General overview and timeline

By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

As we have seen, at Brest-Litovsk, in the sprawling brick fortress that guards the River Bug, the German High Command demanded extensive cessions of territory from a Bolshevik delegation.

Whereby during the first quarter of 1918 an underground political opposition had started to form some factions of which sought contact with some of the Allied forces in Russia. Although many of the figures who entered into one or another underground group were right-wing monarchists, the political reality of 1918 was that Russia had been radicalized as a result of the tumultuous events of 1917. Any successful campaign against Soviet power would necessarily be forced to deal with the fact that the peasant masses had seized the land of their former landowners, control of industry was no longer in the hand of a wealthy minority but the hands of workers, and that the only way of defeating the Red Army would be to develop a political strategy to win over at leas some of them. In short, the old regime would not be saved by those members of the Imperial Army who remained loyal to it. Those who were determined to put an and to Bolshevik rule needed to come to some arrangement with representatives of socialism. This, led to the formation of several inter-party groups, of which the Union of Regeneration and the National Centre emerged as the two most significant, which later became involved with Komuch and the so-called Provisional All-Russian Government.

In 1917, the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party split between those who supported the Provisional Government, established after the February Revolution that in the end was led by Kerensky and those who supported the Bolsheviks, who favored a communist insurrection. The majority stayed within the mainstream party, but a minority who supported the Bolshevik path became known as Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk caused a breach between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SR), who thereupon left the coalition. In the next months, there was a marked drawing together of two main groups of Russian opponents of Lenin:  the non-Bolshevik left like the Mensheviks and the Right SRs, who had been finally alienated from Lenin by his dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the rightist whites.

But although Russia one could argue, had been in a state of civil war for at least several months before they were signed and arguably for an entire year, but 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.

But It was only at the end of June that the Left SRs’ patience with their erstwhile Bolshevik allies ran out. One incident which prompted this change was the Bolshevik decision on 9 June to close down the Moscow Regional Government, which the Left SRs controlled and used to resist the “committees of the poor”; the Left SRs protested at this arbitrary move at the Fifth Congress of Soviets of the Moscow Region on 27 June, but to no avail – for Lenin it was a classic example of pro-peasant attempts to “swamp” his socialist programme.1

However, the main reason why the Left SRs lost patience with Lenin at the end of June was what the Left SRs perceived as the ever-growing control of Germany over the life of Soviet Russia once the German ambassador had arrived in Moscow. On 24 June, the Left SR Central Committee met to decide how to respond and passed a resolution calling for an end to Lenin’s “breathing space” and the start of a campaign of terror against “representatives of German imperialism.” The party recognized that this would lead to clashes with the Bolsheviks, but drew a distinction between Lenin’s policy, which it opposed, and the policies of the Bolshevik Party, which it was willing to support. As Kamkov explained a few days later to the Third Left SR Congress, held from 29 June to 1 July, Lenin’s desire for an economic treaty with Germany had turned Soviet Russia into “a servant of German capitalism.” 2

The Left SRs argued at this congress that “our aim is not to overthrow the Bolsheviks but the correct implementation of Soviet power.” However, the method they chose to “correct” Soviet power – tearing up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and instigating a popular peasant uprising – was targeted at the Bolsheviks. Confusingly and naively, the Congress resolution hoped that the planned popular uprising against Lenin would result in the formation of a new Left SR– Bolshevik Coalition Government based on the principle of parity.3

At the time they took this decision, the Left SRs were still confident that they would win over 40 percent of the delegates to the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which was scheduled to assemble at the beginning of July to adopt a new constitution. From such a base, the party hoped to win a vote overturning the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, after which they would rejoin the Bolsheviks in government as an equal partner. For Lenin, parity of representation was anathema; the Bolsheviks had to lead socialist construction, so the elections to the Fifth Congress of Soviets had to be rigged. As its opening on 4 July approached, so the scale of Lenin’s gerrymandering became clear: official figures gave the Bolsheviks 678 delegates and the Left SRs 269; the historian Alexander Rabinowitch has carefully recalculated these figures to reach the conclusion that the actual results were Bolsheviks 378, Left SRs 379, with 30 delegates going to the SR-Maximalists, a small SR splinter group in the process of merging with the Left SRs.4 As more and more Left SR delegates were ruled ineligible, and more and more representatives of the “committees of the poor” were allowed to attend, the Left SRs realized that the Bolsheviks had deprived them of a slim Congress majority and allocated them less than a third of the seats. 5

Opening the Congress, with characteristic bravado, Trotsky led the attack on the Left SRs. He now declared that any group which opposed German actions on the Russia– Ukraine border without government authorisation would in future be shot on sight, a far cry from his attitude in April. When the Left SR Central Committee met on the night of 4– 5 July, it decided that a dramatic response to Trotsky’s speech was essential and voted in favor of assassinating the German ambassador. When, on 5 July, Lenin also used his congress speech to attack the Left SRs, the party put down a resolution asserting that Lenin’s Russia had become “a colony of German imperialism”, then, declaring the need for “an uprising of all labourers”, they walked out of the Congress and staged a protest rally carrying slogans like “Down with the imperialists and conciliators!”. The next day, two Left SR assassins succeeded in killing the German ambassador.6 Lenin felt he had ample grounds to exclude the Left SRs from the Soviets and end their political influence once and for all.

The Left SR uprising had no real planning, and the attempt to seize control of Moscow was put down within 24 hours. Although the Left SR sailors of the so-called Popov Brigade had 200 men with eight heavy guns, 48 machine guns, and four armored cars and outnumbered the forces loyal to Lenin, ultimately they were no match for the heavy artillery deployed against them.7

But as the Left SR plot was unfolding in Moscow, a Right SR plot was being launched simultaneously on the Volga northeast of the capital. The latter was the work of Boris Savinkov, the former commissar who had been Kerensky’s acting war minister during the Kornilov affair. After the October Revolution, Savinkov had traveled to the Don and made contact with Generals Alekseev and Kornilov. A more impatient soul than they, Savinkov formed his own “Union for the Defense of Fatherland and Freedom” and pitched plans for an anti-Bolshevik rebellion to the Allies. The French ambassador gave Savinkov 2.5 million rubles, which he used to recruit former officers, including a formidable war hero, Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Perkhurov. Savinkov’s idea was to seize Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow on the only direct rail line to Murmansk, and hold it until the Allies would reinforce him from the north. Subsidiary risings would be launched at nearby Rybinsk and Murom, a station on the eastbound Moscow–Kazan railway. At around two a.m. on July 6, Savinkov’s organization took up arms, seizing Yaroslavl (where the competent Lieutenant Colonel Perkhurov was in charge) with ease.8

Back in Moscow at two o’clock that afternoon, two killers recruited by Spiridonova, posing as Cheka agents, entered the German Embassy on Denezhnyi pereulok, in the Arbat district. What followed was a grotesque affair reminiscent of Rasputin’s murder. The assassins unleashed a hail of bullets at Mirbach and Riezler that somehow all missed. One assassin threw a bomb—which also missed. Finally, the other chased down Mirbach and shot him in the back of the head. By 3:15 p.m., the ambassador was dead.9

So shocking was the crime, so potentially damaging to Soviet relations with Berlin, that Lenin himself went to the German Embassy at five p.m. to express condolences to Riezler (who had survived the assault) in person. It was an extraordinary scene, not least because Riezler was the very man who had overseen the Germans’ Lenin policy in 1917 while stationed in Stockholm, only to turn against the Bolsheviks after he had seen Lenin’s regime up close in May–June 1918. Unimpressed with Lenin’s apology, on July 10 Riezler requested permission from the Wilhelmstrasse to “temporarily” break off relations until the Bolsheviks showed “proper atonement for the murder.”10

Meanwhile, the Left SRs used the assassination as a springboard to a rebellion, of sorts. Cheka headquarters, in Lubyanka Square, were seized by Left SR sailors, who took the Cheka chief, Dzerzhinsky, hostage. After seizing the Telegraph Bureau, the Left SRs sent out a message over the national wires claiming credit for the murder of Mirbach and denouncing the Bolsheviks as “agents of German imperialism.” At seven p.m., the Congress of Soviets reopened in the Bolshoi Theater with a passionate speech by Spiridonova. Were the Left SRs going to seize power? No one seemed quite sure. Toward midnight, Lenin summoned Vatsétis, commander of the Latvian Rifles, who, after reinforcing Perm and the Volga region, had only about 3,300 men left in the Moscow area, facing 2,000 or so armed sailors fighting for the Left SRs. At five a.m. on July 7, the Latvians stormed the city center, reconquered the Lubyanka, and surrounded the Bolshoi Theater. Although the Germans still wanted justice for Mirbach’s murder, the rebellion was over.11

The crisis of authority Lenin’s government faced in July 1918 unleashed the beginning of what became known as the Red Terror. Food requisitions in the countryside were stepped up. In Moscow, Petrograd, and nearby towns, 650 Left SR party members were arrested. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks had 13 ringleaders executed, although they showed clemency to Spiridonova, who retained a certain mystique as a hero of 1905. The crackdown in Yaroslavl was more serious, owing to the brutal nature of the fighting there. Only on July 21 was Yaroslavl retaken by the Red Army, after days of shelling that “gutted” the ancient city center. This time, no mercy was shown. Although Perkhurov himself escaped, another 428 of Savinkov’s followers were shot, in the first mass execution carried out by the Bolshevik regime.12

The next victims of the burgeoning Bolshevik terror were the Romanovs. It had been a year of trials for the former tsar, his wife, Alexandra, their children, and the few family servants (such as Nicholas’s doctor, Evgeny Botkin, and the tsarina’s ladies-in-waiting) who had stayed loyal to them. During the months of house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo after the February Revolution of 1917, there had been some hope of salvation owing to an invitation from the tsar’s English cousin, King George V. But the Petrograd Soviet had objected, causing the British Labour Party (and a wide swathe of English public opinion) to pressure the king into rescinding his invitation. Tsarskoe Selo was close enough to Baltic ports that a rescue plot was launched by sympathetic military officers, though it had not come off. After the July Days of 1917, Kerensky had shipped the Romanovs, in the dead of night under heavy guard, to Tobolsk, where they were safe from the Bolsheviks—but thousands of miles from any port. There had been a whisper of hope of escape in the chaos after the October Revolution, until Red Guards seized Tobolsk in March 1918.13

The Bolsheviks’ original plan, after securing the Romanovs, was to bring them back to Moscow and force Nicholas to stand trial. But in the chaos of 1918, especially after the Czechoslovak uprising in Siberia, there was a serious risk the family could be captured en route. And so the Romanovs were transferred west to Ekaterinburg, only for the Czechs to threaten this regional capital, too. In early July, the head of the local Cheka, Yakov Yurovsky, took personal control of the house where the captives were being held, commandeered from an engineer named Ipatiev. Yurovsky’s orders from Moscow were simple. He was to take a careful inventory of all the Romanovs’ property before “expropriating it.” Then he was to execute them.14

Buried in a shallow grave, the remains lay undisturbed until 1989. For good measure, on the next day, July 18, the tsar’s blood relatives held at nearby Alapaevsk, including two Romanov grand dukes, a grand duchess, and their children, were shot, and dumped in a mine shaft.15

Although the Romanov murders represented a political victory of sorts for Lenin, it was a fleeting one. Ekaterinburg fell to the Czechs on July 25, along with the nearby Four Brothers mine where the Romanovs had been initially buried.16

Damaging as the fall of Ekaterinburg was for the Bolsheviks, in material terms it paled in significance next to the Czech capture of Kazan, and its banks, on August 7. The Czechoslovak Legion at this moment acquired nearly 500 tons of gold, 100 million tsarist paper rubles (worth, at official par, $50 million then, or $5 billion today), platinum stocks, and a huge quantity of other valuables. The impotence of the Red Army was also nakedly exposed. The fall of Kazan to the Czechs prompted an acid response from Trotsky, who proclaimed the restoration of the death penalty for desertion in the Red Army on August 15.17

Bolshevik fortunes had now sunk so low that Lenin was forced to give up still more concessions to the Germans. In a Supplementary Agreement to Brest-Litovsk signed on August 27, 1918, the Bolsheviks agreed to pay 6 billion marks of reparations, about $1.4 billion at the time, equivalent to $140 billion today. The Bolsheviks also agreed to recognize Georgia (that is, as a German satellite), and to ship to Germany 25 percent of the future oil production of Baku. In exchange, the Germans promised to evacuate White Russia, Rostov and part of the Don basin; not to encourage separatist movements on Russian territory, and to help the Red Army expel the Allied troops from Murmansk and Archangel. With the Bolsheviks duly shipping to Berlin the first two of five planned reparations installments in September, including 100 tons of gold, it appeared that the German investment in Lenin had paid off handsomely. With the German armies retreating on the western front, and 250,000 fresh American “doughboys” arriving in France every month, Berlin and Moscow were now locked in a desperate embrace to ward off catastrophe.18

If a shrewd observer were to wager on which partner would give in first, it would not have been the Germans. Americans or no Americans, the Germans were fighting fiercely, and the Allies had still not breached the Siegfried or “Hindenburg” line on the western front, believed to constitute “five miles of the most formidable defensive position in the history of warfare.” From official memoranda, we know that British and French commanders believed, well into September 1918, that the war would continue into summer 1919 at least. Even if the Allies broke through the last major fortified trench line, the Germans could easily retreat beyond the Rhine and blow the bridgeheads. With an eastern empire conquered with German blood, guarded by a million occupying troops, the Germans had every reason to fight on, and all indications suggested that they would do so.19

The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, were hanging on for dear life. Western intervention in Russia, spurred along by the success of the Czechoslovak Legion, was getting serious. On August 3, Komuch issued a formal invitation for the Allies to intervene militarily in Russia’s civil war. The United States and Japan promptly signed an agreement on proposed troop deployments to Siberia. By month’s end, Britain had forty thousand troops on the ground in Russia, mostly at Archangel and Murmansk. Although France had few troops to spare, Paris declared unequivocal support for intervention on August 7. In a clear declaration of intent, Britain’s envoy from the “Hammer and Sickle” (formerly Mikhelson) factory. The first missed him entirely, but the second lodged in his shoulder, and the third punctured his lung, forcing Lenin to slump to the ground before bodyguards carried him back to the Kremlin. Kaplan belonged to an underground SR cell affiliated with Savinkov’s Union for the Defense of Fatherland and Freedom, believed to be plotting another coup. Lending credence to the theory, earlier that same day in Petrograd the head of the city Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, was assassinated outside Cheka headquarters. Suspecting British involvement, the Bolsheviks arrested Bruce Lockhart and interrogated him in the Lubyanka. Although accused of the involvement in a plot Lockhart survived (he was later allowed to leave Russia in a “prisoner exchange” for Maxim Litvinov, his counterpart as Soviet plenipotentiary in London).20

Meanwhile, to hedge the Wilhelmstrasse’s bet on Lenin, the German high command had negotiated its deals with the anti-Bolshevik Kuban and Don Cossacks, seeding them with 15 million rubles, more than Britain spent on the Volunteer Army. Unbeknownst to the German Foreign Office, which had requested that he contribute “six or seven divisions” for anti-Allied operations in North Russia, Ludendorff inserted the operational option (code-named “Schlußstein”) that they would proceed to Murmansk and Archangel by way of Petrograd—where they would forcibly depose the Bolsheviks. The Germans also had operational plans to occupy Baku and secure the Caspian oil fields. (The Turks beat the Germans to Baku, arriving on September 15. Even so, Ludendorff issued an order to “plant the German flag on the Caspian” as late as September 29.) After learning of the assassination attempt on Lenin, Ludendorff ordered a division of German warplanes north from Kiev to the Baltics. On September 4, Ludendorff ordered preparations for Operation Schlußstein “to begin as soon as possible.”21

Had Operation Schlußstein been carried out, it is difficult to see how Lenin’s regime could have survived. A German occupation of Petrograd would have left Moscow isolated, an island of Bolshevik rule in a raging sea of foreign armies. Instead, the Bolsheviks were granted another improbable reprieve, on a hitherto obscure front in the world war: the Macedonian. Owing to diplomatic fallout from Brest-Litovsk, which had seen Bulgaria’s co-belligerents deny her hoped-for spoils from the carving up of Russia, morale in the Bulgarian army holding the line in Macedonia against an Allied expeditionary army based at Salonica since 1915 had begun to crack. On September 15, the Allied commander at Salonica, Louis-Félix-François Franchet d’Espèrey, ordered a general attack that quickly blew a hole 20 miles wide in the Bulgarian line, opening up a clear path for the Allied armies to Belgrade—and Vienna. At the high command, Ludendorff threw up his arms, telling aides that “the war was lost.” On September 27, he called off Operation Schlußstein for good, granting Lenin—who had just left Moscow to convalesce at Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky)—a stay of execution. On September 29, the Allies breached the Siegfried line, prompting the Germans to sue for peace.22

The impact of the German collapse in the west was felt immediately in the east. In a flash, the prestige of the conquerors was erased. Brest-Litovsk, a German diplomat reported from Moscow on October 10, “is a dead letter. Our influence with the Bolsheviks is completely exhausted. They do with us now what they wish.” Soviet officials confiscated the diplomatic bags used by the German Embassy in Moscow. After the western armistice had been finalized on November 11, the Bolsheviks looted the German consulate in Petrograd, where they found 250 million tsarist rubles stuffed into thirty diplomatic mail bags. Accounts of German nationals in Russian banks, which had been exempted from confiscation at Brest-Litovsk, were turned over to the “German Revolutionary Worker and Soldier Council of Moscow,” assembled out of pro-Bolshevik German prisoners of war.23

It also deprived the Allies of their justification for the allegedly non-political intervention in Russia and inspired dreams of journeys home for those troops unlucky enough to be caught in the Russian mire (especially for the Czechoslovaks, who had a newly independent homeland awaiting them from 28 October 1918); and it deprived nationalists, from Estonia to Azerbaijan, of the protection they had hitherto enjoyed (albeit accidentally) in the shape of the forces of the Central Powers (consequently, Red forces had recaptured Narva and Pskov before the end of November 1918). But, by December 1918, surveying the view from Moscow, it would not have escaped Trotsky's attention that almost all the North Caucasus was in the hands of the Volunteers. Meanwhile, in the North, White forces were preparing to advance down rail and river corridors toward Petrograd and Moscow. In the North West, the lingering presence of the Germans (whose regular forces were disintegrating, but only to reform into a variety of militant, anti-Soviet Freikorps) and the arrival of Allied missions in the Baltic theater to say nothing of the Royal Navy, which proceeded to bombard Narva-was providing a mighty fillip to White formations based within a day or two's march from Petrograd.24

Even in the east there were causes for concern: at Simbirsk and Syzran' major rail bridges across the Volga had been dynamited and destroyed by the retreating forces of Komuch and the Czechs in September 1918, leaving only the rail crossing at Kazan' (150 miles further north, on the Moscow- Ekaterinburg line) as a route to the east and severely hampering any further push along the Samara-Ufa track. Ufa was eventually reached by Red forces, on 29- 31 December 1918, but it had been a difficult task to supply units moving toward the southern Urals passes. Moreover, the Reds' progress beyond the Volga was far from uncontested. First, around the armory and factory towns of Izhevsk and Votkinsk, 15,000 workers who had risen against Soviet rule in August 1918 had clung on there until November, and had then retreated eastwards through Red lines towards Perm', en masse and in good order, to join Kolchak's forces.25 Then, the Reds' vanguard (chiefly of the 1st Red Army) revealed themselves to be close enough to exhaustion to fall into a trap laid by General V.O. Kappel' at Belebei, which allowed 15,000 more former Komuch troops to escape encirclement and retreat eastwards.26 Further north, the failure to provide relief and furlough for men who had been in the front line for six long months witnessed an even more dramatic disintegration of the 3rd Red Army, which surrendered Perm' to the Siberian Army on 25 December 1918, having retreated 150 miles in less than a month. The White victors at Perm' were jubilant: "People believed, or wanted to believe, that the future was now clear, bright and of unlimited happiness:' recalled General G.L Klerzhe, who was there.27

Back at Omsk, the naive Colonel D.A. Lebedev, whom Admiral Kolchak had been unwise enough to raise to chief of staff of his newly proclaimed Russian Army, was even more gung-ho: he confided to an American visitor that the Perm' victory presaged not just the reunification of the Russian Empire, but "the realization of the old dream of a Russian Constantinople.28 This was of course madness, but there were nevertheless plenty of reasons to hope, in Omsk, Ekaterinodar, and Arkhangel'sk, that 1919 would be the year of the Whites, and in the Baltic and Transcaucasian capitals that it would be the year of the national minorities: if the winter of 1917-18 could be characterized by Lenin as witnessing "The Triumphal March of Soviet Power:' the winter of 1918-19 could surely be described as "The Triumphal March of Reaction" or "The Triumphal March of Nationalism."

But in the end the Bolsheviks would prevail. Trotsky was able to rally the still-developing Red Army through a combination of logistical brilliance, revolutionary rhetoric, and draconian punishment for anyone unwilling to engage the enemy. As General Gordon-Finlayson, a British commander at Archangelsk in 1918– 19, reported to the General Staff in London, Trotsky had succeeded in turning the Red Army into a serious fighting force: “There appears to be an impression in Great Britain that the Bolshevik forces are represented by a great rabble of men armed with sticks, stones, and revolvers who rush about foaming at the mouth in search of blood and who are easily turned and broken by a few well-directed rifle shots.” Instead, Finlayson found the Red Army to be ‘well-equipped, organized and fairly well trained …’ – in short, a force perfectly capable of facing up to its opponents. His assessment proved accurate. A Bolshevik counter-attack stopped their opponents’ advance up the Volga. Kazan was retaken in September 1918, prompting a retreat of the Legion and Komuch forces across the Ural Mountains.

More on that in the next part.

 

1. Partiya Levykh Sotsialistov Revolyutsionerov: Dokumenty i Materialy, 2 vols (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 72, 100, 144. vol. 1, p. Hereafter LSR.

2. Ibid., p. 139.

3. Ibid., pp. 161– 3, 167, 169, 178.

4. A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 288, 442 n. 26.

5. LSR, vol. 2, pp. 304– 5.

6. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks, p. 289.

7. G. R. Swain, ‘Vacietis: The Enigma of the Red Army’s First Commander’, Revolutionary Russia 16 (2003), p. 75.

8. Pipes, Russian Revolution,1991, 646–649. For more on the Savinkov plot, see also Richard H. Ullman, The Anglo-Soviet Accord, p.189–190, 230–231; Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 1966, 228.

9. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1991, 641–642.

9. Riezler: cited in Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 225.

10. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk the Forgotten Peace, March 1918, 337–338.

11. “Executions at Moscow,” from Novaia Zhizn’, July 14, 1918, and “Executions at Yaroslavl,” Pravda, July 26, 1918, reproduced in James Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia, April-December 1918, pp. xv, 594 Johns Hopkins Press, 1936., 227–228.

12. Edvard Radzinsky, “Rescuing the Tsar and His Family,” in Historically Inevitable?: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution, 2017, 163–177.

13. “Yakov Yurovsky’s note on the execution of the imperial family,” in Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution, 1997, 353–354.

14. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 779–780.

15. John F. O'Conor and N. Sokolov, The Sokolov Investigation of the Alleged Murder of the Russian Imperial Family, 1968, 91–107.

16. “Seizure of the Gold Reserve at Kazan,” report of Lebedev to the Samara Government, reproduced in Bunyan, Intervention, 292.

17. The August 27, 1918, Supplementary Agreement, along with an accompanying “Note” from Hintze to Joffe and “Financial Agreement,” are reproduced in Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 427–446. On the reparations shipments to Berlin, sent on September 10 and 30, 1918, see the April 7, 1919, German Foreign Office postmortem on the Brest-Litovsk supplementary treaty, titled “Aufzeichnung betreffend unsere handelspolitischen Beziehungen zu Russland,” in DBB, R 901/81069, 339–345.

18. Nick Lloyd,Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War, 2014, 139–140.

19. Cited in Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Chapter 4: The Red Terror, 1999, 71; “Allied Plan for Armed Intervention,” August 7, 1918, reproduced in Bunyan, Intervention, 111; and Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 109–117.

20. See Martin Sixsmith, “Fanny Kaplan’s Attempt to Kill Lenin. August 1918,” in Historically Inevitable? 178–199.For the “Lockhart plot” see Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West, 2012, and also the letter that was written by his son confirming the involvement in the plot: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_03_11_document.pdf

21. Cited in Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 116– 117 and (for Caspian), 204– 205.

22. Ludendorff: cited in David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy,2005, 468.

23. A. Rosemeyer “Abschrift” sent from Moscow to Berlin, October 10, 1918, in Deutsches Bundesarchiv Berlin. Lichterfelde, Berlin, Germany (hence DBB), R 901/ 86976, 84– 87; report from gez. Leutnant Rey, head of the German military commission in Petrograd, sent to Petrograd on November 19, 1918, in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (Political Archive of the Imperial German Foreign Ministry). Berlin, Germany, R 11207; and Franz Rauch’s April 12, 1919, report to the German Foreign Office in Berlin after his return from Moscow, in DBB, R 901/ 82082, 22– 25.

24. If any reminder was needed of how perilous the situation was becoming, it was provided in these months by the fate of F.F. Raskol'nikov, who was effectively commander of the Red Navy: on 27 Dec. 1918, Raskol'nikovs flagship, the Spartak, was run aground off Revel while being pursued by vessels of the Royal Navy (chiefly the destroyer HMS wakeful). Raskol' nikov was taken into custody by the British and the Spartak was gifted to the Estonians, who promptly executed most of its crew. See Jonathan D. Smele, "A Bolshevik in Brixton Prison: Fedor Raskol' nikov and the Origins of Anglo-Soviet Relations:' in Thatcher (ed.), Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia, pp. 110-11; and Geoffrey Bennett, Cowan's Wtir, pp. 29-46. More generally, see Edgar Anderson, "British Policy Toward the Baltic States, 1918-1920;' Journal of Central European Affairs, vol. 19, no. 3 (1959), pp. 276¬89; and Edgar Anderson, "An Undeclared War; The British-Soviet Naval Struggle in the Baltic, 1918-1920;' Journal of Central European Affairs, vol. 22, no. 1 (1962), pp. 43-78.

25. The Izhevsk-Votkinsk uprising was fairly disastrous for the Reds, as Izhevsk produced 25 percent of Russia's infantry rifles and was the sole producer of rifle and revolver barrels, while Votkinsk produced armor for naval needs (transformed in the civil wars to plating for armored trains also). See P.N. Dmitriev and K.I. Kulikov, Miatezh v Izhevsk-Votkinskom raione, Izhevsk: Udrnurtiia, 1992, pp. 7-8. On the revolt, see Aaron B. Retish, Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil Wtir: Citizenship, Identity and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914-1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 179-88. On the fate of the participants in the rising, in Siberia and the Far East, see A.G. Efimov, Izhevtsy i Votkintsy, 1918-1920, Moscow: Airis Press, 2008 (originally published privately by Efimov in San Francisco in 1975).

26. There is some evidence to suggest that the withdrawal of forces of the People's Army towards Ufa was altogether more orderly than has generally been allowed (certainly in Soviet histories). See, for example, the account in Serge P. Petroff, Remembering a Forgotten Wtir:

Civil Wtir in Eastern European Russia and Siberia, 1918-1920, Boulder: Eastern Euro¬pean Monographs, 2000, pp. 106-8; and P.P. Petrov, Rokovye gody, California, 1965, pp. 119-25. Alternatively, had the Omsk coup of 18 Nov. 1918 not thrown confusion to their ranks, the former forces of Komuch might have rallied before Ufa in late November 1918 and resumed a full offensive, as Red units (notably the Latvian Riflemen) lost their nerve.

27. G.I. Klerzhe, Revoliutsiia i Grazhdanskaia uoina: lichnye vospominaniia (ChdSt' peruaia), Mukden: Tip. Gazety "Mukden;' 1932, pp. 113-14.

28. William A. Brown, The Groping Giant: Revolutionary Russia as Seen by an American Democrat, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920, p. 176. Lebedev (b. 1882), who had grad¬uated from the Academy of the General Staff in 1911, had served on various army staffs and had taught at the Academy before and during the First World War, but his major qualifications for such an exalted post in Kolchak's army seem to have been that he had helped found the Officers' Union in 1917 and, as an instigator of the Kornilov affair, had been imprisoned with the Bykhov generals. In White Siberia, where eonspiracy was king, this sort of thing mattered. Moreover, he, therefore, carried with him a whiff of the Volunteers (although some sources have it that he only made his way to Siberia in Feb. 1918 because General Kornilov had dismissed him as a disruptive element among his staff).

 

 

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