History of the Soviet Union

The first to take advantage of the situation were the Socialist Revolutionaries. Since the October revolution they had been uncertain and divided about how to meet the Bolshevik threat. On walking out of the Second Congress of Soviets they had declared the seizure of power ‘a crime against homeland and revolution, which means the beginning of civil war’. But they had been reluctant to back this declaration with actions. One inhibiting factor was the fear of finding themselves along with the ‘Kornilovites’ on the side of counterrevolution: they still felt the lingering ties of socialist brotherhood with the Bolsheviks. All the same some Socialist Revolutionaries, without the approval of their Central Committee, did organize the assassination of the German ambassador and attempted to seize power by a coup in the new capital, Moscow, in July 1918. This coup was supplemented by an armed rising in Yaroslavl and one or two other northern towns, timed to coincide with an Allied landing at Arkhangelsk. The landing, however, was postponed, and the risings put down.

Taking advantage of the Czech revolt, the Socialist Revolutionaries set up a government at Samara on the Volga, which they called the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch. As their title implied, they wanted to reconvene the Constituent Assembly on non-Bolshevik territory. They saw themselves as a ‘third force’, between the emerging ‘Red’ and ‘White’ orientations. Their programme declared, for example, that the land was ‘irrevocably the property of the people’, which was not to the taste of most of the generals. In Omsk a Provisional Government headed by the Kadet, P. Vologodsky, promised, on the contrary, that all nationalized property, including land, would be restored to its former owners. The two governments eventually reached a compromise and formed a joint Directory, but this in its turn was overthrown by officers and Cossacks, who objected to its (moderately) left-wing programme, and installed Admiral Kolchak as supreme ruler and ‘commander-in-chief of all the land and naval forces of Russia’. In this way political uncertainty and disunity undermined the efforts of the Whites, while the attempts to found a ‘third force’ all failed, since such a force always needed support from army officers, which meant the Whites.

The emerging White armies did have some degree of foreign support, from Russia’s former allies, especially Britain and France. The effectiveness of this support should not, however, be exaggerated. The truth was that Allied governments, though worried by the incipient power vacuum in Russia, and by the growth of communism there, were not sure what they wanted to achieve, nor of the best means for doing so. In the summer and autumn of 1918 the main aim was to get the Russians back into the war against Germany. When that objective lapsed in November 1918, some Western politicians still took the view that it was necessary to rid Russia of Bolshevism, which might otherwise sweep Europe like the plague (Trotsky’s vision in reverse). The majority, on the other hand, felt that after a long war the first priority must be to bring the troops home at last, and that in any case anti-communism was a policy that would split public opinion at home. Some British soldiers, indeed, mutinied. For that reason, most Allied troops left Russia during 1919, though the Japanese stayed on longer in the Far East, where they had more durable geopolitical interests.

Perhaps the most important contribution the Allies made was to supply the Whites with arms, ammunition and equipment, without which they could scarely have mounted an effective military challenge to the Communists. On the other hand, they never committed enough men to make a decisive difference to the outcome of the war, and, by committing what they did, they opened the Whites to the charge of being unpatriotic, of encouraging foreigners to intervene in Russian affairs. They also gave the Communists impeccable grounds for believing, as Lenin had warned them, that the imperialists were out to crush the young Soviet state. The foundations of many a myth were laid by the Allied intervention.

The Whites were able, at any rate, to mount a very serious threat to the Soviet Republic. Two moments of crisis stand out in particular. The first was in August 1918, when the Czechs and other White forces captured Kazan, on the Volga. This was some four hundred miles from Moscow, but there was no significant force of the infant Red Army ready to interpose itself, so that the capital was very vulnerable. Trotsky, now commissar for war, rushed in what was to become his famous armoured train, to assemble a force to defend the town of Svyazhsk, on the road to Moscow. He succeeded in doing so, and in recapturing Kazan. This was when he issued his command, ‘I give a warning: if a unit retreats, the commissar will be shot, then the commander.’ This crisis gave the decisive impulse towards the creation of a full-scale Red Army, as well as to the declaration of the Red Terror (see below, page 70).

The second period when it seemed as if the Reds might be defeated was in the autumn of 1919. The Volunteer Army, having finally become a formidable force under General Denikin, took advantage of a Cossack rising against the Reds to conquer most of the south and the Ukraine, and by October had advanced as far as Chernigov and Orel, the latter less than two hundred miles from Moscow. At the same time, General Yudenich, using the Baltic region as a base, advanced on Petrograd, and penetrated as far as the suburbs of the city by October. In both cases the Red Army proved equal to the challenge, and was able to drive the attackers back.

The Whites were, then, ultimately unsuccessful. This was partly because of political disunity, as has been suggested: at the very least they failed to act as a focus for all the various anti-Bolshevik forces. They failed even to attract a mass following among the population, though both the workers and the peasants were becoming very disillusioned with Bolshevik rule as it had turned out in practice. The Whites’ political programmes were vague and inadequate: they did nothing to reassure the peasants that the land they had won in 1917 would not be taken away from them again in the event of a White victory. They failed to offer the workers a secure status for the trade unions, factory committees and other new representative organizations of 1917. In fact their only consistent political message was ‘Russia one and indivisible’–which of course alienated the non-Russian nationalities who might otherwise have been inclined to support the Whites as Bolshevik nationality policy began to reveal itself in practice.

All this might not have mattered so much if the Whites had demonstrated by their behaviour towards the population that they were fairer and more responsible rulers than the Bolsheviks. But this was not the case. Dependent for quartering and food supplies on the regions where they were fighting, they requisitioned and pillaged less systematically, but scarcely less ruthlessly, than the Bolsheviks. They never glorified in terror as a system of rule, but they often applied it nevertheless. Moreover, the White generals continually lost control of their subordinates, so that, even if Kolchak and Denikin were themselves morally blameless, they proved powerless to prevent their armies committing excesses. As Kolchak wrote to his wife: ‘Many of the Whites are no better than the Bolsheviks. They have no conscience, no sense of honour or duty, only a cynical spirit of competition and money-grabbing.’ That was no recipe for winning a civil war, especially against opponents who were such masters of political propaganda.

The creation of the Red Army was one of the clearest examples of the way in which the Communists reversed the slogans of the revolution. The Bolsheviks had come to power by undermining the old army. Insofar as they had thought about what might replace it, they had envisaged an armed people’s militia, on the model of the Red Guards. This was what made the Left Communists’ programme for a ‘revolutionary war’ against the Germans so logical and appealing. Even for some time after Lenin had secured the defeat of that idea at Brest-Litovsk, the regime left itself with only a small new army, the so-called Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, structured on the principles the Bolsheviks had proclaimed in 1917: there were no insignia or ranks, and each unit was run by an elected committee, one of whose jobs was to choose officers. Military discipline was recognized only in active combat, and even there unit commanders had to operate for the time being without the sanction of the death penalty.

This structure, however, did not last for long. During the confusion of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the Germans actually resumed their advance for a time. This was a cruel reminder of just how helpless and quixotic the new Russian army was. Trotsky decided to scrap it, and to rebuild on more traditional principles. He set up a Supreme Military Council, under the tsarist General Bonch-Bruevich, to organize the task of creating a new army. A network of military commissariats was distributed over Red-controlled territory to raise recruits, at first voluntarily, then, after the Czech revolt, by compulsory conscription. Most of the Red Guard and militia units were disbanded as unreliable, with a few party members drawn from each to constitute the nucleus of newly formed and conventionally constituted regiments. But who was to command the new units? The party did not possess anywhere near enough men with the necessary degree of military training and experience to lead troops in modern warfare. With Lenin’s support, Trotsky turned to officers of the old Imperial Army, at least those who had not fled to serve with the Whites: their insignia and ranks were not restored, but otherwise they were given the disciplinary powers to which they had been accustomed, up to and including the death penalty. There was no longer any nonsense about ‘soldiers’ committees’: they were simply abolished and replaced by ‘political commissars’. These were party-approved appointees, placed at the side of the officers–some of whom, at least initially, were reluctant to serve the Reds–to ensure their loyalty, pass on political instructions and raise the level of political consciousness among the conscripts. The commissar was explicitly not subordinated to the officer but was his equal, with the right to execute him if he committed treason towards the Red Army.

Trotsky’s methods aroused much criticism, both in and outside the party. In VTsIK the Menshevik, Dan, exclaimed, ‘Thus the Napoleons make their appearance’, while inside the party a so-called Military Opposition called for a return to the militia principle and the dismissal of old-regime officers. However that might be, Trotsky did create an effective fighting organization under ultimate party control. Considering how hastily it was put together, and the magnitude of the tasks it faced, the Red Army fought remarkably well, and it can probably be asserted that morale inside it was better than in any other section of the Russian population. Its troops were, of course, better fed than almost anyone else at the time, and service in the Red Army was an excellent means of advancing oneself in the new society. Hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in the Red Army joined the party, and some of them later advanced through it to positions of power and responsibility in the new society. Trotsky, in fact, did his best to ensure that Red soldiers were given special training and promoted to command positions as soon as possible. By the end of the civil war, these new promotees constituted two-thirds of the officer corps: among them were some destined to become household names during the Second World War. All this had a profound effect upon the social structure of the party (see below, pages 86–7).

The revolutionary regime’s other main instrument was the Cheka. As we have seen, this was established in such a way that it was not subject to the supervision either of the party or of the soviets. It arose outside even the rough and ready legal norms which the new regime set before itself. It might be said, indeed, that the Cheka directly embodied Lenin’s ambivalence about democracy and authoritarianism. ‘The workers and soldiers’, he exhorted the presidium of the Petrograd Soviet in January 1918, ‘must realize that no one will help them except themselves. Malpractices are blatant, profiteering is monstrous, but what have the masses of soldiers and peasants done to combat this? Unless the masses are aroused to spontaneous action, we won’t get anywhere. … Until we apply terror to speculators–shooting on the spot–we won’t get anywhere.’

From the beginning it was the Cheka, as the ‘avenging sword’ of the proletariat, which in fact carried out these functions, though Lenin talked of ‘spontaneous mass action’. With Lenin’s at least implicit encouragement, it soon overstepped the restrictions that had initially been placed on it: it proceeded from mere investigation of counterrevolutionary crime to the arrest of suspects, and from there to staging trials, deciding sentences and even carrying them out. The first person shot by the Cheka was a certain exotically named Prince Eboli, an extortionist who particularly offended the Cheka head, Felix Dzerzhinsky because he claimed to be a member of his organization. ‘Thus’, said Dzerzhinsky, ‘does the Cheka keep its name clean.’ The Cheka also received the right to create its own armed formations to carry out its growing duties.

From January to July 1918 the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were represented on the ruling Collegium of the Cheka, and they resisted summary justice and the application of the death penalty (traditionally abhorred by Russian revolutionaries). Steinberg, the Left Socialist Revolutionary commissar for justice, sought to restrict the Cheka’s judiciary functions in the name of the ‘revolutionary tribunals’, which, though not necessarily gentle with their accused, were at least elected by the soviets and to some extent under their control. They more nearly, in fact, embodied popular involvement in justice.

After the rising of July 1918, however, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the Cheka, and the republic entered a more dangerous period, when emergency justice became more acceptable. A start was made with the insurgents of Yaroslavl. The future prime minister, N. A. Bulganin, there headed a Cheka detachment which summarily shot 57 rebels, mostly officers, while a commission of investigation selected a further 350 captives for execution. This was still an isolated incident, but with the proclamation on 5 September of the Red Terror, such operations became routine. The decree stated that ‘it is essential to protect the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating these in concentration camps; all persons involved in White Guard organizations, plots and insurrections are to be shot.’ It became unnecessary for an actual crime to be proven against any person of non-worker and non-peasant origin. His very existence could be held to imply that he was at war with the Soviet system, and therefore with the people as a whole. The sinister term ‘enemy of the people’ began to creep into official instructions and propaganda. Latsis, chairman of the eastern front Cheka, told his officers in November 1918:

We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.

The imagery of public hygiene became part of the standard language of Soviet propaganda. Already in December 1917 Lenin had called for ‘a purge of the Russian land from all vermin’, by which he meant the ‘idle rich’, ‘priests’, ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘slovenly and hysterical intellectuals’. And on 31 August 1918 Pravda exhorted: ‘The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction. … All who are dangerous to the cause of the revolution must be exterminated.’

Concentration camps served the same sanitary purposes, by isolating the class enemy from the ordinary people. Lenin first proposed their establishment in a letter to the Penza provincial soviet on 9 August 1918 (the town was in an exposed position on the vulnerable eastern front): ‘It is essential to organize a reinforced guard of reliable persons to carry out mass terror against kulaks [rich peasants], priests and White Guardists; unreliable elements should be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.’ Such camps were mentioned again in the decree on Red Terror, and were evidently already in existence, although the enactment authorizing them was not passed by VTsIK till 11 April 1919. By 1922 it appears from official figures that there were some 190 camps containing 85,000 inmates. According to Solzhenitsyn and others, conditions in most of them (there were notorious exceptions) were still tolerable compared with later days: prisoners still worked an eight-hour day and received a small regular wage. Perhaps something of the genuine notion of ‘corrective labour’ still survived. On the other hand, the inmates were hostages, liable to be summarily shot or taken out in a barge and drowned in a river in retribution for some action of the Whites in the civil war.

It is impossible to know how many people died at the hands of the Cheka during this period. Latsis stated that 12,733 persons were shot by them up to December 1920. Chamberlin in his standard history of the revolution makes an estimate of more like 50,000, while more recently Robert Conquest has given a figure of 200,000 for the period 1917–23, reckoning that a further 300,000 died as a result of other repressive measures, such as the suppression of peasant risings, strikes and mutinies.

These figures yield something by comparison with Stalin’s later efforts, and of course it must be remembered that they occurred in a period of genuine civil war, when the other side was also committing atrocities. One has the impression that White brutality was sporadic and sometimes committed without the knowledge of White leaders, while the Reds frankly and proudly acknowledged terror to be part of their system. Lenin’s attitude we have seen above, and Trotsky (in Terrorism and Communism, 1920) called terror ‘no more than a continuation … of armed insurrection’. Perhaps these distinctions are tenuous. What one can say with certainty is that Lenin introduced and made habitual the ruthless use of violence against all real and imagined ‘enemies’, while also creating, outside soviet or party control, the extra-legal institutions to enable this to be done.

Whatever may have been the Bolsheviks’ intentions when they came to power, there can be no doubt that during the civil war they withdrew or nullified most of the benefits they had given to the people in October, while submitting the democratic institutions they had helped create to rigid and often brutal control from above. ‘During the civil war’ does not, however, necessarily mean ‘because of the civil war’: in fact, there is considerable controversy among historians on this point. Soviet historians, and some Western ones, would attribute the extreme authoritarianism of Bolshevik rule at this time to the emergencies which the regime faced. Many Western historians, on the other hand, have always insisted that such authoritarianism was to be found in Lenin’s attitudes from the outset and in the way he organized his own faction and broke with all those who were unable to agree with him wholeheartedly.

There is in fact no need no posit any total incompatibility between these two views. By their very method of seizing power the Bolsheviks plunged Russia into a situation akin to civil war–which later developed into actual civil war. Futhermore, some of their most authoritarian measures were taken either before or after the most critical phases of the civil war. The war, in fact, merely offered the Bolsheviks the first occasion to grapple with reality, to move out of the realm of fantasy into that of practical politics. They were guided by the vague but powerful preconceptions they had brought to the situation. Wartime, moreover, in some ways provided them with the best opportunity to combine democracy (in the sense of contact with the masses) and authoritarianism in the manner of Lenin’s exhortations of November and December 1917. In State and Revolution he had urged that ‘to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service … all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat–this is our immediate aim.’ If one substitutes for ‘armed proletariat’ ‘the party and the Red Army’ that is a pretty close approximation to what War Communism actually was. But of course that substitution is the whole point. Lenin easily made the transition from the concept of ‘proletariat’ to that of ‘party’, without seeing the enormity of the questions begged. He displayed the same ambivalence in his article ‘The immediate tasks of Soviet power’, of April 1918, in which he was able to assert at one and the same time that ‘without full-scale state accounting and supervision of production and the distribution of products, the workers’ rule cannot hold, and a return to the yoke of capitalism is inevitable’, yet also that ‘each factory, each village is a producers’ and consumers’ commune, with the right … of deciding in its own way the problem of acounting for production and distributing the products’. Perhaps such ambivalence was natural in what was still largely a utopian programme being tempered by reality.

At any rate, there can be no doubt that the actual measures adopted even before, but especially during and after the civil war increased the power of the state enormously, and withdrew or nullified the benefits the Bolsheviks had granted to the people in October. The essence of War Communism consisted in (i) the nationalization of virtually all industry, combined with central allocation of resources; (ii) a state trade monopoly (which, because it could not satisfy people’s needs, was accompanied by a vigorous black market); (iii) runaway inflation, leading to a partial suspension of money transactions (welcomed by those Bolsheviks who considered that money had no place in socialist society) and the widespread resumption of barter and of wage payments in kind; (iv) requisitioning of peasant surplus (or even non-surplus) produce. Alec Nove has summed it up trenchantly: ‘A siege economy with a communist ideology. A partly organized chaos. Sleepless, leather-jacketed commissars working round the clock in a vain effort to replace the free market.’

Already gravely overstrained by more than three years of a huge war, and then by the fears and conflicts of revolution, the economy finally collapsed. By 1921 heavy industrial production was at about a fifth of its 1913 level, and in some spheres had virtually ceased altogether. Food production declined somewhat less severely, as far as we can tell from the inevitably unreliable figures we have, but the trading and transport systems to bring it to the consumer had broken down. The situation of both cities and countryside was indescribable. Evgeny Zamyatin thus evoked Petrograd in the winters of War Communism: ‘Glaciers, mammoths, wastes. Black nocturnal cliffs, somehow resembling houses; in the cliffs, caves.... Cave men, wrapped in hides, blankets, wraps, retreated from cave to cave.’ And Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago, depicted the devastation on the railways:

Train after train, abandoned by the Whites, stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by running out of fuel and by snowdrifts. Immobilized for good and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as fortresses for armed bands of robbers or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives–the involuntary vagrants of those days–but most of them were communal mortuaries, mass graves of the victims of the cold and typhus raging all along the railway line and mowing down whole villages in its neighbourhood.

In the countryside the peasants had already set about the welcome task of expropriating private land and dividing it up among themselves. Under the terms of the Bolshevik Land Decree, this process was mainly managed by the old village communes, which of course tended to be dominated by the more established and wealthier (or less poor) village families. The redistribution engendered a lot of friction, was probably not strictly egalitarian in its results, and was in any case vitiated by the discovery that, even when all private, church and state land had been absorbed, each peasant household could only add, on average, half a desyatina (just over an acre) to their holding.

Before the process was complete, moreover, the peasants were being importuned by supply officials looking for produce and unable to offer much in the way of money or goods to pay for it. This problem, of course, was inherited from the Provisional Government, but with the increasing hunger of the towns in the winter of 1917–18 it now became much more severe, and clashes became more bitter. Given their political philosophy, the Bolsheviks were bound to regard this problem as one of class warfare, and therefore to react much more sharply than the Provisional Government. In January Lenin suggested that the Petrograd Soviet should send out armed detachments to find and confiscate grain, and that they should be empowered to shoot the recalcitrant. And in May VTsIK and Sovnarkom issued a joint decree dubbing those who were reluctant to deliver grain to the state as a ‘peasant bourgeoisie’ and ‘village kulaks’. ‘Only one way out remains: to answer the violence of the grain owners against the starving poor with violence against the grain hoarders.’ To organize class war in the village, and to make the search for hidden stocks more effective, ‘committees of poor peasants’ (kombedy) were set up in every village and volost. Theoretically these were to consist of all peasants whose holdings did not exceed the local norms laid down at the land redistribution. But, in practice, whatever the village’s internal disputes, peasants were more and more reacting with united resentment against outsiders. Few except down-and-outs were prepared to help the hated intruders, and the kombedy degenerated into bands of louts looting for their own benefit or getting senselessly drunk on home-brewed ‘moonshine’. The Bolsheviks themselves quickly came to the conclusion that the kombedy were doing more harm than good, and abolished them in November 1918.

In fact, then, much of the provisioning of the towns was carried on outside the state supplies monopoly. Peasants trudged with their sacks of produce into the towns and there either sold it for high prices or–in view of the unreliability of money–bartered it for manufactured items tendered directly by artisans or workers. Intellectuals and non-manual workers bargained away furniture and family heirlooms in the desperate struggle to stay alive, sometimes themselves going out to the villages to do so: Zoshchenko’s story in which a bewildered peasant accepts a grand piano in return for a sack of grain was only a slight exaggeration. Half of Russia was on the roads or railways, carrying or trundling objects with which to trade. These were the so-called meshochniki, or ‘bagmen’, who became part of the daily scene. Such urban markets as the famous (or notorious) Sukharevka in Moscow became arenas of permanent lively and desperate haggling, as people sought the means to survive. Of course the Communists deeply disapproved of this commerce: it offended their trade monopoly and their ideological instincts. At times they set up road blocks round cities to apprehend the ‘bagmen’. But they never really tried to eradicate the illicit trade, since they knew that to do so would finally bring mass starvation.

These experiences, and the kombedy episode, naturally inflamed peasant feelings against the Communists. Further fuel was added to the flames by the closures of churches and the arrests of priests, as well as by compulsory conscription for the Red Army. Between the spring and autumn of 1918 rural violence against Communists and against supply officials increased markedly. It was still somewhat restrained, perhaps, by the fear that if the Communists were overthrown by the Whites, then the peasants would lose the land they had recently gained. But in the autumn of 1920 and spring of 1921, when the Whites no longer represented any danger, sporadic violence broke out into full-scale peasant insurrection.

According to the Dutch historian Jan Meijer, a typical peasant rising would begin with a meeting of the skhod, the traditional gathering of heads of households. There an act of condemnation would be formulated, and local Communists or members of kombedy taken prisoner or shot. Arms would be seized from the local military training unit (set up by the Red Army), and the requisition team driven off. The peasants would then endeavour to cut themselves completely off from the outside world and to defend this isolation by force.

These risings culminated in the huge insurrections of the black-earth provinces, the Volga basin, North Caucasus and Siberia (the major grain-producing areas) in 1920–1. The largest of them was probably that in western Siberia, where armed rebels may have numbered as many as 60,000: they occupied two large towns (Tobolsk and Petropavlovsk) and cut several stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway for three weeks in February-March 1921. We know very little about this rising, however, whereas that in the black-earth province of Tambov left somewhat more in the way of written evidence, which has been exhaustively investigated by the American historian, Oliver Radkey. Much of what he discovered may well be true of other risings too.

The Tambov movement was a peasant rising in the classical sense, with no direct influence or support from any political party. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, who would have been their natural sponsors, were reticent in their support for the insurrection, perhaps because their civil war experience suggested to them that fighting meant sub-ordination to generals, and they wanted no more of that. It is true that the leader of the rising, Antonov, had once been a Left Socialist Revolutionary, and that there were Socialist Revolutionary features in the programme issued by the Union of the Toiling Peasantry, which was the civilian branch of the movement: reconvening the Constituent Assembly, renewed guarantees of civil liberties, full socialization of the land, and restoration of the mixed economy. But the latter two were natural peasant demands anyway.

At first Antonov’s men consisted of odd bands of deserters from the Red Army, dispossessed peasants and other people ‘on the run’ for a variety of reasons. It was not until the final defeat of Denikin that Antonov extended his forces any further. Then began a campaign of murdering Bolshevik and soviet officials, raiding village soviets and court rooms (burning documents, like the French peasants of 1789), railway stations, and grain collection points.

Full-scale insurrection came only in August-September 1920, with the appearance of the requisition teams to claim their share of the harvest, which that year was a poor one. Battles broke out between grain teams and villagers, to whose aid Antonov came. At first he was very successful: thousands of peasants flocked into the Green Army (as it became known), and, since Bolshevik morale and strength in Tambov was low, they were able to liberate whole rural districts and establish a civilian administration. The Green Army was in some ways remarkably like the Red Army in structure, complete with political commissars, though naturally with few trained officers: even the Reds’ opponents found themselves imitating Red methods. At its height the Green Army numbered up to 20,000 men, with a good many more fighting as irregulars. It cut no fewer than three main railway lines on which the Bolshevik government depended for communications with the Volga and North Caucasus. By December 1920 Lenin was so alarmed by the situation that he created a Special Commission for Struggle with Banditry, initially under Dzerzhinsky. Surviving local Bolsheviks and Cheka officials were pulled out of Tambov province, and special troops sent in under the command of Antonov-Ovseyenko (formerly of the Petrograd MRC) and later Tukhachevsky (fresh from suppressing the Kronstadt rising–see below, pages 90–1). These troops took control of villages one by one, shooting whole batches of peasants suspected of having fought with Antonov’s army. Some villages they actually burned down. At the same time they flushed the Green forces out of the relatively sparse woodland into the open fields, where armoured units with machine-guns could function more effectively against them.

Repression was, however, combined with concessions. Grain requisitioning was abolished in Tambov on Lenin’s specific order, and scarce supplies were brought in from elsewhere. In effect, the New Economic Policy (see below, page 119) was given a preliminary trial in Tambov, and seemed to work well, when combined with ruthless repression, in reducing the peasant will to fight.

It remains to be explained, however, why this and other peasant risings failed. After all, their aims were shared by most peasant communities, especially in the grain-producing regions, and even in some measure by urban workers. Yet there was never any consistent link, either between individual peasant movements, or with the workers. The peasants remained too localized and rural in their consciousness. The Green Army did once mount an attack on the town of Tambov, but seems to have been repulsed relatively easily by Red Guards. Above all, there was a lack of political coordination, such as might have been supplied by the Socialist Revolutionaries, had they not been already organizationally weakened and reluctant to take up arms; and in any case the peasants were by now distrustful of all political parties and of all help from urban intellectuals.

In some ways, given the anti-rural prejudices of most Marxists, it was not surprising that relations between the Bolsheviks and the peasants should have deteriorated so sharply. Matters were not much better, however, among the workers, who should have been the new government’s natural allies. We have already seen that by the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks had nationalized most of industry and subordinated the factory committees to the trade unions, centralizing ‘workers’ control’ to a point where it no longer came from the workers. This certainly contributed to the revolution’s loss of its ideals, but nevertheless such centralization was often accepted by the workforce as an alternative to the even graver threat of hunger. The fact was that the peace policies of the Bolsheviks, popular though they undoubtedly were, created a great deal of unemployment. It has been estimated that as many as 70 per cent of Russia’s factories were working in some way for the war effort–and these tended to be the larger enterprises, employing large numbers of workers. State defence contracts ended abruptly with the ceasefire of December 1917, and in Petrograd some 60 per cent of the workforce was laid off between January and April 1918. The factories which survived very often went over to one-man management, since Lenin was now very keen on clear lines of authority, and began to pay piecework wages. Since the managers who took over were sometimes the old capitalist ones, now working under state supervision, factory discipline became once again reminiscent of pre-revolutionary days.

At the same time, food prices rose: in Moscow the price of potatoes doubled between January and April 1918, while rye flour (the main ingredient of the staple Russian loaf) quadrupled. In Petrograd rations fell to 900 calories a day, as against 2300 considered necessary for non-manual labour. Productivity declined as workers became malnourished and exhausted. To supplement their rations, many pilfered, resorted to the black market, went out to the villages to barter, or even to resettle there permanently, if they still had relatives or communal rights. Many workers of course joined the Red Army. The great depopulation of the major cities began. Between mid-1917 and late 1920 the number of factory workers declined from around 3½ million to barely over a million. Those who stayed behind either sought a career in the new party and state institutions (which gave preference to entrants from the proletariat), or they remained cold, hungry, insecure and powerless.

The demonstrations over the Constituent Assembly offered the first opportunity for the workers to express their new discontents. The shooting of unarmed workers by the Red Guards was widely denounced, while workers in a number of factories condemned Sovnarkom, demanded the disarming of the Red Guards (in some resolutions compared to the tsarist gendarmerie) and called for new elections to the soviets. On 9 January (which happened to be the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 1905) a huge procession accompanied the funeral of those killed.

The non-Bolshevik political parties were too restrained and disorganized to offer effective articulation to the movement. All the same, some dissident Mensheviks managed to organize in Petrograd a so-called Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Works and Factories, which met in March 1918. It is not clear how the assembly was elected, but it did contain a number of working-class activists of 1917, especially from among the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Their speeches gave abundant evidence of renewed discontent among the workers: at hunger, unemployment, the closure and evacuation of factories–the capital had just been moved to Moscow–at arbitrary arrests by the Cheka, and the muzzling of the soviets. Above all, the workers felt powerless: they no longer had any institutions speaking for them. The factory committees were turning into obedient organs of government, the trade unions were no longer in a position to protect their interests, the soviets would no longer permit them to recall delegates of whom they disapproved in order to choose new ones. ‘Wherever you turn’, complained one worker delegate, ‘you come across armed people who look like bourgeois and treat the workers like dirt. Who they are we don’t know.’ In general, they felt that they had been promised bread and peace, but given food shortages and civil war; they had been promised freedom and given something nearer to slavery. The assembly called for the resignation of Sovnarkom, the repudiation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly.

The Assembly movement did spread to other parts of Russia, and organized a number of stoppages and protests directed against Communist policy. It looks as if the movement mainly attracted workers from sectors such as metalworking and armaments, which had suffered particularly severe dislocation at the end of the war. The assembly’s debates reflect the alarm and disorientation of such workers. On the other hand, many workers continued to identify ‘soviet power’ with the Communists, seeing them as their best hope in a bewildering and dangerous world. In June 1918 the Communists received working-class support in the elections to the Petrograd Soviet, while the general strike called by the assembly on 2 July fizzled out. Its failure was partly due to increased governmental pressure. The whole Moscow bureau of the Extraordinary Assembly was arrested, and the Red Army cordoned off the entire Nevsky district of Petrograd (the southern industrial area where the assembly was especially strong) and declared martial law there.

By the summer of 1918, though many, perhaps most workers were profoundly disillusioned with Communist rule, they had no convincing alternative to which to look. This may account for the haphazard and inconclusive nature of their activity, compared with the previous year. Most, in any case, were more preoccupied with survival. In 1917 they had felt themselves to be on an upswing, creating the future through the new democratic institutions they had themselves brought into being. Now they had ostensibly achieved their aims, yet were faced by poverty, insecurity and oppression such as they had never known before. The institutions they had created were now being used against them. Of the two political parties who might have articulated and channelled their grievances, the Mensheviks had pledged themselves to strictly legal activities through the soviets, while the Socialist Revolutionaries were divided and ambivalent about whether to oppose the Bolsheviks outright. One Menshevik summed up the workers’ political mood in June 1918 as follows: ‘To hell with you all, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the whole of your political claptrap.’

This disillusionment and uncertainty, combined with the increasing repression now being applied by the Communists, probably explain the failure of the Assembly movement. On 21 July, the Cheka finally arrested all 150 participants at a congress and took them to the Lubyanka, where they were accused of plotting against the Soviet government and threatened with the death penalty. In the event, however, they were all gradually released over the next few months. The age of rigged trials against supporters of the October revolution had not quite arrived.

The workers were not again able to mount such a widespread challenge to Communist rule, but their voting behaviour in the soviets during 1919–21 showed the extent to which they had become disillusioned. Some of their support went to the Mensheviks, who maintained a strong presence in the trade unions, especially among the printers. The Mensheviks also sent an increasing number of delegates to the soviets, even though they were banned from them for several months after June 1918. Even after they were readmitted they faced constant official harassment: the candidates would be detained shortly before an election, or Menshevik votes would be disqualified on technical grounds. Since soviet voting was by show of hands, moreover, it was easy for Menshevik voters to be victimized. In view of all this, it is a tribute to their tenacity that they still had any deputies at all in the soviets: one or two were elected as late as 1922, after which the party’s Central Committee (or its surviving members in emigration) forbade further participation in soviet elections, as too dangerous for the voters. By that time, anyway, all the party’s leaders still inside Russia had been arrested by the Cheka. The Mensheviks’ main political activity thereafter was to publish an émigré journal, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (The Socialist Herald), which evidently claimed an extensive network of correspondents inside the country: over the next decade it published abundant accounts of working-class life in the Soviet Union, which are invaluable to historians.

The working-class movement was also, of course, gravely weakened by hunger, poverty and the drain of so many town-dwellers. By 1921 the industrial working population was at about a third of its 1917 level, and was poorer in every respect. The Communists had their own ideas about how to restore this supposed social base of their rule. To absorb soldiers coming out of the Red Army at the end of the civil war, the Central Committee resolved early in 1920 to convert certain army units into ‘labour armies’–thus the Third Army became the First Labour Army. The railways and certain key industrial enterprises were placed under military discipline, and political commissars from the Red Army were brought in to replace trade union officials. ‘Labour soldiers’ felled trees, cleared roads, rebuilt bridges and restored railway lines. All this was supposed to facilitate the transition to a peacetime planned economy, without the disruption which demobilization would have brought. Some Communists thought that in any case the ‘labour army’ was the appropriate industrial unit in a socialist society. ‘In a proletarian state, militarization is the self-organization of the working class,’ proclaimed Trotsky. And in an Order of the Day he exhorted them, ‘Begin and complete your work … to the sound of socialist songs and anthems. Your work is not slave labour but high service to the socialist fatherland.’

Not everyone agreed. The Workers’ Opposition (see below, pages 89–90) were strongly resistant to the idea, and in the great crisis of February-March 1921 (pages 90–2) Lenin came over to their way of thinking (on this issue alone). Apart from the enormous resentment the labour armies aroused among soldiers who wanted to get back home, their actual work achievements were unimpressive. In 1921 they were abolished.

By 1921, the Communists were the only significant political force in Soviet Russia. They were also an enormously important social force. Most of the other classes of Russian society had been destroyed or gravely weakened in the revolution and civil war–even the working class in whose name the Communists ruled. In the absence of any ruling class, the full-time officials of the Communist Party and the Soviet state came closest to fulfilling that function. Of course they could not yet be regarded as a social class in the full sense: their power and their institutions were as yet embryonic, likewise their customs and their culture, and they certainly had not devised a means of perpetuating their power and privilege. In many ways the history of Soviet Russia might be regarded as the history of their efforts to extend this embryonic power and privilege into a permanent, secure and accepted acquisition, such as any ruling class expects to have.

Anyone who had known the Bolsheviks in February, or even October, 1917, would have found them in many ways difficult to recognize in 1921. In February they had been a party of underground and exile, small, loosely organized (in spite of Lenin’s principles), quarrelsome, but lively, spontaneous, and beginning to make real contact with the mass of the population, especially the workers and soldiers. In October the party still looked much the same, though by then it had perhaps ten times as many members, and close contact with the mass of workers and soldiers, to whose aspirations it was far more sensitive than any other party at the time. By 1921, it had changed in almost every respect. It now had a mass membership, including many who were in it for careerist reasons; it was tightly organized, rigid, intolerant of divergent views, and out of touch with the mass of the people, indeed regarded by most of them with resentment and fear. The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 sanctified the final stages of this transformation.

What had made this difference? Basically it had been the experience of holding power and of conducting a civil war; and both those experiences had resulted directly from Lenin’s decision to go it alone in seizing power in October.

The most obvious external change was the growth in membership. After their rapid rise in 1917, numbers grew a further three- to fourfold by March 1921, when officially membership stood at nearly three quarters of a million. The climb had been by no means smooth. There was, for example, a considerable influx immediately after October, but then a large-scale exodus, probably mainly of workers disillusioned with Bolshevik rule. Growth resumed during the civil war as Red Army soldiers joined, but there were also periodic ‘purges’ designed to weed out the half-hearted, the corrupt and the merely careerist.