remarkably similar to the tsarist land captains, who had ruled the villages like petty tsars. There were several cases of the same land captains returning as district captains to their former fiefdoms, where they took savage

revenge on the villagers executing and flogging their leaders. The efforts of the liberals to restore the volost zemstvos met with stiff resistance from the Rightist elements in Denikin's regime on the grounds that this would undermine the status of the local nobility. The worst form of the gentry's reaction — that which had opposed the volost zemstvos under Stolypin — lived on at the heart of the White regime. As Denikin himself acknowledged, the rural power holders under his regime may have had the advantage of experience:

but in terms of their psychology and world-view, their customs and their habits, they were so far removed and alienated from the changes that had taken place in the country that they had no idea how to act in the new revolutionary era. For them it was a question of returning to the past — and they tried to restore the past both in form and spirit.²⁶

This failure of the Whites to recognize the peasant revolution was the reason for their ultimate defeat. Denikin himself later admitted as much. It was only in 1920, after their failure to penetrate into the rural heart of central Russia, that the Volunteers finally confronted the need to appeal to the peasants; but by then it was too late. Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.

* * * In November 1918, with the end of the fighting in Europe, the civil war entered a new phase. The rupture of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty after the German defeat and the retreat of German troops from the Baltic, the Ukraine and the Crimea gave the civil war armies the chance to step into the vacuum left by this withdrawal.

The Volunteers had every reason to be optimistic. With the defeat of the Germans, they expected the Allies to increase their support for the White cause in the south. Until then, the Allies had looked at the civil war from the sidelines. Their main interest had been in the north and in Siberia, where they had been hoping to resurrect a