By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Although Russia one could argue, had been in a state
of civil war for at least several months before and arguably for an entire
year, it was the treaty's of Brest-Litovsk that the
Central Powers concluded first with the Ukrainian National Republic (27 January
1918) and then Soviet Russia (3 March 1918) that largely
determined the actual fighting during the Civil War in 1918.
During the last fortnight of May, the Mensheviks, Right SRs and Kadets all held party conferences which rejected the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk, while a Social Revolutionary appeal called for an immediate
armed uprising against the Bolsheviks. On 18 May some 400 Constituent Assembly
deputies met together and condemned the treaty, declaring that the state of war
with the Central Powers continued to be in place.
What is commonly known as the Russian Civil War should also rather be
seen as a whole series of overlapping and mutually
reinforcing conflicts: a rapidly escalating struggle between the armed
forces of Lenin’s Bolshevik government and its counter-revolutionary opponents.
By the terms of Brest-Litovsk (Article 5), the Germans had expressly
forbidden Russia from fielding an army (“Russia will, without delay, carry out
the full demobilization of her army inclusive of those units recently organized
by the present government.”) Still, the Germans had chosen to look the other
way as Trotsky assembled the Red Army, seeing it as a useful bulwark against
the Allied incursions in Siberia and at Murmansk. So long as the German army, 1
million strong, remained in the East, the Bolsheviks had not really been
masters of their own house.1
The first and most critical result of the German collapse on the western
front was therefore simple: the Red Army could be expanded without German
interference. As early as October 1, 1918, after he learned of the Allied
breakthrough at the Siegfried line, Lenin ordered general conscription to
begin, with the aim of building an army of 3 million men by spring 1919. It was
an ambitious goal, not only logistically but also politically, as an army of
that size could only be recruited among the peasant population, which remained
mostly hostile to Lenin. An army of millions would also need officers to train
and command it, who could only be found among veterans of the Imperial Army.
Trotsky had already begun enlisting Tsarist officers in the Red Army in spring
1918, but only about eight thousand had signed up so far; Lenin’s proposed army
would require ten times that many. Moreover, many of Trotsky’s early officer
recruits had enlisted in the hope of fighting the Germans (then carving up
Ukraine, White Russia, the Baltics, and Finland)—only to discover, by fall
1918, that their most likely opponents would be either Russia’s former allies,
or worse, their fellow Tsarist officers in the Volunteer Army.2
Even so, the German collapse made Trotsky’s task, in political terms, a
bit easier. In spring and summer 1918, the Allied landings at Murmansk,
Vladivostok, and Archangel had been small-scale and, in theory at least,
friendly. Only after the Czechoslovak rebellion and Boris Savinkov’s
uprising at Yaroslavl in July had relations between the Entente powers and
Moscow tipped over toward outright hostility, and even then it stopped short of
armed combat. The November 1918 armistice, ending the world war, tore off the
mask of friendliness. Any continued Allied military presence in Russia would be
ipso facto hostile, which the Bolsheviks could plausibly describe to peasant
recruits, or to ex-tsarist officers, as a foreign invasion. True, officers
irredeemably opposed to Bolshevism could still join the Volunteer Army, and
more than fifty thousand did. But for some patriotic officers, it now appeared
that the Bolsheviks, for all their strange economic policies, were fighting for
Russia, while their enemies were collaborating with foreigners. Small wonder
that thousands of veteran officers joined the Red Army that winter, with as
many as 75,000 serving by summer 1919, including 775 generals.3
The strategic picture facing Moscow in November 1918 was menacing, but
far from hopeless. Finland and the Baltic states were lost, along with the Transcaucasus; but the embryonic states in these areas were
mostly wrapped up in their own affairs, having no aggressive designs on Russian
territory. In Ukraine, the situation was fluid. The Germans were withdrawing
very slowly (concerned about Bolshevik penetration, the Allied Supreme Command
had stipulated in the November 1918 armistice that German troops should leave
only “as soon as the Allies shall think the moment suitable, having regard to
the internal situation”). The western Allies, pursuant to the Mudros armistice
they signed with Turkey on October 30, now controlled the Black Sea, which
enabled a British-French landing at Novorossiisk, in
the Kuban area in the rear of the Volunteer Army, on November 23. The Volunteer
Army itself was entrenched in the north under the protection of the Kuban
Cossacks, but General Denikin’s cool relations with
the Don Cossack ataman, General Krasnov, complicated any advance farther north.
While still under German patronage, Krasnov’s Don Cossacks had attacked
Tsaritsyn, on the lower Volga, repeatedly in fall 1918, only to be beaten off
in a brutal series of battles best remembered for the quarrel between Stalin,
who had unleashed a reign of terror against ex-tsarist officers, and a furious
Trotsky, who recalled Stalin to Moscow. Britain and France did control Russia’s
Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel, with more troops (including 5,000
Americans) landing there all the time. Still, Archangel was 770 miles from
Moscow along a jerry-built railway very easy to sabotage, and Murmansk another
500 miles farther still. In Siberia, there were 70,000 Japanese
and 7,000 American troops on the ground. But most of them were stationed in
the Far East between Vladivostok and Harbin, 5,000 miles from Moscow.4
The most serious threat to the Bolsheviks came from Samara, 650 miles
southeast of Moscow, where the in part one mentioned Komuch, an organization that claimed the mantle of the
deposed Constituent Assembly, was issuing its own decrees under the
protection of the Czechoslovak Legion. This would-be Russian government
controlled, at its peak in late August 1918, Samara and Ufa provinces, in which
lived about 12 million people, mostly Socialist Revolutionary (SR)–voting
Russian peasants. Owing to the existence of a rival “Siberian Provisional
Government” at Omsk, its authority did not extend farther east, but the
territory Komuch controlled was more strategic,
straddling the Volga River basin from Nizhny Novgorod to the Caspian. Komuch had even articulated a serious agricultural policy,
turning over the land to peasant communes and freeing up grain prices. Komuch had begun recruiting its own “People’s Army,”
although this numbered fewer than thirty thousand by the end of summer 1918, a
force still overshadowed by the Czechoslovaks. Even so, Trotsky had sent his
best troops, the Latvian Rifles under General Jukums Vacietis, to deal with Komuch,
and arrived himself in August 1918 to take personal charge of a new “Eastern
Army Group.” On August 27, Trotsky narrowly escaped capture at Sviazhsk, in a close-run battle that turned out to be the
high-water mark for the Czechs. Kazan fell to the Reds on September 10;
Simbirsk, on September 12; and then Samara, on October 7. The Czechoslovak
troops, unsure what or whom they were fighting for, were demoralized by these
defeats. By the time the armistice was signed in November ending the world war
on the western front, the Czech-Komuch Alliance was
in disarray. What remained of Komuch and the Siberian
Army, as we have seen at the end of the link here:,
retreated east to Ufa and Omsk.5
Like the departure of the Germans from Ukraine, however, the
disintegration of the Czech Legion removed a buffer between Moscow and the
Allies. The shift from Samara to Omsk also changed the political complexion of
the resistance in Siberia, weakening the hand of the radical Left SRs who,
after breaking with the Bolsheviks in the botched uprising of July 1918, had
fled east and come to dominate Komuch. But with Komuch haven't been able to secure authoritative power a
compromise of right-wing anti-Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries at the
so-called Ufa State Conference convened formed a five-man Directory.
But although the Ufa State Conference duly convened (from 8 to 23
September 1918)-and, compared to its raucous and divisive precursor at Moscow
in August 1917, convened in apparent harmony-it, its outcome, were a sham.
There were reported to be 160-70 delegates present, from a variety of political
parties, social organizations, and local and minority-nationality authorities,
but neither of the chief protagonists was sincere in its offerings: both Komuch and the Provisional Siberian Government (PSG) had
been forced to the negotiating table by the Allies' threats of withdrawing
support and by fears aroused upon the advance of Soviet forces across the Volga
in September 1918 (see below). What emerged from the conference a coalition
regime, the Ufa Directory, claiming all Russian authority was hailed as a
triumph for the Union of Regeneration, good sense, and good compromise, but it
was none of these. For Komuch and its allies, the SRs
elected as members of the Directory (N.D. Avksent' ev and V'M. Zenzinov) had long
since sacrificed their bonafide's as party members
(and even as socialists) in favor of their predilection for coalition with the Kadets (both, ofcourse, were
founder members and mainstays of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia-URR),
while the very existence of the regime was an affront to Komuchs
claim to be the true government of all Russia, on the basis of the democratic
credentials of its members accorded by their election to the Constituent
Assembly in 1917.6
Needless to say, the extreme Right and the military looked upon the
whole affair with a mixture of disdain and alarm, but even eminent Kadets who had been committed to the creation of a
coalition directory were dismayed by this one: for them, there were too many
members (five, not the three his party had endorsed by joining the National
Center and the Union of Regeneration), noted N.L Astrov,
and its military member had insufficient power (and was, to compound the sin,
the notorious friend of the socialists V'G. Boldyrev, not a hardliner, such as
General Alekseev, that he had been promised). Finally, and most damningly, Astrov charged, the Ufa conference had admitted the possibility
of a reconvention of the Constituent Assembly of 1917: "I shall not enter
into a debate as to whether that assembly was good or bad:' he remonstrated in
a letter from South Russia, abruptly refusing to accept the seat on the Ufa
Directory that had been reserved for him, "I shall merely point out that
it simply does not exist and to build an all-Russian government on the basis of
it is the grandest of illusions.7 He had a point.
So, just as in February 1917, in Petrograd, nobody had got the revolution
they wanted, in September 1918, at Ufa, nobody got the counter-revolution they
wanted. But time was now moving faster: the progeny of February, the
Provisional Government, lasted eight months; the offspring of Ufa, the
Directory, lasted barely eight weeks. Its demise was definitely hastened by the
Directors' decision to relocate immediately to Omsk, the capital of the PSG and
the headquarters of the Siberian Army. It's SR members were not so naive as to
fail to recognize that this relocation was implicitly perilous: "We must
put our heads in the lion's mouth:' N.D. Avksent' ev informed critics of the move. "Either it will eat
us or we will. choke it.8 But, given the situation at the front, where Soviet
forces were approaching the western slopes of the Urals by late September 1918,
it was probably necessary. Yet nobody was surprised when, on 18 November 1918,
the Siberian lion duly swallowed the meek Directory in a coup d'etat organized by local Kadets,
Cossacks, and leaders of the Siberian Army (with at least the tacit
encouragement of the British Military Mission at Omsk).9 In its stead was
established a military dictatorship led by a "supreme ruler," 10
Admiral A.V. Kolchak, which promised the restoration of order, the merciless
expunging of Bolshevism in all its forms from Russian life, the reestablishment
of a "Russia, One and Indivisible;' and a prioritization of the needs of
the army.11
This was just the sort of menu for which the Russian military and
political Right had been hungering since the abortive Kornilov coup of August
1917. Whether it was a recipe for either political or military success remained
to be seen, but in the short term, at least, the signs were positive: the
abducted Directors meekly accepted their fate (and in the case of the socialists
were quietly ushered into exile); swayed by their pro-Kolchak commanders, the
men of the Czechoslovak Legion (who were generally supportive of the Party of
Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and socialism in general) declined to
intervene again in Russian politics in order to resurrect the Directory; the
dregs of Komuch (in the guise of a Congress of
Members of the Constituent Assembly) were mopped up and imprisoned at
Ekaterinburg or fled; a Bolshevik-inspired uprising against the new Kolchak
government, in mid-December 1918, was a shambles, with the local party
subsequently decimated; and, after an initial bluster of protest, Ataman
Semenov, now based threateningly astride the Trans-Siberian Railroad at Chita,
reluctantly subordinated himself to Kolchak.12 The accession of the Supreme
Ruler was immediately greeted with great warmth by the heads of Cossack hosts
East of the Urals, by the command of the Siberian Army, local councils of trade
and industry, including the 'krug' (assembly) of the
Don Cossack Host.13
Earlier, after dramatically resigning his command in June 1917 by
throwing his sword overboard, Kolchak had escaped Russia, visited the Admiralty
in England, and then traveled to the United States, where he gave lectures at
the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. A fervent Anglophile, Kolchak
was liked and trusted by the British, especially Major-General Alfred W. F.
Knox, the head of the British military mission in Siberia. In an eerie replay
of the odd diplomacy of the Rasputin affair, a conspiracy was hatched in Omsk
by a combination of ex-tsarist officers and Siberian Cossacks, which, on the
night of November 17–18, 1918, brought Admiral Kolchak to power as “Supreme
Ruler” of a new “All-Russian Provisional Government,” with “warm approval”
expressed by (and possibly the covert support of) Major-General Knox and the
British military authorities in Siberia.14
The Kolchak coup in Omsk, coming hard on the heels of the western
armistice, clarified the political stakes in the Russian Civil War. Previously
a confusing, multiparty conflict, the war now appeared to be a bilateral affair
pitting pro-Bolshevik “Reds” against right-leaning “Whites,” who were backed by
the Western “imperialist” powers. (The term “Whites” was a Red insult, as this
color of the French Bourbons implied a reactionary attachment to the monarchy.
None of the “White” leaders, who all pledged to restore the authority of the
Constituent Assembly (not the tsar), ever accepted the term. Still, with
apologies to the Whites, it is a useful shorthand. After General Alekseev, the
titular head of the Volunteer Army, died of natural causes in October 1918,
Kolchak was unrivaled as the political leader of the Whites. While posing as a
simple patriot who disavowed partiinost’ (party politics),
Kolchak summed up his war aims as an uncompromising “struggle against
Bolshevism.”15
If the emergence of Kolchak as supreme ruler brought clarity to the
political goals of the White armies, it did little to clear up the military
chain of command. The area between Omsk and the Volunteers in the North
Caucasus was Red-controlled, which meant that communications between Kolchak
and Denikin needed to be routed by way of
Vladivostok—and the Allied Supreme Command in Paris. Nor were the Allies agreed
on which front to prioritize. The British were all in with Kolchak, but the
French wanted to focus on Ukraine. The Americans were cool on Kolchak, too,
owing to Woodrow Wilson’s reservations about the anti-democratic coup in Omsk
(the president also believed, erroneously, that the Whites planned to restore
the Romanov monarchy).
Nor was it clear where the Whites, cut off from Russia’s industrial
centers, would obtain arms. The most logical supplier was the United States,
which meant shipping weapons all the way across the Pacific Ocean to
Vladivostok, and then thousands of miles along the Trans-Siberian. But
Kolchak’s government had little money of its own, and the Czechoslovaks refused
to hand over the Kazan gold reserves he might have used as security. In the
end, the only weapons Kolchak could afford were British army surplus—600,000
rifles, 6,831 machine guns, 192 field guns, and 500 million rounds.16
The Bolsheviks enjoyed a more unified command and more favorable
geography. Moscow was ideally located in strategic terms, at the center of a
ramshackle but still functioning hub-and-spoke railway network from which troop
trains could be dispatched northwest to Petrograd, northeast to Archangel,
south toward the Don region, or east to the Urals and western Siberia. Ruling
over central European Russia, the Bolsheviks could also recruit soldiers from a
homogeneous population of “Great Russians,” even as their White opponents,
operating on the periphery of the old tsarist empire, had to rely on Cossacks,
Ukrainians, Estonians, Finns, and other minorities of uncertain loyalties. The
Red Army also inherited the bulk of the old Tsarist Army arsenal, including 2.2
million rifles, 18,036 machine guns and 3 billion clips, 430,000 midrange or
light guns, 500 Vickers heavy guns, 1.56 million hand grenades, and 167,000
officers’ pistols and revolvers. The Bolsheviks also controlled the arms
factories of Tula. Although production capacity was now severely limited, these
factories were still critical assets.17
Despite laboring under material disadvantages, both Denikin
and Kolchak put together real armies during the winter lull in fighting between
November 1918 and March 1919. The departure of the Germans from the Don basin
helped, by costing the Don Cossacks their patron and forcing their Ataman
Krasnov into an alliance of convenience with Denikin.
On January 8, 1919, Krasnov accepted Denikin’s
command, instantly enlarging the Volunteer Army by 38,000 men. By mid-February
1919, Denikin’s “Southern Army Group” counted 117,000
men, 460 guns, and 2,040 machine guns. The departure of the Germans from
Ukraine and the collapse of their puppet Hetmanate in Kiev (replaced by a
short-lived “Ukrainian People’s Republic”) opened up a new front for operations
for Denikin, who could now outflank the Reds to the
west and maybe even link up with the Polish army forming, led by Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, under Allied auspices. While this was bad
news for the 30 million people of Ukraine, whose second dawn of independence
would last less than two months, it was good news for the Whites.18
On paper, Kolchak’s Army was even stronger than the Volunteers. By
February 1919, Kolchak had 143,000 men under his command, enough to outnumber
the Red Eastern Army Group, which counted only 117,600 (although the Reds had
another 150,000 or so in reserve east of Moscow, in case of a White
breakthrough). The Red Eastern Army Group was superior in both artillery (372
guns to 256) and machine guns (1,471 to 1,235), but owing to British aid, the
Whites had enough stocks to sustain an offensive, if not indefinitely. The
critical factor in western Siberia, where the armies (unlike in south Russia)
were already poised in striking range of one another, was timing. After Lenin’s
October 1918 call for three million soldiers, it was only a matter of time
before the Reds could overwhelm the Whites by force of numbers. To have any
chance of a decisive victory threatening Moscow, Kolchak would have to strike
quickly.19Kolchak, a navy man, entrusted army operations planning to D. A.
Lebedev, a former Stavka staff officer. But Lebedev had little material to work
with, as there were fewer experienced officers in western Siberia than in the
Don region—or in central Russia, where the Reds had an almost infinite supply
of ex-tsarist officers to draw from. Only one of the veterans in Omsk, M. V. Khanzhin, had ranked as high as general. There was the
self-declared “General Gajda” of the Czech Legion,
but he was a Habsburg war prisoner with no command experience other than in the
railway skirmishes of 1918.20
Despite these myriad deficiencies, the Siberian People’s Army acquitted
itself well in Kolchak’s offensive, which began in mid-March when the Siberian
winter began to ease (though crucially, before the ground had thawed out). In
the first month, the Siberian Army, advancing along a 700-mile-wide front
between Perm and Orenburg, pushed the Reds back nearly 400 miles, nearly to the
Volga River. The Whites captured Ufa with ease, even while a southern army
pushed southwest into the steppe above the Caspian, targeting Astrakhan. By the
end of April, Kolchak’s armies were threatening to retake Samara and Kazan.
Meanwhile, a cascading series of anti-Bolshevik peasant uprisings in the rear
of the Reds seemed to herald a major strategic breakthrough. In Omsk, the
atmosphere was euphoric, with bold talk of linking up with the Allies at
Archangel or Murmansk. The Japanese liaison officer to Kolchak, General Kasatkin, even offered to send Japanese troops to reinforce
his armies (for a price, of course, which included territorial concessions in
the Far East). In panic, Trotsky ordered all available reinforcements to the
eastern front.21
Trotsky’s panic was short-lived. By May, Kolchak’s eastern offensive had
run into the same problem that bedeviled armies invading Russia from the West:
the rains came, and the roads turned to mud. Meanwhile, Trotsky reorganized the
command structure of Eastern Army Group, making two inspired appointments. M.
N. Tukhachevsky, a high-born tsarist officer famous
for escaping from a German fortress-prison, was made commander on the central
front, while M. V. Frunze, a low-born Communist who had directed operations in
Turkestan in 1918, was put in charge of the southern army group on the lower
Volga. On April 28, Frunze struck at a vulnerable hinge point between the White
central and southern armies at Sterlitamak, on the Belaya River, capturing
prisoners and, significantly, a White operational directive from Omsk. Learning
that his right flank was safe, Frunze pushed forward. By mid-May, he had
punched a substantial gap in between the two White Siberian armies.22
Frunze’s coup came at a critical moment in the Russian Civil War. In the
burst of optimism that had followed Kolchak’s early victories, the Western
Allies had begun drawing up conditions for continuing to supply his armies, not
realizing how precarious his strategic position actually was. Despite energetic
lobbying at the Paris Peace Conference by such old-regime diplomats as Izvolsky and Sazonov, the Whites
simply had no diplomatic leverage, as they discovered when their request for a
role in the postwar Ottoman Straits regime, pursuant to the initial Sykes-Picot Agreement, was summarily dismissed. As
the Bolshevik regime, despite having defaulted on all treaty and financial
obligations to the Allies, was making no such demands regarding the Ottoman
settlement, the Allies had even allowed President Wilson, against the fervent
objections of Sazonov and Izvolsky,
to send a mission to Moscow in March 1919, led by William Bullitt. (Bullitt’s
subsequent recommendation, that Allied diplomats meet Bolshevik representatives
for formal peace talks on Prinkipo Island in the Sea
of Marmara south of Constantinople, was vetoed by the French.)
To remind Kolchak who had the leverage, the Allied Supreme Council in
Paris informed him, on May 26, that the Allies would continue to supply his
armies only if he immediately convened a new Constituent Assembly and joined
the nascent League of Nations (in both cases to appease Woodrow Wilson); if he
agreed to honor all debts contracted by tsarist Russia (to satisfy the French);
if he recognized the independence of Poland and Finland, and accepted mediation
on the status of the new states in the Baltic region (to please the British).
Kolchak, barely holding on against the Red tide, was forced to agree to these
onerous terms, although he summoned enough patriotic stubbornness to insist
that Finnish independence could be recognized only by the Russian Constituent
Assembly if it ever reconvened. To reassure Woodrow Wilson in particular,
Kolchak declared, on June 4, that “there cannot be a return to the régime which
existed in Russia before February 1917.”23
While the Allies were putting the squeeze on Kolchak, the White position
in western Siberia was falling apart. As seen on the map at the end of the
previous part, the Reds stormed into Ufa on June 9,
pushing the Whites back to the Ural Mountains. Serious dissension was now
brewing in the White command, with “General” Gajda,
in charge of the northern front between Ufa and Perm, complaining that Lebedev
had starved him of resources. Owing to the leverage still enjoyed by the
Czechs, although they were no longer fighting at the front, they still held
most of the Kazan gold reserves, Lebedev was forced to sack Khanzhin,
the Whites’ only experienced corps-level commander from the world war, and put Gajda in charge of the entire central and northern sectors.
It was a poor decision. By the end of June, the Whites had fallen back to
Ekaterinburg. In mid-July, Tukhachevsky’s Fifth Army
captured Zlatoust and, on July 24–25, Cheliabinsk,
driving a deep gap in the White Center. Farther south, Frunze was pushing east
along what is now the border between Russia and Kazakhstan, threatening to
outflank the entire White army on the right.24
If there was a silver lining in Kolchak’s reverses, Trotsky’s heightened
focus on the eastern front did open up room for Denikin
in the south. In mid-June 1919, just as the Siberian Army was falling back to
the Urals, the Volunteers advanced into the Donbass region. Kharkov fell on
June 21, opening up the path through central Ukraine to Kiev. On Denikin’s right flank, a Caucasian Army, commanded by Baron
P. N. Wrangel, a highly decorated cavalry officer of Baltic German stock,
crossed the Kalmyk steppe and closed on Tsaritsyn, where the Reds had spent all
winter digging trenches and erecting barbed wire. Deploying two British tanks,
Wrangel’s army breached these defenses and crashed into Tsaritsyn on June 30,
capturing some forty thousand Red prisoners. Wrangel’s was a signature victory
in the Civil War.25
Timing did not favor the Whites, however. Far from coordinating his
advance with Kolchak, a virtual impossibility, owing to the lack of a direct
telegraph connection, Denikin’s Volunteers had
reached the Volga at Tsaritsyn at a time when Kolchak’s forces were retreating
all across the line, their own high water mark, less than 50 miles from the
Volga east of Saratov, having been reached nearly two months earlier. It was a
similar story in Ukraine, where France’s own limited intervention had petered
out long before Denikin finally went on the offensive
in June. Because France had sustained such terrible losses on the western
front, the sixty-five-thousand-odd “French” expeditionary force, which was
commanded by Franchet d’Espèrey,
and had landed at Odessa and on the Crimean Peninsula in December 1918,
consisted mostly of Greek, Romanian, and French colonial troops from Senegal,
none of whom had shown much enthusiasm for fighting in Russia’s Civil War. In
the first week of April 1919, a disgusted Franchet d’Espèrey simply evacuated the lot of them, along with
forty thousand “White” civilians, including Grand Duke Nicholas, the first of
many waves of Russian émigrés to leave via the Black Sea and Constantinople
(where there was soon a large Russian colony, the glamorous women of whom
titillated Muslim men not accustomed to seeing unveiled women in public).26
The French withdrawal from Crimea was hardly an encouraging omen for the
Volunteer Army as it poured into Ukraine. The Allied Supreme Command in Paris
had some hope that Pilsudski’s new Polish army might put pressure on the Red
Army from the West. The Poles indeed fought a series of small border
engagements with the Red Army in spring and summer 1919 in Lithuania and White
Russia. But for Polish nationalists to cooperate with Denikin’s
Volunteer Army of Russian patriots and Cossacks would require something of a
political miracle. True, Kolchak had promised to recognize an independent
Poland; but he had clearly done so under duress, and Denikin,
fighting under the well-publicized slogan “Russia, one and indivisible,” had
made no such promises regarding Poland. Pilsudski therefore remained distinctly
cool to Allied requests that he coordinate his operations with the Volunteer
Army.27
The diplomacy of the war was still more complicated in the Baltic theater.
Here, just as in Ukraine, the Germans had withdrawn their troops slowly after
the armistice, owing to Allied concerns about Bolshevik encroachment. The
Germans also had troops in southern Finland, operating under the aegis of Carl
Gustav Mannerheim’s Finnish Army, which caused the Allies to view Mannerheim’s
“White Finns” skeptically and even, at one point in April 1919, demand that
Mannerheim calls off an offensive in Karelia just as he neared Petrograd. In
Lithuania and White Russia, the Reds moved into Vilnius and Minsk after the
German withdrawal in early 1919, only to lose these cities to Pilsudski’s
Polish army in April and August 1919, respectively. In Riga, veterans of the
Latvian Rifles, after doing such great service to Lenin in 1918 by seeing off
the Czech threat in Perm province and crushing the Left SR uprising in Moscow,
returned home in triumph in January 1919, helping to establish a “Soviet” (that
is, pro-Moscow) Latvian government.
The situation in Estonia was the most bewildering of all. After the
armistice, the Red Seventh Army invaded from Petrograd, galvanizing resistance
from a motley assortment of Estonian patriots, German soldiers who had never
withdrawn, Baltic German locals, freed German prisoners of war, “White”
refugees fleeing Petrograd, and tsarist officers returning east from German
captivity. For a time, this anti-Bolshevik “Northern Corps” was commanded by a
German general, Count Rüdiger von der Goltz. Nikolai Yudenich, the conqueror of Erzurum and (despite his
notorious and now overweening corpulence) one of tsarist Russia’s greatest war
heroes, then arrived in late April and fashioned Northern Corps into a
“Northwestern (NW) Army” of 16,000, augmented by 20,000 ostensibly allied
Estonian allied Estonian troops, who were commanded independently by General
Johan Laidoner. On May 13, Yudenich’s
NW army crossed into Soviet Russian territory and swiftly captured Pskov.28
By summer 1919, despite Kolchak’s reverses in western Siberia and the
French withdrawal from Ukraine, the Bolshevik regime appeared to be in serious
danger. The threat from the east had receded, but there were at least four
active military fronts, two threatening Petrograd, and two Moscow. Mannerheim’s
White Finns threatened Petrograd from the northeast, while Yudenich’s
NW Army was encamped at Pskov, less than 200 miles from the city’s southwestern
perimeter. There were no armies this close to Moscow, but Pilsudski’s Poles
were at Minsk, just a simple rail connection away, and Denikin’s
Volunteers were advancing north of Kharkov on a broad front less than 300 miles
south of Moscow, approaching Kursk and Voronezh. If these four armies achieved
even a modest level of cooperation, Lenin’s regime would not likely last out
the year.
Once again, the Bolsheviks were fortunate in their enemies. In May 1919,
Yudenich and Mannerheim came to an agreement, in
principle, to coordinate a joint attack on Petrograd. But these plans ran
aground owing to diplomatic complications. Some of the difficulty was rooted in
Kolchak’s stubbornness over Finnish independence, although Yudenich
himself agreed to this condition on June 19. Four days later, Kolchak sent a
telegraph to Mannerheim, requesting that his Finns attack Petrograd and even
consenting to a Finnish occupation of the city, so long as Russian troops were
present. But the British refused to cooperate with Mannerheim’s Finns, whom
they viewed as pro-German. The British Foreign Office took a blinkered view of Yudenich, too, owing to the “German” origin of his NW Army.
In the British cabinet, only the minister of war and munitions, Winston
Churchill, favored greater cooperation with Mannerheim and Yudenich,
and he was overruled. With his Russian interventionist policy discredited owing
to British hostility, Mannerheim was forced to stand for election in Finland in
July 1919, and he lost. Having dodged a bullet in Finland, on August 31 the
Bolsheviks offered peace—and diplomatic recognition—to Estonia. General Laidoner then chose to stand down his Estonian army,
refusing to fight alongside Yudenich.29
Pilsudski, for his part, was content to observe the unfolding conflict
from Warsaw, holding Vilnius and Minsk as bargaining chips. The longer the
Russian Civil War continued, the better for Poland, as whichever side emerged
triumphant would be all the more exhausted in case Pilsudski chose to fight to
adjust Poland’s borders eastward (the “Curzon line” drawn up by Britain’s
foreign secretary, Lord George Curzon, had drawn Poland’s eastern frontier
along the Bug River from East Prussia to Galicia). Although willing to parley
with both Lenin and Denikin, Pilsudski had concluded,
by September 1919, that it was “a lesser evil to help Soviet Russia defeat Denikin,” and so he decided not to engage the Reds during Denikin’s fall offensives. Pilsudski secretly informed
Moscow of his decision in early October, which allowed Trotsky to transfer
forty-three thousand troops south to face Denikin.30
In the absence of diversionary help from the French, Poles, Estonians,
or Finns, and with Kolchak’s Siberian army reeling, Denikin’s
Volunteers would have to fight on their own as they slogged their way north. On
July 3, Denikin issued Secret Order No. 08878,
stating his goal as “the occupation of the heart of Russia, Moscow.” This
“Moscow directive” envisioned an advance along three fronts, with Wrangel’s
Caucasian Army targeting Saratov, Penza, Nizhny Novgorod, and ultimately Moscow
from the east, while V. I. Sidorin’s “Don army” would
march on Voronezh and Ryazan. The main thrust, led by the original Volunteer
Army, would target the war factories of Tula by way of Kursk and Orel, even
while dispatching rearguard troops to secure the Crimean ports abandoned by the
French and, possibly, Kiev.31
As Denikin’s armies marched into the heart of
Ukraine, the Russian Civil War approached its sinister climax. The Volunteers
quickly captured Red-held territory. But Denikin’s
supply lines were soon stretched to the breaking point, and they were thinly
guarded. Ukrainian peasants were no more well disposed
to the Whites than they had been to the German occupiers or the Reds, who had
set grain requisition quotas even higher than the Germans had. The posture of
most Ukrainian peasants was “a pox on all your houses,” with farmers hiding
their produce underground to deny them to marauding armies. By the time the
Whites moved in, there were half-dozen partisan armies operating in Ukraine,
ranging from right-populists led by the Cossack hetman Semen Petliura to the far-left anarchists led by Nestor Makhno, a kind of T. E. Lawrence of the Russian Revolution,
who blew up troop trains and robbed the survivors. Given an army commission by
Trotsky in December 1918, Makhno had turned against
the Reds. On August 1, 1919, Makhno issued his own
Order No. 1, which called for the extermination of the White Russian
“bourgeoisie” and of Red commissars.32
The one thing Ukrainian partisans had in
common was xenophobia, encompassed in slogans like “Ukraine for Ukrainians”
and “Ukraine without Moscovites or Jews.” Long before
the Whites had moved in, pogroms had erupted in the old Pale of Settlement on
both sides of the shifting military lines. The Terek Cossacks, notorious
Jew-haters, reached western Ukraine in October 1919 and crashed into Kiev,
Poltava, and Chernigov. In a single pogrom in Fastov,
outside of Kiev, 1,500 Jews were slaughtered, including 100 who were reportedly
burned alive. Denikin, concerned about the erosion of
discipline, condemned such atrocities and even tried, on several occasions, to
convene courts-martial. Still, the evidence is abundantly clear that thousands
of his troops, including regulars, officers, and Cossacks, indulged in terrible
pogroms.33
As ugly as the situation was in Denikin’s
rear, the vistas opening up in front of him seemed endless. On August 10, a
flying brigade of eight thousand Cossack cavalrymen, led by General K. K. Mamontov, captured Tambov and Voronezh, inducing panic in
Moscow. On September 12, Denikin ordered all his
armies, “from the Volga to the Romanian border,” on the offensive, with Moscow
the objective. Kursk fell on September 20, and there were signs of collapsing
Red morale, with some units deserting en masse to the
Whites. On October 13–14, the Volunteer Army conquered Orel, only 250 miles
from Moscow, and less than half that distance from Tula and its munitions
factories.
Meanwhile in Pskov, Yudenich had launched his
own assault on Petrograd on October 12, not so much in coordination with the
Volunteers as in defiance of the British, who had demanded, on October 6, that
he transfer his forces to Denikin’s front. The
British did contribute six tanks, along with their British crews, to NW Army,
along with naval support. Other than this, Yudenich’s
NW Army, now seventeen thousand strong, was on its own: Laidoner’s
Estonians refused to fight. The British tanks were rendered useless after the
Reds blew up the bridge over the Luga River.
Nonetheless Yudenich reached Gatchina,
only 30 miles from Petrograd, on October 16. In the next five days, NW Army
rolled into Pavlovsk, Tsarskoe Selo,
and finally Pulkovo, just 15 miles from the capital.
Covered by the British fleet, a detachment of Yudenich’s
marines also landed at Krasnaya Gorka, opposite Kronstadt, northeast of Petrograd. In Paris, Sazonov made one last desperate plea for Finnish
intervention to help Yudenich, proposing to Allied
diplomats that they could use the “Brest-Litovsk” gold the Bolsheviks had
shipped to Germany (now in Allied hands) to pay for it. In this aim he was
supported by Mannerheim himself, who, after being ejected from power in July,
had gone to Paris to lobby with everyone else. Would the Allies back Yudenich when it counted?"34
It was a moment of truth for the Bolshevik regime. Lenin, more worried
about Moscow, wanted to abandon Petrograd and reinforce the southern front
against Denikin. Zinoviev, the Bolshevik Party boss
in Petrograd, suffered a “nervous collapse” when he heard of Yudenich’s approach. And so it was left to Trotsky to save
the city. Arriving in Petrograd on October 17, the commissar of war ordered
that the “capital of the revolution” be defended “to the last drop of blood.”
Demonstrating real physical courage, Trotsky went to Pulkovo,
abandoned the armored train car he usually traveled on, and rallied Red troops
on horseback. With reinforcements pouring in from Petrograd, Trotsky pushed NW
Army back to Gatchina on November 3, and then into
Estonia. The only mercy for Yudenich was that Lenin,
following the advice of Foreign Minister Georgy Chicherin,
ordered Trotsky not to pursue Yudenich beyond the
border, so as to drive a wedge between accommodationists and “inter-ventionists” in London (Chicherin
mentioned Churchill by name, displaying a keen grasp of British cabinet
politics).35
Almost simultaneously with Yudenich’s
comeuppance, the Reds turned the tide against Denikin.
Reinforcements had been pouring in all through September and early October to
plug the gap north of Orel. The most important units dispatched south were the
Second and Third Latvian Brigades. On October 18–19, just as the Volunteers
were approaching Tula, the Latvians smashed into Denikin’s
left flank, in brutal action that saw the Latvians lose nearly 50 percent of
their men, including 40 percent of their officers. That same day, a Red Cavalry
Corps, commanded by Semen Budennyi, surprised General
Mamontov’s increasingly disorderly Cossacks, weighed
down by war booty, above Voronezh, threatening to encircle the Volunteers from
the southeast. Denikin was forced to retreat to Kursk
and then, in early December, to Kharkov. Red Moscow was safe.36
Such was the conclusion of British prime minister Lloyd George, who now
abandoned Britain’s commitment to the Whites so swiftly that he shocked even Chicherin and Lenin, who had expected a proper cabinet row
over the matter. Without giving prior notice to his colleagues of a change in
policy, Lloyd George simply announced, at the lord mayor’s banquet at London’s
Guildhall on November 9, that Britain was giving up. “Russia is a quicksand,”
he intoned darkly: it was time for Britain to escape before she was sucked in
further. The coming winter months, he suggested, would give all sides time to
“reflect and reconsider.” When the text of this historic speech was published
and transmitted to Russia, the effect on White morale, a British journalist
accompanying Denikin’s army later wrote, “was
electrical.” Within days, “the whole atmosphere in South Russia was changed… Mr George’s opinion that the Volunteer cause was doomed
helped to make that doom almost certain.”37
But it was not over quite yet for the Whites. In December 1919, Denikin transferred General Wrangel to the command of the
Volunteer Army (replacing the now permanently drunk Vladimir May-Mayevsky, who was retired). This was far too late for
Wrangel to effect the sort of concentrated Cossack push against Moscow that he
had long favored over Denikin's multi-pronged Moscow
Directive, and the baron was quick to remind Denikin
of this in a typically tactless letter he sent to his commander in mid-February
1920. Although a recent biographer of Wrangel has highlighted that the Baron
subsequently censored the letter for publication in his memoirs, omitting
passages that he deemed to have been too personal in their attacks on Denikin-expunging, for example, a description as a man "poisoned by ambition and the
taste of power, surrounded by dishonest flatterers" and one who was
"no longer preoccupied with saving the country, but only with preserving
power"38 Denikin would, of course, have seen the
original version and was consequently enraged. Moreover, the contents of the
letter had been leaked by Wrangel to the press and were published widely. One
can sense the rage bubbling beneath the surface of Denikin's
outwardly calm reply of 25 February 1920.39
The extent, beyond talk and denunciations, of Wrangel's
"conspiracy" against Denikin remains
obscure. Wires were certainly crossed at a very confused and nervous time, and
the fact that several key commanders were sending Denikin
telegrams at this time urging him to make Wrangel commander of the Crimea need
not necessarily have portended any coup. Moreover, Wrangel certainly had
nothing to do with a rogue White band of deserters and various malcontents
under a Captain Orlov, who at this time were
advancing from the central mountains of the Crimea towards Sevastopol' and
issuing proclamations in which Wrangel was hailed as "our new leader"
and calling upon "officers, Cossacks, soldiers and sailors" to join
in the cry of "Long live General Wrangel-the strong man with the mighty
soul!"40 But that could have not failed to confirm further in Denikin's mind that he was under a concerted attack from
his (in)subordinates. Consequently, in the midst of all this, Wrangel was
removed from his active command (2 January 1920). He was subsequently accused
of conspiring against The Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) leadership and,
on 28 February 1920, was obliged to leave Russia for exile in Constantinople.
41
There was still some time for the playing our of feuds in the Red ranks
also, as delays in crossing the Don and the Manych
enflamed those anxious for a quick kill and made vulnerable those who, for
various reasons, had earned the enmity of the man of the moment, Budennyi. Thus, first Colonel Shorin
was dismissed as head of the South East Front, which finally took Tsaritsyn
only on 2 January 1920, having been set that task back in August 1919. Then,
the charismatic cavalryman B.M. Dumenko, a rival to Budennyi as the "first saber of the republic" and
chief inspirer of the liberation of the Don over the previous months, was
arrested and shot for involvement in the death of his military cornrnissar.42
Moreover, the Reds were not without broader tribulations of their own:
by early 1920 the forces in the south-east were very far from their home
territories, were occupying generally hostile Cossack lands (and were poised to
attack more of the same), and were exhausted after their 450-mile
counter-thrust against the Whites. Even General Budennyi
no longer seemed invincible, as his typhus-ravaged force lost most of its
artillery in a disastrous effort to storm the Manych,
leading to fulminations from Lenin in Moscow regarding the poor state of the
troops on the Caucasus Front and "the flabbiness of the over-all
command" and panicky predictions that Rostov, Novocherkassk, and even the
Donbass might soon be surrendered to the Whites.43 Denikin,
therefore, ignored murmurings that he should resign and recall Wrangel, while
making more changes and concessions to local sentiments in a last-ditch effort
to shore up his regime.
It was, thus, the ataman of the Don Cossack Host, General A.P. Bogaevskii, who was chosen to replace the disgraced
Volunteer General Lukornskii as head of the Government
of the Main Commander of the Armed Forces of South Russia-AFSR (itself merely a
new version of the Special Council, but with appropriately repositioned deck
chairs), while it was the commander of the Don Army, General V.I.Sidorin, who took command of the front. But this was
all to no avail: a general All Cossack Supreme Krug gathered in January 1920
(with representatives of the Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, and other hosts) was
not in the mood to bargain with the AFSR commanders over more promises of land
reforms and national assemblies. Indeed, the Supreme Krug looked very much like
a revivification of the separatist United Government of the South Eastern Union
of Cossack Hosts that the Volunteers had been struggling to keep in abeyance
ever since arriving in the south-east two years earlier.44 It was clear that Denikin's heavy-handed treatment of the Kuban Rada back in
November 1919 (when he had arrested ten of its members and forced Ataman A.P. Filimonov to resign) had not expunged from it all thoughts of
separatism, while his sudden dismissal of the much-loved (if insubordinate)
General Shkuro from command of the Kuban Army at the
end of February 1920 won him few friends in Ekaterinodar
(even if Shkuro had actually spoken out there quite
often against Kuban separatism). Around this time, as a British officer noted,
the Cossack ranks within the AFSR suddenly began to thin out:
Gradually their forces were drifting away to their villages,
disappearing in ones and twos and groups during the night, or simply turning
away in front of the despairing eyes of their officers and shuffling off
sometimes as a complete squad, company or even regiment, sick of the fighting
and the mismanagement and the overwhelming strength of the Reds. There was
nothing anyone could do to stop them.45
February 1920
To make matters worse, just as Kolchak's Siberia had sprouted a number of
anti-White SR organizations as the Russian Army collapsed in late 1919 (the
Political Center, the Committee for the Convocation of a Zemskii
Sobor', erc.), in early 1920 an unexpected second
blossoming of the democratic counter-revolution overran much of the rear of the
AFSR, especially in the wooded hills of the coastal Black Sea region of the
North Caucasus, where there lurked thousands of deserters and refugees from all
sorts of civil-war armies that were being loosely organized by fugitive SRs
(notably V.N. Sarnarin-Fillipovskii and Colonel N.Y. Voronovich, the former a long-standing SR and the latter an
officer of the tsarist era with SR sympathies) and around the picturesque
resort town of Sochi further south. This self-styled "Green" movement
was coordinated from November 1919 onwards by a united Black Sea Liberation
Cornrnittee.46
For the White movement in 1920, then, February may have been the
cruelest month. On a single day, 7 February 1920, Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak
was executed at Irkutsk, while the last White toe-hold in Ukraine was lost with
the botched evacuation of Odessa. Meanwhile, the internment of Iudenich's forces in Estonia was completed, as was that of
the Bredovtsy in Poland. On 10 February 1920, Red
forces captured Krasnovodsk (today's Tiirkmenbasy), on the shores of the eastern Caspian,
consolidating Soviet power in Central Asia and forcing onward the withered
remnants of the 15,000 Urals Cossacks who had departed southward from Gur' ev on 5 January 1920.47 Finally, on 19-21 February 1920,
1,000 White soldiers were evacuated from Arkhangel'sk,
leaving tens of thousands more to their fate.48
Denikin did manage a brief
resurgence, and Don Cossack forces recaptured Rostov on 20 February 1920, but
it was a false dawn and, for the remainder of that bitter and fateful month,
his forces retreated toward the Kuban. Harried, however, by a newly
reorganized, 160,000-strong Caucasian Front of the Red Army (commanded by the
energetic and now near ubiquitous M.N. Tukhachevskii)
49 and with the 1st Cavalry Army pressing in along the Tsaritsyn-Ekaterinodar railway on their right flank, there was
nothing Denikins forces could actually do when they
got to the Kuban other than abandon its capital, Ekaterinodar,
without a fight, on 17 March, and then strike out for the last remaining port
in anti-Bolshevik hands, Novorossiisk. Their fading
hope was of evacuation by sea, before that city fell either to the Reds
advancing on it along the Rostov railway from the north or to the SR-insurgent
forces of the Black Sea Liberation Committee approaching it from the south (who
had captured Tuapse, 75 miles south of Novorossiisk, on 17 February 1920).
Denikin’s retreat turned into a general
evacuation of “White Russia,” with civilian émigrés from the northern cities,
joined by local Kalmyk, Tatar, Cossack and Circassian notables who had
collaborated with Denikin, fleeing on foot with
whatever they could carry. “The exodus of the Russian people,” as one White
officer called it, “reminded me of Biblical times.” In March 1920, Entente
journalists recorded tearful scenes at Novorossiisk,
as crowds of refugees tried to evacuate on the last British and French ships
before the vengeful Reds closed in. Crimea, protected from the mainland by the
easily defended Perekop Isthmus, was safe for now,
guarded by a small rump army of Whites led by General Slashchev
(who would soon surrender his command to Wrangel). But it could not be long
before this last beachhead, too, was breached by the advancing Red armies.50
In Omsk, meanwhile, Kolchak and what remained of the Siberian Army had
been hanging on for dear life after the fall of Cheliabinsk
in late July 1919. Instead of pursuing immediately, Tukhachevsky
and Frunze had paused to wait on reinforcements, knowing that time was on their
side. As the thinning White armies retreated toward Omsk, the front contracted
to about 200 miles from north to south. By October, the Reds enjoyed a two to
one advantage in manpower (about 100,000 to 50,000) at the front, with massive
Red reserves in the rear. On October 14, just as the decisive battles were
being joined on the northwestern and southern fronts, Frunze, who had taken
over the overall command of Red Eastern Army Group, ordered Third and Fifth
Armies to attack. The Whites fell back behind the Ishim River at Petropavlovsk,
and then evacuated farther east when the Reds crossed the river, the last
natural barrier before Omsk, on October.51
Refugees now streamed into Omsk in terror of the advancing Reds,
swelling the population of this provincial capital from 120,000 to over half a
million. As one English officer recalled the scene: “Peasants had deserted
their fields, students their books, doctors their hospitals, scientists their
laboratories, workmen their workshops… we were being swept away in the wreckage
of a demoralized army.” On November 14, the Reds conquered Omsk without a
fight, and the White exodus continued east into the vastness of the Siberian
winter. The Trans-Siberian was clogged with bedraggled refugees, with thousands
succumbing to typhus in the cramped, unsanitary railcars. The Czechoslovak
Legion, hopeful of avoiding the epidemic, began halting the eastward movement
of trains from Omsk, stranding even “Supreme Commander” Kolchak, who had
planned to set up a new government in Irkutsk. For most of November and
December 1919, Kolchak was held ransom by Czechoslovak guards at Nizhneudinsk, prior to being handed over to a Bolshevik
Military-Revolutionary Committee in Irkutsk on January 21, 1920. The details of
the negotiations remain murky, but the upshot is that the Czechoslovaks,
directed by the French General Maurice Janin, turned
over Kolchak and 285 tons of the Kazan gold reserves to the Bolsheviks in
exchange for their freedom. Both the
Czech Legion and Japanese militarists have been accused of stealing some of the
gold. What really happened is
explained by Oleg Budnitskii. On the night of
February 6– 7, 1920, Kolchak was shot following a “trial” reminiscent of the
one given the tsar in Ekaterinburg, and his body was pushed under the ice of
the Ushakovka River. So ended the White movement in
Siberia.52
In the Baltics, the Bolsheviks played a more subtle game. By not
pursuing Yudenich into Estonia, Trotsky had levered
Lloyd George into a policy of accommodation, just as Chicherin
had promised Lenin. Toward the end of October 1919, the British fleet began
easing up on the Baltic blockade of Soviet Russia, stopping only ships with
actual weapons aboard while letting dual-use items through. On November 20,
Lloyd George informed the House of Commons that the blockade would be lifted in
even this form as soon as the winter snows melted. Wired to the world, this
declaration was music to Bolshevik ears, and to interested parties in
Stockholm, where lucrative Soviet orders for everything from field and machine
guns to locomotives, armored cars, and aero-engines were on hold.53
To capitalize on Lloyd George’s stunning announcement, in December 1919
Lenin sent his roving trade commissar, Leonid Krasin, to Estonia, to negotiate
peace terms. Because Petrograd’s ports on the Gulf of Finland were ice-bound
for much of the winter, they had also been severely damaged during the
revolution, access to the great Baltic port of Reval
(Tallinn) was critical. Krasin did not disappoint. By the terms of the Tartu
(Dorpat) Treaty, ratified on February 2, 1920, Estonia granted official
recognition to Soviet Russia, the first country to do so since Germany in the
now-defunct Brest-Litovsk Treaty, while guaranteeing unlimited Soviet Russian
use of her rail network for commercial freight. The treaty even created
“special zones” in Estonian ports, use of which would be set aside exclusively
for the Bolsheviks.54
In the end, while some have argued that the loyalty of peasant recruits
to Lenin’s regime was weak, the salient fact was that in a war against a world
of enemies, from White armies supported by the Entente powers, to Finns, Poles,
Cossacks, and partisans, the Reds had won.
Some have also argued that it was in recognition of this military
verdict that the British Blockade was lifted and on 16 March 1921 the
Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed. Both sides agreed to refrain from
hostile propaganda. It amounted to de facto diplomatic recognition and opened a
period of extensive trade. 55
1. “Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,” signed on March 3, 1918, article 5,
reproduced in Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 406.
2. Citation and figures in Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,
51–53.
3. Figures in Stephen Kotkin , Stalin:
Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, 2014, vol. 1, 297.
4. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, vol. 2, 6–7, 20–21, 233. Armistice
terms: cited in Evan Mawdsley, “Sea Change in the
Civil War,” in Historically Inevitable?: Turning Points of the Russian
Revolution,2016, 200–201. On the Stalin-Trotsky feud, see Kotkin,
Stalin, vol. 1, 300–307.
5. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 1987, 67–68;
and Serge P. Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 2000, 80–81,
6. Only three of the eight members of the SR Central Committee present
at the State Conference voted in favor of the Ufa agreement (although, once it
had been agreed, most of them reluctantly accepted it, as did a Siberian
conference of SRs in late September). See Scott Smith, Captives of Revolution:
The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-23,
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, pp. 146, 153.
7. See A.P. Iziumov (ed.), "Ufimskoe gosudarstvennoe soveshchanie," Russkii istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 1 (1929),
pp. 274-5.
8. L.A. Krol', Za tri goda:
Vospominaniia, vpechatleniia
i vstrechi, Vladivostok:
Tip. T-va izd. "Svobodnaia Rossiia," 1921,
p. 140.
9. On the Omsk coup, see Jonathan D. Smele,
Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak,
1918-1920, 1997, pp. 50-107.
10. The title of "supreme ruler" was adopted over the more
blunt "dictator;' according to one of Kolchak's closest confidants, 1.1. Sukin, so as "to maintain the decorum of the civic
spirit": V.V Zhuralev, ''Prisoiv
takovomu lirsu naimenovanie verkhovnogo pravirclia': K voprosu 0 titule, priniatom admiralom AV Kolchakom 18 noiabria 1918 g.,Antropologicheskiifirum,
no. 8 (2008), pp. 353-86.
11. In Aug. 1917, Kolchak, whom (as one of Russia's few successful
commanders of the First World War) many had favored for the role of military
dictator that was subsequently assigned to Kornilov, had been dispatched on a
pointless mission to the United States by Kerensky to get him out of the
country. He returned to the Far East in Oct. 1917 and offered his services to
the British, who sent him to assist General Khorvath's
efforts in Manchuria. However, despairing of reining in Ataman Semenov and of
bringing any semblance of order to the anarchic anti- Bolshevik formations in
the region, Kolchak subsequently retired to Japan. There he met General Alfred
Knox of Britimis, who promptly ferried what he called
"the best Russian for our purposes in the Far East" (National Archives,WO 33 962/186, Knox to the Director of Military
Intelligence, 31 Aug. 1918) to Omsk. There, on 4 Nov. 1918, he became Minister
of War and Marine in the government of the Directory (which had co-opted, en bloc, the cabinet of the Provisional Siberian
Government).
12. On the consolidation of the Kolchak regime in late 1918, see Smele, Civil War in Siberia, pp. 108-23,188-99.
13.V.V. Zhuravlev (ed.), Privetstvennye
poslaniia Verkhovnomu Praviteliu i Verkhoonomu
Glav-nokomanduiushchemu admiralu
A. V. Kolchaku. Noiabr'
1918-noiabr' 1919 g.: sb. dokurnentou, St Petersburg:
Izdatel'srvo Evropeiskogo universitera v Sankt-Peterburge,
2012, pp. 18-19, 181.
14. Citations in Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, vol. 2, 33–34 and 34n55.
Conclusive evidence of British involvement has never emerged, although Knox was
rebuked by the Foreign Office on December 1, 1918, for his “highly indiscreet…
recent activity in political matters.” For interpretations downplaying Knox’s
involvement, see Mawdsley, “Sea Change in the Civil
War,” and Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 39–42. For a more critical
account: Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 113–225.
15. Cited in Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, vol. 2, 30.
16. Figures in Mawdsley, Russian Civil War,
144, 167.
17. “Svodnaia Vedomost’
raskhoda artilleriiskago imushchestva na grazhdanskuiu voinu/s 1/II–18–IV
20 g.,” in RGAE, 413-6-5, 82; and “Vedomost’ Predmetam Artilleriiskogo Imushchestva Podlezhaschikh Zakazu,” October 7, 1920, in The Russian State Economics
Archive, RGAE, 413-6-10, 155 and back, 156 and back.
18. Figures in Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 155; and Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 163–164.
19. Figures in Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 171–173.
20. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 144–145.
21. Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 173–179; and Pipes, Russia
Under the Bolshevik Regime, 77–178.
22. Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 198–1200.
23.For White negotiations in Paris: Uget’ to Sazonov, March 24, 1919, in the Girs
Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, box 1, folder labeled “Telegrams. From
March 14, 1919, to April 22, 1919”
24. Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 202–204.
25. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 82–83.
26. Figures in ibid., 74–75. On the White émigré phenomenon in
Constantinople, see Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation
1918–1923.
27. On these fractious negotiations, see Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord,
vol. 3, 20–23; Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 88–89; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 205.
28. Ibid., 116–119.
29. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, vol. 2, 258–265. On Laidoner
breaking with Yudenich, see McMeekin, History’s
Greatest Heist, chap. 6.
30. Cited in Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 90–91. On
Pilsudski and the Polish border question, see Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, vol.
3, 20–21.
31. Cited in Mawdsley, Russian Civil War,
172–173.
32. Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines
of the Civil War, 106–112.
33. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 106–108, and Werth, “Dirty
War,” 95–96; and Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews
Between Reds and Whites, 1917–1920, trans. Timothy Portice,
257 and passim.
34. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, 283–285.
35. Ibid., 285.
36. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 127–129; and, on Mamontov’s raid, M. Beller and A.
Burovskii, Grazhdanskaia Istoriia bezumnoi voiny, 348 and passim. Oleg Budnitskii,
in Russian Jews Between Reds and Whites (271) argues, plausibly, that Mamontov’s force was weakened owing to his troops’ penchant
for pogroms and looting.
37. Citations in Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, vol. 2, 306; and, for
British journalist, Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 129.
38. Vrangel',
Vospominaniia, 1924, vol. 1, pp. 296-302.
39. Ibid., vol. 1, p.
302.
40. Alexis Wrangel, General Wrangel, 1878-1929: Russia's White Crusader,
London: Leo Cooper, 1987, p. 144.
41.Together with Wrangel were dismissed and exiled his alleged
co-conspirators Generals A.S. Lukomskii and P.N. Shatilov and the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral
DV Neniukov, and his chief of staff Admiral A.D. Bubnov.
42. On the Dumenko affair, which remains to be
fully explained, see YD. Polikarpov, "Tragediia komkora Durnenko," Don, no. 11 (1988), pp. 142-8. Also V.V.
Karpenko, Komkor Dumenko,
Saratov: Privolzhckoe Knizhnoe
Izd-Vo, 1976.
43. Meijer (ed.) The Trotsky Papers, vol. 2, pp. 39,61.
44. Although, formally, the Supreme Krug abolished the dormant United
Government, there was the implicit suggestion that it, the Supreme Krug, had
replaced it.
45. Hudleston Noel Hedworth
Williamson, Farewell to the Don,1970, p. 249.
46. See: Landis, "Who were the 'Greens'?",2010, pp. 43-6;
Karmann, Der Freiheitskampf Der Kosaken,1985, pp.
549-52; andGeoffrey Swain, Russia's Civil War,2008,
pp. 128-32.
47. At most, 215 Urals Cossacks made it as far south as the Persian
border by 20 May 1920, although others give a figure of 162. On this
extraordinary campaign see the account of their Ataman: V.S. Tolstov, Ot krasnykh
lap v neizvestnuiu pal' (pokhod
ural' tseu),
Constantinople: Tip. izd. Tv.-a "Pressa," 1921. Also L.L. Masianov,
GibeI' Ural'skogo kazach'ego voiska, New York: Vseslavianskoe Izd.-vo, 1963.
48. Among the latter was Colonel L.V. Kostandi,
who chose not to board General Miller's ship during the evacuation but to
remain ar Arkhangel'sk to negotiare a peaceful transfer of the city into Bolshevik
hands, as the 6th Red Army approached. This he did, but his fare was to suffer
immediate imprisonment and then execution a year later at the hands of the
Cheka in Moscow.
49. On Tukhachevskii, see Neil Harvey Croll, "Mikhail Tukhachevsky
in the Russian Civil War;' University of Glasgow PhD Thesis, 2002. Also B.N.
Sokolov, Mikhail Tukhachevskii: zhizn'
i smert' 'Krasnogo marshala', Smolensk: Rusich, 1999.
50. Mawsdley, Russian Civil War, 223–224.
51. Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten War, 223–231.
52. Ibid., 250–253; and Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,
117–119. On the Czechs and the gold: see Budnitskii,
“Kolchakovskoe zoloto,” in
Diaspora IV (2002), 458, and Den’gi russkoi emigratsii. For
contemporary accounts and rumors: “Tell of Kolchak’s Gold,” New York Times,
September 30, 1919; “8 American Officers Reported Captured,” New York Times,
January 30, 1920 (which discusses Lake Baikal). On the estimated figure
recovered by the Bolsheviks (285 tons), see “Russia’s Gold Reserve,” in State
Department Reports on Russia, National Archives Annex (NAA), M 316, roll 119.
53. See report from Lucius von Stoedten, the
German Minister in Stockholm, October 16, 1919, in Politisches
Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (Political Archive of the Imperial German Foreign
Ministry). Berlin, Germany, R 11207.
54. Timothy Edward O'Connor, The engineer of revolution: L.B. Krasin and
the Bolsheviks, 1870-1926,1992, 231–232.
55. For details see Christine A. White, British and American Commercial
Relations with Soviet Russia, 1918-1924 (1992).
For
updates click homepage here