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

more than doubled in size since the spring, they still lacked enough troops to sustain their advance towards Moscow. Deni-kin's 150,000 soldiers were very thinly spread along the thousand miles of the Southern Front, making them vulnerable to a counter-offensive. In the rear the Whites had left themselves without enough troops to defend their bases against Makhno's partisans, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Chechens in the Caucasus, and at the height of the Moscow offensive they were forced to withdraw vital troops to deal with them. They were also hampered in part by the lack of reinforcements. The Kuban Cossacks, whom Wrangel was counting on to reinforce his campaign against Saratov on the Volga, refused to leave their homelands. It was the old problem of Cossack localism: without guarantees of autonomy for the Kuban — which the Whites were not prepared to give — they would not take part in the fighting in Russia. But the real problem for the Whites — and the single biggest reason why their offensive ran out of steam — was their inability to mobilize enough troops within the newly occupied regions of the Ukraine and Russia. And here the Whites were defeated by their own political failures.

In the Ukraine the Whites were crippled from the start by their Great Russian chauvinism. This guaranteed the opposition of the richer peasants, much of the rural intelligentsia and the petty-bourgeoisie, all of whom were sympathetic to the Ukrainian nationalist cause. Of all the contenders for power in the Ukraine — the Greens, the Blacks, the Reds and the Whites — Denikin was the only one who made no concessions to the nationalists. This was not a mistaken calculation: the need to defend the Great Russian Empire was the essential belief of the White regime. Even if they had been told that without such concessions they could not succeed, the Whites would still have refused to make them. Dragomirov, Lukomsky and Shulgin, the three Kievan Russians who dominated the White movement in the south, were more Russian than the Russians in Russia. Denikin satisfied their nationalist demands. He appointed Russians to all official posts; suppressed the agrarian co-operatives, strongholds of the nationalist movement; and forbade the use of the Ukrainian language in all state institutions including schools. He even denied the existence of a Ukraine — which he called 'Little Russia' in all his pronouncements. His clumsy 'Proclamation to the Little Russian People', in which he pledged to reunite

Russia with its 'little Russian branch', merely helped to drive the Ukrainian peasants into Petliura's nationalist army, which did so much to weaken the White rear. During the decisive battles of the autumn the Whites were forced to withdraw 10,000 troops from the Front against the Reds to fight Petliura's and other nationalist bands.

An even more crucial weakness was the failure of the Whites to build up an effective system of local administration in the newly conquered territories. It meant they lacked the means to mobilize the peasantry and its resources without the use of terror. This became critical as they advanced into Soviet Russia and were cut off from their bases of supply. At the height of the offensive it became very difficult to get food and equipment to the soldiers. Makhno had occupied the key supply bases in the rear — Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdi-ansk — and, along with Petliura's nationalists, was holding up the military trains from the south. Then there was the problem of the railway workers, who by and large were against the Whites and could often only be made to work for them at the point of a gun. Within the Whites' own industrial bases there were similar tensions with the workers, as Denikin rolled back the rights of the trade unions and returned plants to their former owners. Coal production in the Donbass fell dramatically, bringing much of industry and transport to a halt. The Whites responded with a reign of terror, shooting workers in reprisal for the 'Bolshevik' decline in production. In Yuzovka one in ten workers was routinely shot whenever mines and factories failed to meet the output targets for coal and iron. Some workers were shot for simply being workers under the slogan 'Death to Callused Hands!' It was a sort of class revenge for the Red Terror with its own slogan 'Death to the Burzhoois!' But even such repression was unable to reverse the decline in production. The White economy was thrown into chaos as factories closed down, inflation spiralled and workers went on strike. Vital supplies for the army were either not produced or not transported to the Front.²⁴

Meanwhile, in August, Allied shipments of aid were reduced as the Western powers, chastened by Kolchak's retreat, became sceptical of a White victory. Much of the aid had been lost through corruption: weapons, uniforms, linen, blankets, even hospital equipment, would somehow find their way on to the black market. During the fighting at Kharkov several soldiers from Denikin's tank corps were caught selling their radiator anti-freeze as vodka in the Hotel Metropole. Henceforth, the Allies resolved, military aid should be given in the form of 'non-marketable' goods (although in Russia there were no such things) and should be paid for by Denikin in cash or exported goods. This was a death blow to the White campaign. The front-line soldiers were left without supplies, notably warm kit for the coming winter. Without an effective system of local administration to organize this, the soldiers soon broke down into chaotic

looting. As Denikin himself acknowledged, more than anything else this alienated the local population and guaranteed a White defeat.²⁵

The worst looting was carried out by the Cossack cavalry. They held the Russian peasants in contempt and viewed it as their right to plunder them at will, as if invaders of a foreign country. Their commanders were a law unto themselves and, on the whole, allowed the looting as a means of winning the Cossacks' loyalty. It was precisely the same combination that produced the atrocious pogroms against the Jews (of which more on pages 676—9). Mamontov and Shkuro were only the most notorious examples, urging on their soldiers with the promise of loot. But there were dozens of junior commanders who made themselves into 'Cossack heroes' in this way: one of them was called the Prince of Thieves. Denikin disapproved of these adventurers but he lacked the firmness to bring them to book — a fact he would later bitterly regret. Some of the Cossack units were so weighed down with booty that they were quite unable to fight. Their cavalry was followed by long tails of wagons — some stretching up to thirty miles — laden down with stolen property. Trains were filled with looted goods and diverted to the rear instead of being used to transport equipment to the Front. Mamontov's Cossacks, having rejoined the Whites after their August raid on Tambov, were so concerned to get back with their spoils to the Don that all but 1,500 out of 8,000 deserted. Wrangel claimed that by the autumn the Whites had only 3,000—4,000 committed fighters left at the Front: 'all the rest were a colossal tail of looters and speculators .. . The war for them was a means of getting rich.' With such an army, he concluded, it was 'impossible to win over Russia. The population has come to hate us.'²⁶

* * * With Denikin's capture of Orel, the crucial arsenal of Tula, 100 miles away, was imminently threatened. Its loss, claimed Trotsky, 'would have been more dangerous than that of Moscow'.²⁷ Without Moscow the Reds would have lacked a prestigious capital; but without Tula they would have lacked an army. The entire fate of the Soviet regime hinged on the defence of Tula — and at the centre of that defence stood Dmitry Os'kin. As the Military Commissar of Tula, Os'kin was placed at the head of the two key bodies — the Military Council and the Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) — which between them ruled the so-called 'Tula Fortified Region' by martial law.

Os'kin had no doubts about the need for martial law. He had long ago left behind his Left SR libertarianism and accepted the need for ruthless discipline in a civil war. The necessity was underlined by the fact that the Tula workers were threatening to strike in protest against shortages of food. There had been a general strike in Tula in the spring. Os'kin and his comrades had been denounced by hungry workers at every factory meeting: 'Down with

the Commissars!' became the slogan of the strike. To suppress the strike the Bolsheviks had waged civil war against the workers. Dzerzhinsky himself had been sent by Lenin on 3 April. Special Communist detachments had occupied the factories and up to 1,000 workers had been arrested. Since then relations with the workers had been less embattled — Os'kin had made sure that better food supplies were brought in — but this was now threatened by a renewed strike as food stocks once again became depleted. Given the vital need to keep munitions production going, there was no choice m Os'kin's view but 'to militarize the factories and repress the workers if they went on strike'. None of the Bolsheviks had any illusions about the possibility of negotiating a settlement with the workers: there was not enough time. And, in any case, as Lenin admitted to the Politburo on 15 October, 'the masses in Tula are a very long way from being with us'. In fact, if anything, they were with the Mensheviks, who had led the general strike in the previous spring and who, before that, had held majorities in the city Soviets. Some of the Mensheviks now chose to agitate for the Reds in Tula in order to repel Denikin. It was a measure of the Bolsheviks' desperation, and of the low esteem in which the workers held them, that they had to rely on their deadliest rivals to come to their aid. Os'kin