Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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donald j. raleigh

The Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage

(Cheka), set up in December 1917 under Feliks Dzerzhinsky, carried out the

terror.

Seeking to reverse social revolution, the Whites savagely waged their own

ideological war that justiﬁed the use of terror to avenge those who had been

wronged by the revolution. Although the Whites never applied terror as sys-

tematically as the Bolsheviks, White Terror was equally horrifying and arbi-

trary. Putting to death Communists and their sympathisers, and massacring

Jews in Ukraine and elsewhere,

the Whites posed a more serious threat to

the Reds after the Allies backed the Whites’ cause. Until their defeat in 1920,

White forces controlled much of Siberia and southern Russia, while the Reds,

who moved their capital to Moscow in March 1918, clung desperately to the

Russian heartland.

The Whites’ unsuccessful three-pronged attack against Moscow in March

1919 decided the military outcome of their war against the Reds. Despite their

initial success, the Whites went down in defeat that November, after which

their routed forces replaced General Anton Denikin with Petr Wrangel, the

most competent of all the White ofﬁcers. Coinciding with an invasion of Russia

by forces of the newly resurrected Polish state, the Whites opened their ﬁnal

offensive in the spring of 1920. When Red forces overcame Wrangel’s army

in November, he and his troops retreated back to Crimea from which they

then withdrew from Russia. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks’ conﬂict with

the Poles ended in stalemate; the belligerent parties signed an armistice in

October 1920, followed by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which transferred parts

of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland.

Although at civilwar’s end the differencebetween victory and defeat seemed

a small one, it is hard to imagine how the Whites might have prevailed in the

ordeal: the Constituent Assembly elections made clear that over 80 per cent

of the population had voted for socialist parties. The Whites simply lacked

mass appeal in a war in which most people were reluctant to get involved.

Concentrated on the periphery, the Whites relied on Allied bullets and ord-

nance to ﬁght the Reds. True, a more determined Allied intervention might

have tipped the scales in the Whites’ favour in the military conﬂict, but their

failure was as much political as it was military. Recent scholarship reafﬁrms the

ineptitude and corruption of the White forces, emphasising that their virtual

government misunderstoodtherelationshipbetween social policy andmilitary

12 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan

Cape, 1996), pp. 563–4, 656–9, 665, 676–9, 717.

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success.

Moreover, the alliance with the moderate socialists, made frail by

lack of a common ideology to unite them, contributed to the Whites’ political

failures, as did the hollow appeal of their slogan, ‘One, Great, and Indivisible

Russia’.

Apart from their military encounters with the Whites, the Bolsheviks also

had to contend with a front behind their own lines because of the appeal

of rival socialist parties and because Bolshevik economic policies alienated

much of the working class and drove the peasantry to rise up against the

requisitioning of grain and related measures. Viewing October 1917 as a stage

in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Menshevik Party refused to take

part in an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks, but found their neutrality

difﬁcult to sustain when the White threat intensiﬁed. The party’s political

and ideological concessions to the Bolsheviks, however, damaged its identity,

even its ideals, thus jeopardising its support among workers. Adopting hard-

line policies towards Right Menshevik critics opposed to accommodating the

Bolsheviks, the Menshevik Central Committee disbanded certain local party

organisations, and expelled members from others.

True, some Right SRs

experienced a short-lived period of co-operation with the Bolsheviks during

the White offensive of 1919, but for the most part they threatened the Soviet

government with the possibility of forming a third front comprising all other

socialist groups. Given the far-reaching opposition to Bolshevik rule by 1920,

Mensheviks and SRs believed the Leninists would be forced to co-opt the

Menshevik/SR programme or face defeat. This encouraged them, as well as

anarchist groups, to step up their agitation against the Bolsheviks at the end

of the year.

The activities of the rival socialist parties provided the frame for popular

revolt. Recent studies underscore the vast scale of the crisis of early 1921, doc-

umenting workers’ strikes and armed peasant rebellions in many locales.

Peasant discontent, which the Communists called the Green movement,

and mass worker unrest convinced the party to replace its unpopular eco-

nomic policies known, in retrospect, as War Communism – characterised by

13 Jonathan Smele, Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak,

1918–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Norman G. O. Pereira,

White Siberia: The Politics of CivilWar (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University

Press, 1996).

14 Susan Z. Rupp, ‘Conﬂict and Crippled Compromise: Civil-War Politics in the East and

the Ufa State Conference’, Russian Review 56 (1997): 249–64.

15 Brovkin, Behind,pp.244–6.

16 Raleigh, Experiencing, ch.12; and Jonathan Aves, Workers against Lenin: Labour Protest and

the Bolshevik Dictatorship (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996).

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economic centralisation, nationalisation of industry and land and compul-

sory requisitioning of grain – with the New Economic Policy (NEP), which

swapped the hated grain requisitioning with a tax in kind and restored some

legal private economic activity. The necessity of this shift in policy was made

clear when, in early March 1921, sailors of the Kronstadt naval fortress rose

up against the Bolsheviks whom they had helped bring to power. Demanding

the restoration of Soviet democracy without Communists, the sailors met

with brutal repression. Although most historians view the Kronstadt uprising,

worker disturbances, the Green movement and the introduction of the NEP

as the last acts of the civil war, after which the party mopped up remaining

pockets of opposition in the borderlands, the famine of 1921 marks the real

conclusion to the conﬂict, for it helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power by rob-

bing the population of initiative. Holding broad swaths of the country tightly

in its grip until late 1923, the famine and related epidemic diseases took an

estimated 5 million lives; countless more would have perished had it not been

for foreign relief.

Moreover, the Bolshevik Party took advantage of mass starvation to end its

stalemate with the Orthodox Church. Turning many believers against the new

order, the Bolsheviks had forced through a separation of Church and state in

1917 and removed schools from Church supervision. Once famine hit hard, the

party leadership promoted the cause of Orthodox clergy loyal to Soviet power,

so-called red priests, or renovationists. They supported the party’s determi-

nation to use Church valuables to ﬁnance famine relief, hoping thereby to

strengthen their own position. Popular opposition to what soon amounted

to a government conﬁscation of Church valuables, however, triggered vio-

lent confrontations. Viewing these as evidence of a growing conspiracy, party

leaders allied with the renovationists. But this move was one of expedience,

for ‘the Politburo planned to discard them in the ﬁnal stage of destroying the

church’.

The defeat of the Whites, the end of the war with Poland and famine made

it possible for the Lenin government to focus on regaining breakaway terri-

tories in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Siberia and elsewhere, where issues of

nationalism,ethnicity,religion, class,foreign intervention and differinglevels of

economic development and ways of life complicated local civil wars. Russians

had comprised approximately 50 per cent of the tsarist empire’s multinational

population. At times tolerant, but increasingly contradictory and even repres-

sive, tsarist nationality policies had given rise to numerous grievances among

17 Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 39–73, quote on p. 72.

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the non-Russian population. Yet only a minority of intellectuals in the outly-

ing areas before 1914 championed the emergence of independent states. The

situation in Poland and perhaps Finland was the exception to this generali-

sation. The Revolution of 1917, however, gave impetus to national movements

in Ukraine and elsewhere.

As Marxists engaged in an international struggle on behalf of the inter-

ests of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks backed self-determination of nations.

This policy contributed to the destabilisation of the Provisional Govern-

ment, and also created problems for the Bolsheviks once they took power. In

January 1918 Sovnarkom’sCommissariatofNationalities(Narkomnats)headed

by Stalin conﬁrmed the Soviet government’s support for self-determination of

the country’s minorities, characterising the new state as a federation of Soviet

republics. The ﬁrst Soviet constitution of July 1918 reiterated these claims,

without specifying the nature of federalism. The cost of survival, however,

made it necessary to be pragmatic and ﬂexible: Lenin made clear already in

early 1918 that the interests of socialism were more important than the right of

self-determination. The sober reality of ruling, disappointment over the failure

of world revolution, fear of hostile border states that could serve as bases for

new intervention and the Soviet state’s inability to prevent the emergence of an

independent Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, shaped emerging

Soviet nationality politics.

Fostered by intellectuals and politicians, local nationalisms tended to

develop into political movements with popular support in territories most

affected by industrial development, whereas national consciousness arose

more slowly where local nationalities had little presence in towns. Often, how-

ever, class and ethnic conﬂicts became entangled as these territories turned

into major battleﬁelds of the civil war and arenas of foreign intervention. The

situation in regard to Ukraine illustrates these points. The Ukrainian author-

ities had demanded autonomy from the Provisional Government, and the

Bolsheviks recognised Ukraine’s independence at the end of 1917. But Ukraine’s

support of General Kaledin and the consequences of the short-lived Brest-

Litovsk Peace with Germany dramatised the dangers of an unfriendly border

state. Soon the activities of peasant rebel Nestor Makhno obscured the inter-

twining hostilities among Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, Germans and

Poles, as Ukraine changed hands frequently. Under the black ﬂag of anarchism,

Makhno ﬁrst formed a loose alliance with the Communists, but then battled

against Red and White alike until Red forces crushed his army in 1920. With its

rich farmland, developed industry and complex ethnic and social situation that

included a sizeable Russian population in the cities, Ukraine was too important

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to the emerging Soviet state to be allowed to go its separate way. In Belorus-

sia, nationalists had declared their independence under German protection in

1918, but this effort at statehood failed with Germany’s withdrawal from the

war. Nevertheless, the signing of the Treaty of Riga forced the Bolsheviks to

give up parts of both Western Ukraine and Belorussia.

The Bolsheviks also had to accept other circumstances not to their liking.

Recognising the non-socialist government set up in Finland in 1918, theybacked

an unsuccessful Red Army uprising in the former tsarist territory, after which

they had to bow to political realities. With Germany’s patronage, the Baltic

states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania achieved their independence in a similar

manner. Declaring their independence in 1918, the states ﬂoundered after

Germany’s defeat since coherent nationalist movements had not set them up.

Yet with the assistance of the British navy and of units from the German army,

they managed to prevail against the Red Army and local socialists.

In the Caucasus, Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks and Azeri

Musavat established independent regimes in 1918. Because these states had

developed so unevenly in the preceding decades, their nationalist movements

remained distinct. Thus, when they attempted a short-lived experiment at

federalism, irreconcilable differences and the territorial claims they had on

each other forced them to turn to foreign protectors for self-defence. The

Germans, followed by the British, came to the aid of the popular Georgian

socialist republic set up by Mensheviks. Meanwhile, the Turks assisted their

co-Muslim Azeris, while the Allies expressed support for the Armenians. The

defeat of the Germans and the Turks, and the withdrawal of the British made it

possible for ethnic strife to break out between Azeris and Armenians in Baku,

especially since the Soviet government that held power brieﬂy in the city in

1918 failed to rally the ethnically diverse region around the platform of Soviet

power. The Red Army invaded Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1920, and Georgia

the following year. Meeting with stiff resistance from religious leaders and

guerrilla forces in mountain regions of the northern Caucasus, Soviet forces

eventually overcame opposition there, too.

The situation in the Islamic regions of Russia proved to be particularly

difﬁcult to handle, since Islam, like Marxism, also espoused international-

ist sentiments and there was always the fear that these feelings would ﬁnd

expression in support for the idea of a pan-Turkic state. By the late nineteenth

century, elements within Russia’s Muslim elite felt at home within a broader

community of the world’s Muslims. Some of Russia’s Muslim intellectuals, the

Jadids, advocated a complete reform of culture and society to meet the modern

world’s challenges. Embracing modernity and searching for what it meant to

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be Muslim, they encountered resistance from Muslim society’s leaders, ever

the more so because some would-be reformers had become socialists. To be

sure, notions of statehood remained inchoate, but Jadids among the Crimean

Tatar population did criticise tsarist policies, while war and revolution added

impetus to anti-Russian feelings. Violent anti-European uprisings ﬂared up

in Central Asia in 1916, leaving embittered feelings on both sides. Moreover,

the revolution emboldened the All-Russian Muslim Congress to press claims

against the Provisional Government. Disintegration of state power further pit-

ted reformers against traditional elites and Muslims against Russian settlers.

For instance, angry clashes between Russian-controlled soviets and natives in

Tashkent and Kazan’ prompted some Muslims to side with the Whites. But

this marriage of convenience was short-lived, since the Whites failed to dispel

fears that they were little more than Russian oppressors.

Appreciating the need to win support within the Muslim world, the Bol-

sheviks granted autonomy to the Bashkirs in 1919 and to the Tatars in 1920.

However, the party faced a diverse partisan movement deep in Central Asia

that drew support from all classes but whose separate parts often fought for

different reasons. Recapturing the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva in 1920,

the Bolsheviks continued to face stubborn opposition elsewhere from armed

bands of Islamic guerrillas,whom the Bolsheviks labelled brigands,orbasmachi.

They resisted the Red Army takeover until 1923. Given political realities, some

Jadids joined the Communists in order to fulﬁl their vision of transforming

Muslim society.

The Bolsheviks’ victory in the civil war led to the founding of the Union of

Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1922. Under the supervision of

Narkomnats, the Soviet government set up a federation, granting statehood

within the framework of the Soviet Russian state to those territories it had

recaptured. Seeing the nationalist threat as a serious one – including that

among Russians, which had the potential to provoke defensive nationalism

among others – Lenin and Stalin supported the development of non-Russian

territories and downplayed Russian institutions, hoping to create a centralised,

multi-ethnic, anti-imperial, socialist state, an ‘afﬁrmative action empire’.

The Bolshevik party-state

War, geopolitics and the prolonged crisis beginning in 1914 shaped the emerg-

ing Bolshevik party-state, which differed radically from the utopian views of

18 Terry Martin, The Afﬁrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,

1923–1939 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

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the commune state that Lenin had formulated in 1917 in his State and Revolu-

tion. True, political power devolved to the locales for much of the civil war,

but this was not by design. In many localities, revolutionary leaders headed

up their own councils of people’s commissars (sovnarkomy), which frequently

declared themselves independent republics or communes. Localism emerged

because each local unit of administration had to rely on its own resources to

establish state power. In these dire circumstances, the revolutionary soviets

became transformed into pillars of the state bureaucracy as their plenums

lost inﬂuence and their executive committees and presidiums came to govern

Russia. These small bands of revolutionaries justiﬁed their actions by insisting

that opposition to Soviet power had made them necessary.

From the Sovnarkom’s perspective, localism made it difﬁcult to prosecute

the war effort. To combat separatist tendencies, the Commissariat of Internal

Affairs purged soviet executive committees of those opposed to centralism

and turned party organisations into overseers of local soviets. The gradual

implementation of the Soviet constitution helped to transform the country’s

network of soviets into pillars of state power by more narrowly deﬁning their

functions, making them ﬁnancially dependent upon the Centre, and obliging

local soviets to execute the decrees of higher organs of power. As a result, some

soviets no longer held elections. In others, the party ended secret balloting

and organised Communist election victories or had to settle for majorities of

‘unafﬁliated’ deputies forced to conceal their real party preferences.

The government’s attempts to centralise the political system gained

momentum at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, as a result of which

a principle of dual subordination was introduced: all administrative depart-

ments formed by soviet executive committees became subordinate to them

but also to the corresponding Moscow commissariats. The debate over how

centralised the new state should be, however, was fuelled by the Democratic

Centralists (DCs), whobelieved that the decline in elective ofﬁces and collective

decision-making had caused a malaise within the party. The DCs supported

the integrity of the soviets vis-

a-vis local party organisations and the Centre,

opposing Moscow’s periodic redistribution of cadres. The DCs debated these

issues before the 1919 party congress and later led a full-scale attack against

‘bureaucratic centralism’. But true reform ‘remained a dead letter’

because

open debate threatened the party’s tenuous hold on power.

19 Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet

State. First Phase, 1917–1922, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977),

p. 223.

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To be sure, the cultural frame that deﬁned the parameters of Bolshevik

civil-war practices was rooted in centuries of autocracy characterised by

Russia’s frail representative institutions; low levels of popular participation

in political life; centralisation; a bureaucratic, authoritarian government with

broad powers; and highly personalised political attachments.

Yet political

culture does absorb new inﬂuences from historical experience. The condi-

tions of the 1914–21 period endowed civic practices with exaggerated, even

grotesque features. Some historians ground the party elite’s maximalism in

the circumstances of the First World War, which created a new political type

prone to apply military methods to civilian life. The attitudes and skills the

new leaders acquired during a period of destruction, violence, social unrest,

hunger and shortages of all kinds made them enemies of compromise who

believed that anything that served the proletariat was moral. Such beliefs fed

corruption, abuses of power and arbitrary behaviour, as well as a system of

privileges that kept the party aﬂoat often in a sea of indifference and hostil-

ity from the people whose support they lost.

Moreover, in promoting the

use of violence in public life, the civil war affected the political attitudes not

only of Bolsheviks: a synchronous birth of ‘strong power’ forms of govern-

ment emerged among both Reds and Whites, producing chrezvychaishchina,

or forms of government based on mass terror, which left a deep mark on the

country’s political culture.

Although Russia’s vulnerable democratic tradi-

tions continued to coexist with Soviet power, the civil-war experience reduced

the likelihood that the democratic strains in Russian public life would supplant

the authoritarian ones.

The civil war widened access to the political elite for members of all rev-

olutionary parties, young adults, women, national minorities and the poorly

educated, creating not a workers’ party, but a plebeian one, run mainly by

intellectuals. Throughout the conﬂict, workers made up roughly 40 per cent

of the party’s membership and the peasantry 20 per cent. Ofﬁcials and mem-

bers of the intelligentsia accounted for the rest, and perhaps for this reason the

party remained better educated than the population at large. Approximately

20 Stephen White, ‘The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialization’, in Archie

Brown and Jack Gray (eds.), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, 2nd

edn (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), p. 25.

21 E. G. Gimpel’son, ‘Sovetskie upravlentsy: Politicheskii i nravstvennyi oblik (1917–

1920 gg.)’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1997,no.5: 45–52; and Fitzpatrick, ‘The Civil War’,

pp. 57–76.

22 See Gennadij Bordjugov, ‘Chrezvychainye mery i “Chrezvychaishchina” v Sovetskoi

respublike i drugikh gosudarstvennykh obrazovaniiakh na territorii Rossii v 1918–

1920 gg.’, Cahiers du Monde russe 38, 1–2 (1997): 29–44; and V. P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta:

Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow: Rosspen, 1997).

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1.5 million people enrolled in the party between 1917 and 1920, but fewer than

half a million members were left by 1922.

Moreover, at this time the over-

whelming majority of party members had joined it in 1919–20.

Civil-war

circumstances had propelled recent converts into positions of prominence,

but Old Bolsheviks monopolised the political leadership, which also con-

tained a larger percentage of minority nationalities than among the rank and

ﬁle.

Dramatising their differences from non-Communists, the Bolsheviks cast

themselves as disciplined, hard, selﬂess, dedicated, committed, honest and

sober. The gulf existing between Bolshevik self-representation and individual

party members’ personal attributes was so large, however, that party diehards

mistrusted the rank and ﬁle. Party leader L. B. Krasin, for instance, opined

that 90 per cent of the party’s members were ‘unscrupulous time-servers’.

Appreciating the powerful role of cultural constraints, the party enrolled thou-

sands of young recruits on probation, maintaining a revolving-door policy and

expelling members who compromised it. The most serious attempts to ﬂush

the party of undesirable elements took place in the spring of 1919, when 46.8 per

cent of the party’s total membership was excluded. During the purge of 1920,

28.6 per cent of the party’s members were expelled, and in 1921, 24.8 per cent.

One of the most widespread problems that purging the party sought to

remedy was corruption. Blaming it for the Whites’ success, the party made

corruption a class issue by depicting it as a ‘dirty’ form of class relationships

inherited from old Russia, as bourgeois specialists and former tsarist bureau-

crats obtained administrative positions – and rations – ‘simply by applying

for party membership the day before applying for the job itself ’.

Indeed, in

1918, necessity forced the Bolsheviks to co-opt into the emerging state appa-

ratus individuals whose political views were often inimical to Bolshevism:

the Bolsheviks needed their class enemy not only to run the machinery of

state but also to blame when its (mal)functioning provoked mass discontent.

The process of ‘othering’ the bourgeoisie likewise had practical limitations

because the vicissitudes of class war could be turned on and off during this

time of terrible shortages with a bribe or valuable personal contact.

23 Jonathan R. Adelman, ‘The Development of the Soviet Party Apparat in the Civil War:

Center, Localities, and Nationality Areas’, Russian History 9, pt. 1 (1982): 91–2.

24 T. H. Rigby, ‘The Soviet Political Elite’, British Journal of Political Science 1 (1971): 418–19,

422, 436.

25 Cited in Gimpel’son, ‘Sovetskie upravlentsy’, 44.

26 Adelman, ‘Development’, p. 97. See also Narskii, Zhizn’,pp.452–61.

27 Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917–1923: A Study in Organizational

Change (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 90.

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The consequences of the Bolsheviks’ arbitrary policies proved difﬁcult to

eradicate. When the party in April 1919 broadened the activities of the State

Control Commission to do something about the problem of corruption, the

commission found malfeasance, theft, speculation and other forms of corrup-

tion in virtually all Soviet institutions. As part of a national campaign to curb

abuses of power, restore discipline, cut down on red tape, revive industry and

overcome growing worker alienation from the party by involving workers in

participatory practices, the party replaced the State Control Commission in

1920 with the Workers’–Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin). But it too failed to

remedy the problem because of the billiard-ball interaction of circumstances,

ideologically fuelled initiatives, rivalries, misunderstandings, deep cultural pat-

terns and the unbelievably awful functioning of essentially all institutions and

organisations.

Revolution and culture

Bolshevik cultural policies underscore the complex interaction between the

empowering environment of revolution, utopian stirrings of Communists and

intellectuals alike, Russian cultural practices and the larger contemporary

arena of Western and even American culture.

Bent on retaining power and

the symbols of legitimacy, the Bolsheviks disagreed over how best to imple-

ment new cultural practices, which they saw as essential to the success of

their revolution. Like the French Revolutionaries, they sought to create a new

national will through revolutionary ideology. Although some party members

opposed the complete destruction of the cultural past and instead sought to

‘proletarianise’ it by making it more accessible, others promoted efforts to

sweep away old cultural forms.

The institution most identiﬁed with cultural revolution was Proletkul’t,

organised in October 1918. An acronym for proletarian cultural-educational

organisations, Proletkul’t aimed to awaken independent creative activity

among the proletariat. Without a common vision of what ‘proletarian culture’

was or ought to be, cultural activists showed that their struggle ‘was just as

contestuous as the efforts to change the political and economic foundations of

Soviet society’.

Their efforts reveal that an intelligentsia divided among itself,

28 Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1995).

29 Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. xviii.

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