This week’s episode is brought to you by Chime. It’s a new year, which means it’s time to leave behind the things that don’t serve you, like overdraft fees. When your checking account balance is running low, the last thing you need is an overdraft fee. But with Chime, an award-winning app and debit card, you can save that harder and paper without paying overdraft fees. Eligible members can overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals with absolutely no overdrafts. So make your first good decision of the new year, and join over 10 million people using Chime. Sign up only takes two minutes and does not affect your credit score. So get started at chime.com/revolutions. That again: chime.com/revolutions.

Banking services provided by an debit card issued by the Bank Corp Bank or Stride Bank NA, members FDIC. Eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply; overdraft only applies to debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. Limits start at twenty dollars and may be increased up to two hundred dollars by Chime; see chime.com/spotme.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Better Help online therapy. Relationships take work. A lot of us will drop anything to go help someone we care about. We’ll go out of our way to treat other people well, but how often do we give ourselves the same treatment. This month, better Help online therapy wants to remind you to take care of your most important relationship, the one you have with yourself. I can speak from personal experience that therapy helps bring out, define, and address all the conflicting issues lurking around in your subconscious as vague emotional signals influencing how we think about ourselves without us really realizing it. Once we can start to identify and name those things — which therapy helps with — they become infinitely more manageable. So Better Help is an online therapy that offers video. Phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist so you don’t have to see anyone on camera if you don’t want to. It’s much more affordable than in-person therapy, and you can be matched with a therapist in under 24 hours. Give it a try and see why over two million people have used Better Help online therapy. This podcast is sponsored by Better Help, and Revolutions listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhealth.com/revolutions. That’s betterhealth.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.86: The Communist Soviets

Before we get started this week, I have some fun, cool news. Background 2019, I started thinking about the kinds of things I might like to do in addition to podcasting and writing books. One of my favorite things is going around doing book events, performing a talk in front of a live audience, and so doing more live events became an obvious future path to consider. I, in fact, started making plans to write and rehearse material that I could take out on the road, but then of course, COVID blew all that up, and we retreated to our bunkers.

Well, now the dead dream is going to go live, and I’m here to announce that on Saturday, April 30th, 2022, I will debut a live monologue at the backroom at Colectivo in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is going to be a live performance. It is all new material, it’s nothing anybody has heard before, just between you and me, I’m not even done writing it yet. But if I had to gesture at where it’s coming from or what to expect, I would point to Episode 7.13: The Spectre of the French Revolution, where I explained conflicting reactions to the Revolutions of 1848 by mapping out everyone’s conflicting interpretations of the French Revolution. Also, I would point to those first nine episodes of the Russian Revolution series, where I delved into socialist and anarchist philosophy. Plus, I would merge all of that with that supplemental streets of Paris personal episode I wrote about my time living in France. If you enjoyed those episodes and those types of episodes, that’s where I’m coming from here, the reflective space that mixes history, philosophy, biography, and storytelling, in an attempt to make sense of what’s going on around here. Where we’ve come from, where we are at now, where we’re going.

So I’m going to debut this thing on Saturday, April 30th, 2022, at the backroom at Colectivo in Milwaukee; tickets go on sale today. There is a link to it in the show notes, and there are a limited number of tickets available because you do have to come out for the live show to see it. And I really hope that you do, because I am really looking forward to doing it. So I will see you all Saturday, April 30 at Colectivo in Milwaukee, and if everything goes well and people come out and everybody enjoys it, then I’ll get to take it out on the road. But I’m also never going to stop podcasting, so let’s also get back to podcasting.

Last time we talked about the German Revolution and the failed Spartacus Uprising of January 1919. Now, I’ve got that uprising representing the extremely brief high watermark for the kind of European revolution the Russian Bolsheviks had long been counting on, but which then failed and receded as quickly as it developed. But I don’t want to oversell that, and it’s only in hindsight that we can recognize the Spartacus Uprising as a weather vane telling us which way the winds are blowing. Lots of revolutionary conflicts broke out in the wake of World War I from Ireland, Hungary, to Turkey and radical communist groups are always in the mix. But those groups always wind up being small and isolated and working at the periphery of events, and in places like Bavaria or Hungary, where they do briefly seize power, it’s not long before they are ousted from power. With the clarity of hindsight, we know that the revolutionary narrative after World War I is that conservative forces — which now include moderate socialist parties like the German SPD or the British Labor Party — will successfully forge a post-war political and economic order that has no place for radical communist revolution. And we find the essential features of this new order defined by the victorious allies at the peace talks, which are presently commencing in Paris; they start on January the 18th, 1919, and which Communist Russia was pointedly excluded from.

Hoping to foster, foment, and unite the forces of Communist revolution against the bourgeois international order that was coming together in Paris, the Russian Communist Party issued an invitation at the end of January 1919 for Communist aligned groups throughout the world to send delegates to Moscow to form a new International. A third International, to replace the dead and buried Second International, which as we know committed political suicide in the summer of 1914. This new Communist International would be committed to true proletarian world revolution and set themselves not just against the forces of imperialist capitalism, but also the weak willed, moderate Social Democrats who appeased, rather than fought, the forces of imperialist capitalism

Drafted by Trotsky, this invitation read, “The congress must establish a common fighting organ for the purpose of maintaining permanent coordination and systematic leadership of the movement, a center of the Communist International:, subordinating the interests of the movement in each country to the common interests of the international revolution.” Trotsky said they would reject false bourgeois democracy, which he called “that hypocritical form of rule by the financial oligarchy.” The invitation declared the Communist intention to completely overturn the capitalist world order and replace false bourgeois democracy with a system of Soviet style councils, composed of workers and peasants, not bankers and fat cats and sellouts.

So as the high priests of diplomacy negotiated with each other in Paris, about fifty Communist delegates representing roughly 20 countries gathered in Moscow on March the second, 1919 to found a new International this founding Congress was a fairly inauspicious event, as the delegates gathered in the Imperial Senate chamber in the Kremlin, they were seated on a hastily assembled collection of folding chair. As Allied forces had most access points into Russia blockaded, most of the delegates present were already residing in Russia when the invitation went out. Only nine delegates were able to show up from abroad. Most of the delegates were also from areas formerly under the umbrella of the Russian Empire. Though. There was a delegate each representing France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, two for Austria, and one delegate representing the Socialist Party of America. Credentials were extremely loose, and when these people initially gathered, it was not clear whether they were to plan a founding Congress of a new International, or whether they were the founding Congress of a new International. After some discussion and debate however, they decided nah, we are the founding Congress of the Third international, also known as the Communist International, which would be shorthanded down the road as the Comintern.

Most of the initial sessions of this founding Congress were taken up with defining the key differences between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Addressing the Congress on March 6, Trotsky said the principle task in fronting them was to prevent “toiling mankind to become the bond slaves of victorious world cliques, who under the firm name of the League of Nations, and aided by an “international” army and an “international” navy will here plunder and strangle some peoples and their cast crumbs to others, while everywhere and always shackling the proletariat.” Instead, he said, the proletariat of the world must fight to erect their own system built on the principle of worker Soviets. He said, “This irreplaceable organization of working class self rule, this organization of its struggle for, and later of its conquest of, state power. Through the medium of Soviets, the working class can save itself from decomposition, come to power most surely and easily in all countries where the Soviets are able to rally the majority of the toilers, exercise its sway over all spheres of the country’s economic and cultural life, as is the case at present in Russia.”

After declaring themselves to be the new Communist international, the delegates formed a standing executive committee chaired by Gregori Zinoviev to supervise the arduous task of exporting true communist revolution throughout the world.

But while Trotsky’s language at the founding of the Comintern was a panegyric to the Soviets, it was not at all clear that what he described was actually the case at present in Russia. By early 1919, there was a great deal of grumbling among both the Russian workers and the Russian peasants that the locally empowered Soviets that they had come together to form in 1917 were being co-opted by Communist party officials acting not in the interests of the workers and the peasants, but in the interests of… themselves. In fact, while the founding Congress of the Comintern met in Moscow to plan how to export the Soviet system abroad, peasants in the Volga region rose up in the first major popular rebellion against the Soviet regime at home.

Now, the Volga River had been on the front lines of the civil war all through 1918, and in the spring of 1919, the local Communist officials and Red Army leaders prepared for an invasion through the Ural mountains by the military forces, which had coalesced in western Siberia under Admiral Kolchak. With this attack looming, Communist leaders and red army officers put the local population in the Volga region under enormous pressure to produce food, supplies, and soldiers. Armed detachments fanned out to expropriate grain to feed the army and to conscript eligible young men to fight in the army. Whenever these armed detachments came into a village, resistance to their demands were met with a mostly unsupervised campaign of threats, abuses, torture, execution, and rape. This, of course, infuriated the local population.

On March 3rd, 1919, a squad of Red soldiers tried to requisition more grain than was even stipulated in their orders from a small town in the province of Samarra. The enraged population mobbed the soldiers, disarmed them, and depose the local Communist representatives. When additional soldiers were sent in to bring these peasants to heel, they promptly mutinied and shot their own officers rather than attack the peasants, because they were mostly conscripted peasants themselves, and they were entirely sympathetic to the angry people. From this initial spark, flames of popular revolt fanned out across the Volga basin. And this all became known as the Chapan Rebellion, after the sheepskin winter coats worn by the local peasants.

Their collective demands were simple: they wanted an end to forced food requisitioning, forced conscription, and abuses by communist commissars issuing authoritarian directives. Far from opposing the Soviet regime, they actually sought to restore the kind of free elections to the local Soviets that had prevailed in 1917, but which had been steadily eroded and co-opted by the centralizing instincts of the Communists throughout 1918. In many cases, the rallying cry was “Soviets without Communists!” After a week and a half of spontaneously spreading insurrections, a huge portion of the Volga around Samarra and Simbirsk were in a state of acute anticommunist insurrection. And this was just as Admiral Kolchak’s White Armies were launching their attack aimed at precisely this location.

The spring offensive of the White Armies under Kolchak was not a little thing. Their military forces in Siberia had grown to number some hundred thousand men by the spring of 1919, and that sounds like a lot — and it was — but they were also spread out over thousands of miles of territory, and as with the Red Army, their numbers were enlarged by force conscription, which does not always produce the most reliable, committed soldiers. But still, in March 1919, they were a formidable army, especially because the British were dumping insane amounts of munitions at Vladivostok and then shipping it along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In the first six months of 1919, the British sent Kolchak’s forces:

• 1 million rifles
• 15,000 machine guns
• 700 field guns
• 800 million rounds of ammunition
• plus clothing and equipment for 500,000 men.

So while I do think it’s a mistake to overstate the role played by the Allied forces in the Russian Civil War, one should also never make the mistake of underestimating their role either. In the first week of March 1919, Kolchak’s army started advancing on three fronts: a Siberian army moved northwest out of Perm, aiming at linking up with anticommunist White forces based in Archangel; an army of Cossacks moved southwest towards Orenburg, which could open up links to General Denikin’s Volunteer Army in the south; and then in the middle, there was a western army that advanced through the Urals to the city of Ufa, aiming to descend on the Volga region presently engulfed in an anti-Red peasant revolt. The initial offensive launched in the first week of March was almost uniformly successful, and these White Armies advanced the frontlines 200 miles west without breaking a sweat. On March 16th, the western army took Ufa without a fight. The line from there to the Volga, and from there to Moscow, was an alarmingly straight shot.

But the Red forces rallied. And even with the Red Army buckling under the White offensive, local Cheka leaders in Simbirsk peeled off 13,000 troops to first suppress the Chapan rebels. With the White Army looming, the suppression of the peasants was carried out with swift and merciless brutality. It was scorched earth infernal columns type stuff: villages were burned, prisoners were rounded up and summarily executed, a quasi-prisoner of war concentration camp quickly became overcrowded, so they simply shot prisoners who couldn’t fit inside. The Red forces did not discern much between active combatant rebels and people who were simply caught in the middle. By the end of March 1919, they had stamped out the last pockets of resistance. In addition to the destruction of villages and property, it’s estimated the final death toll was somewhere around 10,000 people. So that was the fate of the first large coordinated peasant uprising against the communist regime. It would not be the last.

With Kolchak’s forces advancing towards the Volga, and the brutal suppression of the peasants ongoing, the Communist party convened their Eighth Party Congress in Moscow between March 18th and March 23rd. And for as much as there was angry complaining out there about how the Communists were running a one-party dictatorship, inside the party leadership, the main concern was that they had too little control, not too much. In early 1919, the Soviet system of government in Russia still defied the kind of centralized control that the party preferred, and there was no reliable mechanism to force some local soviet to adhere to decisions made by the All-Russian Executive Committee. But there was such a mechanism inside the party apparatus. Being a member of the Communist Party meant submitting to party discipline. You followed orders from those higher up in the party, or you got kicked out of the party. So, if the Communists staffed all the local committees, bureaucratic jobs, local offices with loyal Communist Party members, then those people could be told what to do not in their capacity as committee members or bureaucrats or public officials, but in their capacity as party members. The way to get a local soviet to align its policy to the national Soviet was to tell the Communist Party members in that local Soviet it is your job to align the local soviet with the national Soviet. And then you stash the national Soviet with a bunch of Communist Party members also under party discipline, and pretty soon the Communist Party, rather than the Soviet apparatus becomes the main source of power, policymaking, and ultimate authority.

So it was here around the Eighth Party Congress that the Communists started to reorient how they went about their business. To guide the party, they created a couple of very important new committees designed specifically to make quicker decisions than the large and somewhat cumbersome Central Committee could. These were known as the Political Bureau and the Organizational Bureau, or as they are better known, the Politburo and the Orgburo. The Politburo would decide policy, and the Orgburo would be in charge of distributing the human resources necessary to carry out the policies as decided by the Politburo. The new Politburo would have just five voting members: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, and a guy called Nikolai Krestinsky. As political centralization and the implementation of state policy started to run increasingly through the party machine rather than the official public state apparatus, the Politburo became an enormously important seat of power. Because in addition to abstract policymaking, they also had power over public appointments, promotions, advancements, who would be hired, who would be fired. The power of patronage now wielded by members of the Politburo and the Orgburo would give senior members of the Party enormous amounts of influence and personal power. Client patron networks started growing up inside the Party underneath people like Trotsky or Zinoviev, who regularly appointed people because they were loyal allies who could be trusted not to stab their political patron in the back. Stalin, of course, became the master of this, and the first to truly recognize that being the one to control the organizational chart of the Communist Party was the key to ultimate power in Russia.

Because of all this, the very nature of the Communist Party started to change. Now, ever since the October Revolution, membership in the Communist Party had always come with perks and privileges. In Lenin’s opinion, those who work tirelessly round the clock on behalf of the revolution deserved a few perks and privileges. But over the course of 1918, and then really starting in 1919, the character of the business started to change. Before the Revolution, joining the Bolsheviks meant voluntarily joining an utterly fringe party of fanatics tilting at revolutionary windmills. You had to believe in what they were doing and want what they wanted. The Bolshevik Party before October 1917 was not a magnet for careerists and social climbers and self-interested opportunists. But after more than a year in power, and with the Communist Party itself now taking on larger importance, that’s exactly what it became. Party membership meant access to food and better lodgings in a time of acute scarcity and hardship. If you were a Party member, you got higher salaries, special rations, subsidized or free housing in hotels and apartments, access to exclusive shops, doctors, and railroad cars, and the Communist Party had soon accumulated all the standard issue trappings of any elite ruling class. And because of this, they now attracted the kind of people who were interested in those trappings, not the idealistic political ambitions of the true believers.

And of course, with all this elevated status and perks and privileges came opportunities for graft and corruption; bribery, theft, embezzlement, misallocation of funds, sale of public property for private gain, requisition of goods for personal gain became endemic within the Party. Party officials, for example, became the clearinghouse for the ever-growing black market. Whatever they had better or more exclusive access to — tobacco, alcohol, fuel, housing — went up for sale on the black market. They use their public roles as inspectors or managers or bureaucrats or local officials to exploit every imaginable opportunity for graft and self-dealing.

The people who joined Cheka seem particularly interested in living this kind of pirate lifestyle. They would go out on patrol to squeeze the bourgeoisie on behalf of the revolution and use their almost unlimited power to extract money, jewels, and other valuables from victims who had no recourse, no place to complain to. And as I said, the Russian Communists are not historically unique in the fact that they abused power that they recently acquired, lots of people do that. But neither were they uniquely immune to all of this on account of their professed socialist principles. They were, after all, under it all, very human.

Throughout 1919, there were increasing complaints about all this, and it was well-known that the Communist Party members were increasingly living high on the hog at everyone else’s expense. And if you wanted to get ahead in life, or maybe just get a few extra perks, you would join the Party. Not because you were ideologically committed to revolutionary socialism, but because you wanted a better life, however corrupt or exploitive it might be in. February 1919, Maxine Gorky wrote, “Only the commissars lead a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people in order to pay for their courtesans and their unsocialist luxuries.”

In July 1919, an old Bolshevik party member wrote despairingly to Lenin, “We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them. The old comradely spirit in the Party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one man rule in which the party boss runs everything. Bribe taking has become universal; without it, our communist Comrades would simply not survive.”

Then in September 1919, Adolph Joffe, who had been a Brest-Litovsk negotiator, and then ambassador to Germany, wrote Trotsky saying, “There is enormous inequality, and one’s material position largely depends on one’s post in the party. You’ll agree this is a dangerous situation. I have been told for example old Bolsheviks are terrified at being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel. And other privileges connected with this. The old party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion.”

Now all of this is partly, for example, why a peasant rebellion is breaking out in the Volga. For all the lofty claims about the superior freedoms of the Soviet Republic issued at the founding Congress of the Comintern, many people in Russia and the adjacent nationalities did not see the communist Party as apostles of liberty, equality, or socialism, but as gangsters from a mafia. Communist Party officials were officially in the business of eradicating economic exploitation and spreading universal brotherhood, but unofficially, they seem to be in the business of seizing whatever they could lay their hands on at bayonet point, and then reselling it for a tidy profit on the black market.

So, you can obviously see where this is all headed. Admiral Kolchak’s White Armies coming over from Siberia are now going to be seen as the great liberators from the mean old Red Communists, who said they were cool, but who turned out to be exploitive jerks. The local peasantry who had just risen up against the Communists will now obviously join the White Armies in droves; their forces will grow exponentially, and they will easily roll on to Moscow and Petrograd.

But, ha ha, that’s not really what’s going to happen. Because the Communists were not unique at all in anything they were doing, and frankly, Kolchak’s government — if it could even be called that — was even worse. The city of Omsk, where he made his headquarters, was an absolute hotbed of corruption and vice. Everyone in town was guzzling vodka and snorting cocaine. Prostitution was rampant, gambling was everyone’s favorite pastime. All those supplies that were being shipped in by the British? They were gathered up by well-connected officials in the Kolchak regime and resold on… the black market! Cigarettes, uniforms, boots, food, coats, whatever. This was up to and including selling things on the black market to buyers representing the Red Army. General Knox, the senior British military official attached to Kolchak, was jokingly referred to as the quartermaster general of the Red Army. And at one point, Trotsky sent a note to Knox teasingly thanking him for helping equip the Red Army. In the coming battles, many Red Army soldiers marched out wearing British manufactured uniforms.

Now beyond the corrupt greed of the people in Omsk, the White forces made themselves hated wherever they went. Everything I’ve just said about Red Army abuses applies just as much to the White Armies. Their armies were also built on force conscription at gunpoint or bayonet point. With their supply lines being so long, they too had to requisition food from the locals. They too used abuse, torture, and executions to extract food, supplies, and anything else they could carry off. When people resisted, villages were burned and people were shot. On market days, White Army cavalry men would come around and conscript young men into the army. Many of these conscripted soldiers promptly deserted as quickly as they could, taking with them even more uniforms and equipment in weaponry over to the side of the Reds. So, in all those respects — the abuse of the peasantry basically — White or Red, it was all the same. But in the final analysis, the Reds still wound up looking like the lesser of two evils. This was because Kolchak’s forces were viewed fundamentally as restorationists in their aims. Because even if they weren’t fighting for the Romanovs or anything like that, they absolutely refused to recognize the revolution in land that had taken place since 1917. So wherever White Armies went, officers and officials tried to reinstate the old economic order, and especially west of the Ural mountains they threatened to take away the land that had been taken over by villages and give it back to the previous owners. And so for as much as the local peasantry, didn’t like the Red commissars, they were still preferable to the Whites. And all throughout the areas where Kolchak’s White Armies were nominally in control, especially across Siberia from the Ural Mountains all the way to the Pacific, they dealt with peasant uprisings and all manner of resistance. This especially took the form of a tax on their supply lines by guerilla units. The Whites responded with more indiscriminate violence — more village burning, more summary executions, and as so often happens in guerrilla wars of this type, it was very difficult for the Whites to tell the difference between active fighters and mere civilians, and so people were just sort of killed at random, which made the Whites even more unpopular.

So theoretically, I think there was an opening in 1919 for the Whites to come in and offer themselves as, like, a less brutal and less corrupt alternative to the Red Communists. But instead they turned out to be equally as brutal and corrupt, and then added a cherry on top, which was they were going to take the land away from the peasants and give it back to the old gentry. There’s a reason Kolchak is going to go nowhere and achieve nothing politically: because at least with the communists, all the abuse and corruption came with the vague promise that it was all leading to a better future, whereas with Kolchak and his gang, the abuses went along with nothing more than a promise to restore a despised past.

So in late April 1919, just as everything seemed to be going wrong for the Reds between these peasant uprisings and Kolchak’s offensive, they regrouped, and launched a very successful counter offensive. In the south, superior Red Army forces crushed the Cossacks near Orenburg, which opened up the overextended middle of Kolchak’s forces to a flanking movement up into their underbelly. On April 25th, the Supreme High Command of the Red Army ordered a general advance that progressed through May, and Kolchak’s forces were forced to fall back and fall back again. On June 9th, the Reds retook Ufa, and on June 13th, Kolchak admitted defeat and ordered a general retreat. This included his army in the northwest that had so far faced very little resistance and had made contact with potential allies coming out of Archangel, and in fact, they seem poised to threaten Petrograd, but they too had to pull back because their supply and communication lines were now exposed. The Reds proceeded to advance across the Urals. And Kolchak’s demoralized forces, most of whom had never wanted to fight for him in the first place deserted in droves. He was soon down from a high of a 100,000 soldiers to just 15,000. This was all the result not so much of military mistakes per se as political ineptitude and an inability to properly distinguish himself in any positive way from what the reds were offering.

Kolchak’s failed spring offensive represents the first of three failed offensives by the Whites in 1919. And next week, we’re going to move on to the second of these, a summer offensive by General Denikin from southern Russia and Ukraine. One of the big reasons the Whites wind up losing the civil war — and spoiler alert, obviously the Whites are going to lose the civil war — is because they couldn’t coordinate their actions. As we’ll see next week, General Denikin is going to start his campaign in July 1919 at almost precisely the moment Kolchak’s forces have been pushed back into Siberia never to be heard from again. And then there’s going to be a third push from forces based in Estonia that comes in the autumn of 1919, which gets going just as Denikin’s campaign is failing. Had these three offensive waves of 1919 come simultaneously instead of successively, the Whites might have won the civil war. But they didn’t. And so they didn’t.

Now, before I go this week, I do want to just remind you that tickets are now, right now, as we speak on sale to see me on April the 30th at the backroom at Colectivo in Milwaukee, and I would encourage you to move quickly, because once the show is sold out, it’s sold out, and I don’t want you to miss it.