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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.88: the Moscow Directive
We left off last week with the Red/Black alliance and Ukraine fracturing just as the Whites put a major head of steam into their offensive operations. At the end of June 1919, the Red Army pulled out of Ukraine entirely, while the Blacks scattered into independent guerrilla units who would harass and disrupt the White occupation of their Homeland. The successful White offensive into Ukraine was matched by successes on the east side of their lines. Their forces on the lower Volga River captured the key city of Zaritzen and now threatened to roll right up the river toward Saratov, Samarra, and Simbirsk.
On July 3rd, 1919, General Denikin, the commander in chief of the White Armies in the south, issued an order to his commanders to harness their growing momentum and launch a multi-pronged offensive aimed at nothing less than the capture of Moscow. Known as the Moscow Directive, it ordered the White Armies to use the rail lines in their sectors to push north, and all converge on Moscow. Upon arrival, they would expel the Communists, reclaim the ancient capital of Russia, and restore the Russian Empire.
The dramatic push to Moscow would serve as the culmination of everything the Whites had been working towards since the first officers had made their way to the territory of the Don Cossacks to form the kernel of the Volunteer Army under General Kornilov and Alekseev in the weeks after the October Revolution. Over the past 20 months, their army had grown enormously from the handful of volunteers who had literally walked off into the wilderness to commence their famous ice march in February 1918. Now numbering somewhere between a 100 and 150,000 men, the time had finally come to stop gathering strength in the south, and instead project that strength towards the north. It was time to plunge into the middle of Russia. They could count on a stream of materials and supplies from the Allies, most especially the British, and they were well aware of reports coming from inside Red territory, that the people were not happy with Communist rule at all.
But the Moscow Directive was a very risky gambit. The headcount for the White Armies had grown to impressive highs, but they were still outnumbered by the Red Army. Plus, the Moscow Directive called for a convergence of separate forces spread across a thousand mile front, and though many small tributaries can ultimately form one mighty river, they were all going to be starting as tiny tributaries. Beyond that, every mile these forces advanced toward Moscow would extend their own supply line one mile further, and long supply lines are never the stuff safe campaigns are made of. Denikin’s hopes thus rested on his armies triggering anti-Communist uprisings wherever they went, attracting volunteers to grow the White forces like a snowball, and also ensure their supply lines were secure, and maybe even augmented by locally available resources. Winning this kind of local support would require restraint by the advancing White soldiers, and careful politicking from the officers at the spear point of the chart. This was never going to work if the Whites wound up alienating the people that they propose to liberate from the Communists.
From the moment the Moscow Directive was issued. It faced criticism from inside the White ranks, most especially from one of Denikin’s best generals, Pyotr Wrangel. Wrangel was of ethnically German descent, and born in what is today Lithuania. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he started World War I as a captain, and was then promoted up through the ranks, serving with distinction in both the successful Brusilov Offensive of 1916, and the far less successful Kerensky Offensive of 1917.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, Wrangel resigned his commission and left the army, and then subsequently joined the Volunteer Army in August 1918. By 1919, he was in charge of their forces on the Volga, and most recently, he had just led the impressive capture of the city of Zaritzen. He was also, I must mention at some point, an absolute giant of a man; he stood fully six feet, six inches tall.
Wrangel was not a fan of the Moscow Directive. He believed the Whites were spread too wide and too thin, and that their rear was far too disorganized and mismanaged to serve as an effective conduit to maintain a supply line through potentially hostile territory. And he wasn’t wrong about that; the officers and officials in southern Russia tasked with receiving and then transferring the vital shipments from the Allies did what practically all officers and officials in charge of such operations did on all sides of the war no matter their ideology: they sold the stuff on the black market, or traded it for perks and favors. Bribery, corruption, and extortion were absolutely rampant, so much so that by the summer of 1919, the British were actively questioning whether they should continue shipping goods that they knew were just going to be received through the front door and sold off through the back door.
Wrangel hated the Moscow Directive, he called it the death sentence of the White movement. His own preferred strategy was to concentrate all their forces on the Volga; this would allow them to maybe link up with Kolchak’s armies in Siberia, and make one mass push on Moscow rather than a bunch of smaller ones all at the same time. It was of course purely a coincidence that the Volga was the region Wrangel himself was in overall command of, and when Denikin received Wrangel’s counterproposal, he responded, “I see you want to be the first man to set foot in Moscow.”
On the very same July 3rd, 1919 that General Denikin issued the Moscow Directive, the Reds were busy reformulating their own plans. Though they had successfully repelled Admiral Kolchak’s forces, the rest of the spring and early summer of 1919 had been defined by… defeat. In the west, they had been forced out of Ukraine completely, and in the east, Wrangel was besting them down on the lower Volga. With disappointment, defeat, and alarm mounting, rival factions inside the Red Army and the Communist Party challenged the leadership of Minister of War Trotsky and Commander in Chief Jukums Vācietis, the former leader of the Latvian Riflemen who had been commander in chief of the Red Army since September 1918.
Now, I don’t want to get into all the backstabbing right now, but some of this internal maneuvering represents an early skirmish between Comrade Trotsky and Comrade Stalin in what would eventually become an all out war for control of the Communist Party. So, on July 3rd, in what was widely viewed to be an attack on Trotsky, Vācietis was sacked, and a few days later, arrested on charges of treasonous collusion with the Whites, although he was quickly released as no evidence of treason existed; it seemed to be simply a part of the internal politicking to get rid of him and discredit Trotsky.
The new commander in chief was a guy called Sergei Kamenev — absolutely no relation to the senior Bolshevik Kamenev, they just have the same name to keep everything nice and confusing. A former officer of the Imperial Army, this Kamenev was among those who had been recruited into the Red Army when it went fully professional in 1918. He was now being promoted to commander in chief because he had led the Eastern Army Group to victory over Kolchak in the spring, one of the few places where the Red Army had undisputed success. Trotsky opposed this change in command and submitted his resignation of minister of war, but the party rejected this out of hat. Trotsky was too skillful and too valuable to the cause, so he had to stay in his position even though he would now be overseeing military strategies down in the south he did not really approve of. To keep this short and sweet, Trotsky wanted to counter attack the Whites on a southeastern line running through Ukraine, while Kamenev wanted to start on the Volga, and attack on a southwestern line. Both plans have their pluses and minuses, but the fact that the party approved Kamenev’s plan was a sign of Trotsky’s insecure position.
Now Lenin backed Trotsky both publicly and privately to the absolute hilt, and as long as Lenin was around, Trotsky wasn’t going anywhere. But plenty of the other old Bolsheviks had nothing but side-eye for the golden boy Trotsky, who had joined the party at such a late hour, and now acted as if he was the party.
In August, the Red’s got going with their counter attack, with a diversionary army moving down the center to draw attention and resources away from their real line of attack, which would be coming down the Volga. Initially, both offenses advanced rapidly. The force in the middle moved a hundred miles in just ten days, cutting right through the boundary line between the old Volunteer Army and the Don Cossacks. Over in the east, the Red forces started advancing on August 15th, and they drove 150 miles down the Volga aiming at recapturing Zaritzen.
Now, while the Reds were starting to march south, a force of about 8,000 Don Cossacks launched a daring raid deep into Red territory. They use trains to move their forces rapidly and then rode out on lightning attacks, and the Cossacks raided towards the region around the city of Tambov, ultimately running them more than 400 miles behind enemy lines. The military objective was to cause enormous disruption behind the Red lines, and the Cossacks dutifully blew up munition depots and railway lines and scattered the rear guard reserves and local defenses easily. But while they were tactically successful. And yes, caused a lot of chaotic damage for the Reds, in the larger strategic scope of the Moscow Directive, it’s hard to call this Cossack raid anything but a disaster. The raid was mostly defined by violent and destructive looting wherever they went. The Cossacks plundered and killed and raped. Now general Denikin’s motivation for this raid may have been to disrupt the Red Army rear, but the Cossack motivation was loot. That’s what drove them from town to town, that’s what they spent most of their time focused on.
Now Denikin didn’t like this looting, but he also couldn’t control it. The local commanders believed it was perfectly justified, and frankly, the only thing keeping their men in the field at all. As the weeks went by, their movements actually slowed to a crawl because they had to account for miles and miles of recently acquired baggage. Trotsky referred to them as “a comet with a filthy tale of robbery and rape.”
Now over among the White leadership, the assessment was almost identical. Pyotr Wrangel said the soldiers came with “a colossal tail of looters and speculator — the war for them was a means of getting rich.” He now despaired the larger goal of winning over the hearts and minds of the Russian people. All this abusive plundering made it, as he said, “impossible to win over Russia.” He said, “the population has come to hate us.”
Denikin, meanwhile, had said that the plans for the push to Moscow in the summer of 1919 relied on “our liberation of vast regions was supposed to bring about a popular upsurge.” He basically said success or failure would hinge on the answer to this question: “would the people come over to us, or would they, as in the past, remain inert and passive between two waves, between two morally opposed camps? Wherever the Cossacks went, they all but ensured that the answer to this question would be no, the people will not come over to the Whites. As Evan Maudsley writes in his book about the Russian Civil War, it’s really saying something that the Whites weren’t able to win over anyone in the region around Tambov, because they were not disposed in the slightest to support Red Communism, and in fact it would become the seat of a major peasant uprising against the Red Communists in 1920.
Now, while this is all unfolding, Ukraine is busy becoming the bleeding ulcer of the White movement. By the end of June 1919, the Whites controlled all of Eastern Ukraine and had advanced up the Nepa River and taken Kiev. Ukraine was meant to be a vital component to the push on Moscow, as Denikin and his officers envisioned the region providing recruits for the army, coal for the trains, and serving as a main artery for supplies running out from the south. Now if Ukraine was going to be these things, the Whites had to bring the Ukrainians under a peaceful and productive occupation. Ukraine had been in a state of crisis for years, and when the Whites came in, there was essentially no functioning central government or administration. It had become a kind of no man’s land, simply being crisscrossed by rival armies. If the Whites could establish an effective administration and coax the Ukrainians into cooperation by offering them various incentives, it might very well be the key to the Moscow Directive succeeding.
Okay, so enough with the ironic foreshadowing. When the White came into Ukraine, they endeared themselves to precisely no one. In fact, they seemed hell bent on pissing everybody off. To the extent that the Whites had any political ideology at all, it was patriotic Russian nationalism. When the White Armies rolled into town in Ukraine, their big promise was to restore the old Russian Empire, make it one and indivisible again. This ideology was driven by a kind of Russian chauvinism that just did not play in Ukraine at all. Denikin refused to even make the slightest nod to Ukrainian regional autonomy, let alone acknowledge their existence as as people. He never referred to Ukraine in his statements, he only ever called the territory “little Russia,” and he only ever called the Ukrainians “little Russians.” In his mind, there was no such thing as Ukraine or Ukrainians. But even with this whole, hey look, we’re all the same people rhetoric, the native Ukrainians were never invited into serve as partners in this project, even if they had wanted to restore the Russian Empire one and indivisible. When the Whites came to town, Russians were appointed to all important administrative posts. The Ukrainian language was banned in all official institutions. It’s actually impressive how little they did to mollify the Ukrainians. Even the despised Hetman Skoropadsky got more native Ukrainian support than the Russian Whites did, and Skoropadsky’s regime was famously propped up entirely by the German Army. It speaks again to the major political failings of the White movement, which just seemed to offer nothing to no one.
The arrival of the Whites also re-energized the various partisan forces that had been in and out of the field since the Germans had invaded back in early 1918. Nestor Makhno was now resigned from the Red Army, and he had seen his anarchist autonomous zone overrun by the Cossacks, but he was soon organizing a resistance army of thousands of veteran guerrilla fighters. And he was not the only one: Ukrainian nationalist forces under the command of a guy called Simone Petliura organized in the west under his auspices as president of the Ukrainian People’s republic, an entity which at this point existed more on paper than reality.
Then there was also Nikifor Grigoriev, who I briefly introduced last week. He was one of the most important paramilitary leaders in southwestern Ukraine, and he was going around selling a kind of peasant populism that opposed all foreign invaders of their Homeland, which for Grigoriev’s included, not just the Red Army and the White Army, but even the inhabitants of Ukrainian cities, who were often ethnically Russian or Jewish. And even if they had been born in Ukraine, they weren’t exactly Ukrainians. Grigoriev’s portrayed the cities as parasitic dens of vice and corruption, with alien element exploiting the noble native Ukrainian peasantry. Now on the surface, some of what Grigoriev’s says sounds a lot like what Makhno was saying, who also had nothing good to say about the cities, but there was a huge difference between them. Grigoriev leaned heavily into antisemitism. He pointed to the Jews as a major cause of all Ukraine’s misfortunes, and that they should be targeted for dispossession and removal. Makhno obviously disagreed.
But this brings us to a larger discussion we now have to have about one of the blackest chapters in this conflict. Because unfortunately, the anti-Semitism of Grigoriev and other leaders like him found a ready audience among the Ukrainian peasants eager to pin the blame for all their misfortunes on someone. Ukraine was a part of the Pale Settlement, designated by the Russian tsars as the only place Jews could live inside the Russian Empire. And while Jews had lived there, they were subject to further restrictions on land ownership that typically confined them to the cities, where they earn their livings doing the kinds of things that people who live in cities do. They were a part of the urban labor force working for wages, while the more prosperous among them earned their livings as traders, merchants, bankers, and shopkeepers, which of course engendered a lot of jealousy and led to stereotypes about their greedy and exploitive nature.
Now, way back at the beginning of this series on the Russian Revolution, we talked about how just about every European political ideology on the map comes with some kind of anti-Semitic wing, and that was obviously true in both Russia and Ukraine. Tsar Nicholas and the conservative aristocracy were all virulently anti-semitic; they used the Jews as scapegoats to deflect from their own massive failings as leaders. By 1919, if you were an old school conservative opposed to Red Communism — or really just about anybody opposed to Red Communism — you might embrace the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, which had it that all the leaders of the sinister Bolshevik Party were ethnically Jewish, and the whole revolution and civil war was a giant Jewish plot perpetrated against good pure Russians. White newspapers and pamphlets would always be sure to put Jewish surnames in parentheses whenever they discuss Communist Party leaders, so Trotsky’s name would always be followed with the parenthetical Bronstein, to drive home the point that this was all a giant Jewish conspiracy.
But that rightwing antisemitism was always matched by leftwing antisemitism: socialists could attack Jews for seeming to be a pillar of bourgeois capitalism; SRs could tell their peasant constituents that the Jews were an alien element living in cities parasitically extracting the wealth of the native born peasants. Other varieties of socialism and communism would portray Jews as the secret puppet masters of international capitalist imperialism. They could go in for banking conspiracies centered on the Rothschilds — I mean, hadn’t the Jews just pitted the peoples of Europe against one another in a horribly bloody and destructive war just to make a buck?
Now this is not to say that all these ideologies are anti-Semitic, or that anyone who adheres to any one of these ideologies as necessarily anti-Semitic, just that every wing of the Russian Civil War has anti-Semites in their midst, expressing their own particular flavor of antisemitism.
And so it was in Ukraine.
Between 1918 and 1921, Jewish communities in Ukraine endured a particularly brutal concentration of pogroms. The first rounds were committed by the Ukrainian nationalist groups after the withdrawal of the Central Powers at the end of 1918. The nationalist Ukrainian People’s Republic was not officially anti-Semitic in any way: Jewish cultural and religious rights were guaranteed, Yiddish was recognized as an official language, and there was even a ministry of Jewish affairs. But the authority of this Ukrainian People’s Republic did not run very deep, especially in the realm of protecting Jews from abuse, and if you were somebody down in the rank and file, somebody who had volunteered to serve under the banner of Ukrainian nationalism, it was highly likely your definition of Ukrainian did not include the Jews, who were invariably, and almost necessarily, excluded from every project of European nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The initial investigations after all this was over identified close to 500 separate pogroms perpetrated by forces associated with Ukrainian People’s Republic resulting in close to 17,000 deaths. But, as we’ll get to in a second, this is probably a massive underestimate.
Now the head of the Ukrainian people’s Republic, Symon Petliura, made some attempt to halt these pogroms. At the beginning of March 1919, he issued a statement denouncing the pogroms and ordering his forces to stop them. The statement read, in part:
It is time for you to realize that the Jews together with the majority of the Ukrainian population have recognized the evil of the Bolshevik Communist invasion and know already where the truth lies. The most important Jewish parties… have decidedly placed themselves on the side of the Ukrainian independent state, and are working together hand-in-hand for its good.
It is time for you to understand that the peaceful Jewish population, their children and women, the same as ourselves, have been oppressed and deprived of national freedom…. They cannot be alienated from us. They have of old been always with us, and they have shared with us their joys and sorrows.
The statement then went on to say:
I most positively order that all those who are instigating you to pogroms to be thrust out of the army, and as traitors to the fatherland be handed over to the court. Let the court punish them according to their crimes, by giving them the severest lawful penalty. The government of the Ukrainian democratic Republic, recognizing the harm done to the state by the pogroms, has issued an appeal to the whole population of the Ukraine to withstand all attempts of the enemies who might arouse it to anti-Jewish pogroms.
Now this statement gets entered into the ledger of very contested historical territory, because Simone Petliura’s authority was very weak when he issued this order, and even if he personally deplored the pogroms — or more cynically, maybe recognized that they were bad for PR as he tried to curry favor with the western powers — he does not appear to have actually done much to prioritize ending attacks on the Jewish communities. Which is a very common way for these things to unfold, the high leadership lamenting and denouncing the abuses while those on the ground simply continue to abuse the Jewish communities without much in the way of fear of punishment or repercussion. In the case of Petliura, the pogroms would come back to haunt him in a major way: after being driven into exile, he was shot dead in Paris in 1925 by a Russian Jew who then surrendered to the police saying he had done it to avenge his brethren killed in the Ukrainian pogroms. When the confessed assassin was put on trial, two years later, he was acquitted after the jury heard eyewitness and expert descriptions of what had happened. Now I don’t think there was ever any evidence of Petliura’s direct involvement, but it all happened on his watch, and he appears to have done little to stop it.
But the nationalists were just one group among many attacking the Jewish population of Ukraine. Forces aligned with the Red Ukrainian SSRs certainly believed that the Jews had grown rich with wealth that should be returned to the people. When the Reds targeted the Jewish communities, it was marked down as a part of their general looting the looters campaign, as they targeted the old aristocracy or the bourgeoisie or the Kulaks. Now in general, it doesn’t appear that the Reds did quite as much as some of the other groups did, but they did impose heavy taxes on the Jews, requisition them with special brutality, and often took hostages to ensure payment. But at the same time, individual Jews did serve in important parts of the Ukrainian SSR, and the Ukrainian branch of the Cheka, so their looting wasn’t quite so narrowly anti-Semitic in nature.
When the Whites advanced into Ukraine, they took over the persecution of the Jews with a vengeance. Their antisemitism was both racist — as in, the Jews, as a race are evil and greedy — as well as ideological — as in, the Jews are synonymous with the hated Bolsheviks. When a White Army came to town, troops were often let loose for two or three days of looting, and they would go straight for the Jewish communities and neighborhoods. Homes and businesses raided and destroyed. Synagogues trashed, Jews taken hostage and shot if their families didn’t pay a ransom. Families were tortured until they handed over everything of value and then often killed anyway. Corpses were often publicly displayed with signs that read traitors. Jews were herded into synagogues that were then burned to the ground. All of this violence and ransacking was then performatively lamented by senior White leaders like General Denikin, but, y’know, everybody knew the Jews were all but synonymous with the evil scourge of Bolshevism, so, they’d really just brought this all on themselves. Death to the Yids became as common a rallying cry as death to the Bolsheviks.
So just to round this up and take a step back. Pogroms in Ukraine were perpetuated against the Jews by nationalists, by Whites, by Reds, by other leaders like Grigoriev, or just other random smalltime independent paramilitary groups. When all of this was later investigated, the initial tallies had the official recorded number of deaths between 1918 and 1921, at 31,071. That number was assumed to be at least double in reality, numbering anywhere from 50 to 60,000. More recent archival research probably pushes that total number to somewhere between a 100 and 150,000, with at least the same number of wounded. And this was just accounting for the bodily harm, the dead and the wounded. The Jewish communities were also of course dispossessed, their homes were looted and destroyed, their businesses were looted and destroyed, their towns were looted and destroyed. Probably something like half a million people were left homeless.
It was absolutely brutal, and absolutely horrific. And the final verdict is that, really, everyone is to blame. Except the Jews.
Now, among those partisan forces fighting in Ukraine though, it’s pretty obvious that Makhno’s anarchists were the most aggressively anti-anti-Semitic. As I mentioned though, even his forces could fall into the trap of antisemitism. Makhno simply did more to try to prevent it. As the various peasant based insurrectionary forces recoalesced in light of the White occupation, Makhno and Grigoriev held a summit on July 27th to see if they could possibly align their forces. And if you’ll remember from last week, one of the things Makhno had said against Grigoriev is that he represented pogroms and antisemitism. Well, during this summit, Grigoriev said their best choice of action would be siding with the Whites against the Reds. Makhno said no, the best course of action is going to be to ally with the Reds against the Whites, even if ultimately he’s opposed to both. It’s hard to know exactly what happened next, but the standard version is that during the ensuing argument, Grigoriev maybe tried to shoot Makhno, but Makhno’s people gunned down Grigoriev first, and however, it went down, Makhno’s people gunned down Grigoriev at this meeting. And it’s entirely likely they went into the summit having already decided to execute Grigoriev. The stated justification for killing him was his collusion with the Whites, and his perpetration of anti-Jewish pogroms, which Makhno, again, would not countenance. It would also appear that as Makhno signalled his willingness to absorb willing recruits from Grigoriev’s forces, anyone who came in holding antisemitic hopes and dreams were expelled for lacking true revolutionary consciousness.
The Ukrainian Blacks then spent the rest of August 1919 reorganizing themselves, and at the end of the month, they officially refounded the revolutionary insurgent army of Ukraine. Makhno had personally gathered some 3000 soldiers and 700 cavalryman, while other independent groups joined under his overall leadership, pushing their numbers to somewhere between 15 and 20,000. They then launched a campaign against the White supply lines, attacking trains and convoys and isolated garrisons. They caused enormous complications for the Whites, and more than anything else, Makhno’s forces raided for guns and ammunition to keep themselves in the fight. As the Whites had done very little to endear themselves to the local population, they could only respond to these threats through more force and more violence and more terror to keep the people in line and to keep their supply lines running, if the Whites had ever had any intention of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people that was abandoned completely, although it would seem to me that they never had that intention in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the larger context of the push to Moscow, despite these problems in Ukraine, the Whites were very much on the move. On September the fifth and September the sixth, the Red Army coming down the Volga was halted by Wrangel before they had a chance to retake Zaritzen. Meanwhile, in the center, that Red diversionary offensive was now being pushed back as quickly as it had advanced, and by mid-September, they were right back where they started. On September 15th, the general who had been in charge of that operation turned up dead. Officially, the cause of death was typhus, but you never know.
By the end of September, the leading edge of the Whites were driving hard on the capital. On September 20, they advanced to Kursk, by October 15th, they had made it to Orel, just 250 miles from Moscow. But more importantly, they stood poised to strike the industrial city of Tula, which was basically the principal munitions manufacturing base for the Red Army. Losing that would be a catastrophic blow to the Communists.
So at this point by mid-October 1919, it really looks like the Moscow Directive is gonna work, that it’s all gonna work out. And next week, the White forces coming up from the south will thrill at the news that a whole separate anti-Communist army is moving from a base in the Baltic and stands poised to capture Petrograd. I mean, if things go right, everything would come full circle, with October 1917 marking the birth of the Bolshevik regime, and October 1919 marking its death.
But as it will turn out, the White threat was utterly superficial, and October 1919 is not going to stand as the moments when the Whites crush the Reds, but the moment when they go crashing backwards in every direction and never really threatened the Soviet regime ever again.