sign in sign up
<<
Home , Mikhail Zoshchenko, Red Army, Russian Civil War

THE RUSSIAN CIVIL Also by A. B. Murphy

ASPECTIVAL USAGE IN RUSSIAN INlRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY TO SHOLOKHOV'S TlKHlY : A Literary Project

Also by G. R. Swain

EASTERN SINCE 1945 (co-author) THE ORIGINS OF THE RUSSIAN RUSSIAN SOCIAL AND THE LEGAL LABOUR MOVEMENT,1906-14 The Documents from the Archives

Edited by v. P. Butt Senior Scientific Collaborator Institute of Russian History Russian Academy of Sciences A. B. Murphy Professor Emeritus of Russian University of Ulster N. A. Myshov Senior Scientific Collaborator and ChiefArchivist Russian State Military Archive and G. R. Swain Professor ofHistory University of the West of England First published in Great Britain 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-59319-6 ISBN 978-1-349-25026-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25026-4

First published in the of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference , 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-16337-2 Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Russian civil war: documents from the Soviet archives / edited by V. P. Butt ... ret al.l p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16337-2 (cloth) I. -History-Revolution, 1917-1921-Sources. I. Butt, V. P. DK265.A5372 1996 947.084'I-dc20 96-19904 CIP

Selection, editorial matter and translation © V. P. Butt, A. B. Murphy, N. A. Myshov and G. R. Swain 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 10987654321 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 Contents

Introduction vii Glossary of Russian Terms xvi 1 The Directory 1 2 The Don Rebellion 45 3 The Kaleidoscope of War 82 4 The Labour of the Soviet Republic 124 5 The Final Curtain 175 Index 207

v Introduction

For historians of interested in the twentieth century it was until recently traditional to include in the preface to any book a disclaimer about the problems caused by the closure of the Soviet archives. For historians of the Russian Civil War such comments were de rigueur. Thus over twenty-five years ago John Bradley wrote in The Civil War in Russia, 1917-20 (Batsford, 1975) that the Soviet Government's policy concerning the Russian archives meant 'nothing fresh and revealing can be expected from that source' (p. 7), while as late as 1990 Bruce Lincoln could bemoan in his Red Victory (Simon & Schuster, 1990) that 'parts of Russia's Civil War story will almost certainly never be told for the documents remain locked away in the Soviet archives' (p. 13). That has all changed. The opening of the Soviet archives in the years since 's term as President of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself, have enabled scholars to gain new perspectives on the Russian Civil War. The Civil War was a rather strange episode in the historiography of twentieth-century Russia. It saw an unlikely degree of agreement between Western and Soviet scholars on its origins and the reasons for the Bolshevik triumph. Whereas on most aspects of Russian history in the twentieth cen• tury Western and Soviet scholars took diametrically opposite views on how to interpret events, the Civil War period witnessed something quite different. Western and Soviet scholars were pretty much at one. Take, for example, Bruce Lincoln's Red Victory. He writes in the pre- face (p. 12): The ' desperate struggle to survive during the Russian Civil War shaped the Soviet system of government and dictated its future course. Only by placing all human and natural resources within reach at the service of a government that spoke in the name of the people but acted in the interest of the Communist Party did Lenin and his defeat their enemies. These included soldiers from fourteen countries, the armed forces of nearly a dozen national groups that struggled to establish independent governments upon the lands that once had been part of the , and a half-dozen armies that formed on Russia's frontiers between 1918 and 1920. To comprehend the Soviet Union of today, it is important to understand how the Bolsheviks tri• umphed against such crushing odds and how that struggle shaped their vision of the future.

vii Vlll Introduction

Apart from the reference to the Communist Party, few Soviet scholars would have been unhappy with such a summary. Of course, there have been differences of interpretation. Evan Mawdsley has done much in his definitive study, The Russian Civil War (Allen & Unwin, 1987), to qualify the received wisdom on a number of issues. In particular he had debunked the myth of the fourteen interventionist powers (foreign intervention was half-hearted and ineffective); he had made clear that the Red won not simply as a result of its military skill, but because it was far bigger than the White armies; and he had reminded us that, more than the Reds winning the Civil War, the lost it since they represented nothing but the old pre- ruling elite. But, with the honourable exception of Mawdsley, the differences between historians tend to be nuances within the same broad approach. For most, the Civil War was a heroic period in Russian history, before things started to go wrong, as it were. The Civil War took place before the emergence of Stalin as leader of the Russian Communist Party and saw Trotsky playing the leading role on the Bolshevik side in both building the and marshalling it towards victory. Progressive opinion in the West and Soviet propaganda could therefore be at one. Among the points on which Western and Soviet scholars were agreed were the following. One, that the 'democratic' phase of the Civil War, over the summer of 1918, was a meaningless interlude; the only group cap• able of defeating the Bolsheviks were the White generals. The Bolsheviks' democratic opponents, if referred to at all, were depicted as ineffectual idealists who could talk but not fight. The true Civil War was fought between the Bolsheviks, who represented progress, and White generals, who were supported in their attempt to restore the old regime by the rampant imperialist ambitions of almost every conceivable European and world power. Another point of agreement was that the Bolsheviks, partly through their exceptional propaganda but also through their pro• gressive social policies, succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the bulk of the Russian population. And finally, it was agreed that, if a little brutally, Trotsky succeeded in turning the Red Army from a rabble to an incomparable fighting force. All historians agree that, to paraphrase Bruce Lincoln, Russia's Civil War experience determined the framework within which the Russian peo• ple thought and governed throughout the Soviet period; what the newly released documents on the Civil War reveal is that the events of 1918-22 reflected struggles and tensions in Russian society far more complex than the simple Red-White struggle of 'progress' versus 'reaction', and fore• shadow all the horrors of the Stalin period. They remind us first that many Introduction IX of the Whites were not 'White' at all, and that the Civil War began as a war between the Bolsheviks and their socialist opponents - the '' socialist SRs (Socialist ) - who did not simply talk but created the People's Army which at times had the Red Army on the run and always held its own. They show how the antipathy towards peasant led the Bolsheviks to be suspicious of Russia's entire rural population, making it tremendously difficult to adopt a social policy in the countryside which could win even lukewarm support. They show how this failing was linked to the Bolsheviks' essentially urban ideology, and how that ideology was central to Bolshevism. The first attempt at post-war reconstruction took place according to the dictates of Bolshevik ideology, and the firm conviction that was only a matter of months away. They show a regime founded on terror, and which relied on terror throughout the war. They show that while the Red Army was able to defeat the Whites, it was not the disciplined army of Bolshevik propaganda. Desertion, low morale and poor supplies dogged it at every level; and the much vaunted system of political edu• cation scarcely operated. Finally, they show us the limitations and other• worldliness of the Bolsheviks' White opponents.

THE COURSE OF THE WAR

The Russian Civil War began the moment the Bolsheviks seized power on the night of 24-25 October 1917. Within a week forces loyal to Kerensky's Provisional Government tried to wrest power from the Bolsheviks at the Battle of Pulkovo Heights on the outskirts of Petrograd. Few, however, were keen for a fight and Lenin's promise to hold elections to the Con• stituent Assembly and form a coalition administration with the Left SRs was sufficient to restore relative calm. In the run-up to the opening of the Constituent Assembly the only forces committed to war were the future White generals, those associated with General 's attempt to seize power from Kerensky in August 1917; by December 1917 these had gathered on the river Don, but by they were in full retreat to a safe area in the distant . These first armed incidents, however, did point to the two very different groups which were prepared to take up arms against the Bolshevik regime. Kerensky's supporters were SRs, fel• low socialists committed to Russia's democratic revolution of February 1917; the White generals on the Don had no time for democracy, and while not all of them wanted to restore the Tsar's autocratic monarchy, all wanted a dictatorial regime of some sort. x Introduction

Over the summer of 1918 it was the Bolsheviks' democratic opponents who were the first to take up arms. As democrats, the SRs were committed to the Constituent Assembly. Although infuriated by the Bolshevik deci• sion to close the Assembly down after just one session on 5 , the SRs did not respond at once for they had reason to believe it might be recalled in the not-too-distant future. By the middle of , how• ever, they had concluded that the recall of the Constituent Assembly was highly unlikely and decided to prepare for an armed insurrection to over• throw the Bolsheviks by force. Hardly had those preparations begun than the Allied Czechoslovak Legion, for its own reasons, turned against the Bolsheviks and rallied to the SR cause; in a matter of days in the Bolsheviks lost control of most of the basin and , and the Civil War proper had begun. This stage of the Civil War was a war between socialists. The SRs established their own version of socialism in the areas they controlled and created a People's Army to defend it; the Bolsheviks defended their ver• sion of socialism with their Red Army. In it looked as if the People's Army would triumph, particularly when fell on 8 August 1918. The Bolsheviks, however, lived to fight another day. Despite signing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany in , relations with Germany had remained so tense that the bulk of the Red Army had con• tinued to be stationed in the west in case the Germans were tempted to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. However, on 10 August 1918 Lenin initialled a trade treaty with Germany and, confident that his relations with the Germans were now good, he moved as many troops as he possibly could to attack the People's Army and recapture Kazan in early . The People's Army was only just beginning to stage a comeback in when the nature of the Civil War was changed forever. On 18 November 1918 Admiral Kolchak seized power from the demo• cratic administration established by Lenin's socialist opponents and estab• lished a in Siberia; from then on the Civil War would be a war between Red Bolsheviks and White Generals, a war between pro• gress and reaction. At approximately the same time, the ending of the First World War meant that Allied intervention in the Civil War could be chan• nelled through the Sea rather than arriving in Russia through the Arctic north or Far East. Thus when fighting resumed in the spring of 1919 it was the southern Russian front, where General Denikin had emerged as the dominant figure, which would be important in a way that it had never been in 1918. The year 1919 saw the most dramatic of the fighting. It began with Introduction xi

Ko1chak's advance from Siberia in March, retaking and advancing to within less than a hundred miles of the Volga; but a Red counter- started in April and by June Ufa had again changed hands. Although Ko1chak staged a counter-offensive in , this failed; and by his capital at had fallen to the Bolsheviks. At the very moment Ko1chak began to retreat, Denikin began to make a dra• matic advance from the south. The main focus of the Red Army had been the battle against Ko1chak in the east, and the secondary campaign against Denikin had not been going well in the spring of 1919; repeated efforts in March, April and had not resulted in the Bolsheviks extending their position on the river. Then, in the most dramatic counter• attack, Denikin broke out and advanced within three weeks to Kharkov and beyond; on 30 June Tsaritsyn fell. As Denikin's troops advanced up the Volga, he made desperate efforts to co-ordinate activity with the retreating forces of Ko1chak. Denikin's failure to effect any substantive liaison with Ko1chak saved the day for the Bolsheviks, but it was a close call. Their first counter• offensive of 15 August was unsuccessful, and although Denikin's advance had been temporarily stopped, he was able to launch a further offensive in September which captured and Orel, only 120 miles from the arsenal town of Tula and 250 miles from . At the same moment General Iudenich launched an assault on Petro grad from , and by 21 he had reached the suburbs. In October 1919 the days of Lenin's regime really did seem to be numbered. However, the tide did tum. On 20 October 1919, the Red Army retook Orel; Trotsky's inspired counter-attack meant that by mid-November Iudenich was back in Estonia; and on 24 October 1919 the Red of General Budyenny recaptured and forced Denikin's army to begin an ever more desperate retreat until it was back beyond the Don in the first week of 1920. By the spring of 1920 both Ko1chak and Denikin had been defeated and the Civil War seemed over. Then, at the end of April 1920, the Polish Army invaded Russia and the two countries were embroiled in a war that was to last until an armistice was signed on 12 October. The fighting enabled the remnants of Denikin' s forces to evacuate the Kuban and regroup in the , from which General Wrangellaunched a new assault on the Bolshevik regime in June 1920. While the Polish war was still going on the Bolsheviks could do little but try to confine Wrangel's activities to the region immediately north of the Crimean peninsula and prevent any link• up between Wrangel and the Poles; this they did successfully, for the two armies were never less than 250 miles apart. Even before the Polish War xii Introduction

was over the Red Anny began to concentrate on Wrangel, though the decisive fighting occurred at the end of October and during the first fort• night of November; Wrangel set sail from Sevastapol into exile on 14 November 1920. The Crimea was not the last White refuge in Russia. Although the British, and American interventionist forces had abandoned the cause by the end of 1919, this was not the case for the Japanese. After the overthrow of Kolchak and the Red advance into Siberia, the Bolsheviks attempted to assuage Japanese amour-propre by establishing not a Bolshevik regime in eastern Siberia but a nominally independent Far Eastern Repub• lic. The Japanese at first went along with this, but when it became clear that the would actually be under Soviet control, they decided to cling on to Russia's Maritime Province, establishing a White administration there and turning it into a last haven for the supporters of Kolchak. It was not until October 1922 that the Japanese, under diplomatic pressure from the USA, agreed to evacuate the Maritime Province and thus Russia's last White administration, that of General Diterikhs, collapsed. Fittingly, the year 1922 also saw the end of the democratic strand to the Civil War, of which little had been heard since the coup staged by Kolchak in November 1918. The SRs were involved in the events surrounding the arrest of Kolchak over the winter of 1919-20, and some played a role in the Far Eastern Republic; still others were involved in the wave of peasant disturbances that permeated every stage of the Civil War and culminated, after the Red victory, in the insurrection of spring 1921. In Feb• ruary 1922 the remnants of the SR Party leadership were arrested, and put on trial in June; it marked the end of the political careers of the Bolsheviks' democratic opponents, those who in the summer of 1918 had established both Komuch and the Directory as alternative socialist administrations to that of the Bolsheviks.

THE DOCUMENTS

Any selection of documents from a topic as vast as the Russian Civil War is essentially arbitrary. In this collection have deliberately sought out documents which highlight the complexities of the struggle, often explor• ing episodes which are relatively unknown for the light they shed on what was a multi-faceted struggle which left deep wounds on the Russian and non-Russian peoples of what became the Soviet Union. So the Red ver• sus White struggle has been virtually ignored and more difficult issues addressed. If this means that some of the documents need extensive Introduction xiii

contextualisation, then that has been done, for there is no way around it; the Civil War was complex, not a simple Red versus White struggle, and any selection from the newly opened archives is bound to reflect that fact. Chapter 1 relates to the democratic phase of the Civil War, the period when the Bolsheviks were fighting their fellow socialists. As the reader will realise, much of the time these socialists were less worried by the activities of the Bolsheviks than by the activities of the anti-democrtic groups of generals waiting in the wings with whom they were forced to co-operate and whom they feared, justifiably, might turn against them. While traditional historiography has not taken seriously the attempt by Russia's moderate socialists to build a democratic administration, the Directory, around the economic power of the Siberian co-operatives, these documents serve to advance the counter view. The second chapter centres on the Don rebellion of spring 1919. Denikin's dramatic advance and near victory over the Bolsheviks was less a product of his military success than the Bolsheviks' political failure. As would happen repeatedly until Lenin adopted the (NEP) in March 1921, the Bolsheviks were stumped when it came to understand• ing peasant aspirations. Hamstrung by Lenin's false analogy between urban class struggle and social stratification in the village, the Bolsheviks were always trying to identify poor , with whom the working class could ally themselves against rich peasants, and thus antagonising the peasants en masse. The most acute example of this, but far from the only example, was the attempt to apply class among the Don ; this led to such a widespread rebellion in the late spring of 1919 that Denikin could effectively leapfrog from the Don to Tsaritsyn and beyond in . The Don rebellion paved the way for Denikin's near victory. Chapter 3 is a mixed bag designed to highlight several of the issues of 1919 which are rarely fully explored in the propaganda vision of the war. First, there is the question of the 'Greens': the Bolsheviks found it very difficult to work with autonomous radical organisations, but had to if the Whites were to be defeated; this was particularly important in the ultimate. defeat of Denikin. Second, there is the question of morale: of course the propaganda vision of the Red Army as a body of highly motivated and politically conscious fighters for freedom was always suspect, but the documents now available show how far this was from the truth. Third, there is the question of terror, which applied at every level; just as the highest serving officers could find themselves charged with political crimes, so could the rank and file soldier. Fourth, there is desertion, an enormous problem on both sides in the war, but affecting the Reds just as much as the Whites. Finally, there is the day-to-day struggle of ordinary people to xiv Introduction

survive, which is too vast a topic for a collection like this but a few random documents give a flavour of some of the issues. The fourth chapter is devoted to another little-studied episode, the cam• paign to form Labour Armies in the spring of 1920. These documents tell us much about the persisting importance of ideology, about how the Bolsheviks envisaged the forward march of socialism developing in those few weeks before the Polish War broke out and the Wrangel campaign condemned the Civil War to last another debilitating year. By the time that campaign was over, the country was on its knees and facing the three• pronged crisis of the Petrograd strikes of February 1921, the Kronshtadt rebellion of March 1921, and the Tambov peasant insurrection which lasted throughout the spring; faced with such popular unrest Lenin had no choice but to introduce NEP in March 1921 and put the socialist experiment on hold. But the Labour Army episode shows us what might have happened if the Civil War had been over in 1919, how socialism might have been constructed, and foreshadows many of the issues raised later in the decade when Stalin began to move the country away from NEP and towards social• ist planning. Chapter 5 considers the final White campaign led by General Diterikhs in the Maritime Province in October 1922. It is another neglected area, but the true value of the documents is perhaps in the poignancy of Diterikhs' agonised question: why did we lose? No one fought the Bolsheviks longer than Diterikhs, and no one had clearer motives for continuing to fight. Yet when we read his self-justification, we can see how divorced he was from the world of most Russian workers and peasants.

ARCHIVES AND AUTHORS

The documents in this collection are taken from five archives: the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) , the Russian State Archive of Economics (RGAE), the Russian State Military Archive (RGV A), the Rus• sian Central Depository for Documents relating to (RTsKhIDNI), and the State Archive of the Rostov Region (GARO). Not all documents are given in full, but all are referenced by their fond, opis, and ed. khr. numbers in accordance with the usual Russian practice; unless the files are so small that there could be no confusion, the list, or folio, numbers are also given.

Dr V.P. Butt was in essence the originator of this project, having worked for many years in the Soviet and then Russian Academy of Sciences; he Introduction xv was until its disbandment co-ordinator of the group writing the official history of the Russian Civil War. Professor A.B. Murphy taught Russian at the University of Ulster and was attracted to the study of the Civil War through 's epic novel The Quiet Don; his study of the Don rebellion was published in Revolutionary Russia, no.2 (1993), pp. 315-50. Dr N.A. Myshov is a scientific researcher with the Russian Academy of Sciences, attached to the History of the Russian Civil War project. Dr G.R. Swain teaches history at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and has published The Origins of the Russian Civil War (Longman, 1996) a study of the democratic phase of the Civil War in 1918. The documents were assembled by all four authors and translated by Pro• fessor Murphy; the introduction and commentaries on individual documents were written by Dr Swain. The authors would like to thank the British Academy for the financial support given to Professor Murphy as part of this project. Glossary of Russian Terms

All-Russian Council of the National Economy The council appointed by the Bolshevik Government to run the economy An elected leader of cossacks black hundreds Right-wing thugs who in Tsarist times were responsible for organising against the Jews C-in-C Commander-in-Chief Cadet A member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party The Extraordinary Commission or Secret Police People responsible for the political training and reliability of the Red Army Committees of the Poor Committees established by the Bolsheviks to mobilise poor peasants comrades' courts The lowest level of court, responsible for both political and criminal misdemeanours Council of People's Commissars The Bolshevik Government desyatin Unit of measurement, equivalent to 1.09 hectares Donburo Communist Party executive for the Don region Duma The representative assembly with limited constitutional powers tolerated by the Tsar from 1906 to 1914 dzhigit Mounted tribesman GHQ General Headquarters, the Bolshevik supreme command Komuch Committee of the Constituent Assembly, given the task of recon- vening the assembly after its dissolution by the Bolsheviks kulak Rich peasant oblast A region smaller than a province The chief administrative body for the Communist Party pood Unit of measurement, equivalent to 16.38 kg pravitel Archaic word for political 'ruler' People's Commissariat A Ministry in the Bolshevik Government Politburo Ruling body of the Communist Party RKP(b) Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks), full title of the Com• munist Party RSFSR Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic RVS Revolutionary Military Council - these existed at every level, from the chief RVS of the Republic to regional RVSs Special Section The Red Army section responsible for political reliability

xvi Glossary of Russian Tenns xvii Cossack tenn for village troika A committee of three people verst Unit of measurement, equivalent to 1067 metres voisko A cossack administrative unit volost A local district zemstvo An elected assembly of local, regional or provincial government