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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.79: Reds and Whites

Today marks something of a transition. We are crossing the line and heading into the final lap of our final series of the Revolutions podcast. Part one of this final season, episodes 10.1 through 10.39, climaxed with the first Russian revolution, the Revolution of 1905. But since we returned with episode 10.40 for part two, we have spent our time building towards the Revolution of 1917. We passed through the post 1905 era of the Dumas and the Stolypin reforms, then we covered the events, personalities, and triggers that brought about the February Revolution, most especially World War I, and even more most especially, Nicholas and Alexandra’s disastrous management of World War I. Episode 10.62, International Women’s Day, kicked off the much anticipated Revolution of 1917, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. The February Revolution, the April Crisis, the June Offensive, the July Days, the Kornilov affair, and finally the October Revolution.

But now that’s done. Everything we’ve been building towards is now in the rear view mirror.

Now, if we applied the narrowest definition to the Russian Revolution of 1917, it ends on October 26 with Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks overthrowing Kerensky and the provisional government. But that’s not very satisfying, especially because a whole slew of historical contingencies all needed to break a certain way for the events of late October 1917 to go down as momentous days that shook the whole world. Nearly everyone at the time expected Lenin’s little gang to be bounced out of power within a few days, if not a few weeks, with the arrival of the Constituent Assembly marking the absolute limit of their time in power. Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks alike were hyper aware that the new regime — if it could even yet be called a regime — was in an incredibly precarious spot. This is why I tend to extend the periodization of the quote, unquote, October Revolution and the quote unquote Revolution of 1917, to the two big events we talked about last week. On the domestic front, the Bolsheviks closing the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and instead, using the Third Congress of Soviets as the founding congress of a new Soviet government. Then on the foreign front, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, which, as humiliating as it was, left that newly founded Soviet regime with international recognition and sovereign borders.

With those two elements in place, we move from the rising up and seizing power phase to the consolidating and expanding power phase. So as we leave behind the Revolution of 1917 on account of it, well, not being 1917 anymore, we also move from revolution to civil war. From here on out, action is not going to be defined by sporadic street fighting involving a couple thousand armed partisans, but by armies numbering in the millions, waging full-scale war against each other. This war would involve not just every single nationality in what was now the former Russian empire, but also every major European power, as well as the United States and Japan. They all engaged each other in multiple major theaters of operation and dozens of individual fronts, from Poland to the Pacific, and from the White Sea to the Black Sea. It is an insanely large and confusing conflict and a complete treatment of the Russian Civil War could easily fill a hundred, hundred and fifty episodes all on its own. And while we’re not going to do that, I also don’t want to just shut it down and walk away in the spring of 1918 and say, oh, the revolution of 1917 is over goodbye. Because the contingency of civil war still looms over everything. The story of the Russian Revolution is not over until the Civil War is over, and as the old saying goes, the revolution’s not over til the Red Army wins.

The final point I want to make on all this is that I have to say that though we call it the Russian Civil War, that’s not really an accurate description. This conflict involves at least a half dozen major wars of independence between various nationalities and the Russian state; it involves international conflicts among these groups as they jockeyed with each other for territory and influence; it also involved intra-national conflicts, which are themselves simply localized civil wars in class wars and ethnic conflicts. So though the post-Revolution of 1917 and post-World War I conflicts in the former Russian empire all fall under the single heading the Russian Civil War, we are talking about dozens of conflicts drawn over multiple intersecting lines, nationality, religion, class, culture, ideology, and politics. And really what this is, is a giant international conflict taking place within the boundaries of the former Russian empire, and what will become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

After the Red Army wins.

We’ll start today with a bit of business that helps further mark the transition from the Revolution of 1917 period to the Civil War period. On March 6th, 1918, the Bolsheviks met for what they reckoned was their seventh party Congress. They reckoned it was their seventh party Congress because they continued to lay claim to the mantle of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party had held their very first and very tiny Congress in 1898, in which we talked about all the way back in episode 10.26. That Congress was held even before young Lenin, Krupskaya, and Martov had even returned from their Siberian exile.

Now, mostly the seventh party Congress debated the controversial treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And though Lenin convinced the Congress to ratify the treaty after intense debate, the Left Communists who opposed the treaty would come back in force in the summer of 1918 to restate their case by other means. But what this seventh party Congress is mostly known for is voting to officially rebrand themselves. The party would no longer be known as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, but instead the Russian Communist Party. This is the moment in history when the communists become the Communists. It also introduced a more sharply defined ideological divide between socialists and communists in left wing movements throughout the world. The former tended to distance themselves from the emerging Soviet regime in Russia, while the latter fully embraced it. For our immediate purposes here, it means that we now call the Bolsheviks, the Communists. Now it’s a near complete continuity of leadership organization and ideology from Bolsheviks to Communists, as evidenced most obviously by the fact that they’re still calling this their Seventh Party Congress, an old thing just being renamed, rather than the First Party Congress have a brand new thing being born. But still. The transition from the Revolution of 1917 phase to the Civil War phase — and beyond — is helpfully marked by the fact that we stopped talking about Bolsheviks and start talking about Communists. And from here on out, I will be pretty interchangeably using the terms Communists and Soviets and Reds to describe one side in the emerging Civil War.

Now the other big thing that slips in here is that as soon as the party Congress broke up, Lenin and the Communists decided to move the Soviet government from Petrograd to Moscow. The German armies were sitting just 150 miles from Petrograd, and despite the recent peace treaty, it was not at all clear the Germans weren’t just going to keep advancing and overthrow the Soviet government. So on the night of March the 10th, 1980, Lenin did what everyone had made such a huge deal out of Kerensky trying to do back in October. Lenin, Krupskaya , Lenin’s sisters, and about 40 close aides and secretaries secretly boarded a train in the middle of the night bound for Moscow. Shortly thereafter, a second train departed with the rest of the peoples’ commissars aboard, carrying as many files and papers as they could cram into the railroad cars. After nearly 200 years of western- facing St. Petersburg/Petrograd serving as the capital of Russia, the government was returning to Moscow. It is a great historical irony that it was a bunch of hyper westernized political radicals who were the ones to finally ditch western-facing Petrograd and return to Moscow, the ancient seat of medieval Muscovite despotism, but Lenin was a practical guy. At the moment Moscow was flat out safer. It was much deeper in the heart of territory the Soviet government now laid sovereign claim to, and it was a much further distance from all the armies aiming to unseat them. When they arrived in Moscow, the government installed themselves in the Kremlin, which remains the seed of the Russian government to this very day.

With the Soviet government to the Russian communists now installed in Moscow, I want to move on to the real object of today’s episode: embarking on a tour of that one third of the now increasingly former Russian empire that was directly impacted by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Because these territories are going to become major theaters in the Russian Civil War. Now, the theory underlying the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was that Russia’s former minority nationalities would have the right to independence, autonomy, and self-determination. In the negotiations, the Central Powers had positioned themselves — at least abstractly — as the liberator’s of these territories. Meanwhile, Trotsky and the Russia negotiators said, this is no problem for us because we declared the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia back in November. Lenin and Trotsky both repeatedly said, yeah, we have no problem with the independence, autonomy, and self-determination of the former subject peoples of the tsar, but it’s not going to be that simple, is it? No, of course not. It’s never that simple, because in a situation like this competing groups of leaders and governments and institutions are each going to claim to speak on behalf of their respective nations. So who do we listen to? Who gets to make that claim? Embedded in the answer to these questions is the explanation for why wars of independence are always civil wars at the same time.

So we will start in the northwest in Finland. Finland was a late comer to the Russian empire. It had only been brought into the fold in 1809 during the heyday of Napoleon and Alexander the first. Finland was only joined to Russia in personal union with the tsars, who in Finland raised not in their capacity a tsar of Russia, but as grand duke of Finland. Because of this, the Finns had always had a great deal of local autonomy, and they were one of the few parts of the Russian empire with an elected parliament. In the late 1890s, Tsar Nicholas had tried to carry the ultra conservative ideology of orthodoxy nationality and autocracy into Finland with an aggressive Russification policy meant to break traditional Finnish autonomy. It massively backfired and tended to drive all Finns, whatever region or class they happen to be in, towards the dream of independence. During the revolutionary upheavals of both 1905 and 1917, the Finns were always angling to break away from the Russian tsar. And as we have seen, anti-tsarist elements always found influential support from Finnish officials, who were happy to use their autonomous rights to allow wanted enemies of the tsar to set up shop just over the border, roughly a hundred miles from Petrograd.

Economically and politically the Finns were far more advanced than their Russian neighbors. Their industrial working class was a much bigger proportion of the population, with some 500,000 workers in a country of just 3 million people. In their 1916 elections Finnish socialists won an outright majority in their parliament, much to the consternation of the old aristocracy and the commercial bourgeoisie. When the February Revolution hit, all Finnish factions were united in assuming independence was on the way. But the October Revolution split those factions into two bitterly divided camps, the Reds and the Whites, the two colors that would define the massive post-1917 conflict throughout the Eurasian continent. In mid-November the Finnish workers, the Reds, launched a massive general strike to push their leaders towards a declaration of independence, as well as the demand that independent Finland be a workers’ democracy, not a bourgeois democracy. But as had happened with the SRs and the Mensheviks over in Russia, the leadership of the Finnish Socialist Party were more circumspect and cautious than the rank and file. Instead of following the lead of the Bolsheviks and using the November general strike to seize power, the Finnish socialists instead endorsed a unity government dominated by bourgeois and nationalist leaders. This government then officially declared independence on December 6th, 1970. Those bourgeois and nationalist elements, the Whites, were terrified of the effectiveness and implications of the general strike that had been staged by the workers and the socialists, the Reds. The government built up defensive forces and clearly signaled the possible necessity of a dictatorship to keep the workers in line. Pushed from their rank and file below and threatened from above, the Finnish socialists belatedly launched a political uprising in mid January, 1918. They overthrew the existing parliament, and formed an all-socialist government to lead what they would dub the People’s Republic of Finland. In short order, they control just about every city in the country. The ousted coalition of Whites, meanwhile — that is, the wealthier bourgeoisie, aristocratic and nationalist elements — regrouped and mobilized forces to defend the traditional parliament and its government.

When the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, it radically altered the trajectory of the brewing civil war in Finland. With the Russians pledging not to interfere, the Red Finns lost their most potent ally. Meanwhile, within days of the treaty, the White Finns invited the kaiser to send his troops in to help them overthrow the Reds. 20,000 Germans disembarked in early April, and set about capturing key coastal cities like Helsinki. Meanwhile, a White army raised up in the interior marched south and defeated the larger but less disciplined Red forces in the middle of April. As a harbinger of things to come everywhere, the victorious Whites unleashed a punitive terror in the wake of their victory. The Whites summarily executed about 10,000 Reds and herded another 80,000 into concentration camps. Over the next several months, another 11,000 Red prisoners died as a result of the deplorable conditions in these camps. Now, this is not to say the Reds were not brutal in the times and places where they had the upper hand, and throughout the Russian Civil War, wherever it was being waged, White terrors and Red terrors would follow victories. It became the new brutal norm. After all of this incredibly bitter fighting though, Finland now has a White government, backed up by the armies of the Central Powers.

South of Finland, the people of the Baltic states had no opportunity for the kind of class war like the one unfolding to their north. German armies had long since pushed their way in to occupy the region, the German landowning class of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, who only made up 10% of the population, but owned most of the land, were the primary beneficiaries of the shift from Russian military hegemony to German military hegemony. After the peace treaty, the Baltic states were set to become nominally independent, but given the German occupation, independence from Russia didn’t really mean independence in any meaningful way. There was even talk about bringing the Baltic states into a greater German reich once Germany won the war. But as will happen in all the territories we discussed today, if you think the triumphant advance of the Central Powers after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk altered the political dynamic in eastern Europe in the spring of 1918, well, just wait until the fall of 1918, when the Central Powers collapse in defeat.

It was a similar story further south in Belarus. They too were now mostly occupied by the Germans, who had advanced and captured Minsk after the Russians had stalled too long signing the terms of the treaty. While under German occupation, Belarusian leaders declared independence on March 25th and formed what they called the Belarusian Democratic Republic. But like their Baltic neighbors to the north and Ukrainian neighbors to the south, the Belarusians were in a state of occupied suspended animation until the end of World War I, when all hell was going to break loose across Eastern Europe.

If we keep going south, we return to Ukraine, which we’ve already talked about because it was the largest and most important to the former Russian provinces. Ukraine was huge and fertile, and the Central Powers considered their resources and food absolutely vital to their own national interests. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers sent in somewhere between 200 and 250,000 soldiers to secure control of the country. They easily evicted the small force of Red Guards who had taken control of Kiev at the end of January, and they re-installed the Rada, who then invited the central powers to just keep marching all through March and April, until they enveloped and garrisoned the whole of Ukraine. The Ukrainians had promised to deliver 2 million tons of grain, 180,000 tons of meat, 30,000 sheep, and 40,000 tons of sugar. It should come as no surprise to learn that these foreign occupying forces, whose main task was extracting food from the Ukrainian peasantry, were pretty much hated by everyone in Ukraine. As the occupation continued, the Central Powers grew tired of the leaders of the Rada. Despite the inflammatory rhetoric being used by the Russian Communists that the Rada were a bunch of bourgeois capitalist stooges, they were in fact entirely socialist, almost all of them Ukrainian SRs. After being re-installed in Kiev by the Central Powers, the Rada set about constructing a worker and peasant friendly socialist state, which rather rankled both the old Ukrainian elite and the occupying military powers. On April 29th, Ukrainian General Pavlo Skoropadskyi staged a coup d’etat with the backing of the Central Powers. Overthrowing the socialist Rada, Skoropadskyi donned the ancient moniker of the Ukrainian leader, the Hetman, in an attempt to tap into some kind of deep well of traditional Ukrainian national sentiment. He never won much support outside the German military establishment though, so he’s not going to last long when the Central Powers collapse in November.

Now, as we head east out of Ukraine, we should be heading into southern Russia, but for structural reasons, I want to skip that area and head directly to the Caucasus, where we find Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Representing the Southern outskirts of the Russian empire, they had been on the front line to the war against the Turks. But unlike other regions in the Russian empire, where there was a good size Russian population, especially in the major urban areas, the Russian population down in the Caucuses was only about 5%. So, thanks to the physical distance from the center of Russia and the tiny minority of Russians living among them, there had always been a strong independent ethnic identity down here among the Georgians and the Armenians and the Azerbaijani. As the Russian army at the front disintegrated and returned home, the trains were often targeted by locals, hoping to strip them of weapons, ammunition, coats, boots, and whatever else they might be carrying. But although the people of the Caucuses were not exactly russofiles and they expected autonomy in any post-revolution world, they were not at the moment rushing headlong towards total independence. The local Christian populations were worried about their proximity to the Muslim Turks, and the long history of ethnic and religious conflict. The Armenian genocide had only happened a couple of years earlier. But all that said, the October Revolution was not well received by the region. As we discussed, when we introduced young Stalin in episode 10.44, Georgia was one of the few areas where the Mensheviks enjoyed a real base of popular support. Stalin’s gang of Bolsheviks had been treated as an obnoxious band of misfits causing trouble for the prevailing dominance of the Mensheviks. So the October Revolution was greeted with a great deal of hostility. Most of the leaders were still Mensheviks who considered the October revolution a catastrophe. They quickly set up an anti-Bolshevik trans-Caucasian government which united Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan under Menshevik and SR leadership that dubbed itself the Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and they declared independence on April 22nd. The one area outside their control was a pretty critical area: the Baku oil fields. The workers of the oil fields had been heavily bolshevized, and after the October Revolution set themselves up as a Soviet in alliance with the Soviet regime up in Petrograd and then Moscow. But unfortunately they were isolated, and would spend several months under siege by their anti-Soviet neighbors.

So with that, let’s return to the Cossack regions of southern Russia, which as we mentioned in episode 10.76, was the origin point for what would become the White armies of the Civil War. The Cossacks were long considered the most aggressively pro tsarist nationality in the empire. They enjoyed all kinds of special privileges in exchange for their ferocious and unwavering military support. The Cossack population down around the Don River numbered about a million and a half. This group was able to threaten critical mines and factories in the region, block the rail line to the Caucuses and especially those Baku oil fields, and they could strike west into Ukraine. Lenin and the Soviet leadership naturally considered these Cossacks to be the most dangerous threat to their regime. And they had set up the leader of the Don Cossacks — General Alexey Kaledin — as a major reactionary boogeyman. He was one of the three Ks of counterrevolution along with Kerensky and Kornilov.

To combat this threat, Lenin ordered armed attachments into the region in November 1917. These forces were led by Vladimir Antonov, the guy who took the Winter Palace during the October revolution, and Nikolai Moravia, the guy who led the defense of Petrograd at the little Battle of Pulkovo. Now, General Kaledin absolutely tried to form a resistance army to the Bolsheviks, but it was a much tougher sell than anyone on either side expected. Many of the younger Cossacks had spent years serving on the front lines of World War I. They were either sick of fighting entirely or had been radicalized by their experience and actually supported the Soviet government. There was also a divide between the major cities of the region and the countryside. So for example, in Rostov, the largest city in the Don region, in the Constituent Assembly elections, they voted 38% Bolshevik. Finally, it was not at all clear in these first few months after the October Revolution that there was any reason to resist the Bolsheviks. They issued the Decree on Land, the Decree on Nationalities, the Decree on Peace. What exactly do we need to be resisting here?

So the fighting is such that unfolded over the winter of 1917- 1918 was mostly small detachments of Red Guards arriving in cities by train and installing pro Soviet authorities. Unable to convince his people to fight back, General. Kaledin grew despondent and shot himself in the heart on January 29th.

Now the Soviet leaders were not the only ones who had assumed the Cossacks would form the center of resistance to the Bolsheviks. As I noted in episode 10.76, anti-Bolshevik army officers identified the Don Cossack area as the safest place to organize a resistance. At the forefront of this was General Mikael Alekseyev, who had served as chief of staff of the Russian army throughout most of the war. In early November, Alekseyev arrived at the regional capital, Novocherkassk, to organize a counter-revolution. In late December he called for volunteers to flock to the White banner to oppose the Red Soviets. So this is the origin point of the Volunteer Army, which is at the moment also called interchangeably, the Alekseyev organization. But after Alekseyev put out his call for volunteers, the results were… comical. Only a few thousand even responded, and those who did were invariably senior officers. So not unlike those émigré armies who gathered around the comte d’Artois in 1792, the Volunteer Army was all officers and no men. Like, they literally didn’t have any privates. But one thing I must say: these were not ultra royalist reactionaries hoping to re-install Tsar Nicholas. That wasn’t really the point. Nearly all the senior officers of the Volunteer Army had stayed in service after the tsar’s abdication, and by now they accepted the verdict of the February Revolution. Mostly, the Volunteer Army would run on a kind of apolitical code of military honor that was hostile to feckless politicians of all shapes and sizes, and for all their coming military successes, their undoing would be an apolitical failure to offer any kind of tangible vision for the future. They may have been very good military officers, but if you’re going to win a civil war, you need at least a few politicians.

The inner circle of the Volunteer Army came from the officers who were involved in the Kornilov affair. General Kornilov and his comrades regrouped in the Don Cossack region after making their way through hostile red territory, often by literally putting on disguises. Once there, Alekseyev and Kornilov roughly divided up the organizational. With Alekseyev acting as something of a political chief, and Kornilov acting as the military chief. Though the two were united in their hostility to the Bolsheviks, Alekseyev was an aristocratic officer of the old school nobility, while Kornilov was a salt of the earth provincial, with family ties to the Cossacks who had risen through the ranks on merit. The two constantly butted heads and intruded on each other’s alleged spheres of influence.

After the new year, the small Volunteer Army established its headquarters in Rostov, which as I said, was the biggest city in the region. But they had neither the manpower nor the resources to resist the influx of Red Guards coming down from the north. With the Red swarming most of the cities, General Kornilov decided they were in no position to make a stand. On February 22nd, 1918, the day before Rostov fell to the Reds, Kornilov led about 4,000 men out into the frozen steppes. This began what is called the Ice March, one of the most dramatic and romanticized chapters of the Russian Civil War.

General Anton Denikin, Kornilov’s second in command, said, “we went from the dark night and spiritual slavery to unknown wandering in search of the bluebird.” With all the cities and railroads controlled by the Reds, the little Volunteer White Army had to avoid essentially all urban areas and railroad stations. They wandered through the frozen wilderness of February and March, south into the Cuban region, trying to find any place of refuge. After seven weeks just kind of adrift in the wilderness, they finally reached what is today Krasnodar, now the capital of what the Reds had organized into the Cuban Soviet. Kornilov, fed up with the Ice March and eager to take action, brushed off the advice of his staff and launched an attack on the city on April 10th. Days of intense fighting, followed until April 13th, when an artillery shell blasted the farmhouse where General Kornilov had made his headquarters. It blew him up and buried his body under the rubble.

General Denikin assumed command and ordered a withdrawal, recommending the Ice March for another four weeks as the army headed back north. When word reached Moscow that Kornilov was dead, there was jubilant celebration. It was the end of the three Ks of counterrevolution. Kerensky had long since fled west into permanent exile, Kaledin shot himself, and Kornilov was now buried under a blown up farmhouse. “With this news,” Lenin announced, “it can be said with certainty that in the main, the civil war has ended.” It was rare for Lenin to miss the mark so spectacularly, but man, did he miss the mark spectacularly.

General Denikin did his best to hold the Volunteer Army together as they continued wandering through the frozen steppes, but as they returned to the Don Cossack region after 11 weeks in the wilderness, they found circumstances very much changed. The Red leaders who had taken possession of the cities over the winter had made themselves obnoxious to the local population with aggressive requisitioning. The Red Guards had been enough to capture the cities from a largely passive population, but they were not nearly strong enough to withstand fall on popular revolt. And full on popular revolt was now starting. The aggressive requisitioning had given everyone the answer to the question, why should we bother fighting the Bolsheviks? As General Denikin and the Volunteer Army returned to the region around Rostov and Novocherkassk, the local population was now more than ready to flock to the White banner. On top of that, they could also now count on the Central Powers who were pushing their armies in through Southern Ukraine. Together, these forces started clearing out the Reds in early May 1918. On May 6th, anti-Soviet Cossacks recaptured Novocherkassk; on May 8th, the Central Powers captured Rostov. By this point, we can say that the whole region has been basically cleared of Red forces. And what was left of those Red forces marched 250 miles east, where they re-rally at Tsaritsyn, later renamed Stalingrad, and which is now called Volgograd. There on the banks of the lower Volga River, they would form the nucleus of what will become the Red Army’s famous 10th Army. But we’ll get into all that later.

By the spring of 1918, the Soviet government in Moscow was facing setbacks on all fronts. All of that territory they had lost in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was occupied by the Central Powers. Down in the south, they were facing a major uprising from the Cossacks and the White Volunteer Army. They more or less did not have any control whatsoever over the Trans-Caucasus. Faced with all this, they were going to have to radically reimagine their own military structure.

But, we’re going to start next week by leaping far, far to the east, because for everything we have talked about today, there is an argument to be made that the Russian Civil War doesn’t really start until May 14th, 1918, with the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion.