The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (30 page)

Nevertheless, from November 1918 onwards the tide of the civil war ran the Bolsheviks’ way. By April 1919 Kolchak’s forces had been beaten and by July Perm was back in Bolshevik hands, followed by Omsk itself in November. Denikin enjoyed some success in the Ukraine in the summer of 1919 but had lost Kiev by the end of the year. Yudenich’s attempt to capture Petrograd had also failed, thanks in large measure to Trotsky’s rallying of the city’s defenders, who drove the defeated White army back into Estonia, whence they had come. General Peter Wràngel’s Caucasian Army had captured Tsar-itsyn that June, but by January 1920 it was clear that the war was effectively over. The Allies cut off their aid to the Whites. One by one the generals fled or, like Kolchak, were captured and executed. By the summer of 1920 Lenin felt confident enough to export the Revolution westwards, ordering the Red Army to march on Warsaw and confidently talking of the need to ‘sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too’. Only their decisive defeat by the Polish army on
the banks of the River Vistula halted the spread of the Bolshevik epidemic.

Terror by this time had become the keystone of Bolshevik rule. A typical Trotsky order promised that ‘shady agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators will be locked up, except for those who will be shot at the scene of the crime’. The crisis of the summer of 1918 legitimized Lenin’s urge to play the part of Robespierre, assuming dictatorial powers in the spirit of ‘the Revolution endangered’. The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called
kulaks
, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom it suited the Bolsheviks to demonize. ‘How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked. ‘If we can’t shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.’ Convinced that the Bolsheviks would not ‘come out the victors’ if they did not employ ‘the harshest kind of revolutionary terror’, he called explicitly for ‘mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and White Guards’. ‘Black marketeers’ were to be ‘shot on the spot’. The whole notion of exemplary violence seemed to fire Lenin’s imagination. On August 11, 1918 he wrote a letter to Bolshevik leaders in Penza that speaks volumes:

Comrades! The kulak uprising must be crushed without pity… An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them… Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks… P.S. Find tougher people.

Kulaks were ‘foes of the Soviet government… blood-suckers… spiders… [and] leeches’. Egged on by this kind of splenetic language, Bolshevik food brigades felt no compunction about killing anyone who tried to resist their raids.

The very insecurity of the Revolution encouraged terrorist tactics. In the early hours of July 17, just hours after Lenin had wired a Danish paper that the ‘exczar’ was ‘safe’, the Bolshevik commissar Yakov Yurovsky and a makeshift firing squad of twelve assembled the royal family and their remaining servants in the basement of the commandeered
house in Ekaterinburg where they were being held and, after minimal preliminaries, shot them at point-blank range. Trotsky had wanted a spectacular show trial, but Lenin decided it would be better ‘not [to] leave the Whites a live banner’.
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Unfortunately, because the women had large amounts of jewellery concealed in the linings of their clothes, they were all but bullet-proof. One of the executioners was very nearly killed by a ricochet. Contrary to legend, Princess Anastasia did not survive but was finished off with a bayonet. Only the royal spaniel, Joy, was spared. Other relatives of the Tsar were also taken hostage, including the Grand Dukes Nikolai, Georgy, Dmitry, Pavel and Gavril, four of whom were subsequently shot. Violence begat violence. A month after the execution of the Tsar, an assassination attempt that nearly killed Lenin was the cue for an intensification of the revolutionary terror.

At the heart of the new tyranny was the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’ – the Cheka for short. Under Felix Dzerzhinsky the Bolsheviks created a new kind of political police which had no compunction about simply executing suspects. ‘The Cheka’, as one of its founders explained, ‘is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war… It does not judge, it strikes. It does not pardon, it destroys all who are caught on the other side of the barricade.’ The Bolshevik newspaper
Krasnaya Gazeta
declared: ‘Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin… let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible.’ Dzerzhinsky was happy to oblige. On September 23, 1919, to give just one example, sixty-seven alleged counter-revolutionaries were summarily shot. At the top of the list was Nikolai Shchepkin, a liberal member of the Duma (parliament) that had been set up after 1905. The announcement of their execution was couched in the most vehement language, accusing Shchepkin and his alleged confederates of ‘hiding
like bloodthirsty spiders [and] put[ting] their webs everywhere from the Red Army to schools and universities’. Between 1918 and 1920, as many as 300,000 such political executions were carried out. These included not just members of rival parties, but also fellow Bolsheviks who were so rash as to challenge the new dictatorship of the party leadership.

Much of the violence of the civil war was hot blooded. On both sides, prisoners were killed, even mutilated; whole villages were put to the sword. Kornilov himself had spoken of ‘burn[ing] half of Russia and shed[ding] the blood of three-quarters of the population’ in order to ‘save Russia’. His Volunteer Army slaughtered hundreds of peasants on its ‘Ice March’ from the Don to the Kuban and back. But a clear and chilling sign of the true character of the new regime was the construction of the first concentration camps. By 1920 there were already more than a hundred camps for the ‘rehabilitation’ of ‘unreliable elements’. Their locations were carefully chosen to expose prisoners to the harshest possible conditions – places like the former monastery of Kholmogory, in the icy wastes beside the White Sea. The Cheka had unusual ideas about how to rehabilitate prisoners. In Kiev a cage full of starved rats was tied to prisoners’ bodies and heated; the rats devoured the victim’s innards in their struggles to escape. In Kharkov they boiled the skin off prisoners’ hands – the so-called ‘glove trick’. With methods like these it is perhaps not surprising that the Reds were able to recruit more soldiers than the Whites. It helped, however, that many White officers seemed intent on restoring the old regime, complete with their own privileges as landowners; given the choice, many peasants preferred the devil they did not know – especially when the diabolical figure of Lenin was transmuted into a pseudo-saint, all but martyred for the sake of revolution. The personality cult that sprang up around him was intentionally designed to provide a surrogate religion for the Revolution, at a time when churches and monasteries were being destroyed, priests and monks murdered.

The Revolution had been made in the name of peace, bread and Soviet power. It turned out to mean civil war, starvation and the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee and its increasingly potent subcommittee, the Politburo. Workers who had
supported the Bolsheviks in the expectation of a decentralized soviet regime found themselves being gunned down if they had the temerity to strike at newly nationalized factories. With inflation rampant, their wages in real terms were just a fraction of what they had been before the war. ‘War Communism’ reduced hungry city dwellers to desperate bartering expeditions to the country and to burning everything from their neighbours’ doors to their own books for heat. As the conscription system grew more effective, more and more young men found themselves drafted into the Red Army, which grew in number from less than a million in January 1919 to five million by October 1920, though desertion rates remained high, especially around harvest time. When the previously pro-Bolshevik sailors of Kronstadt mutinied in February 1921, they denounced the regime for crushing freedom of speech, press and assembly and filling prisons and concentration camps with their political rivals. Their formal resolution, setting out their demands, was a coruscating indictment of Bolshevik rule:

In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and peasants, [we demand]:
To re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among all workers and peasants before the elections.
Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties.
Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.
To convene, not later than March1, 1921, anon-party conference of workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.
To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working-class and peasant movements.
To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and concentration camps.
To abolish all Political Departments, because no single party may enjoy privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural-educational commissions must be established and supported by the state…
To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards
are needed they may be chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the judgement of the workers.
To grant the peasant full right to do what he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle, which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired labour.
To permit free artisan production with individual labour.
We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.

The Bolsheviks crushed the revolt with a force of 50,000 troops. Those sailors who did not manage to flee to Finland were either shot summarily or sent to the camps. Small wonder the veteran revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky came, for a time at least, to despair of the revolution he had earlier hailed.

Nor did the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of the Revolution end there, for there was a third epidemic in 1918 – an epidemic of nationalism. The non-Russians within the Tsarist Empire at first had greeted the Revolution as a springtime of the peoples; a second 1848, but extending much further eastwards. In the confusion of the civil war, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Byelorussia and the Ukraine all proclaimed their independence – or, rather, sought to make a reality of the fictitious independence granted at Brest-Litovsk. The Cossacks, too, aspired to statehood, electing their own
Krug
(assembly) and
Ataman
(chieftain). There seemed every likelihood that the old Russian Empire would fragment along ethnic lines into a hundred pieces. At first the Bolsheviks simply swam with the tide, proclaiming ‘the right of all peoples to self-determination through to complete secession from Russia’. Anxious to learn from the pre-war problems of Austria-Hungary, they offered virtually every ethnic minority a measure of political autonomy. Ukrainians got their own Soviet Socialist Republic; so did Armenians, Byelorussians and Georgians. Tatars and Bashkirs were given autonomous republics within a new Russian federation; there was also a confusingly named Kirghiz (Kazakh) Republic. All told, there were around a hundred different nationalities recognized by the regime and granted, in proportion to their numbers and concentration, their own national republics, regions or townships. Jews were later given their own autonomous region in Birobidzhan, as well as seventeen Jewish townships in
Crimea and South Ukraine. Koreans were allowed a Korean National District around Posyet. The policy of Russification joined the rest of the old regime in Trotsky’s rubbish bin of history; henceforth non-Russians would be schooled in their own language and encouraged to identify their ethnic identity with the Bolshevik regime.

Yet the man the Bolsheviks put in charge of implementing this policy, although himself a Georgian by birth, was an unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin (‘man of steel’), to his fellow revolutionaries. As People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs he revealed from the outset that he understood the difference between outward form and inner content. Stalin saw at once that the nationalities question was spiralling out of control; reports of ethnic conflict were coming in from all over the country. In the Baltic states, fighting was raging between pro-Bolshevik forces – including ferocious Latvian rifle-women – and German landowners, assisted by so-called ‘free corps’ of bellicose German students and veterans who had not yet had their fill of fighting. This was a vicious conflict, in which both sides seemed ‘bent on exterminating each other’: ‘Hate prevailed. In combat, prisoners were not taken – that was understood; in victory they were taken but then murdered, in a kind of ritual, to make the point about victory clear.’ Similar conflicts raged all over the empire. In the Caucasus, Georgians fought Armenians; Armenians fought Azeris; Abkhazians fought Georgians. In May 1920 the entire Japanese population of the Far Eastern town of Nikolaievsk – 700 men, women and children – were massacred by Russian Bolsheviks. In Kazakhstan there was a mass expulsion of Slavic settlers and Cossacks; whole villages of Russians were literally ‘driven out into the frost’ by Kirghiz tribesmen.

Of all the Russian Empire’s peoples, it might be thought, the Jews stood to gain most from a revolution. They could look forward to an end to the restrictions the old regime had placed on their freedom of movement and civil rights. And, indeed, the new regime did turn out to mean not just emancipation but unprecedented opportunities for social advancement for Jews in Russia – conditional upon their abandonment of Judaism and unswerving conformity to the Party line. In their tens of thousands they deserted the
shtetls
for the big cities, increasing the Jewish population of Moscow by a factor of nearly
seventeen by 1939 and that of Petrograd (now renamed Leningrad) by a factor of six. Trotsky and Litvinov were only two of many Bolshevik leaders who were of Jewish origin. In the short term, however, the civil war merely meant an intensification of the violent persecution that had gone on in the Pale of Settlement since the 1880s. Some of the violence came, predictably enough, from the White forces, which included at least some of those ultra-nationalist elements that had been responsible for the progroms of 1905. Denikin’s forces were involved in brutal attacks on Jews in Ekaterinoslav; anti-Bolshevik Jews there complained that they had expected salvation from the Whites and instead had been subjected to rape and pillage. Non-Russian nationalists were also responsible for attacks on Jews; for example, Ukrainian nationalists also attacked Jews in Bratslav (Podolia), Dmitriev (Kursk) and Kiev itself. Often the perpetrators lumped ‘Yids’ and Bolsheviks together, echoing the counterrevolutionary rhetoric of 1905 and, of course, anticipating a standard trope of Central and East European anti-Semitism throughout the inter-war period.