John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

At this stage neither the Czech Legion nor Komuch were “White” organisations in the strict sense. Having been denied any means of political expression, Komuch sought to physically replace the Bolshevik government and recall the Constituent Assembly. But its policies, as Orlando Figes has characterised them, were “dressed stiffly in the liberal pretence of political neutrality” 4and thus had an air of unreality. It ostensibly championed the democratic revolution of February 1917 and some of its policies, such as the eight-hour day, freedom of the press and trade unions. It also sought to replace rural Soviets with elected Zemstvos, while postponing real social reforms until after the convoking of the Assembly.

Komuch, like Sovnarcom, stripped the Factory Committees of their powers, yet instead of nationalisation they simply returned factories and banks to their previous owners. Its biggest mistake was the failure to fully endorse land redistribution. Lenin’s Land Decree was still in force and extremely popular. While Komuch upheld the Constituent Assembly’s land reform law passed on the only day of its existence, it weakened it by allowing previous owners to take back fields sown before the land seizures. As a result, it lost the support of Volga peasants without convincing the middle classes of Samara and Kazan that it would protect their interests. The fate of Komuch demonstrated there was no longer space for political neutrality.

The situation was different in the southern Don and Kuban regions, where power had been taken much earlier by White Generals Krasnov and Alekseev. Their first acts were to declare null and void all laws of Sovnarcom and the Provisional Government, i.e. to totally suppress the remnants of democracy left over from the democratic republic and the Soviet system in favour of the Tsarist ancien regime . Because the Bolsheviks refused to concede any freedom to socialist opponents like the Mensheviks and SRs–even when, as with the majority of the Menshevik Party, they refused to side with liberals or rightists engaged in armed struggle against Sovnarcom–they alienated many working-class and peasant supporters and ensured that in some regions the Whites appeared to be the only option for those who opposed Bolshevik rule.

The result was total social polarisation. It was not only Kadets like Miliukov and Struve who sided with the Whites. So too did some Right SRs and a smaller number of right-wing Mensheviks like Potresov, although he was expelled from the Menshevik Party for doing so. Menshevik Internationalists like Martov, as well as most anarchists, Bundists and Left SRs, supported the Bolsheviks against White forces whose political agenda, while it sometimes professed allegiance to the Constituent Assembly to ensure the continued support of the Kadets, was more often a toxic mixture of monarchism and anti-Semitism. The Whites’ pretend concern for democracy vanished entirely in September 1918 when the Red Army retook Samara and Simbirsk. Komuch retreated east of the Ural Mountains to the city of Omsk and there began to disintegrate. Finally, the reactionary White Army leader Admiral Kolchak abolished Komuch outright and became “Supreme Ruler” of the entire province of western Siberia.

Upon establishment of his regime Kolchak ordered a mass pogrom of SRs and anyone to the left of his own ultra–monarchism. His men were famous for mass killings of prisoners. On 9th May, 1918 some of Kolchak’s troops took the village of Alexansdrovich-Gai, after which they shot 700 villagers and buried 2,000 Red Army prisoners alive. If a peasant Volost resisted him its village was razed to the ground and all inhabitants killed. Any criticism or insult of the Supreme Ruler was forbidden on pain of hard labour.

Omsk became a mini-police state with SR deputies hunted down, arrested and executed. SR leaders such as Gots, who had considered armed resistance to Sovnarcom and the Red Army, suspended their anti-Bolshevik operations. The real face of the White counter-revolution had emerged and for a while it united the left.

The Russian Civil War was a brutal conflict made uglier by class and ethnic cleansing, famine and social collapse, and was further complicated by foreign intervention. At no point were the relatively small forces of foreign powers militarily decisive. When the British landed 600 troops at Archangel in April 1918 it was to protect the British stockpiles kept there and prevent the Germans, who had recently landed a division in Finland, from taking the strategically important port of Murmansk. The plan was to re-establish an Eastern Front against the Germans rather than overthrow the Bolsheviks, although in 1918-19 a British Navy Squadron roamed the Gulf of Finland, occasionally firing on Soviet ships.

The British also requested that the US send troops to the Northern and Siberian Fronts. The US sent 5,000 troops to Archangel and 8,000 to Vladivostok. After the Armistice in December 1918 the French occupied the port of Odessa and linked up with Denikin’s White forces, but then withdrew five months later. The Japanese landed 70,000 troops, but these stayed in eastern Siberia. Other expeditionary forces, such as the 2,500 Italians, 2,300 Chinese or 150 Australians, were miniscule. Estimates of a total 150,000 foreign troops on Russian soil conflate the 70,000 Japanese and 50,000 Czechs, throw in forces like the French who barely fired a shot before leaving, and adduce a coordinated invasion to crush Bolshevism.

On some battle fronts foreign forces prevented White defeats, but they did not make serious efforts to go beyond that. The one exception was the White attack on Petrograd in October 1919, which the British Navy supported from a distance as part of “Operation Red Trek”, its intervention in the Baltic to secure Estonia and Latvia. Aside from that, the major effect of the allied interventions was to provide an enormous propaganda gift to the Bolsheviks. The occupation of Russian territory by soldiers of countries that had recently been allies of Tsarist Russia, to directly or indirectly fight a government perceived as an authentic representative of the Russian working class, confirmed for many workers that this was a naked class war. As a result, something like a mutiny occurred in Archangel. The men of the 13th Battalion of the Yorkshire Light Infantry did not wish to be there, and they set up a Soviet to make their displeasure known. With cold class allegiance the British Commander Lord Ironside prepared to order White Russian forces to fire on British troops.

The Civil War was terrible enough without foreign intervention at its margins. Between 1918 and 1920 over seven million Russians died of famine and epidemic alone, more than were killed in the actual fighting. Offshoots of the Civil War, such as the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, the suppression of the peasant “Green” rebellions in 1920-21 and the Bolshevik invasion of the Menshevik Republic of Georgia, would extend beyond the Civil War itself, but by 1920 the key struggle, that of Red versus White, was over. Although outnumbered and surrounded, the final victory of the embattled Bolshevik regime rested on three factors. Firstly, Sovnarcom fought with shorter internal lines of supply and communication than the Whites. Secondly, although White Armies advanced on Bolshevik territory from all sides–Yudenich from Estonia, Kolchak from Siberia and Denikin from Ukraine–they seldom concerted their efforts. Thirdly, the Bolsheviks, despite ruthless use of coercion against peasants who resisted confiscations of food, could still generate an authentic feeling amongst many peasants and even socialist opponents like Martov, that ultimately they represented the revolution against the old society, whilst the Whites wanted to return to autocracy.

It is impossible to weigh the scales of Red Terror and White Terror. Both went far beyond any accepted level of military necessity to a deliberate targeting of non-combatant civilians of all ages. Both flowed from the fundamental politics of Red and White, which were at heart eliminationist. Both used and exploited political acts as an excuse to unleash terror programmes they had long nurtured. For the Whites, the banning of the Kadets and the Constituent Assembly provided justification for their counter-revolutionary assault on the Bolsheviks, although once the struggle began they dropped the demand that it be reconvened and preferred straight-up military dictatorship. For the Bolsheviks, the actions of the Left SRs’ in July 1918 gave them a perfect pretext to tighten the screws of state terror.