71 By contrast the Red forces were bottom-heavy - too many infantry and not enough commanders with expertise. The 'committee spirit' of 1917 lived on in the ranks of the Red partisan units such as Makhno's, pictured here in 1920, where tactics were decided by a show of soldiers' hands.
72 Armoured trains like this played a vital role in the civil war.
73 Part of the Red Army, the Latvian Division, passing through a village near the South-Western Front, 1919.
74 Two Red Army soldiers take a break during the fighting on the South-Western Front, 1919.
75-6 The Red Army served as an important channel for the spread of literacy and propaganda.
77 Nestor Makhno in 1919. Facing annihilation by the Bolsheviks, Makhno and the remnants of his army left Russian territory in 1921. After brief periods of imprisonment in Romania and Poland, the anarchist leader lived in Paris until his death in 1935.
78-80 Terror was a weapon of all the armies in the civil war.
pronouncements began with such self-limiting formulae as: 'Until the restoration of the legal authorities'; 'Until the return of normal relations'; or words to that effect. Its programme was dressed stiffly in the liberal pretence of political neutrality. Although freedoms of speech, press and assembly were restored, the civil war conditions made it difficult to respect them and the prisons of Samara were soon filled with Bolsheviks. Ivan Maisky, the Menshevik Minister of Labour, counted 4,000 political prisoners. The town dumas and zemstvos were restored and the Soviets, as class organs, barred from politics. The Komuch also declared its support for a 'democratic federation', which won it plaudits from the Bashkir and Tatar communities in the Volga region.30
In the industrial field, the Komuch, like the Provisional Government, tried to steer a middle course between labour and capital, and ended up satisfying neither. Class divisions were too strong. The workers rejected the Komuch as 'bourgeois' and passed defiantly Bolshevik resolutions in the Soviet. The factory committees were stripped of their powers and control of the factories was transferred to their former owners or (where they were absent) to government-appointed managers. The banks were returned to private control. Free trade was restored and a Council of Trade and Industry, dominated by industrialists, was set up to help formulate economic policy. But even this was not enough to convince the middle classes that the Komuch was not dangerously 'socialist'. They could see only that the eight-hour day was still guaranteed; that the trade unions and the Soviet were still in operation; and that the red flag still hung from the Komuch buildings. What, they asked, was the point of replacing the Bolsheviks with a 'semi-Bolshevik' regime like the Komuch? Why replace the Reds with these 'Pinks' when you could have the Whites instead?
During the early days of the Komuch the Samara middle classes, thankful for the overthrow of the Soviet, had approved a government loan. But they soon switched their support to the White counter-revolution in the east. The Komuch was forced to raise taxes from the sale of vodka — always unpopular with the workers. It also printed money which fuelled inflation. The peasants reduced their food sales to the cities, as money lost its value, forcing the Komuch to introduce bread rationing. Its urban base collapsed even further. Only the tiny provincial intelligentsia stayed with it to the end. During the August Duma elections the pro-government parties polled a derisory 15 per cent; two-thirds of the electorate did not even bother to vote. Democracy was resoundingly silent.31
Despite the SRs' expectations, the Volga peasantry proved no more supportive of their government. Had the SRs been willing to support the peasant revolution, things might have been different. But that would have meant recognizing the peasant Soviets — and the Komuch leaders were not prepared to go that far. They were determined to replace the Soviets with the volost
zemstvos, in which all the rural classes, including the nobility, were represented on an equal basis. But as in 1917, the zemstvo elections were boycotted by the mass of the peasants, who were already committed to their Soviets as organs of direct village self-rule. Even where the zemstvos were elected, it was often difficult for them to function because the rural intelligentsia and officialdom had largely disappeared from the villages since the revolution, while the peasant communes refused to pay their taxes. In some villages the Soviet remained in power but referred to itself as the 'zemstvo' in communiques with the Komuch.* The Komuch was powerless to stamp out this charade, even when it sent in troops. The peasants were too firmly committed to the Soviets as the guarantors of their revolution on the land.
The Komuch was equally reluctant to sanction the peasants' seizures of the gentry's land. True, it upheld the land reform passed at the first and only session of the Constituent Assembly which had recognized the abolition of all landed property. But a subsequent decree, passed on 22 July, enabled the former landowners to reclaim any winter fields which they had sown. This in effect meant reversing one-third of the peasant requisitions of arable land. Troops often had to be called in to enforce the decree. Its aim had been to 'reinforce the rule of law' after the 'anarchic' peasant land seizures during the previous winter and spring, but instead the impression was created, especially among the poorest peasants, who had been given most of the gentry's fields, that the Komuch wanted to restore the old regime on the land. They could be forgiven for this interpretation since some of the local squires saw the decree as a licence to take the law into their own hands. With the help of an army brigade, or their own private militia, they would seize back their property; sometimes they even had the peasant leaders flogged in public to 'teach them a lesson'.32
* * * Of all the Komuch's policies, none was more unpopular than the call-up for the People's Army. In any civil war the success of the contenders depends on their relative abilities to mobilize the local population. This test the Komuch failed in no uncertain fashion.
During the summer, the Komuch and Czech forces were able to conquer territory almost at will. The Reds were chronically weak, without food supplies or a proper army. Ufa fell to the Czechs on 6 July; Simbirsk, Lenin's birthplace, on the 22nd; and Kazan, with its huge tsarist gold reserve, on 6 August. Two days later the munitions workers of Izhevsk, 150 miles to the north of Kazan, rose up against the Soviet and declared their sympathy for the Komuch. It was the biggest ever workers' uprising against the Bolsheviks — and a major
