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s. a. smith

calling on all the belligerent powers to begin peace talks on the basis of no

annexations or indemnities and self-determination for national minorities.

The rejection by the Entente of this proposal led to the Bolsheviks suing for a

separate peace with Germany. German terms proved to be tough and Lenin’s

insistence that they be accepted caused what was arguably the deepest schism

ever experienced by the Bolshevik Party.

On 18 February the German high

command lost patience with Trotsky’s stalling tactics and sent 700,000 troops

into Russia where they met virtually no resistance. On 23 February it proffered

terms even more draconian. At the crucial meeting of the Central Committee

that evening, opponents of peace gained four votes against seven in favour of

acceptance, while four supporters of Trotsky’s formula of ‘No war, no peace’

abstained. The peace treaty, signed at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March, was massively

punitive: the Baltic provinces, a large part of Belorussia and the whole of the

Ukraine were excised from the former empire.

On 26 October the Bolshevik government also issued a Land Decree that

legitimised the spontaneous land seizures by formally conﬁscating all gentry,

Church and crown lands and transferring them to peasant use.

Signiﬁcantly, it

did not embody the Bolshevik policy of ‘nationalising’ land – that is, of taking it

directlyinto state ownership – but the SR policy of ‘socialisation’, whereby land

‘passes into the use of the entire toiling people’. This left individual communes

free to decide how much land should be distributed and whether it should be

apportioned on the basis of the number of ‘eaters’ or able-bodied members in

each household. The idea of socialising land proved hugely popular. The decree

precipitated a wave of land conﬁscation: in the central provinces three-quarters

of landowners’ land was conﬁscated between November and January 1918.

How much better off peasants were as a result of the land redistribution is

hard to say, since there was no uniformity in the amount of land they received,

even within a single township. Slightly more than half of communes received

no additional land, usually because there was no adjacent estate that could

be conﬁscated. And since two-thirds of conﬁscated land was already rented

to peasants, the amount of new land that became available represented just

The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets,

October 1917–January 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

82 Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conﬂict: The Left Communist Opposition of 1918

(London: Macmillan, 1991).

83 The following is based on: John Channon, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry: The Land

Question during the First Eight Months of Soviet Power’, Slavonic and East European

Studies 66, 4 (1988): 593–624; Keep, Russian Revolution,p.5; Figes, Peasant Russia, ch. 3.

84 I. A. Trifonov, Likvidatsiia ekspluatatorskikh klassov v SSSR (Moscow: Politizdat, 1975),

p. 90

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over a ﬁfth of the entire cultivated area. Following redistribution, about three-

quarters of households had allotments of up to 4 desiatiny (4.4 hectares), plus a

horse and one or two cows. This was sufﬁcient for a basic level of subsistence,

but no more.

If the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was widely understood to mean the

transfer of power to a coalition consisting of all socialist parties, the Bolsheviks

nevertheless went ahead on 26 October and formed a Council of People’s

Commissars (Sovnarkom) exclusively from members of their own party. Talks

with the Mensheviks and SRs to form a coalition government got under way,

butwere scuttled bytheintransigence of hard-liners on all sides.Five Bolsheviks

resigned from the Sovnarkom when ordered to withdraw from the talks,saying

‘weconsider a purelyBolshevik government has no choice but to maintain itself

by political terror’. In due course, seven Left SRs did join the new government,

having been assured that the Sovnarkom would be accountable to the VTsIK –

something that never happened – and theyengineered the fusion of VTsIK with

the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Deputies, whose SR-dominated executive had

backed military resistance to the Bolsheviks.

Soviet power was established with surprising ease, a reﬂection of the pop-

ularity of the idea of devolving power to the toilers.

In towns and regions

with a relatively homogeneous working class, such as the Central Industrial

Region or the mining settlements of the Urals, Bolsheviks and their Left SR

and anarchist allies asserted ‘soviet power’ quickly with little opposition. In

big commercial and industrial cities with a more diverse social structure, such

as Moscow, Smolensk or the Volga cities of Kazan’, Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn,

the Bolsheviks enjoyed a plurality of votes in the soviets but faced a strong chal-

lenge from the moderate socialist bloc. Here ‘soviet power’ was often estab-

lished by the local military-revolutionary committee – of which there were

350 nationwide – or by the garrison. Finally, there were the less industrially

developed towns, towns of more medium size, or the capitals of overwhelm-

ingly agricultural provinces, such as those in the central Black Earth provinces,

where the SRs and Mensheviks were heavily ensconced in the soviets. Here

moderate socialists put up staunch resistance to soviet power, as did Cossacks

and nationalist movements such as the Ukrainian Rada.

The Constituent Assembly symbolised the people’s power at the heart

of the revolution and the Bolsheviks made much political capital out of the

Provisional Government’s decision to postpone elections to it. Yet once in gov-

ernment, Lenin insisted that there could be no going back to a parliamentary

85 The following is based on: Keep, Russian Revolution, chs. 26 and 27.

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regime now that soviet power, a superior form of democracy in his view, had

been established. The Bolsheviks nevertheless decided to allow elections to

go ahead. In all, 48.4 million valid votes were cast, of which the SRs gained

19.1m. (39.5 per cent), the Bolsheviks 10.9m. (22.5 per cent), the Kadets 2.2m.

(4.5 per cent) and the Mensheviks 1.5m. (3.2 per cent). Over 7 million voted for

non-Russian socialist parties, including two-thirds of Ukrainians. The SRs were

thus the clear winners, their vote concentrated in the countryside. The main

voters for the Bolsheviks were workers and 42 per cent of the 5.5m. soldiers.

This represented the peak of popular support for the Bolsheviks: hereinafter

they would lose support as soldiers returned to their villages and as worker dis-

affection grew. On 5 January the Assembly opened in dispiriting circumstances.

The delegates elected Chernov chair and voted to discuss the SR agenda. In the

small hours of the morning, the sailor’s leader, A. G. Zhelezniakov, announced

that ‘the guard is getting tired’ and put an end to its proceedings for ever.

The Bolshevik seizure of power is often presented as a conspiratorial coup

against a democratic government. It had all the elements of a coup – albeit one

advertised in advance – except for the fact that a coup implies the seizure of a

functioning state machine. Arguably, Russia had not had this since February.

The reasons for the failure of the Provisional Government are not hard to

pinpoint. Lacking legitimacy from the ﬁrst, it relied on the moderate social-

ists in the Soviet to make its writ run. From summer, it was engulfed by a

concatenation of crises – at the front, in the countryside, in the economy and

in the non-Russian periphery. Few governments could have coped with such

a situation, and certainly not without an army to rely on. Many argue that

democratic government was a non-starter in Russia in 1917. This may under-

estimate the extent of enthusiasm for ‘democracy’ in 1917. It is true, however,

that from the ﬁrst a heavily ‘socialised’ conception of democracy vied with

a liberal conception tied to the defence of private property. Perhaps if the

Petrograd Soviet had taken power in March when it had the chance, perhaps

if it had hastened to summon the Constituent Assembly and to tackle the

land question, the SRs and Mensheviks might have been able to consolidate

a parliamentary regime. In the wake of the Kornilov rebellion, a majority

of moderate socialists came round to the view that the coalition with the

‘bourgeoisie’ must end, but that, of course, was not their view in spring. More

crucially, on the vital matter of the war there were many in the SR Party whose

instincts were little different from those of Kerensky. Therein lay the rub. For

the fate of democracy in 1917 was ultimately sealed by the decision of liberals

86 Protasov, Vserossisskoe,pp.164, 168.

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and moderate socialists to continue the war. It was the war that focused the

otherwise disparate grievances of the people. It was the war that exacerbated

the deep polarisation in society to a murderous extent. It was the war, in the

last analysis, that made the Bolshevik seizure of power irresistible.

The Bolsheviks satisﬁed the demands of tens of millions on the burning

issues of peace and land, but their promise to transfer power to the soviets

proved to be very short-lived and severely incomplete. Historians debate the

extent to which the speedy rise of one-party dictatorship was due to Bolshevik

authoritarianism or to circumstances. There can be little doubt that the Bol-

sheviks’ course of action was powerfully dictated by circumstances such as an

imploding economy, a collapsing army, spiralling lawlessness, a disintegrating

empire, the fragmentation of state authority and, not least, by extensive oppo-

sition to their rule. At the same time, they were never blind instruments of fate.

The lesson that Lenin and Trotsky drew from the experience of 1917 was that

breadth of representation in government spelt weakness; and in their determi-

nation to re-establish strong government – something that millions craved –

they did not scruple to use dictatorial methods. By closing the Constituent

Assembly they signalled that they were ready to wage war in defence of their

regime not only against the exploiting classes, but against the socialist camp.

The dissolution of the assembly doomed the chances of democracy in Russia

for seventy years and for that the Bolsheviks bear the largest share of blame.

Yet the prospects for a democratic socialist regime had by this stage become

extremely tenuous. True, some 70 per cent of peasants voted in the assembly

elections, but they did so less out of enthusiasm for parliamentary politics

than out of a desire to see the assembly legalise their title to the land. Once it

became clear that they had no reason to fear on that score, they acquiesced in

the assembly’s dissolution. The grim fact is that by 1918 the real choice facing

the Russian people was one between anarchy or some form of dictatorship.

87 This argument is worked out in S. A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short

Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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donald j. raleigh

While the story of the Russian Revolution has often been retold, the historiog-

raphy of the event’s most decisive chapter, the civil war, remains remarkably

underdeveloped. A generation ago, the nature of available sources as well as

dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians of the

civil war to focus on military operations, Allied intervention and politics at the

top. This scholarship pinned the blame for the resulting Communist dictator-

ship on Marxist-Leninist ideology and/or Russia’s backwardness and author-

itarian political culture. In the 1980s, interest in social history and Bolshevik

cultural experimentation stimulated publication of new academic and popu-

lar overviews of the civil war,

and also of a landmark collaborative volume

that shifted the explanation for the Communist dictatorship from conscious

political will and ideology to the circumstances of the ordeal.

The ﬁrst full-

scale investigations of the civil war in Petrograd and Moscow appeared as

well.

Some studies issued at this time cast the period as a ‘formative’ one,

emphasising that the Bolshevik behaviour, language, policies and appearance

that emerged during 1917–21 served as models for policies later implemented

under Joseph Stalin.

Although Soviet historians writing on 1917 often produced results that were

not entirely invalidated by ideological content, this is less the case in regard

to the civil war, whose history they patently falsiﬁed, undoubtedly owing to

1 The best of these is Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen and Unwin,

1987).

2 Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg and Ronald G. Suny (eds.),Party, State, and Society

in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1989).

3 Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1991); and Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power: A Study of Moscow

during the Civil War, 1918–21 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

4 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The Civil War as a Formative Experience’, in Abbott Gleason, Peter

Kenez and Richard Stites (eds.), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian

Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 57–9, 71.

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The Russian civil war, 1917–1922

Murmansk

SWEDEN

NORWAY

GERMANY

FRANCE

ITALY

AUSTRO-

HUNGARY

SERBIA

BULGARIA

GREECE

ROMANIA

Odessa

FINLAND

Petrograd

ESTONIA

LITHUANIA

LATVIA

Riga

Vilna

EAST

PRUSSIA

Baltic

Sea

POLAND

UKRAINE

Moscow

Kiev

Khar’kov

Tsaritsyn

COSSACKS

BESSARABIA

Black Sea

TURKEY

KEMALISTS

PERSIA

Orel

Samara

Kazan’

Ufa

Archangel

White

Sea

Tiflis

(Tbilisi)

Caspian

Sea

GEORGIA

Baku

A. Yudenich’s advance

B. Wrangel’s advance and retreat

C. Denikin’s farthest advance,

October 1919

Map 5.1. European Russia during the civil war, 1918–21

mass discontent with Bolshevik practices after 1918. Focusing on the political

and military aspects of the civil war, Soviet historians published a ‘canonical’

ﬁve-volume survey of the subject between 1935 and 1960.

World war and the

partial discrediting of Stalinist scholarship following the Soviet leader’s death

in 1953 help to explain the delay in issuing the last volumes in the series. Like

their Western counterparts, Soviet historians by the 1980s had begun to devote

more attention to the 1918–21 phase of the Russian Revolution, resulting in the

5 M. Gor’kii et al., Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR (Moscow: ‘Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny’,

1935, 1942, 1957, 1959, 1960).

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donald j. raleigh

release of a two-volume authoritative survey to replace the one begun during

the Stalin years.

They debated periodisation of the civil war, acknowledged

opposition parties and regional differences, examined party and state insti-

tutions and re-evaluated War Communism. However, they failed to engage

deeper interpretive issues or to address the degree of popular opposition to

Bolshevik policies.

The opening of the archives has allowed historians to revisit old questions

and also to conceptualise the civil war in fresh ways. Lenin became the object

of this ﬁrst trajectory. Underscoring his disregard for human life, new writing

on the founder of the Soviet state draws on long-sealed documents to conﬁrm

his willingness to resort to terror and repression. Such literature breathed new

life into the long-standing argument that Stalinism represented the inevitable

consequence of Leninism.

An attempt to expose the ‘revisionist’ historians’

intellectual dead end and to convict the Bolsheviks of crimes similar to those

perpetrated under Stalin mars an otherwise valuable study of the civil war pub-

lished in 1994.

More importantly, unprecedented archival access and changing

intellectual paradigms encouraged historians to carry out local case studies

informed by cultural approaches and by an interest in daily life. These works

show how the experiential aspects of the civil war constrained and enabled

later Soviet history, pointing out that many features of the Soviet system that

we associate with the Stalin era were not only practised, but also embedded

during the 1914–22 period.

Shifting focus away from Lenin and Bolshevik

ideology, these investigations interpret this outcome as the consequence of a

complex dynamic shaped, among other things, by Russia’s political tradition

and culture, Bolshevik ideology and the dire political, economic and military

crises starting with the First World War and strongly reinforced by the mythol-

ogised experience of surviving the civil war. Some of these studies conclude

that the 1920s contained few real alternatives to a Stalinist-like system. Herein

lies the civil war’s signiﬁcance.

6 N. N. Azovtsev (ed.), Grazhdanskaia voina v SSSR (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo Minis-

terstva oborony SSSR, 1980, 1986).

7 Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, trans. Harold Shukman (London: Harper-

Collins, 1994); Richard Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1996); and Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2000).

8 Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social

Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

9 Igor’ Narskii, Zhizn’ v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917–1922 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen,

2001); Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolu-

tionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and

Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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The Russian civil war, 1917–1922

Overview

The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the desacralisation of the

tsarist autocracy that took place in the years before the First World War; in

the social polarisations that shaped politics before and during 1917; and in the

Bolshevik leadership’s belief in the efﬁcacy of civil war, the imminence of world

revolution and the value of applying coercion in setting up a dictatorship of the

proletariat. When did the civil war begin? Historians have made compelling

cases for a variety of starting points, yet dating the event to October 1917

makes the most sense, because that is how contemporaries saw things. Armed

opposition to the new Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) arose

immediately after the Second Congress of Soviets ratiﬁed the Bolshevik decree

on land and declaration of peace, when ofﬁcers of the imperial army formed

the ﬁrst counter-force known as the volunteer army, based in southern Russia.

Ironically, the widespread belief among the population that Bolshevik power

would soon crumble accompanied what Lenin, and subsequent generations of

Soviet historians,called the ‘triumphal march’of Soviet power as the Bolsheviks

consolidated their hold in cities across central Russia.

During the civil war the Bolsheviks or Reds, renamed Communists in 1918,

waged war against the Whites, a term used to refer to all factions that took

up arms against the Bolsheviks. The Whites were a more diverse group than

the Bolshevik label of ‘counter-revolution’ suggests. Those who represented

the country’s business and landowning elite often expressed monarchist sen-

timents. Historically guarding the empire’s borders, Cossack military units

enjoyed self-government and other privileges that likewise made them a con-

servative force. But many White ofﬁcers had opposed the autocracy and some

even harboured reformist beliefs. Much more complicated were the Bolshe-

viks’ relations with Russia’s moderate socialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist

Revolutionaries (SRs) and both parties’ numerous offshoots, who wished to

establish a government that would include all socialist parties. Frequently sub-

sumed within the wider conﬂict between Reds and Whites, the internecine

struggle within the socialist camp over rival views of the meaning of revolution

prevailed during much of 1918, persisted throughout the civil war, and ﬂared

up once again after the Bolsheviks routed the Whites in 1920.

Fearing a White victory, the moderate socialist parties threw their sup-

port behind the Reds at critical junctures, thereby complicating this scenario.

Moreover, left-wing factions within these parties forged alliances with the

10 See Geoffrey Swain,TheOrigins oftheRussianCivilWar (Londonand NewYork: Longman,

1996).

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donald j. raleigh

Bolsheviks. For instance, until mid-1918 the Bolsheviks stayed aﬂoat in part

owing to the support of the Left SRs, who broke from their parent party fol-

lowing October 1917. Accepting commissariats in the new government, the

Left SRs believed they could inﬂuence Bolshevik policies towards Russia’s

peasant majority. In some locales the Bolshevik–Left SR coalition even weath-

ered the controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Peace in March 1918, which ceded

eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Ukraine to Germany, as well

as Transcaucasia to Turkey, in return for an end to hostilities. Ratifying the

treaty sundered the alliance with the Left SRs, who withdrew from the Lenin

government in protest, and also sparked heated controversy within the Com-

munist Party, especially among the so-called Left Communists led by Nikolai

Bukharin, who backed a revolutionary war against Germany. Renegade Left

SRs later formed a new party called the Revolutionary Communists (RCs), who

participated in a ruling coalition with the Bolsheviks in many Volga provinces

and the Urals. Committed to Soviet power, the RCs perceived otherwise ques-

tionable Bolshevik practices as the consequence of temporary circumstances

brought about by civil war. The Bolshevik attitude towards the RCs and other

groups that supported the Reds reﬂected the overall strength of Soviet power

at any given time. Exercising power through a dynamic of co-optation amid

repression, they manipulated their populist allies before orchestrating their

merger with the Communists in 1920.

Because political opposition to the Bolsheviks became more resolved after

they closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the Lenin govern-

ment established the Red Army under Leon Trotsky. He promptly recruited

ex-tsarist ofﬁcers to command the Reds, appointing political commissars to all

units to monitor such ofﬁcers and the ideological education of recruits. This

early phase of the civil war ended with a spate of armed conﬂicts in Russian

towns along the Volga in May and June 1918 between Bolshevik-run soviets

and Czechoslovak legionnaires. Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian

armies, they were slated to be transported back to the western front in order

to join the Allies in the ﬁght to defeat the Central Powers. Their clash with the

Soviet government emboldened the SR opposition to set up an anti-Bolshevik

government, the Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly, Komuch,in

the Volga city of Samara in June 1918. Many delegates elected to the Con-

stituent Assembly congregated there before the city fell to the Bolsheviks that

November. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks expelled Mensheviks and SRs from local

11 Donald J. Raleigh, ‘Co-optation amid Repression: The Revolutionary Communists in

Saratov Province, 1918–1920’, Cahiers du Monde russe 40, 4 (1999): 625–56.

144

The Russian civil war, 1917–1922

soviets, while the Kadets met in the Siberian city of Omsk in June to establish

a Provisional Siberian Government. The rivalry between Samara and Omsk

resulted in a state conference that met in Ufa in September, the last attempt

to form from below a national force to oppose Bolshevism. Drawing repre-

sentatives from disparate bodies, the Ufa Conference set up a compromise

ﬁve-member Directory. But in November the military removed the socialists

from it and installed Admiral Kolchak in power. He kept his headquarters in

Siberia, remaining ofﬁcial leader of the White movement until defeat forced

him to resign in early 1920.

Although its role is often exaggerated, international intervention bolstered

the White cause and fuelled Bolshevik paranoia, providing ‘evidence’ for the

party’s depictions of the Whites as traitorous agents of imperialist foreign pow-

ers. Maintaining an apprehensive attitude towards the Whites whom many

in the West viewed as reactionaries, the Allies dispatched troops to Russia to

secure military supplies needed in the war against Germany. Their involve-

ment deepened as they came to see the Bolsheviks as a hostile force that

promoted world revolution, renounced the tsarist government’s debts and

concluded a separate peace with Germany. Allied intervention on behalf of the

Whites became more active with the end of the First World War in November

1918, when the British, French, Japanese, Americans and a dozen other pow-

ers sent troops to Russian ports and rail junctures. Revolutionary stirrings in

Germany, the founding of the Third Communist International in Moscow in

March 1919 and the temporary establishment of B

ela Kun’s Hungarian Soviet

Republic at roughly the same time heightened the Allies’ fears of a Red men-

ace. Yet the Allied governments could not justify intervention in Russia to their

own war-weary people. Lacking a common purpose and resolve, and often

suspicious of one another, the Allies extended only half-hearted support to the

Whites, whom they left in the lurch by withdrawing from Russia in 1919 and

1920 – except for the Japanese who kept troops in Siberia.

Both Reds and Whites turned to terror in the second half of 1918 as a sub-

stitute for popular support. Calls to overthrow Soviet power, followed by the

assassination of German Ambassador Count Mirbach in July, which the Bol-

sheviks depicted as the start of a Left SR uprising designed to undercut the

Brest-Litovsk Peace, provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to repress their

one-time radical populist allies and to undermine the Left SRs’ hold over

the villages. Moreover, with Lenin’s approval, local Bolsheviks in Ekaterin-

burg executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family on 16 July 1918. Following

an attempt on Lenin’s life on 30 August, the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red

Terror aimed at eliminating political opponents within the civilian population.

145