A People's Tragedy (145 page)

* * * 'How do I live? — that is not a pleasant tale,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina in February 1919. 'Only the Commissars live a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people in order to pay for their courtesans and their unsocialist luxuries.' Gorky was not alone in bitterly resenting the privileges of the Communist elite. Popular anecdotes and graffiti ridiculed the Bolsheviks as the real Russian bourgeoisie in contrast to the phantom one of their propaganda. 'Where do all the chickens go?', 'Why are there no sausages?' — there were a hundred variations of the riddle but the answer was always the same: 'The Communists have eaten them all.'

The word 'comrade', once an expression of collective pride, became a form of abuse.

One woman, addressed as such on a Petrograd tram, was heard to reply: 'What's all this comrade! Take your "comrade" and go to hell!' Senior officials were bombarded with complaints about Communists living off the backs of the common people'. Workers roundly condemned the new Red elite. One factory resolution from Perm demanded that 'all the leather jackets and caps of the commissars should be used to make shoes for the workers'.69

The Brusilovs had a special reason to be resentful. They were forced to share their small Moscow apartment with a certain commissar — a former soldier whom the general had once saved from the death penalty at the Front — together with his girlfriend and his mother. Brusilov describes the situation vividly:

Coarse, insolent and constantly drunk, with a body covered in scars, he was now of course an important person, close to Lenin etc. Now I wonder why I saved his life! Our apartment, which had been clean and pleasant until he came, was thereafter spoiled by drinking bouts and fights, thievery and foul language. He would sometimes go away for a few days and come back with sacks of food, wine and fruit. We were literally starving but they had white flour, butter, and whatever else they cared for. The main thing we resented was their hoard of fuel. That was the freezing winter of 1920, when icicles hung on our living-room walls. The primus had long ceased to work and we were freezing. But they had a large iron stove and as much fuel as they liked.70

Complaints about the Bolshevik elite were also heard in the party itself. There was a groundswell of feeling in the lower party ranks that the leadership had become too distant from the rank and file. Many of these criticisms would come to be expressed by the Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Opposition, the two great factions which rocked the party leadership in 1920—I (see pages 731—2). As one Old Bolshevik from Tula wrote to Lenin in July 1919: 'We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them. The old comradely spirit of the party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one-man rule in which the party boss runs everything.

Bribe-taking has become universal: without it our Communist comrades would simply not survive.' Writing to Trotsky the following May, Yoffe expressed similar fears about the degeneration of the party:

There is enormous inequality and one's material position largely depends on one's post in the party; you'll agree this is a dangerous situation. I have been told, for example, that before the last purge the Old Bolsheviks were terrified of being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this. The old party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion! Today's youth is being brought up in these new conditions: that is what makes one fear most for our Party and the Revolution!71

iii
A Socialist Fatherland

At the age of sixty-six, when most men are planning to play with their grandchildren, Brusilov made the most dramatic change of his entire military career and volunteered to serve in the Red Army. It was no ordinary defection from the old corps of tsarist generals. Brusilov was Russia's most famous soldier, its only hero from the First World War, and as such the last living symbol of a winning aristocratic past. News of his appointment in May 1920 to a Special Conference of Trotsky's Revolutionary Military Council came as a rude shock to all those who looked back with nostalgia to the days before 1917. 'Brusilov has betrayed Russia,' one ex-colonel wrote. 'How can it be that he prefers to defend the Bolsheviks and the Jews rather than his fatherland?' added the wife of an old Guards officer. False rumours circulated that Brusilov had received lavish bribes (two million roubles, a Kremlin apartment) for his services to the Reds. The General collected a drawerful of hate-mail. How, asked one, could a nobleman like him choose to serve the Reds at a time when 'the Cheka jails are full of Russian officers'? It was 'nothing less than a betrayal'. All this weighed heavily on Brusilov's conscience.* 'It was the hardest moment of my life,' he wrote five years later. 'All the time there was a deathly silence in the house. The family walked about on tiptoes and talked in whispers.

My wife and sister had tears in their eyes.''2 It was as if they were mourning for their past.

Brusilov's conversion to the Reds was a case of putting country before class. He had every reason to hate the Bolsheviks, and often called them the Antichrist. They had not only imprisoned him but had also virtually murdered his sick brother and arrested several of his closest friends during the Red Terror. Yet Brusilov refused to join the Whites. Two wounds — his wounded leg and his wounded pride at the White adulation for his old rival Kornilov — stopped him from going to the Don. He was also still convinced that it was his duty to remain in Russia, standing by the people even if they chose the Reds. Bolshevism, in the old general's view, was bound to be a 'temporary sickness' since 'its philosophy of internationalism is fundamentally alien to the Russian people'. By working with the Bolsheviks, patriots like him could redirect the revolution

* Brusilov tried to make the release of the officers a condition of his service for the Reds. Trotsky agreed to do what he could but admitted that he himself was 'not on good terms with the Cheka and that Dzerzhinsky could even arrest him'. Brusilov later set up a special office to appeal for the release of the officers — and as a result of its efforts several hundred officers were released (RGVIA, f. 162, op. 2, d. 18).

towards national ends. It was, as he saw it, a question of diluting Red with White — of

'turning the Red Star into a Cross' — and thus reconciling the revolution with the continuities of Russian history. 'My sense of duty to the nation has often obliged me to disobey my natural social inclinations,' Brusilov said in 1918. Although as an aristocrat he clearly sympathized with the Whites and rejoiced when their armies advanced towards Moscow, he always thought that their cause was both doomed and flawed by its dependence upon the intervention of the Allies. The fate of Russia, for better or worse, had to be decided by its own people.73

During the past year two things had happened to strengthen his convictions. One was the murder of his only son, a Red Army commander whose cavalry regiment had been captured by the Whites in the battle for Orel in September 1919. No one knew for certain how Alexei died but Brusilov was convinced that he had been executed on Denikin's orders when the Whites found out who he was. Denikin was thought to despise Brusilov for having overseen the 'destruction of the army' during 1917. The fact that Alexei had only joined the Reds in the hope of persuading the Cheka to spare his father's life left Brusilov full of remorse. He blamed himself for Alexei's death and was determined to avenge it.74 Blood, if not class, had made him Red.

So too had Russian nationalism. The Polish invasion of the Ukraine was the other vital factor behind Brusilov's conversion to the Reds. Since its partition in the eighteenth century, Poland had lived in the shadows of the three great empires of Eastern Europe.

But suddenly with the Versailles Treaty it found itself with a guarantee of independence and a great deal of new territory given to it by the victorious Western powers as a buffer between Germany and Russia. It often does not take much for a former nation-victim to behave like a nation-aggressor; and as soon as Poland gained its independence it began to strut around with imperial pretensions of its own. Marshal Pilsudski, the head of the Polish state and army, talked of restoring 'historic Poland' which had once stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He promised to reclaim her eastern borderlands — the

'Lithuania' cherished by Mickiewicz and other Polish patriots of the nineteenth century

— that had been lost to Russia in the partitions. These were ethnically intermingled regions — Polish and Jewish cities like Lvov, Polish former landowners and Ukrainian or Belorussian peasants — to which both Russia and Poland had a claim. As the Germans withdrew from the east, Polish troops marched in to the borderlands. Pilsudski led the capture of Wilno in April 1919. During the summer the Poles continued to advance into Belorussia and the western Ukraine, capturing Minsk and Lvov. Fighting halted for a while in the winter as the Poles and Russians haggled over borders. But these negotiations broke down in the spring of 1920, when the Poles launched a new offensive. Largely supplied by the Allies, and having signed a pact with Petliura, Pilsudski led a combined force of Poles and Ukrainian nationalists in a mad dash towards Kiev, then held very tenuously by the Bolsheviks. It was a desperate bid to transform the Ukraine into a Polish satellite state. The roots of this adventure went back to the previous winter, when Petliura, forced out of the Ukraine by the Reds, had settled in Warsaw and signed a pact with Pilsudski. By this agreement Petliura's Ukrainian nationalist forces would help the Poles to re-invade the Ukraine and, once they were reinstalled in power in Kiev, would cede to Poland the western Ukraine. It was in effect a Polish Brest-Litovsk. The Poles advanced swiftly towards Kiev, whilst the Reds, who were also facing the Whites in the south, broke up in confusion. On 6 May the Poles took Kiev without much resistance. It was less an invasion than a parade. The residents of Kiev watched their new rulers march into the city with apparent indifference. This, after all, was the eleventh time that Kiev had been occupied since 1917 — and it was not to be the last.*

For Russian patriots like Brusilov the capture of Kiev by the Poles was nothing less than a national disaster. This was not just any other city but the birthplace of Russian civilization. It was inconceivable that the Ukraine — 'Little Russia' — should be anything but Orthodox. Brusilov's ancestors in the eighteenth century had given up their lives defending the Ukraine against the Poles, and as a result the Brusilovs had been given large amounts of land there. Having spent the war and millions of Russian lives defending the western Ukraine from the Austrians, Brusilov was damned if he would now let it pass to the Poles without a fight. He thought it was 'inexcusable that Wrangel should attack Russia at this moment', even more so since the Whites had clearly planned their attack to coincide with that of the Poles. The Whites were placing their own class interests above those of the Russian Empire — something Brusilov had refused to do.

On I May he wrote to N. I. Rattel, a Major-General in the imperial army and now Trotsky's Chief of Staff, offering to help the Reds against the Poles. 'It seems to me', he wrote, 'that the most important task is to engender a sense of popular patriotism.' The war against Poland, in his view, could only be won 'under the Russian national flag', since only this could unite the whole Russian people:

* The twelve changes of regime in Kiev were as follows: (I) 3 March—9 Nov 1917: Provisional Government; (2) 9 Nov I9I7-9 Feb 1918: Ukrainian National Republic (UNR); (3) 9-29 Feb 1918: First Ukrainian Soviet Republic; (4) I March 1918: occupation by the army of the UNR; (5) 2 March-I2 Dec 1918: German occupation; (6) 14 Dec I9I8-4 Feb 1919: Directory of the UNR; (7) 5 Feb-29 Aug 1919: Second Ukrainian Soviet Republic; (8) 30 Aug 1919: occupation by forces of Directory of the UNR; (9) 31 Aug—15 Dec 1919: occupation by White forces; (10) 15 Dec I9I9-5 May 1920: Third Ukrainian Soviet Republic; (II) 6 May-II June 1920: Polish occupation; (12) 2 June I920-: final Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

Communism is completely unintelligible to the millions of barely literate peasants and it is doubtful that they will fight for it. If Christianity failed to unify the people in two thousand years, how can Communism hope to do so when most of the people had not even heard of it three years ago? Only the idea of Russia can do that.75

Trotsky at once saw the propaganda victory to be won by getting Brusilov to join the Reds. The next day he announced the general's appointment as the Chairman of a Special Conference in command of the Western Front.* Printed in
Pravda
on 7 May, the announcement was typical of the increasingly xenophobic tone of the Bolsheviks'

rhetoric. It called on all patriots to join the army and 'defend the Fatherland' from the

'Polish invaders', who were 'trying to tear from us lands that have always belonged to the Russians'. Trotsky claimed that the Poles were driven by 'hatred of Russia and the Russians'. The Red Army journal,
Voennoe delo,
published a xenophobic article (for which it was later suspended) contrasting the 'innate Jesuitry of the Polacks' with the

'honourable and open spirit of the Great Russian race'. Radek characterized the whole of the civil war as a 'national struggle of liberation against foreign invasion'. The Reds, he said, were 'defending Mother Russia' against the efforts of the Whites and the Allies to

'make it a colony' of the West. 'Soviet Russia', he concluded on a note of warning to the newly independent states, aimed to 'reunite all the Russian lands and defend Russia from colonial exploitation.'76 It was back to the old imperialism.

The Bolsheviks were stunned by the success of their own patriotic propaganda. It brought home to them the huge potential of Russian nationalism as a means of popular mobilization. It was a potential Stalin later realized. Within a few weeks of Brusilov's appointment, 14,000 officers had joined the Red Army to fight the Poles, thousands of civilians had volunteered for war-work, and well over 100,000 deserters had returned to the Red Army on the Western Front. There were mass patriotic demonstrations with huge effigies of Pilsudski and Curzon which the protesters proceeded to burn. 'We never thought', Zinoviev confessed, 'that Russia had so many patriots.'77