Russian Civil War; 1918-1920

The Russian Revolution
1815-1924
Civil War; 1918-1921

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

• Introduction: Wartime Origins--The Czech Legion

• War Communism

• The War against the Village

• Red Terror

• The Civil War

• The New Empire


The Czech Legion


Origins of the Czecho-Slovak Legion

• 1914-1917--the Russian army had captured some 50,000 to 60,000
Czech and Slovak prisoners serving in the Austrian army

• most were anti-German, anti-Hungarian, and socialist in sentiment
• June, 1917--the Provisional Government formed some of them into
national units which fought in the Kerensky oﬀensive

• after Brest-Litovsk they wanted to leave Russia quickly to avoid being
punished by the Germans or Austrians as deserters and traitors!

• March, 1918--Moscow agreed and formed them into the Czechoslovak
Legion. They moved by rail eastward towards Vladivostok, bound for
France and service against the Central Powers

• Thomas Masaryk arranged with the Bolsheviks that they might travel
armed to defend themselves from bandits

Thomas Masaryk (black hat) and members of the
Czechoslovak National Council with Czech Legion soldiers


Trouble between the Legion and the Reds

• 14 May 1918--all went quite smoothly until a ﬁght broke out in the
Cheliabinsk railway station wherein several Czechs killed a Hungarian POW

• the local soviet arrested some of the Czechs, only to have their comrades
seize the local arsenal and demand their release

• when the locals complied, Trotsky, recently made Commissar of War,
overreacted, demanded the Legion disarm and discontinue the evacuation.

• their choice: join the Red army, labor battalions, or be interned in
concentration camps

• this tactless move turned sympathetic armed men into implacable enemies
• between May and June the Czech Legion seized major cities along the
railway and presented Moscow with its ﬁrst serious military challenge


The Czechs gain control

Chelyabinsk
26 May Tomsk
Samara 31 May
8 June
Omsk
7 June
Vladivostok
29 June


Political Implications of the Czech Threat

• the westernmost area occupied by the Czechs, the provinces along
the mid-Volga, was a stronghold of the Socialists-Revolutionaries

• as soon as the Czechs had expelled the Bolsheviks, the SRs emerged
into the open and formed in Samara a committee of the Constituent
Assembly, popularly known as Komuch, made up of SR deputies to
the dissolved Assembly

• declaring themselves the sole legitimate government of Russia,
Komuch claimed authority over all the area liberated by the Legion

• they restored civil liberties but maintained the Bolshevik Land
Decree, in as much as Lenin had copied it from the SR program

• a similar government authority claimed sovereignty east of the Urals


Reaction of the Entente/Allies
• early 1918-although some, notably Churchill, urged
“strangling Bolshevism in its cradle,” most Western
politicians were focused on the life and death
struggle with the Central Powers

• March, 1918-concern that the Germans might seize
the arms stockpiled at Murmansk and Archangel
led to the ﬁrst landings of British, followed by
French, Serb and American troops

• May, 1918-the success of the small Czech force
electriﬁed anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the West

• the French ordered them to abandon their plan to
leave Russia and to complete the task of gaining
control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad

• 2 July-the Allied Supreme War Council adopted the
plan of armed intervention


The Allies Divide as to Goals

• Wilson was clearest in limiting the role of the American
Expeditionary Force. The 7,000 men under General Graves had strict
orders to merely protect the arms depots and avoid involvement in
Russian political aﬀairs

• at the other extreme, the 72,000 Japanese soldiers landed at
Vladivostok were clearly hoping to “ﬁsh in troubled waters” and
detach the Russian maritime provinces if at all possible

• Britain was the most supportive of the White forces throughout the
Civil War, especially when Churchill became War Minister

• France vacillated, now hot, now cold, in supporting the southern
Volunteer Army


Birth of the Red Army
• ex-tsarist generals as well as French advisers had long urged the
Bolsheviks to give up their idea of a worker militia and use conscription

• 29 May 1918--one week after the Czechs had defied Trotsky’s order and
rebelled--Moscow announced a general mobilization of workers and
miners

• two months later--all male citizens between 18 and 40 were declared
liable for military service

• all officers of the old army aged 26 to 31 were ordered to register
• the main innovation of the reborn army was the institution of political
“commissars”

• 29 July--Trotsky promised that any officer who contemplated betraying
Soviet Russia would be shot out of hand. All that would remain would
be a “wet spot”

War Communism


LONG LIVE ALL POWER TO
WORKER- CAPITALISTS!
PEASANT, SOVIET DEATH TO WORKERS
POWER! AND PEASANTS!

War Communism

EITHER THE DEATH OF CAPITAL OR DEATH UNDER THE FOOT OF CAPITAL

poster from 1920


[Lenin’s]...belief, shared by all socialists, ... the capitalist system,
driven as it is by private proﬁt, is not only unjust but irrational
and hence inherently unproductive. Socialism, by allocating
human and material resources in a rational manner, with regard
to their maximal utility, should be able to attain unprecedented
levels of eﬃciency.

Pipes, p.192


Therefore, Communism Now!

• Trotsky’s recollection, shortly after Lenin's death in 1924:
• on taking power Lenin wrote: “The triumph of socialism in Russia [required] a certain
interval of time, no less than a few months.” …

• ...at Smolnyi, at meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars [Sovnarkom, JBP] Lenin
invariably repeated that we shall have socialism in half a year and become the mightiest
state

• this was the reasoning behind the the economic policies known as
“War Communism” between 1918 and 1921

• only after their failure and the near economic collapse did Lenin forge
the name and the myth that the necessities of war forced him to the
draconian measures of forcible conﬁscation of private property

• this, more than anything else, fueled the anti-Bolshevik armed
reaction known as the civil war

War Communism, which reached its apogee [high point] in the
winter of 1920-21,when the Civil War was over, involved a number of
sweeping measures designed to place the entire economy of Russia--
her labor force as well as her productive capacity and distribution
network--under the exclusive management of the state, or more
precisely, the Communist Party. The process of expropriation began
with real estate. • The Land Decree of October 26, 1917, deprived
non-peasants of their landed property. A decree nationalizing urban
real estate followed. • In January, 1918, the Communist government
repudiated all state debts, domestic as well as foreign. • A decree of
May 1918 abolished inheritance, and another issued the following
month, nationalized industry. These measures did away with private
ownership of capital and other productive assets; they implemented
the dictum of Mar x and Engels that the quintessence of
communism was the abolition of private property.

Pipes, p. 193


The speciﬁc provisions of War Communism fall under ﬁve headings:

1. the nationalization of the means of production and transport;

2. the liquidation of private commerce through the nationalization of
retail and wholesale trade, and its replacement by a government-
controlled distribution system;

3. the abolition of money as a unit of exchange and accounting in favor
of state-regulated barter;

4. the imposition on the entire economy of a single plan;

5. the introduction of compulsory labor for all able-bodied male adults,
and, on occasion, also women and children.


The theorists and architects of War Communism had only a nodding
acquaintance with the discipline of economics and none whatever
with business management. Their knowledge of the subject derived
exclusively from the reading of socialist literature. Not one of them
had run an enterprise or earned a ruble from manufacture or trade….
That such rank amateurs would undertake to turn upside down the
economy of tens of millions, subjecting it to innovations never
attempted anywhere even on a small scale, says something of the
judgement of the people who in October, 1917 seized power in
Russia.

Pipes, p.194


the abolition of money
• October, 1917-paper money circulating = 19.6 billion
rubles.Most were the imperials (left) called
Nikolaevki, convertible to gold on demand

• also some were issued by the Provisional
Government, called Kerenki, non-convertible

• after taking over the State Bank the Reds continued
to print Kerenkis

• since the tax system had broken down completely,
they financed government by ‘running the printing
presses” with the inevitable inflationary results
An imperial 5 ruble note
A Nikolaevka • early 1919-prices were 15 times those of 1917

• by 1921- paper in circulation=16 trillion rubles. Paper
money became virtually worthless, hyperinflation

• by 1922 the experiment ended and a gold-based ruble
was introduced

Planning
Supreme Council of the National Economy--December, 1917

• subordinated to the Sovnarkom, it was to enjoy the same monopoly in regard to
the country’s economy that the Party enjoyed in the realm of politics

• its authority tended to be largely ﬁctitious:
• agriculture, the nation’s largest source of wealth, continued to be managed by the peasant-
cultivators, not the state

• the traditional black market dominated distribution

• only industry came under the Supreme Economic Council with the predictable
bureaucratic-induced disastrous results

• 1920-even Pravda admitted “there is no economic plan”
• “...the utopian programs which Lenin introduced had all but destroyed Russian
industry and reduced by one half Russia’s industrial labor force.”--Pipes, p. 199


The Liquidation of the Market

•“To Marxists the market is the heart of the capitalist economy, as
money is its lifeblood”--Pipes

• the agency to control distribution of commodities was called Komprod
• citizens received ration cards according to their “value” to society.
Needless to say the “bourgeoisie” received one quarter of a worker’s
ration

• predictably, a huge black market, i.e., free market, developed along with
shortages

• by the winter of 1919-20 “the foodstuﬀs consumed in Russian cities...as
measured by their caloric value...between 66 and 80 %” was furnished by
the free market

• so much for their bold attempt to abolish the laws of supply and demand

Centralized Control of the Proletariat
• labor too must be regimented. “The only way to attract the labor force
required for economic tasks is to introduce compulsory labor service” --Trotsky

• for the bourgeoisie this spelled servitude in work battalions doing
disagreeable or dangerous tasks with execution as punishment for shirking

• proletarians were sent, like soldiers, wherever they were needed without
regard for their personal preferences

• free trade unions were abolished as unnecessary:
• “since Soviet Russia was a ‘worker’s state,’ the worker could have no interests distinct from
those of the state; in obeying the state, he obeyed, in eﬀect, himself, even if he happened to
think otherwise.” Pipes, 202

• instead of raising productivity to unprecedented heights, War
Communism had reduced it to levels that threatened Russia’s very survival

• the remedy was to collectivize agriculture

The War against the Village


The War against the Village

PEASANT! THE RED ARMY,WILL
PRESERVE YOUR HARVEST FROM PESTS.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the October coup d’état was that it
sought to introduce a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country in
which industrial workers (including self-employed artisans) constituted
at most 2 percent of those gainfully employed, while 75 to 80 percent of
the population consisted of peasants. And, as we have noted, peasants,
in the judgment of Marxists, were a “petty bourgeois” class, inimical to
the “proletariat.” This fact and this perception ensured that the
Communists would have to govern not by consent but by coercion.

Pipes, p. 203


Grain Prices

• price increases began during the
1914-18 war and accelerated after the
February Revolution

• this led peasants to keep grain off the
market hoping for further increases

• the Reds required all surplus grain to
be turned over to them at fixed prices

• August, 1918-official price, 1 ruble/kg of
grain vs free (black) market:

• Moscow = 18 rubles

• Skt-Peterburg =26 rubles


Class Warfare--Classic Example
•
• “If we can say that revolutionary Soviet authority
is suﬃciently strong in the cities...the same
cannot be said in regard to the village…

• For that reason we we must most seriously
confront the question of creating in the village
two contrasting and hostile forces…

• Only if we succeed in splitting the village into
two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we are able
to inﬂame there the same civil war that had
taken place not so long ago in the cities…

• only then will we be in a position to say that we
will do to the village that we are able to do for
the city Iakov Sverdlov
in the Ispolkom
May, 1918


Demonization of the Kulaks
photo from the Stalin era

...the Bolsheviks had made up their minds to gain control of the
countryside by inciting one part of the rural population against the
other, unleashing a civil war among citizens living peaceably side by
side. The assault troops were to consist of urban workers [the “food
battalions”] as well as poor and landless peasants; the “enemy” was
the “kulaks,” the rural “bourgeoisie.”
Lenin hated whomever he perceived as the “bourgeoisie” with a
destructive passion that fully equalled Hitler’s hatred of the Jews;
nothing short of their total annihilation would satisfy him. The
trouble was...no standards existed by which to deﬁne a “kulak.” The
difficulty...became apparent in the summer of 1918, when
commissars in charge of inciting poor peasants against their richer
neighbors reported that...40 percent if not a majority of peasants
were kulaks.

Pipes, p.107


The agrarian decrees which the Bolsheviks issued in May and June
1918 had a threefold purpose:

(1) to destroy the politically active peasants, almost to a man
followers of the SRs, by designating them as kulaks

(2) to create a network of rural soviets, run by communists

(3) to extract the maximum of food for the cities and the
armed forces

Eventually 75,000 soldiers joined 50,000 armed civilians in
combating the nation’s food producers.
...The historian Vladimir Brovkin estimates that the “magnitude of
the Bolshevik war with the peasants on the internal front eclipsed by
far the frontline civil war against the [anti-Bolshevik] Whites.”
Pipes, p. 208


A “food detachment” about to depart for the village


Failure

• the quantities of food extracted (after the collectors took their share)
were small

• the eﬀort to split the village proved unavailing. When confronted
with an outside force, the peasants closed ranks. “Poor peasants”
generally refused to denounce their “kulak” neighbors

• 1918-1919-although tens of thousands of rural soviets came into
existence, they were headed, not by Communists, but by the
headmen of the former mirs who were, by and large, SRs

• the village stubbornly clung to its own ways
• the grain output equalled only 60 % of its pre-war ﬁgure
• it required only a spell of bad weather for famine to stalk the country

A typical street scene under War Communism


Red Terror


Red Terror

Dzerzhinsky as the Sword of Revolution
cartoon by Nikolai Bukharin, 1925


Preparations for Regicide
• March-July, 1917--after abdication, the Imperial family stayed at Tsarskoe Selo
under house arrest

• July, 1917--fearing a German assault on Petrograd, Kerensky decided to move
them away from the capital. He feared they would be a rallying point for a
would-be restoration

• July, 1917-March, 1918--the place he chose was Tobolsk, in western Siberia.
There they lived in relative comfort in the former governor’s palace

• at ﬁrst the Bolsheviks ignored the royal family. But after Brest-Litovsk when
resentment began to rise, Lenin decided to tighten security on all the “Royals.”

• April-July, 1918--the imperial family were housed under a Cheka guard in the
Ipatiev home in Ekaterinburg

• 12-13 June--a “trial balloon” in nearby Perm, the murder of Archduke Michael,
next in line to the throne. This was a test of foreign reaction. “The fact that
neither the foreign governments nor the foreign press displayed much concern
probably sealed the fate of the Romanovs.”

The Murder of the Romanovs
July 17, 1918


Lenin’s Close Call, 30 August 1918

• after a rare public speech at a
Moscow factory, he was on his
way to his car

• three shots rang out, one almost
fatal

• under examination, Kaplan said
she wanted to punish him for
dispersing the Constituent
Assembly and for Brest-Litovsk

• this led to the policy of “Red
Terror”


The decree of September 4 ordered an immediate stop to the policy
of “slackness and mollycoddling” of the regime’s enemies:

All Right SRs known to local soviets must be immediately arrested. It is necessary to take
from among the bourgeoisie and oﬃcers numerous hostages. In the event of the least
attempts at resistance or the least stir in White Guard circles, resort must be had at once to
mass executions….Not the slightest hesitation, nor the slightest indecisiveness, in the
application of mass terror.

The decree of September 5 ordered “class enemies” to be committed
to concentration camps and all persons linked to “White Guard
organizations, conspiracies, and seditious actions” to be summarily
executed.

Pipes, p. 223


Concentration Camps

• origins:
• 1896-“Butcher Weyler” in Cuba

• 1901-the British in South Africa

• 1914-1918-POW camps

• end of 1920 -- 84 camps that held approximately 50,000 prisoners
• three years later -- 315 camps with 70,000 prisoners
• 13 March 1921-Adolf Hitler in the Völkischer Beobachter: “One prevents
the Jewish corruption of our people, if necessary, by conﬁning its
instigators to concentration camps.”


Tambov Rebellion, 1920-1921

• one of the largest and best organized peasant rebellions during the Civil War

• it occurred 300 miles southeast of Moscow in the Tambov Oblast

• it was a reaction to the grain conﬁscations of the Food Battlions

• Chemical weapons were used "from end of June 1921 until apparently the fall of 1921", by
direct order from leadership of Red Army and Communist party. Publications in local
Communist newspapers openly gloriﬁed liquidations of "bandits" with the poison gas

• seven Concentration camps were set up. At least 50,000 people were interned, mostly
women, children, and elderly, some of them were sent there as hostages. The mortality rate in
the camps was 15-20 percent a month.

• The uprising was gradually quelled in 1921. Antonov was killed in 1922 during an attempt to
arrest him. Total losses among the population of Tambov region in 1920-1922 resulting from
the war, executions, and imprisonment in concentration camps were estimated as at least
240,000


The Kronstadt Rebellion, March, 1921
• one of a series of left wing revolts against the Reds
during this time caused by war, famine, disease and
the Red Terror

• February, 1921-a group of sailors, soldiers and
civilians at the Kronstadt naval base reached the
breaking point

• 1 March-a meeting adopted the 15 demands of the
Petropavlovsk memorandum

• 2 March-the Reds responded with an ultimatum and
alleged that French counterintelligence was behind
the revolt

• 7-17 March-after an embarrassing start the Reds’
numbers prevailed
All Hail the Avanguard of the
Revolution The Red Fleet
• historians estimate that 1,200 to 2,168 were
1920 poster
executed in the days following the revolt

The Red Army attacks across the frozen Finnish Gulf

Louis Fischer’s concept of “Kronstadt”
The 1949 book The God That Failed contains Louis Fischer's deﬁnition
of "Kronstadt" as the moment in which communists or fellow-travelers
decide not just to leave the Communist Party but to oppose it as anti-
communists. Editor Richard Crossman said in the book's introduction:
"The Kronstadt rebels called for Soviet power free from Bolshevik
dominance" (p. x). After describing the actual Kronstadt rebellion,
Fischer spent many pages applying the concept it to some to
subsequent former-communists -- including himself: "What counts
decisively is the 'Kronstadt.' Until its advent, one may waver
emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether
in one's mind and yet refuse to attack it. I had no 'Kronstadt' for many
years" (p. 204). Writers who subsequently picked up the term have
included Whittaker Chambers, Clark Kerr, David Edgar, William F.
Buckley, Jr., and Norman Podhoretz.


The Civil War


Za Ye•DEEN•oo•u
Ra•SSEE•oo

For the unity
of Russia!

Whites fought
under the Imperial
colors, white, blue,

The Civil War red; but without
the Romanov
double-headed
eagle


The Civil War

Mount up, workers
and peasants!
The Red cavalry--
guarantee of victory!


In its treatment of the Civil War, much as in the case of War
Communism and the Red Terror, the Soviet government and the
historians in its employ insisted on depicting it as something forced
on the new regime by its enemies. But the historical record indicates
the contrary to be true--namely that in this case, too, the Bolsheviks
acted rather than reacted; they wanted a Civil War and did everything
in their power to promote it. Lenin...took power to unleash such a
war. For him the October coup d’état would have been a futile
adventure if its only result were a change of regimes in Russia….From
the instant World War I broke out he denounced paciﬁst socialists,
who demanded an end to the ﬁghting. True revolutionaries did not
want peace: “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The
proletarian slogan must be: civil war.” Trotsky stated this even more
bluntly: “Soviet authority is organized civil war.”

Pipes, p. 233


A Simpliﬁed
Map of the
Civil War
“Fronts”


Reds’ Strategic Advantages
• Unity of Command

• Central Position

• Interior Lines

• Control of many of the arms factories and stores of weapons

• Superior Numbers

• Three Solid Military Supporters

The Bolsheviks’ Praetorian Guards
• two elite units and one group of intensely loyal
amateurs made up the solid early military
supporters

• the sailors, NCOs, and even some officers of the
Kronstadt fleet were early converts to Bolshevism

• likewise the elite Latvian Rifle Regiment of the
Imperial army

• 1918-Vatsetis and his soldiers put down rebellions
against the Reds in Moscow and Yaroslavl

• 1919-he became the first commander of the Red
Army

Jukums Vatceitis (Lat.)
• the Latvian Rifles fought against the Volunteer
Joachim Vatsetis (Russ.)
Army of Yudenich and Wrangel
Commander of the Latvian Rifles
(1873-1938)

War Commissar Trotsky reviews the Latvian Riﬂes, 1918
Commander Vatseitis is second on his left


Trotsky as War Minister, 1918

Revvoensovet (Military Revolutionary Council)

• Trotsky as depicted by his biographer, Isaac
Deutscher, is the man who “had founded a great
army and guided it to victory”

• “In fact, his contribution was more modest”--Pipes

• the decision to create a peasant army staffed by ex-
tsarist officers was made by the Central Committee,
not by Trotsky

• credit for the Red Army’s victory belongs to these
some 75,000 ex-tsarist officers

• “Trotsky had no prior military experience and his
strategic sense left a great deal to be desired”--Pipes

• “He was a spellbinding speaker...like Kerensky, he Trotsky as Commissar of War
could be called ’Persuader in Chief ’ “
chaired the Revvoensovet


Peace and Freedom in Sovietland

The “Star of David”
White poster
is actually 5 pointed,
1919 making it Satanic


D. Moor’s famous poster


Defeating “in detail”

• although the Reds had to face all three fronts at the same time, we
will consider each front separately, from start to finish. Keep in mind
that Lenin and Trotsky didn’t have that luxury!

• Kolchak--the Eastern Front. The first perceived threat, begun by the
Czech Legion, but organized and continued with Entente help under
Supreme Ruler, Admiral Kolchak

• The Volunteer Army--the Southern Front. Actually the first to
organize and the last major group to surrender. Led by four generals.

• Yudenich--the Northwestern Front. The last major threat.
• the other “players”--some “Red,” some “White,” several
opportunistically switching sides. “Blacks,” “Greens,” Poles, muslim
peoples of Central Asia, guerrilla bands


Atrocities and Terror on Every Side


The Eastern Front
May, 1918-February, 1920

Aleksandr Kolchak,
polar explorer,
Admiral, Imperial Navy,
Supreme Ruler of the
Provisional All-Russian
Government
1874-1920


Allied missions pressure the Siberian Whites

• Spring, 1918-after the Legion’s successes in the mid-Volga, a Siberian
government of SRs and Kadets claimed sovereignty there

• the Allies pushed to have Komuch in Samara and the Siberian
government in Omsk merge

• Komuch was much the more radical of the two, keeping in force
much of the Red social legislation, such as land to the peasants. It
also promised to reconvene the Constituent Assembly

• September, 1918-the pressure produced a ﬁve-man Directory. It spent
its two-month life in intrigues, Komuch vs the Siberians”...an air of
unreality…” -Pipes

• night of 17-18 November--a coup arrested the Directory and installed
Kolchak, the Directory’s Minister of War, as military dictator


Diﬀerent views of the Supreme Ruler


still from October, 2008 Russian biopic
“Admiral”

Of all the Allies only the British gave signiﬁcant material
support to the Whites. Here the Czechs train with Lewis guns


The End of the Legion
The Beginning of the End for Kolchak

• 18 October 1918-the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris proclaimed that nation’s
independence.

• As soon as word reached the Legion, the Czechs and Slovaks in Russia withdrew from the
ﬁghting, leaving the defense of the mid-Volga and Siberia to the very inferior Russian
People’s Army.

• At French urging, the remnant of the Legion agreed to guard a segment of the Trans-Siberian
Railway

1919-Success, then Failure

• Kolchak, personally admirable, was uniquely unqualified for the job
• Spring, 1919-the offensive made initial gains. Trotsky had few troops
there fearing the southern front more, anticipating massive Allied
landings on the Black Sea coast

• June,1919-shifting troops quickly, the Reds gained numerical
superiority and this, coupled with Kolchak’s administrative
incompetence, spelled reversals

• the White Army’s retreat turned into a rout and local Bolshevik
guerrilla groups finished the job

• 7 February 1920-Kolchak, personally betrayed, was executed by a
firing squad. Britain lost heart and looked for ways to get out of the
intervention. Too many burdens: Ireland, Iraq, India, Labour (“Hands
Off Soviet Russia!” Glasgow strike) Churchill isolated, was defeated

Kolchak Post Mortem
• devoid of political ambitions and interest, he
had accepted the position with a heavy heart,
as a patriotic duty

• as a naval officer, he knew nothing of land
warfare

• he disliked politics and politicians

• he felt ill at ease in the company of others and
suffered from bouts of depression

• he proved a total disaster as an administrator

• a bloated staff of 2,000 officers headquartered
in Omsk planned operations for an army of
140,000 troops
last picture taken pre mortem
• supplies were regularly pilfered (before his execution)


The Southern Front
October, 1917-November, 1920

Generals Alekseev, Kornilov,
Denikin, and Wrangel

poster for the Volunteer Army
1919


Founder of the First White Force

• Russian patriot, from a military family,
decorated in the Russo-Japanese War

• Aug, 1915-Mar, 1917-becomes Chief of Staff
under Tsar Nicholas when he takes command
of the army

• Feb, 1917-urges the tsar to abdicate

• advised the Provisional Government, opposed
the soviets, was involved in the Kornilov affair

• Oct, 1917-fled and formed Alekseev’s Officer
Organization, the basis of the Volunteer Army

• Dec, 1917-Kornilov becomes military
commander while Alekseev deals with political General Mikhail Vasiliyevich Alekseev
and financial affairs 1857-25 September 1918


From poverty to high command
• born in Russian Poland, his serf father was sent to
25 years military service, became an officer in his
22nd year, retired a major in 1869

• Anton, the only son, was raised as a Russian
patriot of Orthodox faith. He followed his father
into the army in 1890

• became a colonel in the Russo-Japanese War

• distinguished himself in the Brusilov offensive,
was Kornilov’s chief of staff

• followed him to Novocherkassk and the Volunteer
Army
Anton Ivanovich Denikin
• April, 1918-Kornilov was KIA and command of 1872-1947
the army passed to Denikin


Tsaritsyn; A Missed Opportunity
• spring, 1918-Alekseev wants to join the Don
Cossacks in attacking Tsaritsin. Its capture would
have allowed a link-up with the Czech Legion

• Denikin chose instead to march southward into the
Kuban Steppe, eliminating Reds in his rear and
recruiting more Kuban Cossack cavalry

• Nov & Dec, 1918-The Don Cossacks attack,
unsupported, but fail to take Tsaritsyn

• the beginning of the feud between Stalin and
Trotsky. Stalin, on food collection, gets himself
appointed to the MilRevKom, Southern Front. He
interferes with local commanders and promotes
terror against ex-tsarist oﬃcers. Trotsky demands
his recall
Stalin at Tsaritsyn/Stalingrad/Volgograd
1918
• Stalin later claims credit for the successful defense
of Tsaritsyn and has the city renamed Stalingrad


A White Infantry Division, 1919

Main Fronts of the Civil War


Critical Battles
October-November, 1919

• Spring, 1919-Wrangel, Denikin’s
best general, captures Tsaritsyn;
but too late to link up with
Kolchak, already falling back

• almost all of the Ukraine comes
under control of the Whites

• the Fall Oﬀensives (right) ﬁrst
threaten Moscow, then collapse
under counter-attacks

• the Reds are aided by Makhno’s
Black Ukrainians behind
Denikin’s lines


Lenin -- the Darkest Hour

• Fall, 1919--things looked grim for
the Reds

• Western intelligence predicted that
the Whites might soon capture both
Moscow and Petrograd

• following the maxim, “you’re not
beaten until you stop ﬁghting,” the
Bolsheviks kept up their defense

• later they betrayed their Ukrainian
ally, Makhno, whose aid had been
crucial in defeating the Volunteer
picture March, 1919
recovered from the assassination attempt Army
but showing signs of stress

Dashing Red Cavalry Commander

• although born in the Don Cossack heartland, he was
from a farming family, an inogorodnyetz, worked as a
farm laborer

• 1903-drafted, became a cavalryman, fought as a non-
commissioned oﬃcer, four times decorated with the
St. George’s Cross

• 1917-after the October Revolution he became
radicalized, organized what became the First Cavalry
Army

• 1919-key in stopping Denikin’s drive to Moscow

• 1920-took part, with less success, in the Polish-
Soviet War
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny
1883-1973 • emerged as one of the Soviet heroes of the Civil War

First Cavalry Army Monument
in the Ukraine, Lviv Oblast

Cavalry units were vital to both sides

• one of the peasants’ complaints,
which fed the Green rebellion,
was the requisition (stealing) of
their work horses as both cavalry
mounts and draft animals

• although both sides used armored
cars, trucks and even tanks; these
were distinctly in the minority

• mobile ﬁrepower was supplied by
the innovation of carriage-
mounted machine guns called
tachankas
STRUGGLE OF THE RED KNIGHT
WITH THE DARK FORCES

Tachankas (тачанки)


Russian Civil War Armored Cars


Russian Civil War Armored Cars

Zhorki (“Vigilant”) Smelyi (“Brave”) Moguchi (“Mighty”)


British Tanks given to the Whites


Whenever tanks appeared they dominated the battleﬁeld, seizing
strong points and overrunning panicked enemy forces. Only a
concentration of Red artillery or Garford gun cars could drive them
away. Conversely, the arrival of tanks had an almost magical eﬀect on
the Whites. White generals on all fronts consistently requested
these from the Allies above all other logistical considerations.
British Royal Tank Corps personnel witnessed mounted Kuban
Cossacks kissing the sides of tanks in gratitude.

The primary problem with the tanks, however, was simply that there
were not enough of them. Even more importantly, there were never
enough fully trained crew, especially on the southern front where the
greatest employment of tanks took place.

D. Bullock & A. Deryabin, Armored Units of the Russian Civil War, p. 13


White Armored Trains


Railways were central to the planning of most military operations during
the Civil War period and armored trains were vital for controlling the
rails and seizing stations and railheads. Armored trains provided direct
and indirect offensive and defensive fire and could easily be switched
from one sector to another. Control of a line enabled friendly tanks,
armored cars and troop trains to move up in echelon and debouch at the
front while, conversely, denying this ability to the enemy. If a sector
were lightly garrisoned by defensive artillery, armored trains could force
the position and linger in the rear of the enemy, allowing friendly forces
to consolidate the field.

Bullock & Deryabin, p. 23


Primary Rail Lines
1918-1920


The White’s Best General
• born in Lithuania to a German family with a long tradition of
Russian military service

• serves as an oﬃcer in both the Russo-Japanese and First World
Wars

• early volunteer to the southern Volunteer Army

• June, 1919-captures Tsaritsyn. Honest and able administrator,
does not tolerate lawlessness or looting by his troops

• December, 1919- commander, Volunteer Army

• 4 April 1920-elected commander, White forces in the Crimea
Pyotr Nikolaevich Wrangel
1878-1928
• 14 November 1920-last White civil and military personnel leave
for exile with him

• 1928-an émigré in Brussels, he is poisoned by a Soviet agent

White Army,
Black Baron.
Preparing anew
for us the tsar’s
throne!
But from the taiga
to the British sea
the Red Army
is strongest!


WRANGEL STILL LIVES!

White Army, So let the Reds
Black Baron. Grip with power
Preparing anew Their bayonets
for us the tsar’s with their callous
throne! hand,
But from the taiga And all of us have
to the British sea Irrepressibly
the Red Army to go into the last
is strongest! mortal battle!

STRIKE HIM RELENTLESSLY!

The Northwestern
Front
July, 1919-1920

The last and most brief,
though serious, threat to the
Reds. British support was
critical and when it ended, so
did the front

General Yudenich, seated,
with staﬀ oﬃcers


Baltikum

In 1242 Aleksandr Nevsky stopped the Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice. But they
were never expelled from Livonia (Latin) or Baltikum (the Baltics, German) They became the
land-owning upper class over a Slavic peasantry of Lithuanians, Letts (peoples of Latvia) and
non-Slav Estonians.
Above is one of the Teutonic Order’s castles, Marienburg, built from 1270-1300. It is the
largest brick complex in Europe!

The Struggle for Baltikum
• early 18th c.--Peter the Great adds these
lands to Russia in the Great Northern War

• his interest in Western technology leads him
to respect “the German Liberties” here and
throughout the empire

• so the class structure remains down to the
early 20th c.

• 2 Sept 1917-von der Golz’s army captures Riga

• 11 Nov 1918-unwilling to let the Reds crush
the Baltics, the Allies authorize the German
Army in Baltikum to remain under arms and Map of Livonia, 1573
support the newly formed White Army of
General Yudenich

• they are joined by Freikorps volunteers


Freikorps
• Dec, 1918-Jan, 1919--the movement began in
Germany, resisting the Red sailors and
Spartacist uprisings

• the volunteer units, called Freikorps, were
composed of ex-soldiers and youth who had
“missed their war”

• 1919-As Poland began to establish itself as a
reborn nation, German nationalists resisted
surrendering Poznania/Wartheland

• Sturmabteilung Rossbach was formed as part
of this volunteer Grenzschutz Ost

• summer, 1919-as the German Army in
Baltikum began to support the Whites’
Northwest front, many Freikorps units
moved east to join that ﬁght against the Reds Lt Rossbach, Freiwillige
Sturmabteilung Rossbach,
late 1919

The Northwestern “Government”
July, 1919-1920

• after the armistice, British warships could enter
the Baltic and support the Whites there

• July, 1919-Yudenich left France to command the
White forces in Estonia

• he began negotiations with his friend Mannerheim
to bring Finland into a joint attack on Petrograd

• they failed because Kolchak refused to recognize
Finnish independence

• 19 October--attacking alone, he reaches the
outskirts of Petrograd

General Nikolai Nikolaievich Yudenich
• 1 November--Yudenich begins his retreat
1862-1933


KEY (enlarged)
Red counterattack, end of October
White frontline
White positions, 21-22 October
British Navy
Red Navy
Estonian Peipus Flotilla
British and White tanks


Rally to the defense
of Petrograd!


Trotsky and the defense of Petrograd


The Other “Fronts”

as described earlier, the Civil
War was fought over a huge
stage and had innumerable
“sideshows,” some bigger
than others


The Northern Front
August, 1918-Fall, 1919

General Evgenii Miller
declared himself Governor-
General of Northern Russia,
Kolchak appointed him
commander of White forces
there


The Northern Front

• March, 1918- concern that the German army might move through
Finland to seize the stockpile of war materials at Murmansk and
Arkhangelsk led to the ﬁrst Allied intervention

• June, 1918-after the Czech Legion’s initial easy victories, the British
forces began to push southeast to link up with them

• American forces at both ports played minor local combat roles in
response to Red partisan attacks

• fall,1919- after the White reverses, the Allies decide to pull out before
winter ice made that impossible

• White forces were unable to withstand the Red build-up without
their Western allies


The Revolutionary
Insurrectionary Army
of Ukraine

this independent anarchist
army fought both Reds and
Whites, intervening at crucial
points

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno
1888-1934


The Black Army

• Makhno, of Ukrainian peasant origins, joined anarchist organizations and was imprisoned,
1908-February, 1917

• 1918- Makhno organized anarchist forces to resist the German Ukrainian regime of Hetman
Skoropadsky under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

• he is credited as the inventor of the tachanka, the horse-drawn carriage-mounted machine
gun platform

• 1919-1920--the Black Army attempted to establish local anarchic peasant communes
controlling lands “liberated” from local owners under “black partition”

• allegations of atrocities against both Mennonites and Jews as well as internal vendettas
tarnished the army’s reputation

• 1919--Makhno’s guerrilla attacks behind the White Army’s summer oﬀensive helped the Reds
escape defeat, Wrangel also had to ﬁght them in 1920

• 1921-after the White threat was past, the Reds ruthlessly destroyed their former allies


Other “Fronts”

• although Soviet chronology ends the Civil War in 1921, pockets of
resistance carried on the ﬁghting into 1923

• various Islamic nationalist movements required coercion in Soviet
Central Asia and the Caucasus

• as late as 1922, a Menshevik Georgian Republic maintained an
independent existance

• individual “warlords” in Siberia fought one another, often with
Japanese backing

• 1920-the Soviet-Polish War is sometimes considered to be part of the
Civil War since much of the new country of Poland was once part of
the empire. But the Paris Peace Settlement had recognized it as an
independent nation. hence we will examine this next week as the
attempt by Russia to “export” the Revolution

Of all the governments that were set up in Russia to combat
revolutionary rule, only one, that of the Social Revolutionaries at
Samara,[Komuch] had the wisdom to assure the peasants that the
counterrevolution did not mean the restoration of the land to the
landlords. All the rest, in greater or less degree, made plain their
policy of reestablishing them [the landlords] or compensating
them. It was this, and no transcendent virtue in the Bolsheviks,
which decided the issue of the three years’ struggle, in despite of
British tanks and French munitions and Japanese riﬂes and
bayonets.

--MAYNARD

quoted in Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, vol. II, p. 460


Aftermath of War

American relief workers feeding Russian children
during the 1921-22 famine


Moscow Trumpets the White Defeat


The New Empire


Sheroka Strana Moya Rodnaya

the photography of S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky, 1905-1915

Sheroka Strana Moya Rodnaya

Using emerging technological advances in color photography, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-
Gorskii (1863-1944) made numerous photographic trips to systematically document the
Russian Empire. He conducted most of his visual surveys between 1909 and 1915, although
some of his work dates as early as 1905. The Empire at this time stretched 7,000 miles from
west to east and 3,000 miles from north to south and comprised one-sixth of the earth's land
mass. It was the largest empire in history and spanned what today are eleven different times
zones.

Tsar Nicholas II supported this ambitious project by providing passes and transportation: by
rail, boat and automobile. Each journey made by Prokudin-Gorskii is represented by a
photographic album and corresponding negatives. There is also an album of various studies,
including views in Europe.


Study the ethnicity
of the people
in the foreground

The message of this
poster is that the
Red Army will bring
together all the peoples
of the borderlands
under the Red Banner
of
Communism


The Struggle for the Borderlands

• Lenin had once called Imperial Russia “the prison house of nations.”
• as the Duchy of Muscovy expanded, beginning in the 13th century, the
Great Russians added other Slavs and people wholly diﬀerent

• Lenin’s original promise that these nations would have the Wilsonian
right of self-determination was soon seen to be “inoperative”

• so alongside the war against the Village, the Civil War with the
Whites, the Reds had to wage a third struggle to see how many of the
borderlands would be allowed to break away, how many could be kept
in what would become the USSR


the census of 1897
• of the 125 million (exclusive of Finland), Russian speakers numbered 56
million, but ethnic Russians were probably 52 million (42%)

• 85 distinct linguistic groups were recorded in this first and only census
of the empire, the smallest of which numbered in the hundreds; from a
political point of view, the minorities numbered fewer than a dozen

• 22 million Ukrainians were the largest, then 8 million Poles, 6 million
Byelorussians

• next to the Slavs were the 7 million Turko-Tatar groups professing Islam,
mainly Sunni, scattered from the Black Sea to the Pacific

• most troublesome were the Poles. “It is difficult to understand how the
Russians hoped to keep an ancient people, culturally much superior to
the mass of their own population, in permanent subjection. But they
acted as if they could because of Poland’s geopolitical importance to
them as an outpost in Europe.”--Pipes, p. 276

Some escape, some are kept

• Baltikum, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, will be free until World War II
because of the Allied presence there during the Civil War

• Finland, always the least “digested” of Russia’s conquests, also gains
independence

• Poland, “a bridge too far,” will be discussed next week
• Georgians (1.4 million) and Armenians (1.2 million), an Orthodox
Christian minority in the TransCaucasian muslim region, were not so
fortunate. By 1922 they were enfolded into the USSR.

• the Islamic peoples of the Crimea, the Caspian Depression, and Central
Asia, likewise; some ﬁghting until 1924

• Mongolia became the ﬁrst satellite with a captive Communist party but
outside the USSR

Adolf Ioﬀe signs the Treaty of Tartu recognizing
the independence of Estonia and Finland, 1920

On December 29, 1922 a conference of plenipotentiary delegations
from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR
and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty of Creation of the
USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were
conﬁrmed by the 1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by
heads of delegations - Mikhail Kalinin, Mikha Tskhakaya, Mikhail
Frunze and Grigory Petrovsky, Aleksandr Chervyakov respectively on
December 30, 1922.


Russian Civil War; 1918-1920

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