Read part 1 here
The revolution decided the war
More than 100 years ago, more than 100,000 soldiers from all the world’s great powers took part in the Russian Civil War on the side of the white generals. Their aim was to crush the workers’ revolution that had overthrown the Tsar and prevent it from spreading to other countries.
While the bourgeoisie and the right have since been spreading accusations against the Bolsheviks of being undemocratic, they usually keep quiet about the extreme violence of their own representatives during the civil war. And they can’t explain why the whites lost the war.
The brutality of the First World War was further intensified when the imperialist powers decided that the Russian Revolution was to be crushed. But the overthrow of one of the most reactionary regimes by a workers’ revolution that promised peace, alongside extreme war fatigue, made it difficult for the great powers to motivate their soldiers. Imperialism was forced to gradually withdraw its troops, also because of the support the Russian revolution gained among workers internationally.
All propaganda from governments around the world since then has been directed against the revolution, the Bolsheviks and the Red Army. But although Antony Beevor’s book Russia — Revolution and Civil War 1917–21 is clearly bourgeois, he still has to describe a large number of the massacres and anti-Semitic pogroms of the Whites. Here are some clear examples from the book: in April 1919, the “pure slaughter” of 670 prisoners was carried out in Ufa, including 66 Bolsheviks and a large group of left-wing socialist revolutionaries. In Yekaterinburg, on 15 July, a “horrific pogrom against the Jewish population” was carried out, with some 2,200 dead. At Lake Baikal on 4 August, 2,200 Bolshevik prisoners were forced to “dig their own graves and take off their boots before being shot” by Lieutenant-General Semyonov’s Cossack troops. And in Yekaterinoslav: “All Red Army soldiers and Communist suspects who remained in the town were cut down by the Cossacks.” In Odessa: “the Jews hid when the Whites took over”.
None of this was unknown to the imperialist powers that participated militarily and financed the white armies, on the contrary. The infamous General Shkuro, who was awarded the British Order of the Bath in a ceremony, was a cruel anti-Semite and sadist, Beevor writes. The man who presented the order and made the speech in Shkuro’s honour, British Major General Holman, was himself “obsessed with the idea of exterminating Jews everywhere”, wrote his subordinate, Captain John Kennedy.
Bolshevisation of the peasantry
The white generals had no notion of accepting democratic assemblies or freedom for the oppressed nations, and even less a land reform. Beevor describes how this undermined their chances of winning support: “At the same time, the barbarism exhibited by the Cossacks during their antipartisan rallies turned the usually conservative general public against the whites.” It was a process of “Bolshevisation of the despairing peasantry”. “The peasants, who had seen the advance of the Whites as a threat that the old landowners might reclaim their estates, were now much less reluctant to serve in the Red Army.”
In the Baltics, too, the Whites organized anti-Semitic pogroms. Here the German troops, supported by Finnish and Swedish mercenaries, posed the real threat to self-government. Immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks declared the right of the oppressed nations to independence, a cornerstone of the party’s political programme. On 6 December 1917, Finnish independence was proclaimed. In the midst of the civil war, on 17 December 1919, the Bolshevik government negotiated a peace treaty with the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
“Churchill’s hopes for a grand Bolshevik alliance in the Baltics were dashed,” Beevor sums up. War Minister Winston Churchill acted from London for an attack on Petrograd, led by General Judenich and by Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, the former Tsarist officer who had seized power in Finland. But this fell on the refusal of the Whites to accept that Karelia was Finnish. Beevor also recounts how Trotsky, in Petrograd, turned panic at Yudenich’s planned attack into a will to resist. The attack was never carried out.
By Christmas 1919, even Churchill was predicting a “complete victory” for the Bolsheviks. Prime Minister Lloyd George commented on the fiasco of the attack on Petrograd: “The fact that the anti-Bolsheviks have succeeded in raising only 20,000 or 30,000 men out of a population of several millions is another indication of the total misreading of the situation in Russia on which the military line has been based.” When the British evacuated Murmansk, only 6,535 Russians went with them, “many fewer than expected.”
Massacres and pogroms
The Whites were increasingly pushed back in the north and Siberia as well. Soldiers deserted or rebelled, like the Polish troops who surrendered in January 1920, demanding to go home. Now internal fighting and possibly even worse massacres ensued. Kolchak accused the extreme right-wing Czech commander Gajda of “democratic tendencies”, but Gadja was supported by the highest French officer, Major General Janin. Internal strife between the Whites meant that Kolchak, appointed Russian commander by the Entente powers (Britain and France), could not escape quickly enough and was arrested and executed after two weeks of interrogation.
Beevor quotes British Consul General Harris on how the white troops “burn villages, murder hundreds of peaceful Russian citizens, shoot without prior trial democratic people only on suspicion of political disloyalty.” From the town of Belgorod comes Sergeant Berry’s testimony: “Men and women accused of being pro-Bolshevik were hanged in the town square… and drunken Cossacks cut off their arms and legs with their sabres while the wretched were still alive.”
In Ukraine, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Jews were killed in over 300 anti-Semitic pogroms. Whites considered all Jews to be Bolsheviks and vice versa. Beevor describes the historical background: “Yet it is hardly surprising that Tsarist anti-Semitism, which in its most extreme form consisted of murderous pogroms carried out by the Black Hundreds, drove angry young Jews into the arms of the Bolsheviks.”
The Red Terror
Like all bourgeois writers, Beevor does his best to smear the Bolsheviks and Lenin and Trotsky in particular. Both sides committed atrocities during the war, and Beevor finds it difficult to direct only moral condemnations at the Reds. He describes when the Reds took over Omsk that “the capture of the city was marked by comparatively few acts of retaliation and very little looting.”
Immediately after the Second Soviet Congress in October 1917, at which the Workers’ Councils appointed the new government headed by the Bolsheviks, there were no plans for a new army. War fatigue from the First World War and the slogan of peace were strong factors behind the party’s support. The soldiers who had mutinied and revolted within the Tsar’s army were generally called Bolsheviks. Arrested Tsarist officers were released on the promise that they would not take up arms.
Only in January 1918 were the first steps taken towards a Red Army and in March Trotsky resigned as Commissar (Minister) for Foreign Affairs to become Commissar for War. Still, repression was very limited. 22 people were executed by the Reds in the first half of 1918. This was to change. The civil war in Finland, the build-up of White armies, the landings of the Great Powers along the coasts, the assassination and attempted murders of Bolshevik leaders — all this led to the proclamation of the “Red Terror” in September 1918. A separate security service against sabotage and armed counter-revolution, the Cheka, was set up.
The measures taken were defensive and imposed by war and necessity, especially the lack of food. The immediate response to starvation was to forcibly requisition food from the peasants in the countryside. Trading and speculation in food was absolutely forbidden. “War communism” was not the policy the Bolsheviks had in their programme, but as defensive measures aimed at a new society it could mobilise millions in support. The Red Terror that was practised was openly reported and discussed. Crushing rebellions in support of whites and engaging in military combat was part of the war.
Self-appointed local Cheka and Red troops undoubtedly committed atrocities. Beevor reports how Lenin urged caution in the countryside and the Red Army called for an end to forced conscription, confiscation and executions.
All opposition turned White
Beevor, despite his outbursts against Lenin’s “lack of democracy”, avoids making direct comparisons with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Other honest bourgeois historians, such as E H Carr in his classic books on the Russian Revolution, have also shown how Bolshevik policies had nothing in common with the political counter-revolution of Stalin, who wiped out what was left of the Bolshevik Party, established a brutal dictatorship and reversed all democratic reforms.
Those who criticise — or hate — the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution are very silent about whom they would rather have seen come to power in Russia. The “democratic” superpowers were in fact colonial powers, waging war in India, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and East Asia, in addition to the just-ended First World War and the class war against workers and the poor within their countries.
The forces that challenged the Bolsheviks all ended up on the side of the Whites. The Social Revolutionaries, like the Mensheviks, called for armed struggle against the government and Soviet power. The independent army under Machno in Ukraine, named the Black Army because of its anarchist flag, failed to establish a stable credible area under its control or take a clear stand for the revolution and was disbanded in 1921 when its leaders fled to Romania. A tragic event was the 1921 Kronstadt uprising, which was militarily defeated by the Red forces. The Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd had a reputation from 1917 as a stronghold of the revolution but four years later had a completely different crew. Their demands were increased food rations in a time of famine and the revolt was seen by whites as a last chance to undermine the government. The revolt lacked the support of the workers of Petrograd, but its defeat has been used since the 1930s by the Bolsheviks’ opponents as evidence of the party’s authoritarian brutality.
In early 1920, the Polish army attacked Ukraine and Russia. The Red Army responded by mobilising and counter-attacking. The Polish troops were driven back. Lenin and the Bolsheviks urged the Red Army to advance on Warsaw, believing they would gain support in Poland, but then realised that was a mistake. Revolutions cannot be spread by force of arms, let alone against an oppressed country with strong support for independence. The Bolsheviks advocated a union of soviets, workers’ councils, uniting workers across borders, but also the right of nations to independence and a state of their own. It is a policy that Stalin broke with completely, with totalitarian dictatorship ruling the entire Soviet Union and its constituent states. The fact that Putin, on the eve of the attack on Ukraine, praised Stalin and criticised Lenin says it all.
A broken country
The war was de facto already over when the Red Army took control of the whole of Crimea, the last bastion of the Whites in European Russia, in November 1920. White generals Denikin and Wrangel, along with their supporters, fled with the help of British, French and American ships in the Black Sea, the same ships that had earlier fired salutes in their honour. In March 1922, the war finally ended when Vladivostok was captured by the Reds.
Russia was a broken country with enormous needs. Famine disasters ravaged the country, claiming millions of victims. Industrial output was a fifth of what it had been before the First World War and harvests a third. There were seven million orphans.
A large proportion of the most conscious workers died in the war. The defeat of the revolution in Finland, Hungary, Austria and Germany led to isolation and dependence on the old state apparatus. A bureaucratic layer within the regime, led by Stalin, strengthened its power.
Antony Beevor’s book is somewhat messy and, of course, bourgeois. But the conclusion of reading it is nevertheless that imperialism and the whites could not crush the revolution, which was defended by the Bolsheviks, the Red Army and the working class with the support of the rural poor.
