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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.92: Long Live the Bolsheviks, Death to the Communists

Last time we followed the Polish-Soviet War to the ceasefire that effectively ended the fighting in mid-October 1920. This week, we need to turn our attention back to event inside Russia, because one of the big reasons Lenin was so keen to bring the Polish-Soviet War to an end before winter set in was because things were not going so great on the home front. In the three years since the October Revolution, the people of Russia had endured enormous hardships, and born often horrendous treatment by the Communist regime, because they all faced enemies foreign and domestic, which threatened to overthrow the Communists. And as we’ve seen over and over again, for all the faults of the Communists, the workers and peasants of Russia always seem to rate them as the lesser evil.

Well, by the middle of 1920, most of those enemies seemed to be defeated, and with no greater evil to hold up in comparison, the workers and peasants of Russia appraised the Communists on their own merits with an undistracted eye and found them wanting. And so the Communists now faced threats not from White Armies or western allies or rival neighbors, but from their own people.

But before we get into all that, we do need to wrap up one major loose end, because throughout 1920 there was still a White army out there in the field, keeping the flame of civil war burning. After the failure of the Moscow Directive campaign in 1919 General Denikin resigned his command and departed Russia. And he named as his successor General Pyotr Wrangel, who had been one of his best generals, and who had since established a base in Crimea, making the peninsula the last bit of territory under White control. In the spring of 1920, Wrangel had about 30 to 35,000 troops left under his command, but he appeared at least on the surface to understand that the biggest reason the Whites had been losing the civil war was due to their political strategies, not their military strategies. The problem, as I just mentioned, is that the people of Russia always seem to consider the Whites to be a greater evil than the Reds. So he declared his intention to wage a different kind of war. “It is not by triumphal march from Crimea to Moscow that Russia can be freed,” he told the press from his base in Crimea, “but by the creation, on no matter how small a fragment of Russian soil, of such a government, with such conditions of life, that the Russian people now groaning under the Red yoke will inevitably submit to its attractions.”

What this meant was showing the people that the Whites did not represent the restoration of the old tsarist regime — and more importantly, that they did not stand for undoing all the land redistribution that had gone on since 1917. And he later said in his memoirs, “The question had to be settled for an important psychological reason. We had to tear the enemy’s principle weapon to propaganda from him. We had to allay the peasant suspicions that our object in fighting the Reds was none other than to restore the rights of the great landed proprietors and to take reprisals against those who had infringed on those rights.”

So, okay. So far, so good. He’s got a good bead on what’s gone wrong. But even as Wrangel asserted the necessity of demonstrating their benign intention and their understanding of the needs of the people of Russia, the officers and politicians and officials who surrounded him failed in this basic task. So for example, they finally did publish a land law in late May, that at least on its surface appeared to be something that would reconcile them to the realities of post-revolutionary Russia, but in pages and pages of fine print the land transfers would require annual payments to the dispossessed former landlords that might take a generation or more to pay off. It also looked like in many cases people wouldn’t even get that far. There were a thousand tiny loopholes written in that would allow former owners to exempt their specific properties from all these transfers. So even as Wrangel trumpeted the need to recognize the needs of the peasants, the people around him just couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge the revolution in land. More visibly, they couldn’t bring themselves to play nice, to demonstrate that they were not out to take reprisals against those who had supported the revolution. So in Crimea, Wrangel’s government initiated a low grade White Terror, aimed at anyone who was even mildly critical of the Whites. They imprisoned thousands of workers and peasants for suspected Bolshevik sympathies, hundreds were summarily executed for alleged subversive activities. Included in these roundups were also staunchly liberal journalists and professionals who had been loudly anti-Communist since 1917 and had spent the last few years serving in the ranks of the Whites.

But the men around Wrangel lumped them all together and refuse to recognize a difference between liberalism and communism. So if the goal was to deliver, “such a government with such conditions of life that the Russian people now groaning under the red yoke will inevitably submit to its attractions,” then they were failing miserably, and would thus fail miserably. On the military front, Wrangel initially planned no offensive operations. He just wanted to hold onto Crimea and grow political support slowly and steadily by offering a superior alternative to the Communists. His army numbered in the tens of thousands, against a Red Army that was now peaking at 5 million soldiers by the summer of 1920. But his calculations changed when the Poles invaded Ukraine. With the Red Army now forced to turn its attention to their western front. Their southern. Front was clearly vulnerable.

So on June sixth, Wrangel launched a little military operation, moving troops, both by land and sea up into mainland Russia, aiming to move further into the region around the Don River. The Reds of course were so focused on their war with Poland, that the Whites got away with this. And for whatever marginal gain it offered him militarily, it cost him politically. Old patriotic officers like General Brusilov were appalled Wrangel would be so cynical as to launch an attack while Russia fought for its life against Poland. So as the Russians mobilized under patriotic banners in the spring and summer of 1920, it was easy to paint Wrangel as a tool of foreign powers fighting mostly for his own self aggrandizement at the cost of mother Russia herself. If he intended to win the civil war by playing politics, Wrangel was off to a terrible start.

Now when you step back and look at the big picture, it is pretty wild that even at this late hour, the Whites couldn’t muster a superior alternative to the red yoke. Because the red yoke was getting awfully uncomfortable, very heavy and often fatal. The policies the Communists had pursued since 1917 to survive the various crises they faced were becoming truly intolerable. Now granted, after six plus years of world war, civil war, and social revolution, it is not fair to lay the blame for the devastation of the Russian economy, or the suffering of the Russian people, solely at the feet of the Communists. But as the military emergencies passed in 1920, people did want to know what the Communists were going to do about all this. Were they going to continue the oppressive regime of war communism, or transition to some new policies? Because while the Reds had always represented the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils… is still evil. And so the Reds were going to have to start providing better answers than, hey, at least we’re better than the Whites.

The general collapse of the Russian economy since the beginning of World War I was vast and deep. The material devastation of its industry and infrastructure had taken Russia back practically to the days before the Witte Boom of the 1890s. Crisscrossing armies, political mismanagement, general unrest, chaos, sabotage, and accidents had left Russia’s industrial sector in complete ruins. Coal production was just 25% what it had been in 1913. Oil fields were operating at a third of their pre-war level. Mining operations for other vital resources were just a fraction of what they had been. The Allied naval blockades that were only just now beginning to let up had prevented the importation of technology, machinery, replacement parts, and a host of other necessary goods that Russia had relied upon to build up its industrial sector in the first place.

So factories that might otherwise have been running had to cut back on production due to a shortage of both supplies and fuel. Exacerbating all this was the devastation to the railroads: various armies, guerrilla partisans, and terrorists cells had destroyed bridges, torn up rail lines and blown up engines. This was on top of the virtual cessation of regular maintenance and upkeep. So the transportation networks of Russia were running at just a fraction of what they had been before the war. So even if there had been an abundance of fuel and materials, it was just extremely difficult to get anything anywhere else. So by the end of 1920, this all added up to the fact that industrial output in Russia was running at just 20% what it had been in 1913.

All of this meant the industrial working class of Russia, the political and economic base of Communism, was in terrible shape. Life in the cities was horrendous. The scarcity of food and fuel and the necessities of life was at least as bad as it had been in the lead up to the February Revolution. The Communists had continued to print paper rubles with reckless abandon, making wages paid in money effectively worthless. By the end of 1920, the purchasing power of wages for factory workers in Petrograd had fallen to less than 10% what they had been before World War I — a time, let’s not forget, when the cities were constantly on the verge of revolutionary insurrection. Now mostly workers now had to be paid with ration cards for food or allotment of physical goods that could then be bartered for other things, because Russia was now operating almost entirely on an in-kind economy. And that was even if you could get work to be paid for. With factories shutting down or reducing to part-time production, hundreds of thousands of workers were left underemployed or unemployed. Unable to survive in the city, they mostly decamped in the direction of their ancestral villages. Between October 1917 and August 1920, the population of Petrograd went from over 2 million to just 750,000. Moscow, meanwhile, lost 50% of its population over the same period. As you may recall, communism is supposed to come about when the unstoppable growth of modern industry turns all the rural peasants into urban proletarians. Well, after three years of Communist revolution in Russia, the exact opposite had happened. The urban proletariat was turning back into rural peasants, and this was going to be a problem for the communist regime in Moscow.

Those workers who remained workers, meanwhile, were getting awfully pissed at where the communist regime in Moscow was taking the revolution that had allegedly been waged on their behalf. The initial Bolshevik decrees of late 1917 had promised worker empowerment, control over factories, and a general democratization of management, but this had given way to a system of nationalized ownership, centralized management, and the re-introduction of hierarchical systems where the boss has made all the rules and the workers were supposed to just put their heads down and comply. Now for years all of this had been justified by the never-ending emergency of civil war, because everybody did understand that it would be worse if the Whites restored the capitalists to power. But now this threat was receding and the justification for mistreatment of the workers was receding with it. And so in 1920, labor unrest started to grow. In the first half of 1920, 3/4s of all Russian factories were hit by some kind of strike. And their angry resentment intensifie dwhen the Communist authorities greeted these strikes not with friendly understanding, but angry crackdowns. Striking workers were punished harshly. They were arrested. Their leaders were often shot by the Cheka, who in the eyes of the working classes were now becoming virtually indistinguishable from the tsar’s Okhrana — except perhaps that the Cheka was more brutal.

And the thing is, the Bolsheviks had never intended to implement the system of worker owned and operated factories that their declarations of 1917 seemed to indicate. And in retrospect, we can all see clearly that those declarations were mostly about securing support from the workers for the October Revolution. But some members of the Communist Party, particularly those around Trotsky, now laid plans to move beyond even the basic nationalization and centralization program. In Trotsky’s estimation, the one institution that had really shined over the past several years was the Red Army. Trotsky believed that the military might now serve as the model for the economy as a whole; that if they wanted to avoid capitalist trappings like wages and markets and profit to drive economic production, that a good alternative might be adopting the methods, discipline and organization of the army. Trotsky firmly believed that had the Red Army continued to rely on volunteers to fill its ranks — an army-wide democracy to make decisions — that they would have lost the civil war. That while the move to forced conscription, professionalization, and iron discipline may not have been popular, it had been the thing that brought them victory.

So now Trotsky envisioned a similar move in the civilian economy. He wanted to make the central government akin to a general staff planning campaigns and battles, and organizing the people and to companies and brigades and divisions to carry out orders. Trotsky envisioned the militarization of the economy in quite literal terms: if shoes needed to be manufactured or railroads built or timber cut down, then Soviet leaders could draw up a plan to go win these battles on what was now referred to as ‘the economic front.’ So as the Red Army campaigns against Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin wound down at the beginning of 1920, Trotsky reorganized soldiers who were on the verge of demobilization into what were called labor armies. The first labor army was formed in January 1920, the second labor army formed in February. They were put to work chopping timber, repairing railroads, procuring food, all under strict military discipline.

Trotsky’s plans, however, were not universally embraced by his fellow comrades, and indeed a growing number sympathized with the workers, who were, after all, supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the socialist revolution, and instead seemed to be as maltreated and exploited as ever, and were now going to be conscripted against their will into an economic war. The militarization scheme would only make things worse. Would a justified strike be marked down as disobeying orders? Would somebody who slept in for work be considered a desert, her and shot on sight? This was all crazy. So a group loosely organized itself into what we now call the Workers’ Opposition, those who wanted to defend the proletariat as human beings, as workers, rather than as some abstract entity that justified the Communist regime. As a practical objective, the Workers’ Opposition focused on maintaining the independence and autonomy of labor unions. Now, leaders like Trotsky now treated unions as an anachronisms — they were necessary under capitalism to organize the workers and grow power. But now that the Communist Party was in power, and they were the party of the workers, unions were unnecessary. They should in fact be subordinated to the state, because the state was after all run by the party of the workers. Now, intellectually, this all sounds very neat, but those Communist Party members who had come from the working classes rather than from the intelligentsia were not so convinced. A guy called Alexander Shliapnikov, who had risen as a labor leader in Petrograd’s Vyborg district to become the first commissar of Labor, was at the forefront of this movement. He was joined by Sergei Medvedev, who had started working in factories as a teenager back before the revolution of 1905, and then at the beginning of 1921 they were joined by Alexandra Kollontai, who was not exactly working class, but who had become a leading critic inside the inner circle of the Communist Party against the kind of authoritarian bureaucracy that appeared to be setting in. The Workers’ Opposition plan to fight tooth and nail to prevent all of this from becoming permanent.

Now, if the workers in the city were getting disillusioned with the Communists, the peasants out in rural Russia were already well past furious. They had been enduring forced requisitioning for years, and as the wars continued and the economy collapsed, things only got worse. Confrontations between peasants and the food detachments were often bitter and bloody. Soldiers ransacked villages, abusing men, women, and children. They held family members for ransom until withheld grain was produced. This often led the peasants to simply stop working the fields to produce anything more than what they needed for their basic survival, because the food detachments were only supposed to be carting off their surpluses. If they didn’t make surpluses, there wouldn’t be anything to cart off. This contributed to a general collapse in the agricultural sector, paralleling the collapse in the industrial sector. By 1920, the amount of land that was being harvested in Russia had dropped to about 60% of what it had been prior to World War I. Now general chaos, death, famine, and crisscrossing armies had done their bit to drive so much land out of cultivation, but with the realities of war communism leaving the peasants without any incentive whatsoever to grow more food than they absolutely needed, they just stopped doing it.

This unfortunately caused even worse problems. The Communists now took it for granted that the peasants were deliberately hiding their excess grain, and so they set their demands according. So though, yes, the peasants did absolutely hide food and fodder, in the big picture, food detachments were now coming in and calling surplus things that were not actually surplus. It was just the food they needed to live on. Lenin later admitted as much, and said, “The essence of war communism was that we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses, and sometimes not only the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasant needed for feed. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the workers.”

So obviously the leadership in Moscow considers this all regrettable but necessary; the peasants considered it infuriating and cruel. And so they started fighting back. In 1918, roughly 2000 food requisitioners were killed by angry peasants. In 1919, that number grew to 5000. By 1920, it had grown to 8,000, and general revolt was very much in the air.

Contributing to the peasant anger was the Communist response to the agricultural shortfalls. And that was the introduction of collective farms. Now we are not yet to the truly infamous collectivization process, but as we’ve previously discussed, the Bolsheviks had always been aiming for nationalization of all the land, and centralized administration of large industrial farms. They believed that was the future of post-revolutionary Russia. Their adoption of the SR land program, which called for giving the land directly to the peasants, had always been a temporary program to win peasant support in the wake of the October Revolution. Lenin absolutely admitted as much at the time. Now, initially the peasants very much took possession of the land in their neighborhoods, but as the Communist Party found its footing, and the Soviet regime entrenched itself a bit, they started holding back certain estates, and reorganizing them to run as collective farms, often worked by those unemployed laborers who were fleeing the cities. By December 1920, there were 16,000 state run farms encompassing nearly 10 million acres of land, with 1 million people working them. All of this was an affront to the local peasants, who expected and demanded to take that land over.

In 1920, the low grade resistance and skirmishing started blowing up into much bigger rebellions. Hundreds of little local uprisings broke out across Soviet territory. In Ukraine, around the Volga River, over in Western Siberia, down in the Caucuses. It really looks like as soon as the peasants were confident that the Whites were gone and no longer threatened to overthrow the Revolution completely, that it was safe to start resisting the Communists, to start fighting over what post-revolutionary Russia ought to look like. And as we’ve seen before, they often rose up under banners like “Soviets without Communism.” But always and everywhere, they demand it an end to the forest requisitioning and the food detachments. Moderate demands were for a regularly assessed tax, with the peasants then allowed to trade or sell whatever surplus was left over. More radical demands were for the complete overthrow of the Communists. In plenty of places, the rebranding of the Bolsheviks as the Communists had never been fully appreciated, and so they would rise up shouting things like “long live the Bolsheviks, death to the Communists!” because they believed they were two separate groups — that the Bolsheviks had given them land, and now these treacherous Communists were trying to take it away.

The most immediately threatening of these peasant uprisings broke out in the Tambov region Southeast of Moscow. This is the spot I mentioned a few episodes back that was so alienated by their treatment at the hands of the Whites in 1919 that the locals offered the Whites no support against the Reds, even though they were going to launch a huge uprising against the Reds just a year later.

Well, here we are, it’s a year later.

The uprising started in August 1920, when food detachments came around demanding allotments that would leave the locals with just about 10% of what they would actually need to survive. When the Red soldiers got violent and beat an old man to death in front of an entire village, the villagers got real mad. They were really, really mad because the grain that they had been abused into handing over was then taken to a nearby train depot, where it sat… and rotted, on account of how crummy the train system had become. As the uprising in Tambov spread, old guard SRs started coming out of the woodwork to take over. The most important of these leaders was Alexander Antonov, a radical Left SR who had been driven underground after his party’s break with the Bolsheviks, and who had prosecuted a low grade terrorist campaign ever since. He had been sentenced to death by the Communists, and had attained a certain cult status as he managed to continuously outwit, outfox, and escape his Communist Pursuers. As there were only about 3000 total Red Army soldiers garrisoning the whole province, Antonov was able to effectively overwhelm both them and the initial reinforcements sent in to support them. By the time the fall of 1920 arrived, Antonov’s insurrectionary army was numbering in the tens of thousands, and they were waging a full-blown and highly effective guerrilla war. Their movement would still be growing unchecked by the end of 1920, and they organized a political apparatus to go along with it called the League of Working Peasants. This league issued a manifesto in December 1920 that demanded not just free trade and free movement of goods, and of course the end of grain requisitioning but also a litany of SR inspired ideas, points that the Bolsheviks had once upon a time readily endorsed, but had long since abandoned. For example, the convening of a democratically elected constituent assembly. Worker control of factories. Self-determination for all nationalities of the former Russian Empire. Guarantees of political and civil liberties. And of course, the full implementation of the law on socialization of the land — which is to say, confirming the land decree of 1917 as the law of the land, and abandoning nationalization, centralization, and collectivization.

Antanov’s rebels in Tambov fought under the Red flag, and they clearly posed a major threat to the Communists going into 1921, because unlike the Whites, they offered an extremely popular socialist program for the future of Russia, one that might tend to make the Communists the greater of two evils.

To wrap this up today, we’ll go back to where we started with Pyotr Wrangel’s little White Army hovering around down in the south. Now, since this is about to be the end of them, I don’t want to leave without noting one last time how extremely funny it is that even with all of this popular anger against the Communists, people being so angry at them that they are going into open rebellion, that none of those insurrectionary groups even considered joining forces with the Whites. They just wouldn’t do it. Because even now, the Reds may be bad, but the Whites were even worse. And so Wrangel’s little push up out of Crimea never went anywhere or accomplished anything. His strategy to win the war politically did not so much fall on deaf ears, as on the ears of people who could still hear loud and clear what the Whites represented. And so, he garnered no popular support. Nobody new joined him; nobody old, rejoined him. And so as the Polish-Soviet War cooled off in October 1920, the Red Army could turn its attentions south with an overwhelming vengeance. They were able to turn 130,000 men against just 35,000 Whites, and easily push them back into Crimea. The frontal brunt of this Red attack was joined by Nestor Makhno’s Black Army, even though up in Ukraine, the Reds and the Blacks were already at each other’s throats again; that is how much they collectively hated the Whites. So after falling back, the Whites held the geographically defensible isthmus into Crimea, but Wrangel had concluded the one shot he had of emerging victorious in the civil war had now been fired, and it had missed.

The defense of Crimea was entirely about buying time for his people to evacuate. In late October and early November 1920, 150,000 refugees congregated at several Crimean ports and boarded more than a hundred British, French, and Russian ships, most of them bound for Constantinople. After everyone got away, Wrangel himself boarded a ship on November the 11th, a ship poetically dubbed the General Kornilov. And like Denikin before him, Wrangel departed Russia for permanent exile. The last White Army had given up.

A sad epilogue to this story is that General Brusilov, who had been genuinely irritated at Wrangel for attacking during the war against Poland, and was himself living proof that the Reds accepted patriotic defections, the Communists distributed flyers in Crimea over Brusilov’s signature telling officers if they did not evacuate but stayed in Russia and joined the Reds, that they would be fine. They would be integrated into the army. A couple of hundred did so — they believed what was written in the flyer — but when the Red Army showed up, they were all arrested and summarily shot. One last little atrocity in a civil war defined by mutual atrocities.

So going into the winter of 1920-1921, the military threats to Soviet Russia were really receding into the rearview mirror. And the main threat to the Communists was now from all of those worker and peasant uprisings. Now with the military emergencies over, something was going to have to give, but unfortunately it would not give soon enough. And next week, the greatest threat to the Communists would not be their ideological and class enemies, nor even the peasants and workers who had supported the revolution without ever being card carrying Bolsheviks, but instead, from their closest friends and most steadfast allies. No single group had been more important to the Bolsheviks, more stalwart in their support, who boasted more impeccable revolutionary credentials than the sailors of Kronstadt.

But next week, their patience too will finally snap. And they will break, angry and disillusioned into revolt.