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Episode 10.21: The Socialist Revolutionaries

Last time, we talked through the liberal, or at least liberalish, tradition of 19th century Russia. However thin the thread, when Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended the throne in 1894, there was a group inside the intelligentsia who hoped the arrival of a young, new monarch would bring liberal political reform: the constitution, representative government, freedom of speech and the press and assembly, something resembling the rule of law, economic modernization, social improvements. And they were as grossed out as any radical by the chauvinistic, authoritarian, and backwards triptych of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. It embarrassed them abroad, and humiliated them at home.

But those liberals were always going to want to stop well short of the places more radical leaders wanted to take Russia in the 1890s, whether these new groups of Marxist Social Democrats, or the groups we’re going to talk about today: the neo-Narodist Socialist Revolutionaries, or as everyone calls them, the SRs.

To begin this discussion, we need to back up to the late 1870s. In 1879, the terrorism question divided the once unified Land and Liberty party into two factions: the small minority who followed Plekhanov into the splinter group Black Repartition, which then wound up breaking with Narodist ideology entirely when they formed the explicitly Marxist Emancipation of Labor Group in 1884. But the majority of Land and Liberty had done what? That’s right, they embraced the terrorist campaign, redubbed themselves People’s Will, and went off to kill the tsar, finally succeeding in 1881. But what happened to them after that? Well, as I mentioned, somewhat obliquely in episodes 10.16 and 10.17, the People’s Will organization was almost immediately smashed and scattered by the vengeful fist of the Okhrana, the tsar’s new secret police service. The members of People’s Will were hunted, arrested, tried by military tribunals, and then either hanged or exiled. Those who slipped this roundup were forced into exile, taking off for Switzerland or France or Britain. A few stayed behind and dug in even harder on terrorist campaigning, but their old networks were so disrupted, and the repressive hand of the new Tsar Alexander the Third was so heavy, that it was nearly impossible to meet, publish, or plan. So their great prize for successfully killing the tsar… was the destruction of their party.

Not only were the 1880s a low point for radical Narodism in terms of literal personnel and party organization, but it also seemed like their ideas and theories were dead too. Because what was the main organizing principle behind People’s Will in those critical years, leading up to the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second? Well, first, while they fought for the peasants and wanted to base future Russian socialism in the rural villages, the peasantry was at present too hopelessly smothered by the repressive imperial government to rise up en masse. It would only be after the political war against the tsarist state was won that the peasants could be freed and rural socialism could flourish.

Now, one of the main arguments in favor of an assassination campaign carried out by an elite cadre of revolutionary terrorists was that it would deal a fatal, physical, and psychic blow to the forces of political despotism. On the physical level, this was very much a kill the head and the body dies kind of thing. But on the psychic level, on an almost cosmic level, assassinating the tsar would prove that the tsar was just a man after all, not some divine demigod, and the superstitious peasants would then be roused from their fearful and superstitious stupor.

So, on both a practical and a spiritual level, killing the tsar was supposed to simultaneously cause the imperial apparatus to fall apart, and trigger the people to rise up. And then, People’s Will did it. They killed the tsar. And what happened? Pretty much the opposite. The repressive imperial police state only spread wider and drove deeper. And as for the peasants, they did nothing. They were seemingly as inert and apathetic as ever. Certainly there was no mass insurrection accompanying the death of Tsar Alexander the Second. Kind of disproving, and discrediting, all the strategic tactical and ideological assumptions that People’s Will had been operating under.

That leads to what might seem like a pretty straight historical story for the evolution of Russian radicalism at the end of the 19th century. The nihilism of the 1860s had led to the mass mobilization Going to the People of 1874, which failed, giving way to the elite terrorism of People’s Will, which was exposed as fatally flawed in 1881, paving the way for the exciting new brand of Russian Marxism to pick up the fallen torch in the 1890s. And this is what happened? Well, yes and no. Everything I just said definitely led a new generation of radicals to be drawn to the Marxist ideas being disseminated by the Emancipation of Labor Group, because Marxist analysis was going to make a lot of sense against the backdrop of the rapid industrialization of the Witte system.

But Narodism did not die in the 1880s. It simply went into hibernation. And when it emerged from its slumber in the 1890s, it still found a lot of enthusiastic adherents, not for the least reason that even with the rapid industrialization of the Witte system, the empire was still overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, and peasant.

The revival of the fortunes of Narodism can be traced to two coinciding events in the early 1890s. The first was the famine of 1891-1892 that we talked about in Episode 10.18. Bad harvests led to frightening scarcity and then outright famine, which resulted in the deaths of upwards of 500,000 people. The government was simply unprepared and unequipped to deal with the crisis. And while People’s Will theory had been, if we kill the tsar, maybe the people will lose faith in the tsar, there was now a new revelation: if the tsar lets the people die, then maybe the people will lose faith in the tsar.

The experience of mass starvation caused by bad luck but exacerbated by incompetent, indifferent, or outright malevolence by the tsarist imperial apparatus, it was a real blow to the regime’s perceived legitimacy. Old Narodist veterans of the 1870s working among the peasants in the 1890s remarked how much more open and receptive they were to radical critiques of the government. So Going to the People had failed in 1874, but suddenly, it was maybe an idea whose time had come by 1894.

And speaking of those Narodist veterans, they are the other coinciding event of the early 1890s. Many of those who had been tried and convicted of various crimes back in the 1870s, like those convicted in the famous Trial of the 193, were now completing their sentences of Siberian exile and returning home by the early 1890s. Then in his benevolent generosity, when Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended the throne, he marked the occasion by granting wide reaching amnesties and pardons that invited former political prisoners to rejoin society. Now, sure, many of those who returned were like, okay, that’s all in the past, Siberia sucked, I have paid for my youthful follies, and I would like to just go home now, please. But plenty of those returning had changed not one jot. And they had spent their years either in prison or in exile simply biding their time. And because they had gone into isolation, holding old Narodist ideas, they came out of that isolation, holding those same old ideas. They missed the memo that their ideas had been discredited, that Narodism and the rural peasants were old news, the future belonged to the Marxists and the urban proletariat. Now they were not insensible to the fact that conditions in the 1890s were not what they had been in the 1870s, and that past experience and new ideas would mean some of the program would need to be adapted or revised, but still. They had no intention of being merely a stepping stone on the road to Marxist proletarian revolution.

Okay. So what we are up to specifically in this week’s episode, is setting up the formation of the coming Socialist Revolutionary Party in January of 1902. So what we’re going to spend the rest of today talking about are the four distinct groups who would start coming together independently of each other in the mid 1890s, who would go on to form the core of that Socialist Revolutionary Party.

These groups formed organically and separately, often starting with one or two people deciding one day to get a little group together, maybe to educate the workers or the peasants, maybe to offer reading material and discussion space for students, maybe to try to link with like-minded members of the intelligentsia. These groups were self-starting and self-funded. They were often a mix of old veterans and young upstarts. They were never very big — seven people here, a dozen people there, fifty at most — but what they all had in common is that they were working in the old Narodist tradition. Well, that, and they were all destined to feed into the SRs.

So the first group we’ll talk about is called the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries, but they will be better known to history by the shorthand name, the Northern Union. And just as a general warning as we go forward not just for today, but for the rest of the series, all these people are going to be calling themselves a Socialist Revolutionary Union, and the Workers Union of Revolutionary socialists, and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, as opposed to the Revolutionary Socialist Party, as opposed to the Party for Revolutionary Socialism, as opposed to the Revolutionary Party of Socialists. Don’t worry too much about the names just now, just try to follow along with the ideas and the people who are participating in the movement.

So anyway, what becomes known as the Northern Union formed in 1896 in the southwestern city of Saratov, but moved its headquarters to Moscow the following year. And just to remind you of the scale here, the Northern Union at its peak is only going to have about 30 full fledged members. The organizing force behind the Northern Union was Andrei Argunov, who will be on the Central Committee of the SRs come the Revolution of 1905. Born in 1866, he was too young to have been a part of the original run of People’s Will terrorism, but in his early twenties, Argunov hooked up with the few 1880s holdouts in Tomsk, and then spent the early 1890s circulating among student groups, which led to the more formal organization of the Northern Union a few years later. When it was formed, the Northern Union represented the most unreconstructed ideological continuity with the now defunct People’s Will. Argunov would write a declaration of principles for the group in 1898 called Our Tasks, which set out their political goals and tactical approach for the revolution. Both friends and rivals alike noted that it was cribbed almost entirely from similar People’s Will declarations in the 1870s. The argument was that though the peasants, the people, would be the principle beneficiaries of the revolution, they were not yet ready to carry out the revolution themselves. They would not be able to overcome their poverty, ignorance, and apathy until the tsarist apparatus had been brought down. And the best way to attack and topple that apparatus was through violent terrorist assassination campaigns. Before there can be a social or economic revolution, there must first be a political revolution, carried out by diehard radicals inside the intelligentsia.

So this, I mean, all of this, I just said five minutes ago when I was talking about what People’s Will believed. And other groups, among them, neo-Narodists and anarchists and Marxist social democrats, would read Our Tasks and find it full of tried and failed Narodist dogmatism.

While the Northern Union was getting going, there was another developmental pattern centered especially in Ukraine, that is collectively referred to as the southern groups. Unlike Argunov and the Northern Union, the southern groups really leaned into the neo part of neo-Narodism, and they adapted their program to a.) account for the failures of the 1870s, b.) acknowledge the reality of Witte system Russia in the 1890s, and c.) grapple directly with the Marxist analysis now going mainstream inside radical circles. On the matter of terrorism, they either tried to avoid directly taking a stand, or coming down firmly in opposition. Terrorism and assassination might be viscerally exciting, but it had not, and would not, get the job done.

The southern groups were also recalculating the immediate revolutionary potential of the peasants. While the old recycled People’s Will dogma that the Northern Union was spouting said they can’t be activated until the tsar has been toppled, the southern group suspected that things had changed, the times have changed, and that activating the peasants was not only possible but necessary to carry out a socialist revolution in Russia. And they also agreed that a sure path to appealing to the workers and the peasants was to focus on addressing their immediate concerns and grievances, and then helping them alleviate those immediate concerns and grievances.

But just as the southern groups criticized the Northern Union for reheating spoiled potatoes, the Northern Union criticized the southern groups for splitting off from Narodism entirely, this isn’t neo-Narodism, this is something else entirely. For example, one of the big features of Narodism was a desire to either head off or leapfrog over industrial capitalism. And the southern groups tended to accept the Marx’s position that capitalism was coming, and that the urban proletariat might very well serve as the advanced guard of the next revolution. On top of this heresy, they added another: that willingness to talk about and improve living and working conditions was a break with the core beliefs of both Narodism and Bakuninist anarchism. Those guys wanted to reject capitalism root and branch, and not sap the revolution of its vitality by marginally improving the workers lives in exchange for tacitly accepting this new capitalist system. Putting padding on the chains does not break the chains.

But the southern groups were not closet Marxists. In fact, they had more faith in the rural peasantry than the Northern Union did. They still believed that the future of Russia was agrarian socialism, and that the failure of the Going to the People should not be taken as permanent proof that a revolutionary army would never come marching out of the rural countryside. When they looked around in the mid 1890s, they noted that conditions had changed. And there were two new classes who provided an excellent opportunity to more efficiently and productively focus recruitment, propaganda, and education efforts on the peasants. First, there was the so-called rural intelligentsia, and second, there was that large subset of the growing industrial working class who regularly returned home to their native villages. Neither of those classes had really existed back in the 1870s, but now they did, and now they could be used.

As to the first class, this rural intelligentsia, the zemstvo wound up being the factory that produced them. Remember, the zemstvo were focused on creating schools and hospitals and health services and improving local infrastructure. So this drew out to more rural areas educated professionals, who used to be found only in the bigger cities: teachers, lawyers, engineers, doctors, and so forth. And then, especially thanks to the educational improvements of the 1870s and 1880s, you saw a new generation growing up much better educated than their parents. Now obviously, many people in this rural intelligentsia group are going to wind up mostly in political sympathy with the liberal zemstvo constitutionalists that we talked about last week, but there were plenty with more radical ambitions, especially among the teachers. They would start their own little reading discussion and educational circles. Partly this was to alleviate boredom, but partly it was out of real zeal. And you would see things like little lending libraries get organized that allowed the increasingly literate local population to access new and interesting ideas. And one of the great lessons learned of the failed Going to the People was that the people had not known or trusted the people who went to the people. But the rural intelligentsia was engaged with far more permanent cohabitation, and they were identified as the perfect bridge between the elite revolutionary leadership still based in the capital cities and the mass of peasants they hoped one day to organize and lead.

The other group that this elite revolutionary leadership realized had potential was that semi-seasonal labor force that moved back and forth between industrial labor sites, like factories and mines and railroad projects, and their home villages. If you were a socialist revolutionary organizer, you could maneuver your way into one of these mass concentrations of industrial workers that we talked about at the end of episode, 10.18, on the Witte system, and find a very receptive audience, an audience whose minds had been opened by the general terribleness of their working conditions. Then you could explain to them your theory of what socialist revolution would look like and they would carry that message back to their friends and families in the home villages, ideas that were now being delivered not by strangers who just showed up one day and started saying, hey, you know what? Down with the tsar. They heard it from their cousin, or their sister, or their best friend. And with a little luck, when those workers then returned to their factories, the people left behind might find a radical member of the rural intelligentsia lurking around ready to talk more about all of these interesting new ideas and further foster revolutionary consciousness.

So this was a pretty exciting realization, and it made the southern groups more convinced that right now, today, they should think of the peasants as a force that could be mobilized. Now, as I’ve said, these groups are not very big, and they would still have to be based in the cities focused mostly on the urban workers, but they could create a social web that would spread ideas. And when the time was right, a revolutionary army could come marching out of the rural countryside. Now this wasn’t going to happen overnight, but the path was clear, and the heart of what is going to become socialist revolutionary ideology, started beating.

The third pillar of the future SRs grew out of a worker education circle in Minsk that was dubbed the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia. Founded in 1895, the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia was unique in that it was specifically focused on the jewish community, a community that held its own unique position inside the Russian Empire. Navigating as they did between the antisemitic assumptions of the tsarist authorities, that the jews did not really fit into a system of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and the antisemitic assumptions of many revolutionary Marxists, and populists and anarchists, that the Jews were greedy parasites, adversaries, not allies in the coming revolution. But that said, this jewish centered workers’ party operated a lot like the Northern Union did in the tradition of terroristic Narodism and anarchism. They believed that first and foremost, the revolutionary task was to overthrow the tsar. What better way to fight the encroaching tyranny of capitalism than overthrowing the state, which backed up those capitalists with the force of the police and the army and an array of anti-labor laws? So the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia and the Northern Union were largely in agreement about both the task and the methods of revolution.

One of the key organizers of the Workers’ Party was an old veteran of the 1870s, who was among those leaders now returning from a long period of political exile. They had in fact spent the last 20 years bouncing around between prisons, penal labor camps, and supervised exile. I am speaking of Yekaterina Breshkovskaya, a revolutionary stalwart on her way to earning the nickname Babushka, the Grandmother.

Born in 1844 into a well-to-do land and serf owning family. Breshkovskaya was 17 years old when the Emancipation Decree was issued in 1861. She enthusiastically helped her father navigate the logistics of freeing the family serfs, and took it upon herself to organize education and literacy programs. Two years later, she followed a normal social path by marrying a landowning magistrate, but that was a very short-lived experiment with normalcy. She left her husband two years later and moved to Kiev with her sister and a friend named Maria Kolenkina. Upon arrival, the three of them set up house and got super into Bakuninist anarchism, meeting at this point a young 20 year old named Pavel Axelrod. Now her sister appears to have died young, but in 1874 Breshkovskaya and Maria Kolenkina of course went to the people. They were however soon tipped off that they might be arrested and Kolenkina went home, but Breshkovskaya simply bounced to other villages. Eventually though, she was arrested. While trying to pass a checkpoint dressed as a peasant, she failed to act the part and show the instinctive deference expected from a peasant woman. She blew her own cover, and was arrested.

So now she’s in jail, and then she wound up as one of the 193 in the famous Trial of the 193. When it was her turn to stand accused, she gave a defiant speech declaring that she did not recognize the court’s authority over her and that yes, she was a socialist and that yes, she was a revolutionary and she was damn proud of it. The court of course, recognized its own authority over her, and unlike most other arrested women who were acquitted and set free, Breshkovskaya was given five years penal labor in Siberia. And I have seen it claimed that she was the first woman in Russia sentenced to prison labor for political crimes.

And now I must break this story, so that we can tie ourselves back to some big drama from previous episodes, because after the sentencing Breshkovskaya’s old friend, Maria Kolenkina resolved on a plan to murder the prosecutor in revenge. And Maria got together with one of her new friends to plot a double assassination, and that new friend was… Vera Zasulich. So yes, when I talked about Zasulich’s comrade in the murder conspiracy, that was Maria Kolenkina. This is a very small world we’re talking about here. Anyway, while Zasulich was able to get her shot off, Kolenkina was not, and instead she was arrested and sentenced herself to 10 years in Siberia.

But getting back to Breshkovskaya: after a couple of years, her sentence was reduced from penal labor to mere exile, and she immediately attempted to flee the country. But the attempt failed, and so she got four more years hard labor. After completing that sentence, she was back to living in mere exile again, when an American journalist came through in 1885 and Breshkovskaya gave an interview where she said that maybe she would die in exile, maybe her children would die in exile, maybe her grandchildren would die in exile, but someday it would all be worth it. This interview made her a minor celebrity among unionists and radicals and progressive liberals in the English speaking world, though as it turned out, neither she nor her children nor her grandchildren died in exile. In 1896, she was released as part of a general amnesty that accompanied the formal coronation of Nicholas the Second. Now well past 50 years old, she returned home so full of thankfulness at the amnesty that she… went right back to organizing for a socialist revolution, this time in Minsk.

Her partner in crime during this period was future inner circle SR leader Grigory Gershuni. Gershuni was 25 years younger than Breshkovskaya, but they formed a working revolutionary partnership with Breshkovskaya as the dynamic, charismatic, passionate living witness to the indomitable spirit of revolutionary will, then once the audience was fired up, Gershuni would follow in her wake and handle the practical logistics of organizing and establishing groups and communication between them. Their partnership made the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia one of the most dedicated and well organized inside Russia, and though even at its peak there were never more than 60 full-time members, they would be one of the backbones of the coming SR coalition.

The fourth and final group we need to talk about today are those not in Russia at all. Because if you had been in People’s Will when the reactionary hammer came down in 1881, and you managed to escape arrest and execution or exile, you invariably wound up fleeing abroad, and settling in Russian émigré enclaves, usually in Switzerland or Paris or London. As so often happens with communities of exiled radicals, as we’ve seen going all the way back to the post 1848 émigré waters that Marx and Engels and Bakunin swam in, these exile groups continued to publish pamphlets and newspapers that focused as much on prosecuting beefs and rivalries amongst themselves as the larger project of socialist revolution. Everyone was pushing their own idiosyncratic vision for the revolutionary future even as that revolutionary future seemed further away than ever.

The most important of these groups came together in Paris, where one of the old deans of Russian populism, Pyotr Lavrov, had moved after his time in Switzerland. Lavrov, remember, had been an influential Narodist theorist going all the way back before the Going to the People, and he was as old an old timer as they came. In the mid 1890s, he was enjoying something of a personal renaissance after the failure of People’s Will style quick terrorism made Lavrov’s pitch for slow and steady education seem much wiser in retrospect. So in the early 1890s, Lavrov and a few other old exiled luminaries form their own group of veterans. Now that conditions in Russia seem to be improving, they hoped to form a kind of Narodist senior leadership in exile, who could observe and direct their younger comrades who were making good headway back home.

But though voices were listened to and their service was respected, they suffered from the same delusion that many émigré groups abroad suffer in all times in places: namely, that while they considered themselves to be the leaders of the movement, the people on the ground back home didn’t know them, and certainly weren’t going to take orders from them. The leaders in Russia saw themselves as the leaders, and they saw the émigrés serving merely as ambassadors and fundraisers, not as like, the central committee of the revolution. This disconnect is shown clearly in that one of the principle preoccupations of those leaders inside Russia was how to get their own printing presses and newspapers going, because the literature being smuggled in from abroad was so thoroughly out of touch and disconnected from realities in Russia, it was just all around unhelpful.

So the émigrés are going to form the fourth group, the fourth pillar of what becomes the SRs. And by the late 1890s, our future socialist revolutionaries are coming back to life like budding little shoots after a long winter. But as they came back to life, they would find themselves in direct competition with a new species of revolutionary that they had not had to contend with back in the 1870s, and that was Marxist Social Democrats.

And next week will be a very important episode in the Revolutions podcast, because we will be introducing two of the most important members of the energetic, younger generation of Russian Marxists. So join me next week when I finally introduce you to Lenin and Krupskaya.

 

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.20: The Liberal Tradition, Such As It Is

So I am now back in Paris after a great three week trip to the United States. Sound Education was totally fun Ithica was great, Cornell was great. Shout out to all the cool people I met there. Shout out to all the archivists and librarians who helped me with the Lafayette papers. A big shout out to the trees and the gorges and the waterfalls upstate New York in the fall — it’s, it’s no joke.

Now, in our last episode, we introduced Nicky and Alix, against whom our coming Russian revolutions will be staged. First, the one in 1905, and then the one in 1917. What we’re going to do over the next few episodes, though, is bring forward the groups who will be doing the revolutionary staging, so this will of course mean circling back to our friends in the Emancipation of Labor Group, who are on their way to founding the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But they were not the only ones jockeying for position as the 19th century drew to a close. We will also have, for example, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, better known as the SRs, who rise from the ashes of the old narodists and emerge as a radical neo-populist advocate for the Russian peasantry. There will also be anarchist groups working in the tradition of Bakunin, but who are also now picking up further advances in anarchist theory and practice, but today, we are going to start all this by talking about the historical background of the coming Constitutional Democratic Party, who will be known to one and all as: the Kadets. And the Kadets represent the liberal wing of the revolutions.

Now, so far in this series, we have talked at length about reactionaries and radicals, Marxists, anarchists, and populists, but we have spent very little time on Russian liberals. And in part that’s because Russian liberalism in the 19th century is a notoriously difficult political animal to locate, name, and classify.

Now we have, of course talked a lot about 19th century European liberalism generally in all of our previous series, and in the main, we’re still talking about people who supported constitutional government, limited by defined civil rights guaranteed by the rule of law. Liberals could either be monarchist or republican, but they always wanted some kind of representative assembly at both the local and national level. And if you stretch the definition a little bit, you will also find liberals support free market economics, and a strong belief in the importance of defending private property rights.

But when historians go looking through 19th century Russia looking for liberals like this, they find very few leaders fitting the description. Many will have one or two liberal traits, but also have other traits that seem to undermine our ability to say, oh yeah, yep, that’s definitely a liberal. The absence of clear cut Western style liberalism in the Russian Empire in the 19th century is rooted in the fact that the Russian Empire in the 19th century was not really operating under the same social, economic, and political conditions as western Europe. So even if a Russian were temperamentally inclined towards a liberal position, they would often wind up drawing different conclusions about how to feasibly pursue their ends. And probably the biggest difference, as we’ll see, is their attitude towards state power. Western liberals were often working to carve out space for an individual to operate free of state intrusion. So freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly. And usually with the rule of law guaranteeing protection of private property and their investments, that often went along with all that. And when and where the state was required to provide law and order, free individuals would be given a chance to participate in the crafting and execution of laws that they would live under, most especially when it came to taxes. But in Russia, the same kind of well-to-do educated professional, who might like the sound of all this, typically believed that Russia was a long ways off from achieving it democratically. So if you wanted to do social and economic reform, the central state was actually the only thing capable of doing the job. So it would be through the central state that any great reforms had to be run. Otherwise, it would die in the hands of an archaic, conservative, landowning aristocracy, to say nothing of the hopelessly backward and ignorant masses.

So in many ways, they were operating under conditions akin to Ancien Régime France, where these sorts of reformists in the intelligentsia wanted to energetically use the power of the centralized state to achieve reform. The state was thus their friend, and not their enemy.

As to what kind of reforms our proto-liberals wanted? Well, that was a heterogeneous mix with little uniform agreement. And it often feels like somebody pulled out a bucket, wrote liberal on the side of it, and then dumped in anyone who didn’t fit into some other more recognizable category. So this is about defining liberalism less by what it was, than what it was not. So, for example, a liberal is not a reactionary conservative. These guys don’t like orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. They want reform, and progress, and modernization. And whatever those vague catch all terms might mean, reform progress, modernization, a quote unquote liberal is not into stagnant despotism.

But a liberal is also not a radical revolutionary. They are likely opposed to revolution entirely, preferring slow reform to abrupt change. And for sure they will oppose terrorism as a means towards any end that they want to achieve. So that means that at least temperamentally, they are moderate, they are cautious. They want things to progress peacefully and steadily.

So, whatever your own particular set of beliefs, if you were a non revolutionary reformer, chances are somebody is going to call you a liberal. Which then gives way to a tautology on the positive side: what is it that a liberal believes? Well, whatever these people who we have just called liberals believe. As we’ll see in a second, more than a few of those people, even those name-checked by the future Kadets as their intellectual and spiritual forebears, were not really liberal in any sense that we would understand.

Now, if you will recall, from episode, let’s see 10.11, the guy who got to go down as the quote unquote, father of Russian liberalism was Mikhail Speransky. He was the influential advisor and then de facto prime minister to Tsar Alexander the First in the years between Alexander’s ascension to the throne in 1801, and the French invasion in 1812. Whenever Alexander was going through one of his liberal phases Speransky was there. But the brand of liberalism Speransky was pushing was more like rational, participatory autocracy. Remember, he wanted to augment the imperial throne with a state council and a nested set of elected dumas that would reach up from the local to the national level.

But those bodies were only ever meant to be consultative. The emperor’s word would always be law, and power was never meant to be shared in any meaningful sense. Speransky was inspired a lot by Bonapartism: an empire run rationally by a central administrative system, staffed by a meritocratic bureaucracy, with the window dressing of representative government. Now in other parts of the empire, notably Poland and Finland, Speransky did push Alexander towards a constitutional monarchy, and who knows what would’ve happened had Alexander stayed on this liberalish path, but the tsar did not stay on this liberalish path, and Speransky’s quote, unquote liberal reforms were left not even half done. But still. Liberalism has to come from somewhere, and so Speransky gets called the father of Russian liberalism.

But if we were so inclined, and I am, we can push this back just a little bit before Speransky to the reign of Alexander the First’s grandmother, Catherine the Great. Because it was during her turn as the quintessential enlightened despot that many of the liberal seeds were first planted and cultivated. Not only did she simply model a government that favored energetic reform, modernization, and the rule of law, she also created and patronized this thing called the Free Economic Society, which became a home base for many liberally inclined people in the century to come. The Free Economic Society was initially composed of well-educated nobles who wanted to advance Russia’s economy by importing the latest theories practices and techniques from the west. Among other activities, they would regularly hold essay contests, which were open to thinkers across Europe, including Voltaire, who once submitted an essay on the role of the peasant in society.

The Free Economic Society is going to be mostly focused for the next hundred years on economic and scientific advancement. But the kind of people who are interested in that sort of thing are also going to be associated with political liberalism, even if they’re not inclined to be public about that. So the Free Economic Society would become a kind of loose knit social and intellectual club that kept these types of people connected. And it would continue to keep them connected right into the 1890s, at which point, right around the arrival of Nicholas the Second, the society attempted to grow beyond mere economic ideas, and talk about culture and politics. Because by that point, many educated scholars were arguing these things are all interconnected, and we can’t talk about economics without talking about politics.

But anyway. Springing forward now beyond Mikhail Speransky, the father of Russian liberalism, where do we land? Of course. We land on the Decemberists. The Decemberists, for sure, by their own declarations, believed themselves to be representing the liberal spirit of the age in Russia. This group of post-Napoleonic army officers returned to Russia believing that they were at the forefront of Russia’s date with constitutional destiny. And as we discussed in episode 10.12, they believed in constitutional government, whether a monarchy or republic, getting rid of legal and civil inequality, but most especially freeing the serfs. And along with constitutional government, this idea of freeing the serfs became one of the most consistent themes of Russian liberalism.

Now the Decemberists do wind up staging an armed revolt, so that’s not very slow and steady reform of them, but you will recall that they did not really want to be revolutionaries even as they staged this armed revolt they wanted to have a good old fashioned palace coup, they did not want to call in the people to overthrow the state. And one of the reasons they maybe didn’t succeed in their mission, was they didn’t call in the people who helped them overthrow the state. And so we know how all this turns out: when the Decembers revolt failed, the now secure on the throne Nicholas the First instead introduced orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, which was anathema to anything even remotely resembling liberalism.

But future liberal leaders would talk about the 1830s and 1840s as a time when the kind of comfortable and educated types who might be drawn into liberal political ideas mostly withdrew into abstract discussions on literature and philosophy that kept them out of active politics. The Free Economic Society was allowed to keep doing its business, just so long as it did not deviate from economic and scientific topics. So while during this period we find advancements in the natural sciences, geography, and statistics, to say nothing of art, music, and literature, we find very little open discussion of politics, and certainly not from cautious would be liberals. Now some of the westernizers of the 1840s were of course, looking with some longing at the liberal pamphlets and books coming out of the west, but when the revolutions of 1848 hit — led, as we well know, by liberals and liberal ideas — there was simply no corresponding liberal movement in Russia ready to mount a barricade. Now there were a few liberalish types in that Petrashevsky circle that we talked about in the lead up to 1848, but they were just kind of a mixed bag of intellectual free-thinkers who were already becoming much more enamored with socialism than they were with liberalism. And besides, they were broken up and scattered quite easily in 1849.

So now we’re right at the mid point of the 19th century, and there just aren’t that many liberals in Russia to speak of. If you had an education, you either supported the status quo, or you were getting into way more radical socialist ideas.

But that can’t be right, can it? I mean, once Tsar Alexander the Second arrives in 1855, someone has to be telling him to get going with the great reforms. There is obviously some extant group ready, willing, and able to make that case, and if it ain’t liberals then who is it? I mean, were liberals not the ones looking to liberate the serfs, create elected assemblies, and reform the judicial system to make it more friendly to the rule of law? Well, that all sounds pretty liberal to me.

And yes, there was a group of ministers and intellectuals ready to make those arguments, and in the future, Russian liberals will name this group among their spiritual ancestors, but they would be coming at it from a distinctly illiberal position. This generation of reformers wanted to do everything from the top down, from the center out. In their minds, an enlightened ministry was going to have to use the central bureaucracy to fight a political and social war against the old landed nobility and their anachronistic, presumptions and privileges. Now, they could not afford to be absolutely rigid in this approach to reform, and in plenty of places, expediency and a recognition of the limit to the Russian state meant that the central government could only do so much. But in terms of worldview, these mid 19th century great reformers look a lot like the advocates of 18th century enlightened despotism. And so though they will later be name-checked among the liberal grandfathers of the Kadets, the label liberal is kind of ill fitting. But they weren’t radical revolutionaries, and they weren’t reactionary conservatives, so I will give them that.

But the era of great reforms did carve out a space for people who more comfortably fit the label liberal. Especially liberal democrat, and those were the zemstvo. However circumscribed their mandate, and however limited their actual power, the zemstvos were handed some real power and a mandate to have a large impact on certain aspects of local administration, particularly in infrastructure schools and what we would call healthcare, right, doctors and hospitals. Because of both the nature of the zemstvo — they were elected assemblies working within the legal framework of the state — and because of the nature of their work — this is public reform improvement and administration — the zemstvo naturally attracted people with a liberal worldview. If you were an old stodgy reactionary, you wanted nothing to do with any of these reforms. And if you were a young, radical, revolutionary, well, the zemstvos were just so much empty window dressing, they were democratic lipstick for the tsarist pig. But if you were in between those extremes, if you did not support radical terrorism, but also did not like oppressive police states, well where did that leave you? That left you in the zemstvo. And it turned out to be a space seated by both extremes to a liberal middle.

Now, no less than the radical, the people who joined the zemstvo were disappointed that the great reforms became a bracketed time period, the era of great reform that was limited to the 1860s and did not continue towards what many thought would be the logical constitutional conclusion. The participants in the zemstvo system, both its elected members and the hired professional employees, thought that they were building the foundations of what would be a larger, wider, and deeper system of participatory government, and when that didn’t happen, they started to develop an independent, if ill-defined and unorganized, set of ideas that would earn them the name, the Zemstvo Constitutionalists.

Now, unlike their reformist cousins, those enlightened despots, the Zemstvo Constitutionalists did not trust the central bureaucracy to carry out further reforms or advanced Russia towards liberal freedom and progress. They wanted Russia to renew itself from the bottom up, not the top down. And they believe that a constitution, when it came, had to grow organically from some kind of democratically elected national assembly. It could not be some handed down by the grace of God charter of government thing. Now given that one of their mandates was local education, these constitutionalists put a lot of stock in improving the nature of Russian primary education, to ford a new generation, ready to create and then operate that hopefully organically grown national constitution.

But by now we’re heading into the 1870s, and Russia is barreling headlong towards the People’s Will declaring that the tsar must die. That fight, between the radicals and the reactionaries, is where all the real political action was going to be. And these liberal Zemstvo Constitutionalists were few in number and not particularly influential.

Now, one of the leaders of this little movement, if it could even be called that, was a guy named Ivan Petrunkevich. He spent a lot of time trying to dissuade various radical leaders from embracing revolutionary terrorism and to instead join this slower and more peaceful democratic push for a constitution, but to no avail. Not the least of which, because many radicals saw the proposed political constitution as simply a yoke that rich land owners were trying to slip on the people. They were well aware of the critiques of bourgeois constitutions being made by their brethren in the west, and they did not intend to fall for that same trap.

As he struck out with the radicals, Petrunkevich also lobbied the government saying, you can’t beat this revolution with clubs and guns and trains to Siberia, you need to undercut the reason for the revolutions being. Russia needs freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and a democratic political system. If you give the people a voice and some real responsibility in government, they will stop throwing bombs. In March, 1879, Petrunkevich organized the first semi-clandestine meeting of what would become called the Zemstvo Union, a small group of constitutionalists who had a list of political and social demands. Now at the top of this list was of course a constitution and the standard list of liberal civil rights, but it’s also interesting to note that they wanted the government to also scrap the redemption payments that those emancipated serfs had to pay, as they were an immoral and inflammatory burden on the peasantry.

Because this was all taking place against the backdrop of an open war between People’s Will terrorists and a reactionary police state, the fortunes of these liberal constitutionalists rode like a rollercoaster ride over the next few years. Because shortly after the Zemstvo Union meeting in March of 1879, one of the nearest of the near missed assassination attempts on Tsar Alexander the Second happened in April 1879. Now extremely twitchy, the government viewed the zemstvo leaders with suspicion, even though part of their whole thing was we don’t want to do violent revolution. In this atmosphere, anyone challenging the status quo was suspect, and so Petrunkevich was arrested and exiled to Siberia.

But ironically, two assassination attempts later, and suddenly the fortunes of the liberal Zemstvo Constitutionalists was back on the rise. Especially after the Winter Palace bombing, the tsar and his advisors were like, hell, maybe we do need a new strategy, and so they invited in the new Minister of the Interior Loris-Melikov, who, even if he wasn’t necessarily a dyed in the wool liberal, echoed a lot of what the Zemstvo Constitutionalists were saying, we need to let the air out of this thing. We need a new round of reforms. Probably a round of reforms that move us in the direction of a political constitution.

So Loris-Melikov came into office with a slate of liberal-minded ministers. And for like a split second, it looked like the Tsar Liberator’s reign was going to end as it had begun: with a bunch of progressive reforms moving towards at least a semi-democratic constitution for Russia. But instead, the tsar got blown to bits and the constitutionalists’ fortunes plummeted once again. Alexander the Third had no time or patience for any of this claptrap, and the 1880s became a desert for Russian liberalism. Those who kept the faith through this lost decade emerged with an even greater conviction that the central tsarist bureaucracy could simply not be trusted. Enlightened despotism was well out of favor by the time they came back around again in the mid 1890s.

We’re going to wrap things up today with the culminating figure of Russian liberalism, a guy who’s going to be with us for a good long time: Pavel Milyukov. He’s going to be one of the principal leaders and organizers of the Kadets, and then way down the line is going to end up foreign minister in the provisional government, and in-between, have a pretty lengthy political career in and around the post 1905 Dumas. So, we need to talk about Pavel Milyukov.

Milyukov was born in 1859 into a middle-class family in Moscow. His father, who died when Milyukov was a kid, was a professor of architecture. A precocious child with a great memory, Milyukov taught himself things well beyond the standard Russian education. He learned five languages and went off to university with a particular passion for history. Entering the University of Moscow in the late 1870s means that he’s a student just as the streets are exploding into open war, and though he was briefly expelled for participating in some student demonstrations, he was allowed to return and finish his degree, and he never got too deeply caught up in really real radical politics. So he graduated with a degree in history, and then went on to take up a position teaching at the University of Moscow.

Now until he was about 40 years old, Milyukov was principally known for his work in history. And had he died then, at the age of 40, he still would have gone down as one of the great intellectual figures of his generation. Having read and been inspired by the sociological developments out in the west — he read Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx –Milyukov developed a sociological approach to Russian history. Turning away from what he thought of as a dry recitation of the deeds of kings and emperors, he was interested in the whole of a society’s culture. He was less interested in studying the fishes, and more interested in studying the waters within which those fishes swam. With this approach, he hoped to close once and for all the ongoing debate between westernizers and slavophiles. Milyukov himself was a staunchly European Russian who looked west, and he believed that there was something like a universal evolutionary path for societies, but he also believed that said universal path was guided and directed by the material conditions of a given time in place; that included physical geography, as well as what Marx might call the modes of economic production.

But while he rejected the random happenstance of personality driven history, he also never got on board with determinism of any kind, and he considered himself to occupy a middle space between romantic historians, who wanted to exalt great leaders, and a coming generation of historical materialists, who thought it all came down to conditions and that individuals counted for almost nothing. But that said, he clearly leaned in the materialist direction, and did believe that there was an evolutionary course to history. But that said evolutionary course was leading Russia towards constitutional parliamentary democracy. His dissertation was a study of Peter the Great’s reforms, taking the novel position that Peter himself counted for very little in the story of Peter the Great’s reforms. But then by the later 1890s, he was cranking out what would become called the Outlines of Russian Culture, a hugely successful and influential undertaking that sought to synthesize geography, climate, economics, religion, politics, art, education, and literature, to produce a definitive analysis of Russia and its people. And like I said, if this had been all Milyukov had done, he’d still be getting talked about as a giant in Russian historiography.

But that’s not all he did. Milyukov was interested in politics at a very young age, but he did not follow the radical path. Instead, his study of Russian culture, economics and history led him to the conclusion that what Russia needed more than anything else was a democratic system of constitutional government. No friend of even enlightened despotism, Milyukov believed that the problem was that the state and the people and always been kept well apart from each other, each rarely taking any notice of the other. Remember, at the local level, the villages were still mostly self-governed at this point. This meant that national government policy was wholly unresponsive to the people’s needs. And all this revolutionary trouble, radical terrorists fighting a violent police state, it could be resolved by bringing the people into the state. If you introduce universal suffrage and democratic representative government, you will make the state the people’s concern and it will have to respond to them. Unmet needs will have to be addressed because the people will be the new foundation of power. And if you couple all that with further economic development to raise the standard of living and education, well, now you’re talking about a healthy and robust national spirit, rather than the broken, paranoid, weak, violent, and angry spirit that currently pervaded everything.

So by the mid 1890s, Milyukov was getting more active and more vocal and politics, which would lead him to spend most of the decade between 1895 and 1905 bouncing between stints in prison, forced exile, and voluntary vacations abroad. But that is beyond the scope of our show here, and part of the story that leads us to the revolution of 1905.

So we’ll leave it there. Next week, we will talk about those who thought that men like Milyukov were hopelessly naive, that mere liberal democratic reforms and a constitutional government would never be enough to really liberate Russia. But the people we’re going to talk about next week also disagreed with that weird little Marxist cult who thought that a tiny minority of urban industrial workers were going to be the key to real revolution. The peasants were still the vast majority of the Russian population, and political action must be by the people if it was going to be for the people, and it needed to be for the people.

So next week, we are going to talk about the origins of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

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Episode 10.19: Nicky and Alix

So we have done a top line history of the tsars. We saw the principality of Moscow become the tsardom of Russia, become the Russian Empire. We saw the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 163, and saw that dynasty continued to produce the rulers of Russia in perpetuity. We saw them forge a multinational empire. We saw the emperors westernized under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. We saw them rise to become a decisive, great power in European affairs, and then watched them scrambled to keep up with a world that was moving much faster than they were.

But now we come to the last Romanov, the last tsar: Nicholas the Second. The full weight of history was about to come crashing down on his head, and if God had handpicked Nicholas to navigate Russia through the tumultuous turn from the 19th century to the 20th century, he could not have picked a worse man for the job. So let’s talk about the future last tsar, Nicholas the Second.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov was born on May the sixth, 1868. His father was the Tsarevich Alexander, and his mother was Maria, formerly Princess Dagmar of Denmark, before her arrival and conversion to Orthodoxy led to a name change. Now, given the way that the Romanovs had arranged their marriages and intermarriages, importing husbands and wives and then importing husbands and wives for the product of those imported husbands and wives, little Nicky was mostly German and Danish. Nicky was also the scion of a great extended royal family that had grown up under Queen Victoria in the later 19th century that included, like, half the crown heads in Europe, concentrated especially in northern Europe, Nicholas’s mother, Maria was the sister of Alexandra of Denmark, who was herself the wife of the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, though they were known to all as Aunt Alix and Uncle Berty. Nicholas joined a generation of grandchildren/cousins that included Kaiser Wilheim the Second, who they all called Willie, George the Fifth of England, and also the kings and queens of Denmark and Greece and Norway. Small principalities medium-sized kingdoms, enormous sprawling empires; when the rulers of Europe got together, it was quite literally a family reunion.

Now, unlike his father, who kind of kept the European family at arms length, Nicholas fit right in with this crowd. He was an active, welcome, and happy member of this extended dynastic clan. He went along on regular trips to Denmark to visit his mother’s relatives and was always running into English and German cousins and aunts, uncles, and grandparents. At the age of five, he spent two months at Marlborough House in England being spoiled rotten by Aunt Alix and uncle Berty. So it’s safe to say that Nicky was born at the top of every social, political, and economic pyramid in Europe. But his father had ideas about how kids should be raised, and pampered luxury was not the way to go. The future Emperor Alexander the Third was into getting up early, taking cold baths, hunting and fishing, manly stuff. And his children, of whom there were five more after Nicholas, lived in palaces, but they slept on cots. They ate porridge for breakfast. Things were meant to be hard and simple and cold. They were meant to grow up strong and durable, not soft and weak.

But the thing is though, Nicholas always held his father in an intense reverential awe. And he tried to live up to those hard expectations, he was not a hard boy. And he was not going to grow up to be a hard man. For better or for worse, he was soft. One of his relatives described his smile as tender, shy, and a little bit sad. And physically Nicholas did not measure up at all. Remember, old Peter the Great had been seven feet tall. Nicky’s great-grandfather and namesake Nicholas, the First had been six foot seven. His own father was a barrel chested six foot three. When Nicholas grew up, he was all of five foot seven in boots. His nickname growing up was Nikolasha, little Nicholas. So I’m just going to do the joke now about how he had literally big boots to fill and couldn’t do it, and just let you groan your way through it.

But since he was a aristocrat and heir to the Russian Empire, it wasn’t all cold baths and porridge. Mickey was extensively tutored in the ways of both Europe and Russia: history, geography, math, literature, and languages. And by all accounts, he was a good student and had an excellent memory. He spoke French and German very well, he spoke English flawlessly. He also only ever excelled at the other side of a princely education: he was an excellent shot on the hunt and he was a great rider. He was a good dancer and he loved to do it. So on the whole, even if he was small and sweet, he was coming up as an ideal prince and future emperor. But there is a sense early on that though Nicky was good at memorizing things and reciting them and remembering them, that more creative abstract thinking was never really his thing. He would learn something, and then he would know it, rather than turn it over in his mind, combine it with other things and see what new and possibly independent thoughts might appear. And helping along this idea that he should learn something to know it, not abstract beyond it, was one of his most important tutors who also happened to be one of the most important leaders of the empire through these years: Konstantin Pobedonostsev.

If Sergei Witte — and it is Sergei Vit-uh, not Sergei Vitt, I messed that up last week, I’m sorry about that — Sergei Witte represented the advancing economic spirit of the age, Pobedonostsev represented their retreating, traditional conservative, political, and social spirit. Pobedonostsev was an old bald humorless skeleton of a man with a dour disposition and a misanthropic view of the world. He began his career as a jurist and a legal expert, and by ideological and religious conviction was aghast at everything the Tsar Liberator had gotten up to in the 1860s Pobedonostsev was a staunch believer in orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. He tended to believe that the Russian people were inherently lazy and stupid. He thought political freedom was wicked. He thought constitutions the devil’s work. He said that parliaments were the instruments of ambition, vanity and self-interest which, I mean, you could maybe say the same thing about a family running a despotic autocracy, but, uh, sure, man, go off.

In addition to his positive admiration for the necessarily strong hand of autocracy, Pobedonostsev was also a religious and ethnic bigot. He disliked Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Orthodox Christianity was one true faith for the one true God. And that one true God had chosen the tsar to rule. Pobedonostsev tutored the future Tsar Alexander the Third and in him found an eager receptacle for all these reactionary ideas. And when the time came, Alexander made sure that Pobedonostsev played a major role in his own children’s education, most especially little Nicholas. After Alexander the Third became tsar in 1881. Pobedonostsev was then given a major hand in shaping the reactionary politics of the 1880s from his position as procurator of the Orthodox Church, and I have seen him called the high priest of stagnation.

At the age of 12, Nicky’s life was progressing pretty normally for an heir to the heir to the throne. Ruling the empire was at the end of the line, but that end of the line was still quite a ways off. His grandfather the Tsar Liberator was still pretty healthy and in his mid sixties, his father was the picture of robust health and in his mid thirties. Nicky himself was still just a kid. But then in 1881, obviously, shocking tragedy struck. Nicky was hanging around in the Winter Palace on March the first 1881, when an emergency clamor electrified everyone in the building and people started running this way and that. Then the dying body of his once pretty healthy grandfather was dragged into an office, where he died in a bloody heap. And just like that Nicky’s father was tsar. Nicky himself was suddenly the heir to the throne. One more bomb, and he would be the tsar.

After the assassination of his Tsar Liberator, the new tsar, Alexander the Third, took the advice of his security ministers and moved the whole family out of St. Petersburg permanently. They moved to the Gatchina Palace, a gargantuan 900 room palace in the suburbs that could be better policed and protected, and for the rest of his reign, Tsar Alexander the Third remained there, coming to St. Petersburg only to perform certain ceremonial functions. And if you read the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels are enthusiastic about the prospects of tsardom being toppled by radical revolutionaries, they refer to Alexander the Third as the Prisoner of Gatchina. And this is what they’re referring to. We’ve got him on the run, he’s scared and in hiding, we just need to finish the job.

In 1884, Nicky turned 16 and had his coming of age ceremony where he officially stopped being a boy, though it would be sometime before he really left the mental trappings of childhood behind. But 1884 was a more significant year for another reason: his uncle grand. Duke Sergei, married the 25 year old princess Elizabeth of Hesse. Ella, as she was known, was another granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and on the occasion of her wedding, she brought along her 12 year old sister to serve as a bridesmaid. And it was in the activity surrounding the wedding of Sergei and Ella that Nicky first met Alix, his future wife and the future empress of Russia.

Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse was born June the sixth, 1872. She was the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, Louis the Fourth, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, who was third daughter of Queen Victoria and the now late Prince Albert. Their little baby girl was named after her mother, and that name, Alix, was just the German approximate pronunciation of the English name, Alice, and it always makes me happy when other people butcher English names so that I know that it’s not just me going the other way. Little Alix was brought up a bright and happy kid, and she was so bright and happy that from a very young age, her nickname around the house was Sunny. When she was two years old — so, 1874 — Hesse was forcibly annexed into the recently proclaimed German Empire. And so, though she too was in the extended dynastic family and Willie — that is, Kaiser Wilheim the Second — was her first cousin, Alix always had a lingering bitterness against the arrogant Prussians.

Now Alix’s world was fundamentally changed in 1878. The scourge of diphtheria came through and her younger sister died, making Alix once again the youngest member of her family. Now this was of course gut wrenching, but then just a few weeks later, her mother, Princess Alice, all of 35 years old, also died. A six year old child who loses her mother is going to be profoundly affected, and Alix was. The sunniness became far more withheld, she became more serious, more withdrawn, more unsettled by company she did not know or trust. After this tragedy though, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, kind of adopted the whole family of her now widowed son-in-law, inviting them to come stay in England whenever and for as long as they wanted, Victoria took a special shine to Alix and Alix responded in kind. She always loved her granny, always loved England, and took on many of the habits and manners and tastes of English women of the time, much to Queen Victoria’s evident delight.

In 1884, the now 12 year old Alix accompanied her older sister Ella, who was marrying the Russian grand Duke Sergei, and she met her 16 year old cousin Nicky for the first time. But though the pair met for the first time at the ages of 12 and 16, 12 and 16 is not exactly the age of romance. But when she came back for a second visit five years later, she was 17 and he was 21, and this time some sparks started to fly.

In the intervening five years, Nicky was not exactly in a hurry to grow up to be tsar. Nor was anyone in a hurry to force him to grow up and be tsar. His father was still young and healthy, Alexander the Third expected to reign for at least 20 more years, maybe even 30, so rushing Nicky along the process of psychological, emotional, and political maturity was not a very high priority for anyone. And the tsar does not seem to have been particularly impressed with his eldest son, and so didn’t really feel much like bringing him into the daily practice of government.

So through the 1880s, Nicky is just a playboy. He sat in on council meetings from time to time, but was bored and got out of it as quickly as he could, and no one ever gave him anything interesting to do anyway. So he did what any other insanely rich and privileged teenager would do in these circumstances: he partied with his friends. They had dinners and dances, balls, concerts, lots of gambling and drinking and carousing. He very much liked all things, military. He loved a good parade, and a good regimental dinner. He really prized his rank as a colonel in the Russian army, and he dug drinking with the boys, to the point where his mother had to remind him that these were his subjects and his subordinates, not his friends, and he really shouldn’t be getting falling down drunk and needing them to carry him to his carriage at the end of the night, it was all a bit embarrassing. But Nicky was having a good time. And he wasn’t like a huge jerk or anything, he was predisposed to liking people, he was predisposed to wanting people to like him. He liked pleasing people, and being pleased by people. He wasn’t a let’s go throw rocks at the peasants kind of spoiled rich boy, but he was very much a spoiled rich boy.

Now during these years, Nicky enjoyed hanging out with his quote unquote aunt Ella, who was really just a few years older than he was. But when her little sister Alix came back for a second visit to Russia in 1889, Nicky was around all the time. And this is when we have him writing in his diary that one day he’s going to marry Alix. Now she was not so sure about this. She liked him, she maybe even loved him — he was handsome and charming and wonderful — but she was a devout Lutheran, and marrying Nicholas came with the price of conversion to Orthodoxy. But for now, no one was in a hurry, so they just flirted and enjoyed each other’s company. She came back to Russia again in 1890 and stayed out on an estate near Moscow. But this time Nicky did not come around, because he was preparing to depart on a world tour.

So the now 22 year old Nicky, his brother, George and their cousin, Prince George of Greece and marked on a world tour at the end of 1890. First they traveled to Egypt, then they moved on to India, then Singapore and Bangkok and Hong Kong, and every stop, he represented the Russian Empire to the various courts and dignitaries he encountered. The party finally wound up in Japan, where in April of 1891, Nicky was nearly killed before he ever got the chance to go down in history as the last tsar of Russia. While they were walking through Ōtsu Japan, a dude came at Nicky with the sword and tried to kill him. His first glancing blow left a deep cut in Nicky’s forehead, giving him a permanent scar, the second thrust was blocked by Prince George of Greece. Now, I have read multiple motives for this attack, one of them being this guy was a religious fanatic who was upset over the entourage’s desecration of a temple. I have also read that he may have been an angry husband whose wife Nicky had hit on. Either way, the assassination failed, and it went down as another near miss assassination attempt on a Romanov. But aside from the scar and the occasional headaches, the lingering after effects of this attack was a persistent racism towards the Japanese that Nicholas displayed for the rest of his life. Typically, he referred to them as monkeys.

The return trip from Japan to St. Petersburg was overland, and Nicky happened to be in Vladivostok in May, 1892, when they were getting ready to launch the east to west half of the Trans-Siberian railway project. And Nicky actually lay the first stone of the final Eastern terminus in Vladivostok. But the train was not yet built, and so Nicky had to endure the long and disjointed road and river and rail journey back to St. Petersburg.

After his return from the world tour, the newly-minted minister of finance, Sergei Witte, advised the tsar that maybe they should put Nicky in charge of the Trans-Siberian railway project. An idea at which the tsar scoffed. He said, he’s a child with childish ideas. To which Witte responded, well sure, but he’s got to grow up sometime, and this would be a decent way to ease him into it. But the tsar would not hear of it, and Witte resigned himself to watching the boy ominously drift irresponsibly, with so much responsibility looming in his future.

So when Nicky returned to Russia, he returned to his playboy lifestyle, which now added a new feature: a girlfriend. Mathilde Kschessinska was a 19 year old ballet dancer, and just getting going with a career that would make her one of the most famous and beloved ballet dancers in Russian history. She and Nicky had crossed paths multiple times since they first met in 1890, but when he came back, the relationship with Mathilde got serious on both sides. They spent as much time together as they could, often in an apartment that she kept in the city where they could be alone or just hang out in the company of a small group of friends. But both of them knew going into this, that even though their relationship was more than just some random fling — I mean, they were a couple — there was no way it was going to ever end in anything but Nicky going off to marry a proper princess. And for Nicky, that still meant Alix of Hesse, whatever anyone else said.

At first, his parents wanted him to marry Hélène, the daughter of the Count of Paris, that is, the grandson of the last King of the French Louie Philippe. But Hélène refused, because she was a staunch Catholic and would not convert to Orthodoxy as her position as Empress of Russia would require. So Nicky’s parents next looked to Princess Margaret of Prussia, who Nicky refused on the grounds that he was not attracted to her and she was boring, and then she refused on the grounds that she would also not convert to Orthodoxy. Now there were other options out there, but Nicky was still persistently insisting that he was going to marry Alix, even though his parents were opposed. Alix was a fine girl they said, but she was not a suitable match for an emperor. Meanwhile, she was off fending off her own promising proposals, most especially one from Prince Eddie, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, who she refused saying that they just would not be happy together.

In 1893, Nicky went off to England to attend the wedding of his cousin, the future King George the Fifth, and moderate hi-jinks ensued, thanks to how much these two future monarchs resemble each other. They have the same face, the same vandyke beard, and they parted their hair the same way. And Nicky spoke such good English that they were often just straight up mistaken for each other, like random drunk uncles coming up and clapping Nicky on the back and saying, boy, how does it feel to be married? You know, that sort of thing. But Nicky wasn’t a married man yet.

Upon his return to Russia though, he found his insistence that he was going to marry Alix of Hesse suddenly finding greater acceptance from his parents. In early 1894, tsar Alexander the Third’s robust health had began to falter, and even if this was merely a brush with mortality, it was enough of a brush to make both the emperor and empress eager to see Nicky’s marriage settled. They needed him off producing more heirs to keep the Romanov dynasty going; I mean, god forbid Nicholas turned out to be the last Romanov.

So in April of 1894, Alix and Aunt Ella’s brother, Prince Louis of Hesse, was going to marry Princess Victoria Melita in Coburg. Everyone was going to be there. And when Nicky was added to the guest list as the principal Emissary of Russia, he brought with him permission from his parents to ask Alix to marry him. Nicky was over the moon. He believed this was his destiny. But it was going to take some convincing to get Alix on board.

So this wedding in Coburg in April of 1894 turns out to be a pretty famous affair. There were indeed tons of relatives who turned out, including Queen Victoria herself, everyone’s granny, Kaiser Wilheim the Second, Willie, the Prince of Wales, Uncle Berty, and a raft of grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And there’s a pretty famous photograph that they all took at Berty’s suggestion, which is famous both for its single frame assembling of like half the rulers of Europe, but also for the fact that in about 10 years, they’re all going to be blowing the hell out of each other, and at least the Russian contingent would all be assassinated or executed or commit suicide. So it’s a very famous family portrait… a family portrait of a doomed family.

But of course, nobody knew that yet. The immediate family drama that dominated this wedding was the fact that Nicky had shown up intending to propose to Alix, have you heard? This was a big deal, and Nicky wasted no time going to see her as soon as he could and asking her directly to marry him. But she did not immediately say yes. Again, she was a devout Christian, and she was a Lutheran. That was the faith she had been raised in and the faith she professed. She was like, look, I think I like you, I think I might even love you, but I can’t convert to Orthodoxy, that’s just not what I believe. So Nicky departed this meeting undeterred, but without a yes. This unaccepted proposal then dominated the chatter of the attendees of the wedding. The general consensus was that it was a great match and Alix should say yes. Victoria had been initially skeptical, but now that the match was at hand, she seemed thrilled by the idea. She loved Alix, she liked Nicholas, and Alix might be a good influence on Russia generally. Their cousin Kaiser Wilhelm impressed upon Alix that she simply had to do her duty and say yes. Alix’s older sister Ella’s voice probably carried the most weight because she said, look, I converted to Orthodoxy, it’s fine, it’s all of a piece, it’s not that big of a deal. You should do it. You like Nicholas, you’d be happy with him. So say yes. So Alix came around — she said yes. This then turned out to be the big news of the wedding, we have just joined the future emperor and empress of Russia. And I can only imagine what the actual bride and groom thought about all this. I mean, this is their wedding, it’s supposed to be their big moment, and it turned out to be the mere backdrop for like a season finale of the Bachelor.

After the engagement, Nicky had to go home to Russia, but was soon turning around and heading to England for a six week long rendezvous with his now fiance. At first, they got to spend three days basically alone together at a seaside resort, which in the future would go down in both their memories as like the happiest three days of their whole lives. Then they went up to London where they continued to spend a lot of time together but now they were under the closer scrutiny of both society and Queen Victoria.

After this glorious six weeks together, Nicky had to go home for the wedding of his younger sister. But that wedding was also overshadowed by momentous news. The pains and health problems that had started up for the tsar at the beginning of the year were getting worse, not better. And in the fall of 1894, there was real whispered concern among doctors, advisors, and family that something was, like, really seriously wrong. The tsar was diagnosed with a possibly fatal kidney disease.

The tsar tried to put all this off, pretend like nothing was wrong, but on October, 1894, he was finally prevailed upon to go south to recuperate. He was meant ultimately to go to the Island of Corfu, but he couldn’t get past Lavadia on the Black Sea Coast before the family decided he was too weak to travel further. Things got bad enough that Nicky summoned Alix to come join them. Things might be moving faster than either of us thought. Please come.

The chaos around the now very possibly dying tsar was such that the court secretary straight up forgot to arrange passage for Alix, and she had to book a seat as a private passenger. But when she showed up, Tsar Alexander the Third insisted on getting up and greeting her in full military regalia. She was, after all, the future empress of his empire. They all then spent a week and a half lingering in and around what was now distressingly becoming clear was the deathbed of the tsar. Alix took stock of the situation and concluded that Nicky was not being forceful and assertive enough in all this, that he was often being kept out of the loop of doctors and ministers and his mother Empress Maria. And in what marks probably her first real influence on her husband, she said, look, make them come to you, make them report everything to you, you are next in line for the throne. But Nicky was shy and tender and unprepared for all of this. He was sitting there like, I don’t want to make trouble. But he took her advice and tried to insist that he mattered.

Not that things were left in this confused state for long. On October the 20th, 1894, Tsar Alexander the Third suddenly stopped breathing. And then he died. He was just 49 years old. At the age of 26, Nicky was now Emperor Nicholas the Second. He was not prepared. He had almost no experience in statecraft beyond family diplomacy. He had never been asked to rise to a single occasion in his life. He had figured mentally he had about twenty more years to grow up and get settled, and now his father, who he had always considered something of a god on earth, was dead. And in talking to Grand Duke Alexander, Nicky famously let loose his concern, he said, “What am I going to do? What is going to happen to me and you? To Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all Russia?”

Well my man, we’re about to find out, aren’t we? But I can tell you, the fact that you figure so prominently in a podcast about the great political revolutions in history that does not bode well for you.

So, as I said, last time, I am taking the week off next week, but if you need more Mike Duncan in your life, I did successfully complete interviews at Sound Education with my new friends at Pax Britannica and the Eastern Border. Both of those interviews have now posted, and I will include links in the show notes to both of them, but you’re looking for Pax Britannica and the Eastern Border. I am off now to delve even deeper into the Lafayette archives at Cornell, and will see you again in two weeks, as the reign of Nicholas the Second begins, and the old world prepares to end.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions

Episode 10.90 – The Polish Soviet War

After spending 1919 launching multiple attempts to overthrow the Communists, the White movement was collapsing into a heap on all fronts by 1920. In the east, Admiral Kolchak’s forces disintegrated in Siberia, and he himself was executed in February 1920. Down in the south, General Denikin’s armies were pushed all the way down to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, where Denikin evacuated as many people as he could over to Crimea before resigning his command and departing for permanent exile in April 1920.

This was not the end of the Whites, as remnants of Kolchak’s armies will remain active in Sibera, while General Pyotr Wrangel will organize a final redoubt of the southern Whites in Crimea. But history will soon mark this all down as the last stands of a defeated cause, not a springboard back to final victory. From a contemporaneous point of view, it was clear by the spring of 1920 that the chances of the Whites prevailing over the Reds in the Russian Civil War were small. From a historical point of view, we know that those small chances would not be converted. But this does not mean the Russians are done fighting with each other, nor does it mean the Communist regime in Moscow no longer faces dire threats to their existence. Their victories over Kolchak in the east and Denikin in the south simply changed where they fought, and who they fought, and specifically it turned their attention to unanswered questions in the west.

For centuries, millions of people in hundreds of thousands of miles of territory in central and eastern Europe had been dominated by imperial regimes based in Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg. As these great empires collapsed in the midst of World War I, subject peoples revived the dreams of 1848 and sought independence. Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles all sought sovereign independence, both from their former Imperial masters and from each other. The final defeat of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1918 triggered a violent race among all these peoples to stake out as much territory as possible for themselves before the dust settled and the diplomats of the victorious Allied Powers started drawing lines on maps in Paris.

Now, so far we’ve talked about these scrambles in the regions immediately bordering central Russia — places like Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. We know that we are dealing with conflicts defined by a dozen different factional dimensions, including ethnicity, language, religion, social class, political ideology, and national identity. These conflicts thus unfolded simultaneously as internal civil wars and external border wars, as armies crisscrossed central and eastern Europe capturing and relinquishing territory in the name of this political party or that nationality.

The objective of the Allied diplomats in Paris was to organize new nation states that would ensure national self-determination, but this is massively complicated by the fact that these regions were, in reality, a jumble of different ethnic and national groups living side-by-side — often literally next door neighbors, each wielding their own historical claim for their groups’ right to political dominance in that region. In circumstances such as these, it is usually force of arms that makes the final determination of whose title is recognized, and whose is discarded.

Now, today, we are going to turn the dial one big click to the west, and talk about Poland, because one of the most immediate consequences of the collapse of the Russian Whites in the Civil War in 1919 was the eruption of the Polish Soviet War in 1920. Now, having been erased from the map of Europe by the third Polish partition in 1795, Polish leaders had never given up their dream of winning back independence, as was evidenced by numerous revolts, rebellions, and revolutions during the 123 year interval between 1795 and 1918. None of those revolts, rebellions, or revolutions had proved successful, but to say that the political situation in 1918 was quite a bit different would be a massive understatement. In November 1918, Polish leaders got together in Warsaw and declared the independence of what they were calling the Second Polish Republic. The final borders of this Second Polish Republic were yet to be determined, as there was quite a range of possibilities. At its maximum extent, during the medieval period, the great Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of the largest political entities in Europe, encompassing a massive swath of territory between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. On the other hand, at its minimum extent, Poland didn’t even exist — all of its territory was claimed by the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian Empires. So, the final border of this new Second Polish Republic was bound to be somewhere in between those extremes, and they were going to have to fight for every potential square mile. Starting in November, 1918, the Poles fought and they fought hard. To the west, they embarked on the greater Polish Uprising and Silesian Uprisings against Germany; to the southwest, it was the Polish-Czechoslovak War; to the northeast, the Polish-Lithuanian war; to the Southeast, it was the Polish-Ukrainian War, the latter two of which are folded into the main topic of today’s episode and the reason why we’re talking about all this: the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 and 1920.

The Polish Soviet conflict began almost the minute the Central Powers admitted defeat in World War I. As we talked about back in episode 10.84, after the Soviet leaders in Moscow, annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they sent Red Army detachments west into territories they had once renounced, and now plan to reclaim. Over the winter of 1918-1919, they occupied cities like Vilnius, Minsk, and Kiev. But their strategy was not one of annexation or direct incorporation of territory, but instead establishing an array of nominally independent socialist soviet republics in the former territories of the Russian Empire. So, there would be an Estonian SSR, a Latvian SSR, a Ukrainian SSR. The idea was to co-op national liberatory ambitions while ensuring local Communists prevailed over other would be leaders, whether they were liberal, bourgeois, nationalist, or reactionary. This was a practical step towards the ultimate goal, which was international revolution of the proletariat that would erase all national boundaries and identities.

But in most cases in 1918 and 1919, the local Communist parties were not very strong. And the advance of the Red Army was not welcomed by locals as a harbinger of liberation, but instead resisted as a harbinger of renewed Russian imperialism. Over in Poland, alarm bells clanged incessantly by the time new year’s 1919 came around when it got out that the Red Army was referring to part of their western push as Target: Vistula, indicating their plans to march all the way to Warsaw.

Now by far the most important Polish leader facing this Russian advance, and who had spent his life fighting for an independent Poland, was a guy called Yosef Pilsudski. So, before we go on, we really got to introduce Pilsudski, because he’s been around the revolutionary block about a dozen times. Yosef Pilsudski was born in 1867 into a noble Polish family from Lithuania, an area that was at that time part of the Russian Empire. This was, in fact, just a few years after the 1863 Polish Uprising against Russian domination, which led to some pretty severe reprisals and policy changes from the tsar. This meant stepping up Russification of the region, pushing Orthodox Christianity over local Catholicism, and the Russian language over Polish.

Pilsudski came from a family of adamant Polish patriots. His father participated in the 1863 Rebellion, and Pilsudski himself was a rebellious revolutionary against tsarist Russia from a very young age. He participated in demonstrations, got rejected from university for his political affiliations, and was even tangentially caught up when his brother was implicated in a plot to kill the tsar. And — small world alert — his brother was caught up in the 1887 plot to kill Tsar Alexander the Third where one of the co-conspirators was Lenin’s brother, so that’s how small this revolutionary world really was. Pilsudski himself was arrested in the wake of all this and exiled to Siberia for five years.

When he returned, he joined the socialist underground in Poland and became editor in chief of the newspaper called The Worker. But though he had left-wing sympathies, his main motivation was Polish patriotism, and this left him hanging in a space between the more overtly nationalistic Poles and the internationalist socialists like, for example, Rosa Luxemburg. But he never lacked for revolutionary fervor, and he spent the next several years bouncing in and out of prison before going abroad, and at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, we actually find him in Tokyo trying to convince the Japanese government to arm and fund a Polish rebellion against Russia, which they considered, but ultimately declined, after other Polish representatives in Japan maintained it would be a fool’s errand — and in particular, I’m talking here about a guy called Roman Dmowski, who emerged as the leader of right wing Polish nationalism, and who would be a long standing political rival of Pilsudski, even as they both worked towards the same goal of Polish independence.

Pilsudski then returned to Poland and formed a paramilitary unit that was active all throughout the 1905 Revolution. They led strikes and demonstrations, but also bombings and assassinations, invariably directed at Russian interests, but his group also occasionally clashed with Dmowski’s National Democrats.

After the 1905 Revolution, Pilsudski moved away from his old socialist comrades to maintain a sole fixation on Polish independence. He spent those post-1905 pre-World War I years fixated on independence through armed revolution. He ran a paramilitary group that continually assassinated Russian officials and engaged in revolutionary expropriation like the Russian Bolsheviks, which is to say, they were armed robbers. Operating in between the nationalists on one side and the socialists on the other, Pilsudski tried to hold himself aloof from all parties, though he seems far more antagonistic towards the right wing National Democrats than the left-wing socialists. In the lead up to World War I, he had moved over to the Austrian part of Poland and with their apparent permission, organized sporting clubs that were ostensibly about hunting, but which were actually about regular rifle training for future deployment against the hated tsar. By 1914, Pilsudski sporting clubs numbered 12,000 members, and they were a defacto Polish legion ready for service. Pilsudski himself entered the war under Austrian auspices to fight the Russians on the eastern front, and served with distinction over the next several years. In 1916, he was critical in the push that forced the flagging Germans and Austrians to declare an independent kingdom of Poland. They finally agreed to this in November 1916, mostly to garner more Polish recruits for their armies, and they absolutely expected this thing that they declared to be the kingdom of Poland to be nothing more than a puppet state. Pilsudski and his colleagues, however, considered this the first step to real independence.

Pilsudski himself was invited to serve as minister of war of the new Polish government, but in the summer of 1917, with the defeat of the Central Powers seeming like a real possibility, Pilsudski started unshackling Poland from their puppet strings. He forbade Polish troops from swearing a loyalty oath to the Central Powers and was promptly arrested and tossed into the Magdeburg Fortress, which had once upon a time been the prison of the Marquis de Lafayette, which I discussed on pages 301 to 303 of Hero of two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution, which, you know, I just had to jam that right in there.

Pilsudski spent the remainder of the war in the Magdeburg Fortress. But on November 8, 1918, the Germans released him and sent him on a train back to Warsaw, apparently in the vain hope that he would, like, rally the Poles to their defense. But by this point, Pilsudski had spent decades in the service of Polish independence and Polish independence alone. When he returned to Warsaw, he enjoyed basically unrivaled popularity. Everybody knew who he was, everybody knew what he had been doing, everybody knew what he wanted to do; he was the natural choice to be the visible leader both of the government and the army during the post-World War I tumult. He was the man best situated to secure independence and not let it go, because more than anything, he had the loyalty of just about every Pole under arms.

On November 11th, 1918, the Regency Council that was running the Kingdom of Poland appointed Pilsudski commander in chief of the Polish Army, and later that day, he was the one who proclaimed an independent Polish state. On November 22nd, he was named provisional chief of that state, making him both the head of state and the commander in chief of Poland. After taking over control of the Polish Army, Pilsudski helped organize a counter attack against the western Red Army, whose advances over the winter of 1918-1919 had stalled out, now that the Russian Communists were dealing with far more pressing threats in the form of Kolchak and Denikin. By necessity, they withdrew resources, manpower, and attention from their relatively less threatened western borderlands. This was golden opportunity for Poland to stake out a generous border for itself in the region. Pilsudski himself said “At the moment, Poland is essentially without borders, and all that we can gain in this regard in the west depends on the entente, or the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany. In the east, it’s a different matter. There are doors here that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far.”

In February, 1919, the Polish government declared its policy was the liberation of what they called the northeast provinces of Poland, with their capital in Vilnius. This led to the first official skirmish between the rapidly growing but still somewhat ramshackle Polish Army and the western Red Army. It came on February 14th, 1919 at the town of… oh boy, uh… Bereza Kartuska, a town about midway between Warsaw and Minsk. This skirmish involved less than a hundred soldiers on each side, but it did see the Poles capture 80 prisoners and begin to run a virtually unbroken success through the spring and summer of 1919.

In April, Pilsudski personally led a renewed offensive that took the Polish army into Vilnius, where they expelled the recently proclaimed Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania and Belorussia. In Moscow, Lenin was furious when he got the news that Vilnius had fallen, and on April 25th, ordered the Red Army to do everything in their power to reclaim the city. But, with the great battles of the Russian Civil War presently raging around the Volga River and the Don River, the Western Red Army was little more than a skeleton crew. The only thing that it was in their power to do was retreat.

When Pilsudski entered Vilnius, he was taken to be something of a liberator. According to a 1916 census taken by the Germans, Vilnius was 53% Polish and 41% Jewish, and both groups were optimistic about their prospects under a Polish regime. Doubly so because had his own idiosyncratic political program that did not actually jive with a lot of the more nationalistic Polish leaders back in Warsaw. They believed the object was direct annexation and incorporation of Lithuania and Belarus into a Poland restored to its former historical greatness.

Pilsudski thought this extreme folly, and pushed instead for a Polish led confederation dubbed the Intermarium, as it would encompass all that territory between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south. In his grandest visions, this political Confederation would include Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Now, Pilsudski was a Polish patriot, and he absolutely conceived of Poland as the dominant power in this confederation. He envisioned them overseeing a defacto empire that placed them between Germany and Russia. But, not unlike the Communist SSR system, he believed the best and most practical way to go about achieving Polish dominance was to create a bunch of nominally independent units that would, yes, look to the ascendant power of Poland, but not have their own national aspirations threatened by direct incorporation into Poland. So wherever he went, he loudly and publicly declared his army had come not to conquer and annex, but to liberate and set free.

So for example, after entering Vilnius, Pilsudski issued a proclamation on April 22nd, which read in part:

The Polish army brings Liberty and freedom to you all. It is an army which I led here in person to expel the rule of force and violence and to abolish governments which are contrary to the will of the people. I wish to create an opportunity for settling your nationality problems and religious affairs in a manner that you yourselves will determine without any sort of force or pressure from Poland.

This was of course welcome to the people of Vilnius, but it caused quite a stink back in Warsaw among Polish leaders who absolutely expected Poland to rule these places, using all the force and pressure due to a sovereign government ruling its own territory. But there wasn’t much they could do, because none of them could match Pilsudski’s reputation and authority, especially inside the army.

So as the Polish Army moved east into Belarus, they simultaneously advanced into western Ukraine as a part of the little Polish-Ukrainian War that had been ongoing since November 1918. The historic boundary line of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had been the Nepa River, and they had once upon a time claimed even the city of Kiev as their own. Now, Pilsudski, did not necessarily share any plan for Poland to occupy and rule Ukraine, but he did believe that keeping Ukraine free from Russian domination was vital to the security and integrity of Poland, and he expected Ukraine to be a key component of his planned Intermarium confederation. Now, the Polish-Ukrainian War had gotten going in November 1918, when Ukrainian leaders in the western city of Lviv declared themselves to be the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. They successfully resisted Polish encroachment over the winter, but come the spring of 1919, the Poles drove them back hard, thanks especially to the arrival of General Józef Haller’s famous Blue Army. This Blue Army had been formed of Polish volunteers in France in 1917, and they had spent the remainder of the war fighting on the western front. They now numbered more than 60,000 men and would prove to be by far the best led, best trained, best equipped, and best fighting armed military force in the whole theater. They pushed deep into western Ukraine at the same time that the Russian Whites were pushing their way up into Eastern Ukraine.

In the summer of 1919, the Poles then capitalized further on the fact that the Russian Reds and Russian Whites were caught up in a fight to the death with each other during the Moscow Directive campaign that extended into the fall. During this period, the Polish army advanced and captured Minsk on August 8th, and by mid-September, had secured a north south running line that covered hundreds of miles between Lithuania in the north and incorporating most of Belarus and western Ukraine before terminating in the south around the Romanian border. For Pilsudski, this was just about the limit of what he thought was viable, and he did not think it was a good idea to go any further. The Red Army made a half-hearted attempt to push them back in October, but it accomplished little, and these lines more or less settled into place until the following spring.

All of these border wars and civil wars in eastern Europe were very frustrating for the Allied diplomats at the Paris Peace Talks. After all, they were the victors of World War I, and assumed it was their right to settle all the final territory boundaries. And here all these people were out there trying to settle things for themselves in their own way. It was making a mockery of self-determination! The Allies meant self-determination after they put everyone in boxes of their own making, not that the people would get to design the boxes themselves. Polish aggression in particular flummoxed the British and the French, who didn’t want Poland getting so ambitious that they forced Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany to form a military alliance, which would be just about the worst possible post-war scenario imaginable. They wanted an independent Poland, but one that knew its place. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George didn’t want the British to get involved with Polish conflicts one way or the other, and mostly fobbed it off on the French to take responsibility for the Poles. And while the French did extend loans and equipment to Poland, plus a bunch of French officers to train the new Polish Army — including a young Charles de Gaulle — they wanted this to be a defensive force protecting boundary lines drawn by European diplomats in Paris, not an offensive force, marching around trying to draw their own lines. And for example, the French only released Józef Haller’s Blue Army after the Poles promised not to use it for an offensive campaign, a promise the Poles had no intention of keeping, and when he returned, they promptly ordered Haller to invade Ukraine.

Now, despite their attempts to contain Poland, in the fall of 1919, the Allies changed their tune a little bit, and leaned heavily on Pilsudski to join forces with General Denikin to defeat the Russian Communists. If the Poles sprang forth from the line they had reached over the summer and attacked the western flank of the Reds, it might very well cinch victory for the Whites. But Pilsudski was absolutely his own man with his own plans. When the Allies wanted him to stay put, he advanced, now that they wanted him to advance, he refused to budge. In Pilsudski’s opinion, whatever his issues with the Russian Communists were, the Russian Whites were by far the greater of two evils. The Reds may clash with the Poles over some disputed territory, but at least they had declared the partitions of Poland a historical crime, and recognized the right of something called Poland to exist. The White leaders refuse to do even this. They refused to recognize even the basic right of Poland to exist. This, even as they tried to court Pilsudski into an anti-Communist military alliance. It was absolutely not in Poland’s national interest to side with the Whites. And Pilsudski said, “The lesser evil is to facilitate White Russia’s defeat by Red Russia. With any Russia, we fight for Poland. Let all that filthy west talk all they want; we’re not going to be dragged into and used for the fight against the Russian revolution. Quite to the contrary, in the name of permanent Polish interests, we want to make it easier for the revolutionary army to act against the counter-revolutionary army.”

Pilsudski absolutely believed that Poland would be better served dealing with Russian Reds than Russian Whites. He resisted all Allied pressure to aid Denikin, and went so far as to promise the Reds that he would not launch any offensive campaign in the fall of 1919, leaving them free to pull troops from their western front to defend against Denikin’s advance coming up from the south. In his memoirs, Denikin mentions that had Pilsudski joined him. .They probably could have won the war. But frankly, that was Denikin’s problem, not Pilsudski’s.

Over the winter of 1919-1920, there was at least in theory an opportunity for the Poles and Soviet Russia to come to terms that would settle the boundary between them without further conflict. It should come as no surprise that in November 1919, Moscow was absolutely ready to sign a peace favorable to Poland, as they were presently in the midst of fighting for their lives against Denikin. On the Polish side, they had just about reached the limit of their territorial ambitions and could plainly see that the Reds would be dealing with them from a position of weakness. The two sides communicated in October, and as I said, Pilsudski had indicated he wasn’t going to resume hostilities anytime soon. Lenin gave a speech on October 24th where he said, “We have clear indications that the time has passed when we might have expected further encroachments by the Polish Army.” On November 3rd, the Poles communicated a list of seven conditions of peace; Lenin and the Politburo sought nothing too objectionable on the list, and only countered on point five, a demand that the Red Army not engage in any hostilities with the Ukrainian nationalist forces under Symon Petliura. This didn’t seem like a deal breaker, but instead, Pilsudski surprised everyone by using this objection as a pretext to abruptly end negotiations. The two negotiating teams went their separate ways on December the 14th, and the opportunity to avoid a full blown war seemed to leave with them.

Pilsudski’s decision to abruptly end the peace talks came from two basic assumptions he made. First, he was succumbing to overconfidence about his ability to handle the Red Army. After all, he had been besting them for the better part of a year, and they would surely be even more battered and exhausted after their war with Denikin. He said, “I am not worried about the strength of Russia. If I wanted to, I could go now, say to Moscow, and no one would be able to resist my power.” But I think even more importantly, he absolutely did not trust the Reds. At all. He knew they would promise him everything under the sun to keep the Polish army from attacking, but as soon as they bested the Whites and their position improved, they would go right back to their Target: Vistula nonsense. Their whole ideology was premised on exporting communist revolution, and the idea that Lenin would feel bound by his promises once he felt like he was in a position to break those promises was to fundamentally misunderstand the political character of Lenin. The day after the talks ended, Trotsky published an awfully bellicose statement that was clearly ready to go, which read:

The Polish lords and gentry will snatch a temporary marauders’ victory, but when we have finished with Denikin, we shall throw the full weight of our reserves onto the Polish front.

Now this was no doubt a bit of calculated gamesmanship, but it also pretty much predicts what’s about to happen. Far more so than the note Lenin and Trotsky sent to the Polish government in late January 1920, which said,

You are deceived when our common enemy say that the Russian Soviet government wishes to impose communism on Poland at the point of the Red Army’s bayonets.

Pilsudski absolutely did not believe that for a second, and it’s hard to blame him.

But there were a couple of flaws in Pilsudski’s reasoning. First, he was counting on alliances with all the states that were threatened with domination by the Russian Communists. He expected them to join his Polish led confederation. But not unlike Pilsudski himself, most of their leaders had concluded the Reds were actually offering them a better deal, that Moscow posed less of a threat to them than Warsaw. So Latvia signed a cease fire with the Russians on February 1st; Estonia signed that first formal peace treaty with the Soviets on February 3rd. Lithuania would follow suit in July. Pilsudski also had similar difficulties gaining favor for Poland in Belarus and Ukraine, because people just weren’t interested in joining a reborn Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Eventually, Pilsudski had to settle for making just a single alliance of real consequence with the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura, who was by that point reduced to pretty third rate status — he had been pushed out of Ukraine entirely and was presently living in exile in Polish territory. Petliura enjoyed little popular support in Ukraine, and all he could offer was the veneer of Ukrainian participation in Pilsudski’s plan to invade Ukraine in the spring of 1920.

The other big flaw was his underestimation of the capacity of the Red Army, to say nothing of the morale of the Russian Communists. Far from flagging on their way to total exhaustion, the victory over Denikin seemed to revitalize the grandest and most optimistic ambitions of the Communists. Lenin was once again speaking of Poland as the revolutionary bridge to Germany — that is literally the physical geographic link between revolutionary communism centered in Russia, and its advanced towards Berlin, and from there to Paris. Lenin was now talking internally about his hopes of looking at things like the failure of the Spartacus Rebellion is a mere unfortunate blip in the grand historical march of the proletarian revolution. He once again laid plans to advance west with revolutionary bayonets. Approaching the spring of 1920, he wrote in a telegram, “We must direct all our attention to preparing and strengthening the western front. A new slogan must be announced: prepare for war against Poland.”

And this is exactly what Pilsudski had expected. And though he was, I think, over confident heading into the spring of 1920, he was acutely aware that the Red Army’s western front would only get stronger with each passing day.

This is why he made the decision to launch a preemptive strike before the Reds got settled. In late April, 1920, just as General Denikin was boarding a British destroyer to leave Russia forever, and the Red were trying to reestablish their hold in Ukraine, Pilsudski ordered his forces to launch a daring raid through western Ukraine, and in just a matter of days, all the way to the Nepa River. Their forces marched into Kiev on May 7th. As Norman Davies notes in White Eagle Red Star, the classic history of the Polish-Soviet War, Pilsudski sought to assuage the potential fears of the people of Kiev by ordering his forces to march through the streets with flowers in their muzzles to demonstrate their peaceful intentions, but mostly the people of Kiev just didn’t pay any attention, because as Davies notes, this was the fifteenth time in three years that a new army had come marching into town.

The Kiev offensive of the spring of 1920 was meant to be an audacious punch to the nose of the Reds that pushed the Russians back out of Ukraine and force them to consider the efficacy of simply giving up their larger ambitions and settling for control of Russia and Russia alone. But though the capture of Kiev was surprising, the Communists did not draw the conclusion Pilsudski hoped they would. And next week the Red Army will rapidly regroup and turn the tables. As one Polish soldier would later say, “We ran all the way to Kiev, and then we ran all the way back.”

We are going to pick up this story in two weeks, as I’m taking next week off to travel home for a family visit. But when we come back in two weeks, we will talk about the Reds turning the table on the Poles, and then the Poles turning the table on the Reds, which they humbly refer to as the Miracle on the Vistula.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.89: the Collapse of the Whites

The Russian Civil War began the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. It was an inevitable result of October 1917. Now, this conflict had spent the six months after October taking the form of low grade skirmishes between armed factions before it really blew up in the spring of 1918, especially after the Czechoslovak Legion played their wild card at Chelyabinsk on May 14th. Now, since then we have seen massive armies rising and clashing and major battles in theater spread across thousands of miles, which involved every nationality in the former Russian Empire, as well as every great power in the world. Two years after the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War is now reaching a critical point of climax. In the autumn of 1919, the White forces that had been raised funded and equipped to oust Lenin, Trotsky, and the Communists threw everything they had at the Reds… and they would come up short.

The winter of 1919-1920 does not represent the end of the Russian Civil War, but it does mark a major turning point that we can say, from this point right here, the Whites are done. They are not coming back from this.

Now, we left things off last week with General Denikin’s most advanced forces having reached the city of Orel by mid-October 1919. They now stood just about 250 miles from Moscow. The communist capital was in a state of emergency, as workers were conscripted to dig defensive trenches and the Communist Party leadership made plans to possibly evacuate Moscow should it come to that. Had it come to that, the plan was to regroup on the Volga and up in the Ural Mountains. And the communist leadership had reason to believe it might very well come to that, because at that same moment in mid-October 1919, Petrograd, the birthplace of the revolution, stronghold of the revolution, was itself in imminent danger of falling to a White Army. It was not out of the question that within a matter of months, perhaps, even within a matter of weeks, the two major cities in Russia would be lost.

Now we have not talked at all about the Northwestern Army currently threatening Petrograd because it was never that big, nor a major player in the Russian Civil War, except for this one moment in the autumn of 1919. The first kernel of the Northwestern Army had been formed by reactionary officers under the auspices of the Germans back in the summer of 1918, who were looking for native forces to confront the Bolsheviks if they needed to confront the Bolsheviks. In October 1918, this group officially formed a small army of about 6,000 men based in Pskov, the city where Tsar Nicholas had submitted his abdication. But of course, this is all right as the German Empire is collapsing in defeat, and so instead of this Northwestern Army accepting promised munitions and supplies from the Central Powers, they were forced to fall back into Estonia, where they were tolerated with heavy reservations on account of the fact that the Red Army was trying to invade Estonia at that very moment.

So this little White Army plays a role in helping push the Russian Red Army out of Estonia by the spring of 1919, and then they advanced and established a territorial beachhead inside of Russian territory. The Northwestern Army’s administration of this newly conquered territory was terrible, as it was practically everywhere the Whites seem to go: they abused and exploited the local population, they unleashed a wave of White terror against anyone linked to the Communists, and, in particular, they persecuted the Jewish population.

So by this point in the conflict, the officer’s leading the Northwestern White Army recognized the ultimate authority of Supreme Ruler Kolchak. And while this recognition of Kolchak was necessary to win support and supplies from the British and other allies, it absolutely torched their ability to make local alliances. A real campaign to take Red Petrograd was probably going to need the participation of both the Estonians and the Finns, but their interests were no longer aligned with the Northwestern Army. Kolchak’s plan was to restore the Russian Empire, one and indivisible, and that meant absolutely reincorporating Finland and the Baltic states into that one and indivisible Russian Empire. So not only was getting tangled in a Russian civil war a dubious prospect for the Estonians and the Finns, they would find themselves doing so on behalf of political forces that promised to ignore their independent sovereignty. So both the Estonians and the Finns refuse to join this campaign. On the other hand, the Northwestern Army did not get much support from the Allies, despite the obvious geographic proximity to, like, the United Kingdom. The Allies saw this particular group of Whites as being closely linked to the Germans, and so they tended to direct their aid, munitions, and supplies to leaders who they believe to be their clients in Russia, rather than the old Kaiser’s, and that meant Kolchak and Denikin — though, as we’ll see in a bit, the Allies are souring mightily on them too, and they will soon be looking to quit the Russian adventure altogether.

Still, with Denikin’s Moscow Directive pushing up a huge array of forces from the south, the Northwestern Army advanced toward Petrograd at the end of September 1919. Mostly preoccupied with defending themselves against Denikin, the Reds suddenly had to scramble a defense of Petrograd. And while it might seem this is obviously something they would want to do, there was a great deal of argument inside the Communist Party about. Lenin, for one, appeared willing to abandon Petrograd rather than commit vital forces to defending it. There was, after all, a reason, he had moved the capital to Moscow in the first place. But the rest of his comrades were unwilling to just abandon Petrograd to its fate, and so even as Denikin’s forces neared Moscow, the Reds peeled off some key reserves to go shore up Petrograd, and they sent none other than Trotsky to personally see to the defense of the cradle of the revolution.

Trotsky arrived in the city on October 17th, and took over leadership from Zinoviev, who had remained in Petrograd serving as the party boss since March of 1918. He had very much enjoyed his time as party boss of Petrograd, and was among those Communist Party officials living extraordinarily high on the hog as he enjoyed the fruits of revolutionary victory. Trotsky, meanwhile, had spent the last several months enduring slights and critiques of his handling of the war, and was determined to save his flagging reputation by saving Petrograd. He came in and energetically reorganized and refocused the garrisons, oversaw the arrival of reinforcements, and laid plans to turn Petrograd into what he called “a stone labyrinth,” if the white Northwestern Army actually tried to take over the city. Despite the ongoing deep population of all the urban centers of Russia, Petrograd still had a population of about 600,000, and Trotsky laid plans to force the White Army to fight block by block, street by street, and house by house, turning Petrograd into one giant exhausting trap that would either destroy the army or force them to quit and leave.

But Trotsky never had to put this plan in motion, as the Northwestern army never attempted an attack. They got as far as the Imperial palaces at Tsarskoye Selo, but by then their supply lines back to the west were badly exposed, and they were badly outnumbered. Nobody was rising up to join them, the Estonians and the Finns absolutely refused to get involved, and support from the British was extremely minimal. The Reds around Petrograd commence to counter attack on October 21st, coinciding with events in the south that we’ll talk about here in a second and they just forced the Northwestern Army into a fighting retreat west, racing back towards the Estonian line. By the middle of November, the Northwestern Army was even further back than they had started, and they were trying to cross back into the safety of Estonia. But here they found themselves blocked and forbidden to cross the frontier until they disarmed. By this point, the Estonians determined it was in their interest to sign a treaty with the Reds, who appeared willing, at least on paper, to grant them terms that the Whites refuse to consider. And just to look ahead a little bit in February, the Estonians will be the first border state to conclude a formal treaty with the Russian Soviet Republic.

Simultaneous to all these battles around Petrograd, and the alarming thought of possibly losing the birthplace of the revolution, the Reds were also facing a threat to the present capital of the revolution. By mid-October, as we’ve said, the most advanced forces of the White Volunteer Army had entered the city of Orel. But this was as close as they’re ever going to get. Orel turned out not to be the final springboard towards the capture of Moscow, but the high watermark of the White Army. These advanced units had moved fast, their supply lines now stretched for close to a thousand miles, and their conduct ensured that territory they cleared and occupied would be hostile rather than friendly. When he issued the Moscow Directive, Commander in Chief Denikin had counted on something like a popular uprising creating a tidal wave that would bear down on Moscow. Instead, nobody joined up, and the army approaching Moscow looked like nothing so much as a thin trickle currently in danger of being cut off from its source. Coming under heavy Red counter attacks, they fell back within a matter of days, and the Reds retook around on October 20th. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Whites had already gone the furthest they would ever go. From here on out, it was no longer about advancing forward, but about falling back.

Now in the face of the advances made by the Whites through central Russia, the Red High Command improvised a whole new strategy to deal with it. Now you recall from last week that the plan was to direct their main attack down the eastern flank, down the Volga, but that strategy had to be abandoned in order to consolidate a defense against the White column coming up the middle. So as the Whites pull back from Orel, they were hit with a one-two punch that sent them absolutely reeling:

First, they got hit from the west by shock troops that included the core of the vaunted Latvian Rifleman, who were still the best and most reliable troops the Reds had. But even more devastating for the Whites was a sudden mass cavalry attack from the east that truly threatened to cut their lines and envelop all the forward groups.

Now, through mid-1919, the Red Army had shied away from building a cavalry corps as a matter of policy. Minister of War Trotsky associated the cavalry with retrograde politics. He called the cavalry “a very aristocratic family of troops commanded by princes, barons, and counts.” He believed that a modern communist army would be built around mass mobilization of the population, backed by the most advanced industrial weaponry they could build. World War I had amply demonstrated that cavalry, in addition to being a bastion of conservative politics, was a military anachronism. So while small units of Red cavalry did form in the spring of 1919, it was mostly over Trotsky’s objections. The great Cossack cavalry raid of August 1919, however — the one we talked about last week — convinced everyone in the Red High Command of the immediate practical necessity of a large mobile cavalry force in the field. So they aggressively recruited among World War I cavalry veterans, including Don Cossacks and Kuban Cossacks. There was something of a generational divide among the Cossacks, as the younger cohort was more sympathetic to socialism, and saw the advantage of allying with the Reds rather than the Whites. These new recruits and existing cavalry detachments were all merged together and formed the First Cavalry Army under the command of a guy called Semyon Budyonny. Budyonny had been born into a poor Russian settler family in the traditional Cossack regions, and was drafted into the Imperial cavalry back in 1903. He was a decorated soldier, who transferred from the disintegrating Imperial Army into the Red Army, and had been leading small cavalry units down in the southeast since the spring of 1918.

In the emergency chaos of late 1919, Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army made their most consequential and dramatic entrance into the civil war: in the third week of October, in conjunction with several Red rifle divisions, the First Cavalry Army fought the main force of White cavalry for control of the city of Voronezh, which was a critical regional capital and railway junction situated at a very strategically important spot on the upper Don River. When the Reds successfully captured the city on October 24th, the White Volunteer Army was truly exposed to encirclement, and was now effectively cut off from their Cossack allies. The First Cavalry Army was absolutely the difference in this fight. They forced the entire White line everywhere to retreat backwards in search of a safe place to regroup, with the Reds following in fighting pursuit.

Now, as the Whites fell back in late October and early November 1919, they staged various counter-attacks, and it was far more of a back and forth campaign than simply, the Whites fall back and the Reds advance, but if you plot a map through this period of who is where when, the story is: the Whites are falling back and the Reds are advancing. Morale among the White forces is absolutely collapsing as they stumbled backwards, they were unable to find a firm base they could defend long enough to truly regroup. The Reds had them on the run. With their forward detachments in full retreat, the Whites also faced major problems behind their lines. Ukraine was filled with antagonistic turmoil, and Nestor Makhno’s Black Army was making the whole region untenable for the Whites.

Now over the summer 1919, initial White ascendancy in Eastern Ukraine had forced Makhno’s insurgent army to relocate far to the west in the city of Uman. They arrived as a somewhat bedraggled mass of refugees and armed partisans, most of them wounded in one way or another over weeks of fighting, and plenty more sick from a raging typhus epidemic that was taking hold just about everywhere in mid 1919. The Blacks cut a ceasefire deal with the nationalist forces who control Uman, and they tended to their sick and wounded, but by early September 1919 the Whites decided they should launch an offensive and crush the Black menace. This was a decision that backfired spectacularly.

Makhno still had about 8,000 capable fighters, and at the Battle of Peregonovka on September 26th, the Blacks not only resisted the White attempt to annihilate them, but they turned the tables entirely. They broke the Whites, and sent them falling back in complete disarray with entire units being wiped out or disintegrating during their chaotic retreat. Makhno then spent 10 days leading a rapid advanced back east towards the Nepa River, and by the first week of October, they had reestablished control over the whole middle of the river. So just as the Whites’ leading edge was falling back in search of a safe base, the Blacks in Ukraine were there to ensure that they found no peace or rest inside Ukraine.

By November 1919, the Moscow Directive was an absolute dead letter, and the Whites were falling back in an unbroken retreat. In the west, Kiev fell to the Red Army on December 16th; in the east, the Red Army pushed south and recaptured Tsaritsyn on January 3rd. General Denikin tried to reform a line north of the Don River and hold on to Rostov, but frankly could not make his forces hold still, and of their own disobedient initiative, moved south of the river to put the natural barrier of the Don between them and the advancing Red Army. Rostov fell to the Red Army on January 7th.

But here, the lines did briefly resettle. Denikin managed to make a brief reorganized stand and repulsed the first Red Army’s attempt to cross the river. Now, despite Denikin finally holding this position, this is very much end game hours for the White movement on all fronts. Six months after issuing the Moscow Directive, Denikin’s forces had been pushed back not just to where they started, but even further south. The situation looked bleak on all fronts: rail lines and roads were choked with refugee streaming south to the black sea, hoping to be evacuated from what appeared to be inevitable Red Army victory. Soldiers deserted in droves. That major typhus epidemic was sweeping through everything and every body. The White High Command was at each other’s throats, assigning blame, resigning from the service, or being forced out. Pyotr Wrangel organized a group of high ranking officers to oust Denikin as commander in chief. The whole thing was falling apart.

Collapsing morale was then exacerbated by the news from everywhere else, which was all bad. As we’ll get to here in a second, the army and the government of Supreme Ruler Kolchak was, incredibly, somehow even worse off than the Whites were in the south. That little Northwestern Army that had threatened Petrograd was in a state of acute disintegration. They were being disarmed, all their officers were quitting, and perhaps most distressingly, representatives of the Allies indicated they were cutting off aid to the Russian Whites. Back on November 8th, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George gave a speech basically saying, we’re all done in Russia. The combination of White military failures, coupled with their inability to work together politically, coupled with their brazen corruption, coupled with general war weariness, equalled time to leave Russia to the Russians. Because at this point, salvaging the White armies would mean drastically ramping up Allied investment and involvement just to keep them afloat, and no one had any stomach for this, aside from some hard-line anti-Bolsheviks like Winston Churchill, but they were in a tiny minority. The British told their White allies in Southern Russia their last major contribution to the cause would be allowing British ships to ferry as many White refugees as possible out of the country, but that it. Faced with the decision to fish or cut bait in Russia in early 1920, the Allies cut bait.

Now this decision to cut bait was of course massively influenced by events in Siberia during this same period. The Allies had put a great deal of stock in Supreme Ruler Kolchak — they in fact presently recognized him as the sovereign head of Russia. But by the end of 1919, it looked as though the Supreme Ruler of Russia was in control of little more than his own immediate staff. With Denikin’s forces being pushed back away from Moscow, and that Northwestern Army being pushed back away from Petrograd, the Reds felt comfortable sending reinforcements across the Ural Mountains to take the fight to Supreme Ruler Kolchak, although there was practically nothing to take the fight to. By November 1919, Kolchak’s armies were falling apart, and his government, if it could even be called that, was an increasingly hopeless bunch of corrupt officials who didn’t really have power over anything. With very little standing between the Red Army and their capital at Omsk, they decided to just abandon the city and flee east towards Lake Baikal, maybe regroup in Irkutsk. They abandoned Omsk in a hurry, leaving behind tons of supplies and ammunition, which the Red Army gratefully absorbed when they captured the city on November 14th. Those officials and officers and troops who managed to get away then embarked on what is dubbed the Great Siberian Ice March, which is not to be confused with the first thing that is called the Ice March, which was the Volunteer Army wandering off into the wilderness in early 1918. This Great Siberian Ice March was a rolling and chaotic retreat 1500 miles east across the Siberian winter from Omsk to Lake Baikal.

The Great Siberian Ice March represents the disintegration of Kolchak’s forces in the east. Peasant soldiers who had been conscripted simply deserted and went home. Typhus raged through the ranks. Railroads were frozen and clogged with traffic as refugees and soldiers were trying to move in both directions. Local anti-White partisan groups all along the Trans-Siberian Railroad attacked them as they moved east, capturing some, killing some, wounding others, forcing them to remain behind, preventing trains from moving at all. As was happening down in Southern Russia, the senior leadership around Kolchak resorted to pointing fingers at one another, quitting in disgust, or just looking out for themselves. What was left of the political officials who had made up Kolchak’s quote unquote government made it to Irkutsk, where they tried to reestablish the government, but they had no authority whatsoever. Kolchak himself was separated from what was left of his main forces, but he would not be separated from the single most valuable thing in his possession: 36 freight cars loaded with gold.

This gold represented a large chunk of the tsar’s gold reserves, reserves which had been stashed in the city of Kazan on the Volga for safe keeping during World War I, and which were subsequently captured by Kolchak’s forces and taken into his possession the previous year, and as he claimed to be the sovereign ruler of Russia, he claimed control of the gold as his right, and as his responsibility. He was still making his way east with this gold when he got word that Irkutsk was probably not going to be a safe haven. In December 1919, a left-wing group of SRs and Mensheviks took control of the city, declaring themselves to be this new thing called the Political Centre, an anticommunist government which would replace Kolchak’s disintegrated and discredited officials. One of their first acts was to formally dismiss Kolchak from service, and when he received word of this dismissal on January the fourth, he himself submitted his resignation, becoming just a private individual, who just so happened to be in possession of Russia’s sovereign gold reserves.

Kolchak’s resignation coincided with what is probably the great disaster that befell the Whites on their Great Siberian Ice March. The city of Krasnoyarsk, which stood between them and Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad was taken over by anti-White partisans, mostly SRs backed by the local military garrison. With this city falling into the possession of his enemies, Kolchak and his forces would be unable to move forward. Kolchak himself was stuck on a segment of track controlled by the Czechoslovak Legion. Now, the Legionaries had been nominal allies of Kolchak and the Whites, but this had always been a marriage of political and military convenience. Most of the Czechoslovaks were ultimately sympathetic politically to the socialists, and they had frankly regretted the rise of the conservative Kolchak.

So with the road ahead increasingly in the hands of Kolchak’s enemies, the Czechoslovak Legionaries decided to hold his train. Now, what they wanted more than anything else at this point was to get out of Russia. Remember, they had negotiated an exit from Russia nearly two years earlier because they wanted to keep fighting the Central Powers in order to win independence for Czechoslovakia. But then, they had gotten sucked into the Russian Civil War, and in the meantime, the Central Powers had lost World War I, Czechoslovakia had declared its independence, and it looked like the Allies were going to make that independence stick. So here in January, 1920, we have all these Czechoslovak Legionaries still stuck in Russia and all they wanted to do was go home. They were happy to use any bargaining chip they might have on hand for safe passage out of Russia — including Admiral Kolchak, and especially his 36 train cars full of gold.

Now to ensure that they had no trouble with the Political Centre group that had taken control of Irkutsk, the Czechs agreed to hand Kolchak over to them. Now in these negotiations, it seemed like the idea was that Kolchak’s safety would be guaranteed — and for his part, Kolchak wanted what the Czechs did: safe passage to Vladivostok and a ticket out of Russia. But just six days after the Czechs transferred custody of the admiral to the Political Centre group in Irkutsk, a Communist aligned military revolutionary committee asserted its control of Irkutsk.

Between January 21st and February 6th, a group of interrogators questioned Kolchak at length, and by all accounts, he spoke honestly and with unapologetic, frankness about everything he had done, and everything he planned to do. He still hoped to be allowed to leave peacefully, but the orders from Moscow were to ship him back to the capital for trial. In any case, the orders were explicitly not to execute him, because the Reds did not want White leaders fighting to the bitter end on the assumption that if they fell into the custody of the Reds, they would be executed. But the leaders on the ground in Irkutsk made a different calculation, and I think this time it is different from when Tsasr Nicholas and Empress Alexandra and the family were killed. In that case, the leaders in Moscow almost certainly ordered the execution and only pinned it on the local guys after the fact, whereas in this case I think Lenin honestly did not want Kolchak to be summarily executed. But what was left of Kolchak’s White Army was closer to the city than the Red Army was, so in the wee hours of February 7th, allegedly out of fear that the admiral would be rescued by that White Army, they took them out back and shot him along with the guy who had been serving as his prime minister. Their bodies were then unceremoniously dropped in a river.

Admiral Kolchak was just 45, and he had been supreme ruler of Russia for 14 months. His body was never found.

With the Red Army advancing the Czechs decided to cut one last deal. They still had in their possession the tsar’s gold reserves, and they promised to hand it over to the Reds in exchange for free passage to Vladivostok. This was a very easy deal for the Red Army to make, as it would both bring the gold reserves into their possession and get rid of one of their most implacable opponents at the same time. So, they made the deal. On February 7th, 1920, the same day that Kolchak was shot, the Czechoslovak Legion signed an armistice with the Reds, promising to exchange the gold in exchange for safe passage out of Russia. When the armistice with the Communists was concluded, the last dozen or so Czechoslovak trains pass through Irkutsk on their way east. They would run into some trouble both from the remnants of the White Army, who were trying to keep up the fight, and the Japanese military, who had a huge presence in the region, but eventually they made it to Vladivostok, where they disembarked in waves over the next several months. They left behind about 4,000 dead, but more than two years after they commenced what they thought was going to be a journey home, the majority finally did complete this journey home. They practically circumnavigated the globe to return to what was now their independent homeland, where they would go on to form the core of a new Czechoslovak army.

As for the tsar’s gold, the reputable research I can find says that it was taken in full back to the city of Kazan by the Communists, but there are persistent local legends that one of the cars may be wound up falling into the ice of Lake Baikal, and another that the Czechs maybe helped themselves to a bit of gold on their way out the door — which, whether that’s true or not, I can’t say, but I can say, that I wouldn’t exactly blame them.

Rumors of Admiral Kolchak’s execution reached central Russia by mid-February, but they were not officially confirmed until March. By then, the White movement in southern Russia was in its death throes. General Denikin managed to stage one last counter-attack and actually recaptured Rostov on February 20, but by then he was being flanked on all sides and had to abandon the Don River and fall back even deeper into the south. As they fell back, refugees followed in a flood, and one White officer commented, “the exit of the Russian people reminded me of biblical times.”

Their final, final destination was the port city of Novorossiysk, from which they hoped to get passage out of the region — at a minimum, get ferried over to Crimea, which was about to be the last major stronghold of the White forces. But there was not enough time to get everybody on board a ship, nor space enough for everybody who wanted to leave. By the end of March 1920, about 34,000 people had been evacuated, but tens of thousands more were stranded. Some attempted to keep moving on foot, heading down the coast and trying to board anything that would float, some kept going until they had walked all the way to Georgia.

General Denikin understood that whether the Whites would ultimately come back from the disasters of late 1919 and early 1920 would not be his question to answer. In April 1920, he said he planned to drink from the bottom of the bitter cup of the Novorossiysk evacuation, and then resign. Despite his falling out with Pyotr Wrangel, the people around Denikin seemed to believe Wrangel was probably the only viable candidate left to take over the reins of what would be the last last stand of the Whites from their base in Crimea. So with the Red Army closing in in April 1920, Denikin formally transferred all his authority over to Wrangel and boarded one of the last ships departing Novorossiysk. But he was not bound for Crimea. His war was over.

He instead went first to Constantinople aboard a British destroyer. And he said, “When we put to sea, it was already night. Only bright light scattered in the thick darkness marked the coast of the receding Russian land. It grew dimmer and vanished. Russia, my motherland.”

Denikin never would see his motherland again. He spent the next several years bouncing around between England, Belgium, and Hungary, before finally settling in France in the mid 1920s. He wrote a bunch of commentaries on the Russian Civil War, including a highly regarded memoir that was surprisingly candid about the mistakes and failings of the Whites generally, and his own personal mistakes and failings specifically. He was still in France when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and despite his ongoing vehement hatred of the Communists, refused to lend his name or reputation to the Nazis. He ultimately died in New York City in 1947.

The great retreat of all the White forces meant that the spring of 1920 would dawn under entirely new military and political circumstances. Now, none of this marked the official end of the Russian Civil War, nor the wider conflict among the various nationality groups from the former Russian Empire.

Things were different, but it was still far from clear who would ultimately emerge victorious, who would control what territory, what ideology would reign supreme, and what exactly the Russian revolution actually meant.

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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.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions..

Episode 10.87: Anarchy in Ukraine

Last time we talked about the ongoing transformation of Russia into a centralized one-party regime, which increasingly took the form of elected soviets of soldiers, workers, and peasant deputies, but which functionally became an appendage of the Communist Party. And as we discussed, this transformation caused tension, resentment, and finally outright revolt in many areas controlled by the Communists. But we also discussed how this was all taking place inside the context of the larger civil war, and many of those frustrated with the Communists ultimately concluded that the Reds, however annoying they were were better than the Whites. This week, we are going to talk about a region where this mess of social unrest and political tension and military necessity combined with particular volatility… Ukraine.

Since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the armies of the Central Powers had been occupying Ukraine, but their capitulations on the western front in the autumn of 1918 meant that they were now going to be forced to withdraw. This withdrawal would leave a gaping power vacuum that left much of Ukraine in a state of anarchy. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative synonym for chaos and disorder — although there was an awful lot of that going around — I mean, a literal state of anarchy. Because Ukraine was the place where the black flag-flying anarchists enjoyed the greatest success at establishing their vision for what post-revolutionary society ought to look like. Now depending on who you talk to, they either provided a viable blueprint for an alternative to the creeping authoritarianism of the Communists, or, they were simply tossing off half-baked ideas that were never going to survive prolonged contact with reality. Either way, there is no way to tell the story of the Russian Revolution without discussing the Ukrainian anarchists, and specifically their greatest leader, Nestor Makhno.

Nestor Makhno was born in 1889 in Huliaipole, a small rural city in southeast Ukraine situated east of the Nepa River and north of the Sea of Azov. His parents had both been born serfs and were liberated by the Emancipation Decree of 1861, but they were still extremely poor at the time of his birth. Compounding the family’s misfortunes, Makhno’s father died when he was just 10 months old. Little Nestor was the youngest of five children, and he received only a few years primary education. As a student, he was noted for being bright and clever, but also extremely headstrong and rebellious. He didn’t last long in school though, but mostly because the family’s economic circumstances forced him to go out and work for wages. He took his first paying job at the age of just seven. Makhno spent what was left of his childhood working in the fields for wages before moving on to assorted other odd jobs. Wherever you went, the story was always the same: bright and capable, but rebellious and undisciplined.

Makhno came equipped with an instinctive hostility to authority that was compounded by a life spent working for various landlords and estate managers. He never did go back to school, and so unlike most of the other revolutionaries we’ve talked about, Makhno was not radicalized at university before advancing onto the coffee houses. In fact, he developed something of a loathing for those kinds of intelligentsia radicals who had no real connection to the things they were talking about. And in fact, Makhno actually was what many coffee house Russian revolutionaries idolized, but could never be themselves: a true revolutionary peasant.

Makhno first got into politics as a teenager in the wake of the Revolution of 1905. Attracted to the fundamentally anti-authority message of anarchism, he joined a small anarchist group in his hometown of Huliaipole in 1906. Their group numbered in the mere dozens, but were committed to continuing the revolutionary struggle even in these reactionary days of the Stolypin era. The group engaged in both revolutionary expropriations — which is to say, robberies, as well as revolutionary strikes against the enemies of the people — which is to say, bombings and arsons of local estates. He was arrested once and held for ten months before being released without charges even being filed. And then the Okhrana infiltrated the group, and after several shootouts with the police, Makhno was arrested again. Several of his comrades were hanged, and he himself was sentenced to death, but this sentence was commuted down to life in prison on account of his alleged youthful immaturity.

Transferred to a prison in Moscow, young Makhno wound up amidst other veteran political prisoners. And as we’ve seen before, Russian prisons turned out to be a great place to get further radicalized. In particular, Makhno met a guy called Pyotr Arshinov, who schooled him in anarchism, slipping him smuggled copies of Bakunin and Kropotkin. These books gave form and voice to Makhno’s own instinctive loathing of authority, and he became a committed anarchist, placing the blame for most social ills and injustices on the nature of political authority itself, and believing the common people would be just fine running their own affairs without the need for any parasitic and exploitive state apparatus.

Makhno was still sitting in prison at the age of 27 when the February Revolution hit. He and all the other political prisoners were amnestied and set free. He returned home to Huliaipole and immediately started working to organize the local population, putting into practice the things he had learned in prison. Makhno turned out to be a naturally charismatic leader, and in the post-February Revolution era became a forceful advocate for direct appropriation of land by the peasants. These were the days when the provisional government in Petrograd was dragging their feet on the land question, and we talk about how the peasants out there just started taking matters into their own hands. Well, Nestor Makhno was one of those taking power into his own hands. He led strikes and work stoppages, organized volunteer armed bands to go disarm local law enforcement, and simply seize estate lands and redistribute them to the peasants, asking neither permission nor forgiveness. It was during this period in 1917 that Makhno gained a reputation as a sort of revolutionary Robin Hood, rallying the locals under the slogan Land and Liberty, not unlike his Mexican counterpart Emiliano Zapata, who had been doing the same thing for years in the Mexican state of Morelos. Doing of their own initiative with their own people what the educated big city intellectuals only talked about doing.

This initial period of revolutionary anarchism was upended by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the invasion of Ukraine by the Central Powers. This invasion was ostensibly welcomed by the leaders of the Rada and their self-declared Ukrainian People’s Republic, and also ratified and recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks. Makhno and his comrades were aghast at the portrayal of the people of Ukraine, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. He had a small partisan band who were sturdy, loyal, and tough, but they weren’t going to be able to fend off hundreds of thousands of invading Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. So instead they settled into a life resisting the occupation when and where they could, and protecting local peasants from abuses by the occupation authorities.

In the early summer of 1918, Makhno embarked on a tour of Russia to try to gin up support for the Ukrainian resistance, eventually winding his way to Moscow in July. According to Makhno’s memoir, while in Moscow, he had two important meetings: first with aging Kropotkin, who offered him sage advice and cautious encouragement; but the other was an audience with Lenin in the Kremlin. According to Makhno, Lenin quizzed him on the situation in Ukraine, bemoaned the contagion of anarchism, but finally admitted that they were at least probably fighting on the same side. Makhno provides a detailed description of this conversation, and his depiction of Lenin certainly tracks with Lenin’s personality, but it is worth mentioning that, so far as I can tell, Makhno’s memoir is the only evidence we have that he ever met personally with Lenin. There’s apparently no other contemporaneous record, schedule, calendar entry, or note from anyone working inside the Kremlin at the time that confirms that this meeting ever took place. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t, just that it’s not entirely clear that it did.

From Moscow, Makhno returned to Huliaipole and found things had gotten worse in his absence. The occupation forces were rooting out all his comrades, his mother’s home had been burned to the ground, his brother had been shot. He also discovered that a bounty had been placed on his own head, and he had to go into hiding.

But, it would be a very active hiding, not a passive hiding. Makhno started organizing and arming local forces to commence a more deliberate guerrilla campaign against the occupation, and it was during this period in the second half of 1918 that his reputation as an innovative military strategist and tactician grew. He wound up running an exemplary guerrilla campaign built on speed, mobility, surprise, local knowledge and loyal comradery. His growing forces were supported by the peasants with food supplies and information. They could gather, strike and disperse before the enemy forces — mostly Austrian soldiers — could respond. He famously pioneered the use of mounting machine guns on horse-drawn carts to strike targets with deadly speed. And while military affairs took up most of his attention, Makhno also became quite the anarchist proselytizer. He delivered passionate political speeches in every town and village he passed through, always and everywhere, promising the people what they wanted: land and Liberty. His courage in battle and steadfast commitment to the safety of the local population earned him the affectionate honorific Bat’ko, or little father, and as much as Makhno hated all forms of authority, he was earning quite a bit of it for himself.

This brings us to November 1918 when everything gets turned upside down once again. The defeated Central Powers had to renounce their claim to Ukraine and prepare to withdraw their forces. This left the propped up reactionary regime of Hetman Skoropadsky without anything propping him up. Multiple political factions gathered forces to overthrow the Hetmanate, and within a matter of weeks, Skoropadsky abandoned Kiev and fled into permanent exile. His flight was precipitated by the advance of those left leaning Ukrainian nationalists that had formed the initial leadership of the Rada. They took over Kiev on December 19th, and established a new directory government to govern what they were declaring to be the restored Ukrainian People’s Republic.

But they were far from the only faction in play. Conservative forces who had supported the Hetman and the occupation waited in the wings for an opportunity to launch a counterrevolution. Meanwhile, on the border with Russia, there loomed two forces: the Russian Communists were organizing an army to support a Ukrainian soviet socialist republic that would enter Ukraine as soon as they were sure the armies of the Central Powers were fully withdrawn, but there were also White armies under General denikin also poised for an invasion. They planned to take over Ukraine and use it as a further springboard to capture Moscow.

Meanwhile, anarchist groups like Makhno’s had no truck with any of these people, and they planned to carve out their own stateless society free of all outside authority or interference. At a regional congress of insurgent leaders in late 1918, they organized themselves into a much larger force called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, fighting under the black banner of anarchism. Makhno became its overall leader. And even though the insurgent army had its own interests, the brewing conflict over the future of Ukraine was a great time for enemies of enemies to become friends.

Makhno identified four immediate enemies for the insurgent army: the forces who had propped up the Hetmanate, the withdrawing armies of the Central Powers, the Don Cossacks, and the White Russians who were aligned with Denikin’s Volunteer Army. These last two were acutely important, and on January the 12th, 1919, the White Army launched an attack on the area controlled by Makhno. And on January 21st, they directly attacked Huliaipole. Facing this threat, Makhno resolved on an alliance with a rival faction he did not include on his list of immediate threats, but who would in time be his political rivals: the Russian Communists.

Now at that same moment, the Red Army was preparing its own invasion of Ukraine and they were looking for local military allies. So the Reds and the Blacks agreed to an Alliance of pure military convenience. Makhno agreed to integrate his insurgent army into the organizational structure of the Red Army, and nominally submit to orders from Red Army headquarters, but the Ukrainian insurgents would maintain their own internal structure, and in reality, acted far closer to an independent auxiliary force than a centrally controlled subsidiary of the Red Army. The Ukrainian front of the Red Army was now under the command of Vladimir Antonov, the guy who had overseen the capture of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution. His forces crossed into Ukraine and successfully captured Kiev on February 5th, installing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to replace the ousted Ukrainian People’s Republic.

Good luck keeping all of this straight.

As part of the offensive, Makhno’s forces participated in battles against the Whites down in the Donbass region, north of the Sea of Azov. As a result of the Black Army successes, the territory controlled by Makhno grew even more, and they soon control a large autonomous zone free from all outside authority, just the way they liked it.

So, what I want to do now is turn to what was going on inside this zone during the first half of 1919. We’re talking about a loose blob of territory comprising maybe 75,000 square kilometers east of the Nepa River and north of the sea of Azov. It had a geographic and political center in Makhno’s hometown of Huliaipole. At its maximum extent, it probably covered a population somewhere north of 7 million people. Mostly these were agrarian peasants, but we also have several small industrial cities with the working classes that go along with them. The population was also mostly Ukrainian, but there were also Russians in the city as well as a significant population of Jews. And in dealing with the Jewish population, makhno was famously a virulent anti-anti-Semite. Most of the people he had been fighting with since he was a teenager were Jewish, and he detested their persecution and abuse at the hands of anti-Semites. So while anti-Jewish pogroms tended to follow the advance of practically all the armies running around in Ukraine, Makhno wasn’t having it. In fact, he demanded the opposite. In his mind, everybody was a part of a universal brotherhood. Rank bigotry like antisemitism could not be tolerated, it had to be eliminated root and branch. So we find Makhno’s Black Army consistently anti-anti-Semitic, though this was not something everyone in the ranks embraced. He apparently had one troop commander summarily shot for exploitively raiding a Jewish settlement; another soldier was executed for waving a flag that said “beat the Jews and save Russia.”

Now Makhno’s ultimate object was for all the people living in his zone to live under their own authority, forming hyper-local councils that would see to their own affairs. When the Black Army rolled through town, they posted a notice which read:

The Army does not serve any political party, any power, any dictatorship. On the contrary, it seeks to free the region of all political power, of all dictatorship. It strives to protect the freedom of action, the free life of workers against all exploitation and domination. The Makhno Army does not therefore represent any authority. It will not subject anyone to any obligation whatsoever. Its role was confined to defending the freedom of the workers. The freedom of the peasants and the workers belongs to themselves and should not suffer any restriction.

So, Makhno was there to liberate and move on, not to stay and set up shop.

With this particular focus on hyperlocal Administration, makhno also started establishing formal anarchist communes — not just liberating existing villages, but setting up brand new settlements on land seized from largest states and populated with the formerly landless poor. They were meant to live together in communes of a couple hundred people, working the land together and sharing the produce together, and Makhno himself periodically resided in these communes, working the fields just as he had done when he was a kid, except this time, not for any master.

Now, these communes tend to function more like prototypes than anything else, and there were only a handful of them set up. Mostly the people in Makhno’s zone continued to live in their existing village structures, and continue on with their traditional way of life, simply cut loose of external authority. Now, ultimately what Makhno wanted was for all these communities to knit themselves together in a larger confederation that would spread out across Ukraine, and to affect this confederation they wanted to use the existing structure of the soviets. But they called for a very specific kind of soviet: a free soviet.

Over 1917 and 1918, they had seen how organized political parties — now most especially, the Communists — had been getting themselves elected to the executive committees of local soviets, and then ignoring the wishes of the peasants and the workers who had elected them, and instead serving the interests of the party. The role of the soviets had thus been flipped on its head: they were now enforcing top-down decrees with no input from the local population, rather than what they had originally been, which is a forum for the expression of local needs from the bottom up.

So by a free Soviet, what they meant was a soviet that explicitly barred members of political parties from joining. This was supposed to keep the soviet grounded in the interest of the local population they served, rather than having the local population serve the interest of some political party and their far off central committee. This was an idea that was gaining widespread traction, and as we talked about last week, the peasant uprising in the Volga were often rising up under the banner Soviet Without Communists.

So Makhno’s anarchism was rooted in hyper-local autonomy, but that did not mean the Ukrainian anarchists did not seek wider coalitions and confederations. In the first half of 1919, they held several regional congresses, the first one in January of about a hundred delegates, and the second more consequential and controversial congress held in February. It was controversial because by now the Communists had established a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist republic based in Kiev, and the growth and solidification of this anarchist autonomous zone in their midst was a threat. The second Congress held in February also established its own revolutionary military soviet that challenged the Communist’s claim to power. They further issued a declaration that read:

The workers and peasants of Ukraine had liberated the territory from its enemies. Now that the enemy is beaten, some government appears in our midst describing itself as Bolshevik and aiming to impose its party’s dictatorship upon us. Is that to be countenanced? We are non-party insurgents. We have revolted against all our oppressors. We will not countenance a new enslavement no matter the quarter whence it may come.

The Congress then declared its intention to establish a regime of freely elected, anti-authoritarian soviets.

Now it was not all land and liberty inside this anarchist free zone though, and there were internal contradictions of their own making that threatened the project. For one, the regional congresses approve the need for military conscription, which tends to undermine the kind of free choices guaranteed by the anarchist creed. But they insisted that this was all voluntary, it wasn’t conscription, because the levy had been approved by the people’s representatives at the regional congress. Which is, of course, clever rhetoric, but doesn’t matter very much to the people being pressed into service against their will as the Black Army joined the Reds and the Whites and everyone else pissing off every local population they pass through by conscripting people into their army at bayonet point.

There were also problems with the urban population. Makhno was temperamentally a peasant, and he kind of detested cities. He encouraged workers to take control of their own factories, but otherwise offered, very little understanding of their specific needs. He certainly didn’t care much about the value of paper money, which urban workers needed to buy things, like food from the villages. Makhno tended to insist that food should only be given up for bartered goods, goods the urban population often didn’t have readily at hand. So Makhno’s free society had many supporters among the peasants, but was viewed with increasingly hostile skepticism by the urban population.

So while there was internal dissension and internal conflict, the main threat to Makhno’s autonomous zone seemed to come from outside, from the Communists, those in Kiev and those in Moscow. In the spring of 1919, both the Reds and the Blacks were making it very clear to each other that once the war against the Whites was over, there would not be room in Ukraine for the both of them. These conflicts really started breaking out into the open when a third Regional Congress of Insurgents was called to convene on April the 10th. The Communist authorities deemed this congress counterrevolutionary, and explicitly banned the delegates from convening. In their eyes, it represented an attempt to create a state within a state that was outside the bounds of the authority of the Communists. Which of course, it was, that was the whole point, and since Communist authority didn’t actually extend into the region yet, the delegates to the congress just went ahead and convened in defiance of the ban. When they met, they incredulously defended themselves against the crazy charge that they were a bunch of counter-revolutionaries. They said:

Can it be that laws laid down by a handful of individuals describing themselves as revolutionaries can afford them the right to declare outside of the law an entire people more revolutionary than themselves? Is there some law according to which a revolutionary is alleged to have the right to enforce the harshest punishment against the revolutionary mass on whose behalf he fights, and this because that same mass has secured for itself the benefits that the revolutionary promised them… freedom and equality? Can that mass remain silent when the “revolutionary” strips it of the freedom which it has just won. Does the law of revolution required the shooting of a delegate on the grounds that he is striving to achieve in life the task entrusted to him by the revolutionary mass which appointed him? What interests should the revolutionary defend? Those of the party? Or those of the people at the cost of whose blood the revolution has been set in motion?

The Congress met and dispersed without further incident, but gauntlets are being thrown down.

Now, despite all this, as late as April 1919, both sides were still publicly supporting each other. Kamenev even came down and praised Makhno’s steadfast revolutionary principles, though he also sent a private telegram to Lenin recommending only temporary diplomacy with Makhno’s army. Makhno was also told by sympathetic functionaries inside the Soviet apparatus he might be ambushed and killed.

Now, this was not a great time for the Reds and the Blacks to be sizing each other up for a final battle, because General Denikin’s White Army was about to make a major push into Ukraine. Like his counterpart Admiral Kolchak, Denikin was now being supplied by the British, and throughout the fighting in 1919, his army would receive in total:

• almost 200,000 rifles
• 6,200 machine guns
• 500 million rounds of ammunition
• 1100 artillery pieces.
• and nearly 2 million shells.

They also delivered 60 brand new tanks and made available 168 aircraft from the newly minted RAF. They also received additional supplies for the soldiers, including 460,000 coats and 645,000 pairs of boots. Supplied to the hilt, and now commanding a pretty competent and disciplined white army of about 50,000 men, Denikin moved into Ukraine in the spring of 1919.

The forces opposing him started to break down in May. Trotsky visited the region for the first time and reported, “The prevailing state of chaos, irresponsibility, laxity, and separatism exceeds the most pessimistic expectation.” The Ukrainian front to the Red Army had been built on a system of alliances with local warlords, including people like Nestor Makhno. But just as the Whites started to advance, one of the most important of these local warlords, a guy called Nikifor Grigoriev, split from the Reds, taking all his forces with them. Now it wasn’t entirely clear what Grigoriev’s ultimate plan was, but he controlled a good chunk of southwest Ukraine. And his defection was a big deal. Trying to hold the rest of the line together, Kamenev ordered Makhno to denounce Grigoriev publicly, but Makhno refused to take a hard pro-Communist line, and said only that he remained unshakably loyal to the worker and the peasant revolution, and that, “As an anarchist revolutionary, I cannot by any means support seizure of power by Grigoriev or by anyone.” This rather lackluster declaration of loyalty to the Communists, which obviously implied that he wasn’t planning on letting the Communists take over either, rang alarm bells in Moscow that may be Makhno could not really be depended on, though it is worth pointing out the Makhno ultimately did denounce Grigoriev and wrote among other things, “Brothers, don’t you hear in his words a grim call to the Jewish pogrom? Don’t you feel the desire of Ataman Gregoriev to break the living fraternal connection between the revolution of Ukraine and revolutionary Russia?”

And of course, Grigoriev’s ultimate fate, which we’ll get to next week, was a pretty clear final denunciation by Makhno.

Then in the first week of June, there was a huge blow up between the Reds and the Blacks. A Fourth Regional Congress was scheduled for June 15, and this time the Communists absolutely refused to allow it to proceed, especially because the invitation sent out was addressed to soldiers in the Red Army, all, but encouraging them to mutiny and desert, to ditch the authoritarian Reds, and join the freedom-loving Blacks. So Trotsky issued order number 1824 on June 4th, absolutely forbidding the Congress. And he said among other things, “The Huliaipole executive committee, in concert with Makhno’s brigade staff, is attempting to schedule a Congress of Soviets and Insurgents. Said Congress is wholly an affront to Soviet power in the Ukraine, and to the organization of the southern front, to which Makhno’s brigade is attached. That Congress could not produce any result other than to deliver the front to the Whites, in the face of who Makhno’s brigade does nothing but fall further and further back, thanks to the incompetent and criminal tendencies and treachery of its commanders.”

This is quite an open denunciation of Makhno, and it was followed up by Communist-aligned Red Army forces moving into his district, breaking up the anarchist commune, and briefly occupying Huliaipole itself. But this occupation didn’t last very long, because just a few days later, Denikin’s forces showed up and drove off everyone.

Makhno resigned from his position in the Red Army while reaffirming his commitment to the revolution… at least, to the revolution as he understood it, as a revolution of workers and peasants — actual workers and peasants, not just those who claim to represent them. With the whites advancing through Ukraine, Makhno declared his intention to go on waging a guerrilla war, just like he had waged against the occupation forces in 1918. Trotsky ordered Makhno arrested for deserting his post, but sympathetic officers in the Red Army tipped him off, and he avoided capture by the Chekha.

Meanwhile, the Whites enjoyed unbroken success in Ukraine against the disintegrating line of Red and Blacks. The Red Army retreated more than 200 miles beyond even Kharkov, the main political and industrial center of eastern Ukraine and one of the most important cities in the whole region. On June 4th, Trotsky had confidently said, “I think that Kharkov stands in no greater danger than Moscow or any other city of the Soviet Republic.” it fell to the Whites by the end of the month, which opened up the question, if it was a no greater danger than Moscow, then how much danger was Moscow in?

Next week, we will answer that question, as we get to the second stage of Denikin’s 1919 summer offensive. The threat of an ultimate White victory will force the Reds and the Blacks back together into an uneasy fighting alliance, as the Red Army reformed a frontline, and Makhno’s guerrilla forces found the overextended White supply lines easy pickings.

They would once again team up to save the revolution they both believed the other was hell bent on wrecking.

 

 

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Episode 10.18: the Witte System

First of all, Sound Education was great. It was super fun to see everyone. I did some interviews and there may be some other sound bites and recordings or things that pop up out there. And when they do, I will be sure to share them with you all. Uh, thanks to everyone who put it on, showed up and participated.

Now did Sound Education contribute a little bit to this episode coming out late? Yes. Yes it did. But who cares? We’re here now. You can also probably tell that I did get a new microphone. That’s why this episode sounds a little bit different than the last one, hopefully a little bit better. Though I am recording it inside an old apartment in Ithaca, New York, not the usual space in Paris so it’ll probably sound different again when I go home in a few weeks, c’est la vie.

Now, what I want to do today is return to Russia from our spell among the radical émigré exiles in Switzerland, and discuss why the new Emancipation of Labor Group is about to find their Marxist message resonating instead of falling on deaf ears. Now today’s episode is going to take us right up to the early 1890s, right up to the ascension of Tsar Nicholas the Second, in fact, who is going to combine the worst parts of King Charles the First and King Louis the 16th to form the truly platonic ideal of a terrible monarch. We’ll introduce Nicholas fully next week, then I’m going to take one scheduled week off, and after that we will more fully develop the political and economic situation of the Russian Empire as it plunges first towards 1905 and then 1917.

As I have said, this is not just going to be the story of the Bolshevik’s rise to power. This ain’t going to be Lenin versus the tsar because the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were about so much more than that. We’ve got liberals who wanted a democratic constitution and civil rights; anarchists who wanted to blow up the whole empire root and branch; nationalists who wanted self-determination and freedom from the Russian Empire; as well as a resurgent brand of narodism still saying, hey, you know, the empire is 90% peasant, you can’t just ignore that. We’re going to talk about all of it.

Now, as we discussed at the beginning of last week’s episode, Alexander the Third came to power upon the death of his father in March of 1881, and he did not waste any time repudiating everything that the now late lamented Tsar Liberator had done. The movement towards further constitutional reform, like actually having a constitution, was reversed. The new policy of Alexander the Third would be a return to the old policy of his grandfather, Nicholas the First: orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. One tsar, one church, one language — faith, tsar, and the fatherland. The goal now was to suppress anything that challenged that triad. The semi-democratic zemstvo were an affront to the principle of autocracy, so they would find their activities and authority severely curtailed. Religious alternatives to Russian Orthodox christianity: Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, all face new hurdles of intolerance. And as we’ll talk about more in future episodes, the return to an official policy of Russification would land hard on minority nationalities: Jews again, Poles, Germans, central Asians, Ukrainians, all of them would be facing an Imperial policy steamrolling over their ethnic and cultural identities, and none of them would be happy about it.

But this return to the political and cultural policies of his grandfather still left Tsar Alexander the Third with a problem, the problem that had in fact been the impetus for his father’s great reforms in the early 1860s: Russia’s backward economy. In terms of economic and technological process, there was kind of an objective forward and backward, advanced and primitive, and Russia was on the wrong side of all those lines. To compete in the big new world of modern industrialization, they were going to have to… modernize and industrialize and the great reforms on their own had not done the work they were supposed to have done. Russia still did not have the financial resources, the material capital, or the labor force necessary to compete with the likes of Britain and Germany and France.

Now the 1860s and 1870s had seen annual output increases in iron and steel and coal and oil. In 1861, there were thousands of miles of railroad track. By the 1880s, there were tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. In 1861, the quote unquote industrial labor force was only about 750,000 people, and by the time Alexander the Third was ascending, it was on its way to being a million and a half or so. You started seeing financial institutions and joint stock companies forming to pool resources and fund projects. Large factories started sprouting up in Moscow and St. Petersburg and Kiev. Mining operations in the Ural mountains and the exploration and exploitation of the Baku oil fields expanded. But this happened slowly, and not without encountering the inertia of tradition. Capital investment was greater than it had ever been, but it was still low compared to western Europe. And though freed, most peasants still lived in their villages. Now for some of the ascendant conservatives in the ministry of Alexander the Third, this was all for the good. Because no less than Marx, they suspected that major changes in the basic economic relations of the Russian Empire would cause social upheavals that would increase the threat of political revolution. But others had their eye on different threats to the existing political order. Yes, changes to the underlying forces of production can lead to revolution, but what happens if… the state goes bankrupt? Or worse yet, what happens if we lose another war in humiliating fashion? I mean, let’s just take as a purely hypothetical, I’m not saying this would actually happen just purely hypothetically, I mean, what if we got in a war with, and again, I’m just picking a random name out of a hat here, let’s say we got in a war with like Japan. And lost. With so much of our political legitimacy resting on our military might, losing a war like that might topple the government quite a bit faster than changes in the substructure’s mode of production.

So some voices inside the government said, look, we can modernize the economy inside a system of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. We just have to be careful. And besides, even if you’re scared of what might happen, we have to do it. We have to take the risk. We have to navigate the consequences because if we do nothing, we are done for, for sure.

The man who became synonymous with this latter position is Sergei Witte. Sergei Witte was born in June, 1849, just as the Russians were snuffing out the last embers of the revolution of 1848. Born into a noble family of Baltic Germans, Sergei’s father converted from Lutheran to Orthodoxy to advance his political career. Little Sergei was raised on the estates of his noble grandparents, and originally went off to university to study theoretical mathematics, with an eye on becoming a professor. But this career path did not sit well with his family, who prodded him instead to enter the civil service in the growing railroad sector. So after graduating at the top of his class in 1870, that’s what Sergei did. He started out doing internship type work to learn all aspects of the business, and then got himself appointed head of the traffic office for the Odessa railroad. This was a fine cushy job, but then in 1875, there was a bad wreck on one of the lines under his jurisdiction, and Witte himself was arrested and charged with official negligence.

But while his case was being contested, Russia got involved in another brief war with the Turks, which lasted from 1877 to 1878 down in the Balkans. Witte had devised a novel double shift program to increase efficiency of the critical Odessa railroads that serve the front lines. The dramatic increase in efficient productivity, in a sector critical to the war effort, was recognized by an influential grand duke, who interceded in Witte’s case, got his sentence reduced to weeks and then set him free to play a bigger role in Imperial railroad policy.

Now working under the auspices of some pretty powerful patrons that moved to St. Petersburg for a while before moving on again to Kiev, where in 1883, he published an influential paper outlining ways to improve the freight system of Russia. This included not just technical and organizational recommendations, but he also said that the tsar needed to take some official interest in the conditions of the growing group of industrial workers, if not out of humanitarian benevolence than at least out of economic and political self-interest. Well-treated workers are more productive and less revolutionary.

After more than a decade working diligently for the state, Witte then moved to the private sector. Accepting a job as manager of the Southwestern Railway, a privately held operation based in Kiev. When he showed up, he did what he always did wherever he showed up: he quickly increased the efficiency and profitability of the Southwestern Railway, and now had a well earned reputation as something of a wonder boy. That reputation brought him to the attention of Tsar Alexander the Third himself. This attention earned Witte the enmity of a few of the tsar’s other ministers. You see, the imperial family had a private locomotive, which had been outfitted with this super fast double engine that allowed it to travel at super high speeds, which everyone agreed was totally awesome. Witte looked at the specs and said, this is crazy, this is a disaster waiting to happen. Neither the cars these engines are pulling, nor the tracks these engines are riding on, are designed to handle the kind of vibration and stress you’re putting on them. Everyone else was like, dude, you’re no fun at all, look how fast it goes, it’s awesome.

In October of 1888, the imperial train was traveling at its usual, completely unsafe high-speed near Borki, a town 250 miles south of Kursk. When, as Witte predicted, it derailed in spectacular fashion. 21 people were killed in the wreck. Tsar Alexander and his family were in the dining car and managed to escape with only injuries. And the story goes that the tsar personally bore the weight of the collapsed roof of the dining car while his family escaped the wreckage. Now, this isn’t totally implausible, I mean, google up a picture of Tsar Alexander the Third, he’s a big dude, but this feat of heroic strength immediately went into the propaganda machine of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. And became a standard part of Tsar Alexander’s story. Not only the feat of strength, but the fact that the imperial family survived the crash at all, was clearly a sign that his policies were favored by God.

A subsequent investigation found plenty of blame to go around, and one voice who had predicted to a tee what might happen. The tsar may have been protected by God, but he would have been even smarter to trust the word of Sergei Witte. So in 1889, Witte was appointed head of the state railway department inside the Ministry of Finance. This put him in charge of the railroads of Russia. Witte accepted the job on the condition that he would have hiring and firing power, specifically, so that he could hire people who were talented, experienced, and had expertise, and fire doofuses with good political connections or fancy pedigrees. Y’know, the kinds of men who might say things like ain’t it neat how fast we can make the train go.

The arrival of Witte as the head of the railroads in 1889 marks the beginning of his push towards what becomes known as the Witte system. As he took up his new office that published another paper called National Savings and Friedrich List, which outlined a new plan partly influenced by the German economist Friedrich List. Now List had died back in 1846, but Witte liked his philosophy. List had advocated his own stages of economic progress and recommended a plan for how underdeveloped nations could become developed nations. First, you should embrace free trade to swap raw resources for advanced foreign manufacturers and capital. Then once you had some wealth built up, you should erect trade barriers to encourage and protect your domestic industries and make a little tax revenue on the side. Then once your domestic economy was robust, powerful, and productive, you drop the tariffs again and go out and compete on an equal basis. And the global economy. List was a great believer in the national system. No internal barriers to trade, and a major emphasis on economic connectivity and integration. And he was thus a great promoter of domestic railroads to knit together the national economy. Witte took large portions of this theory and believed that he could apply them profitably, literally profitably, to Russia.

Witte also believed, not unlike Marx, that the kind of modernizing economic development Russia needed was not going to be driven by the relatively small and weak Russian bourgeoisie — there hardly even was a Russian bourgeoisie. So he argued that the state itself was going to have to be a major locomotive of development as both producer and customer of industry. And his ultimate goal was to amass financial and material capital that would make Russia a strong industrial economy in its own right. And Sergei Witte being Sergei Witte, he believed that the best place to launch this locomotive of development was… in the locomotives! So the state would organize, direct, and finance railroad development that would create major demand for labor mining, coal and petroleum. To finance these projects Witte energetically looked for foreign investors. He sold Russian projects to British and French and Belgian investors, and they were enticed by the opportunities they saw. High interest rates on their loans, low labor costs for the projects, and a powerful, repressive autocracy that wouldn’t let the workers make any trouble.

But foreign investment was not the only thing. Witte also raised taxes across the board, most of which wound up being born principally by the lower classes, especially by the peasants. Witte also followed List’s recommendations, and protected Russian industrial development by throwing up tariff barriers, that yes, shielded that development, and made the state some revenue, but it also made many consumer goods much more expensive.

So the Witte system in general was about fostering and protecting a growing industrial economy. Raising revenue for the state with new tariffs and taxes, and integrating the empire with a dramatic expansion of railroads, which once finished, would make further progress in other sectors possible. The most important of these new rail projects was unquestionably the Trans-Siberian Railway, which would forge a direct link all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the far East. The Trans-Siberian Railway would take a decade to complete and have all the beneficial impacts Witte desired, prodding major demand for metal, coal, oil, and labor — though, come 1901 when the project was finished, let’s just say that the resulting disappearance of demand and jobs was of some benefit to the activities of the next generation of our Russian revolutionaries.

Another thing that would be of some benefit to our future Russian revolutionaries would be the Russian famine of 1891-1892, terrible harvests in the fall of 1891, combined with terrible government policy that continued to export grain abroad and only belatedly and ineffectually attempted to deal with the problem. The famine led to upwards of 500,000 deaths, and despite official censorship, which tried to pretend like, you know, times are bad, but not that bad, plenty of Russians walked away from the famine with their faith in those are supremely tested. Which again, was something that later Marxists and anarchists and resurgent narodists were going to be able to play on. The mishandling the famine by the Minister of Finance helped lead to his ouster during the summer of 1892, and who better to install in this all-important post than the one guy who seemed like he knew what he was actually doing… Sergei Witte.

Appointed in August, 1892, Witte would serve in the post for the next 11 years. And from this perch, with the full blessing and protection of the tsars he served, he was able to go even further with his plans. He pushed hard for the Trans-Siberian Railway, which would soon have him playing a major diplomatic role in Russia’s relations with China and Japan, both of whom were going to be directly impacted by the project. He further expanded and raised tariffs and taxes, and cultivated foreign investment. And he was already getting ready to have Russia adopt the gold standard, which would ingratiate Russia with the European banking establishment, a move that would proceed the same move José Limantour would make in Mexico just a few years later, the development we talked about in the early episodes on the Mexican Revolution. And really, as I sit here writing about the Witte system, I am very much reminded of the scientifico program for the middle and latter years of the Porfiriato. And in fact, while I’m sitting here, I should say that a lot of the things I’ve been writing about Russia have been very similar to things I wrote about Mexico, and I may have to do a dedicated compare and contrast session on the Mexican and Russian revolutions. And for the record, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were never confused about whether or not the peasants had revolutionary potential.

No promises on that, it’s just, it’s been on my mind a lot lately.

The impact of the Witte system was undeniable, and it is sometimes described as sparking the Witte boom. Now this takes us a little bit ahead of the temporal framework of today’s episode, but between 1890 and 1900, the amount of railroad track doubled from 30,000 kilometers to 60,000 kilometers. Annual output of coal, iron, and petroleum all more or less tripled, and the value of annual textile production doubled. By 1900 Russia had gone from having 1.5 million industrial workers to 3 million, though they were still a minuscule 2.5% of the total population, a population that was pegged in a census taken in 1897 at 125 million people.

But the impact of this was not really an empire-wide affair. It was mostly concentrated in major cities or areas where the necessary raw resources were found, so like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, mining operations in the Ural mountains, petroleum operations in the Baku oil fields. Those specific areas underwent significant economic and social transformation even if Russia as a whole still remained predominantly rural and peasant. So what we’re seeing here is the rapid doubling of the industrial labor population, not spread out over the vast acreage of the empire, but jammed into very specific areas. They were all living right on top of each other.

So the hallmark of Russia’s rapid industrialization was that it was much larger and more concentrated in the factories and mines and construction projects than similar operations in the west. And conditions were infamously deplorable. In an environment where all power was held by management, management backed by orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, working standards and living conditions were bad. Very, very bad. Long hours, low pay, no safety standards, poor sanitation, terrible food, and even worse shelter. It was all dehumanizing and degrading and dangerous. Workers often lived in barracks-like buildings, just living and sleeping next to each other in large open halls that maybe had beds, and maybe didn’t. Certainly most of these barracks did not have dedicated laundry services or built-in kitchens. Everyone was just kind of filthy, ate at communal canteens and had zero privacy. Other areas might have cheap tenement buildings thrown up that would be subdivided and subdivided again to maximize the number of quote unquote rooms available.

Now, some of these deplorable conditions were explained away by one of the other hallmarks of this phase of Russian industrialization, which is the somewhat temporary and quasi seasonal nature of the workforce. Drawing primarily from villages near the big cities and factories and work sites, the workers still identified mentally as residents and members of their home villages. They were just here to work and make as much money as they could, sending most of that money back home. And they themselves would go home whenever duties there like the harvest required it, which would always cause work slowdowns during those times. So Russian industry was still subject to the rhythms of agriculture.

The younger generation of workers, though, were very one foot in and one foot out of the village. They were very interested in getting both feet out of the village entirely. Sure, they had come to make money for their families, but also to escape the dull, ignorant drudgery of village life. Women especially were eager to take on jobs as housekeepers and maids and anything else that was on offer, as that gave them a degree of financial independence and got them out from under the plodding tyranny of the village patriarchy. These young women would be especially receptive to the ideas about breaking down the tyranny of the patriarchal family, which was being pitched by socialists and anarchists, and make them critical mainstays and leaders in the revolutions to come. But for the moment, they were not yet mentally the permanent urban proletarian population that revolutionary theorists like Plekhanov was counting on. For that, they would need additional years together, living in squalid conditions and working terrible jobs, which would instill in them an instinctive fighting spirit that if given a name and a direction, could be very revolutionary indeed.

But next week we’ll get back to the Romanovs, because on October the 20th, 1894, Tsar Alexander the Third would die, at the age of just 49. This left the empire to his 26 year old son, Nicholas the Second. On his death bed, Alexander told his son that the only minister he should listen to was Sergei Witte. Witte is the only one who knows what he’s doing. This is advice that Nicholas would at first take, and then later disregard, as his mind wandered off to listen to other more… eccentric voices. A true believer in orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality, Nicholas never doubted that he was God’s chosen father of the Russian people.

And next week, we will spend time with young Nicholas, and attempt to puzzle out, if it’s true what Nicholas believed, just what on earth God might have been thinking.

 

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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.

 

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Episode 10.85: The German Revolution

At the core of Bolshevik communist ideology was a faith that they were in the vanguard of an international socialist revolution, that World War I would mark the death of the old world of capitalist imperialism, and the birth of a new world, of global socialism. In their minds, the October Revolution was akin to a small army of Russians winning control of the key hill adjacent to an important battlefield. Yes, it was vital and necessary that they hold that hill, but the main battlefield was off in the west, in places like France and Britain and Germany. These more technologically and economically advanced nations would provide the mass proletarian army envisioned by revolutionary Marxism, an army that would storm and overwhelm the forces of capitalist imperialism everywhere. So in the background of all Bolshevik thinking throughout 1917 and 1918 was the idea that all they needed to do was hold their hill, and maybe provide some covering fire for their comrades in the west, so that they could go off and win the greater battle. The notion that the Russians might be left to fight alone was not only not a part of the larger plan, but it was assumed to be effectively synonymous with their own final defeat. Lenin and company needed proletarian victory in the west to secure their own position in Russia.

As the one year anniversary of the October Revolution came around in the autumn of 1918, communist leaders in Moscow thus looked eagerly to events in central Europe, especially in Germany. The collapse of the Central Powers and the end of World War I would surely mark the arrival of the proletarian reinforcements they had been waiting for. And that is what we are going to talk about today. Because the events in Germany between October 1918 and January 1919 are the decisive moments when the theory that radical socialist revolution would soon be sweeping across Europe was decisively contradicted by the reality of events — events that are going to force the Russians to completely rethink and reimagine what it is that they are up to, as they realize that they are going to have to do it alone.

So to set up the fault lines of the coming German Revolution, we need to talk about the fracturing of the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD. Now by the time World War I broke out, the SPD was the model socialist political party. It was by far the largest, strongest, and best organized socialist party in Europe. It was the leading element of international socialism, and a backbone of the Second International. Domestically, in the 1912 Reichstag elections, the SPD won the largest number of seats — not an outright majority, but they were still the biggest single party. But then as we discussed in Episode 10.55, on August 4th, 1914, the leaders of the SPD decided to support the German war effort, whereupon all the other socialist parties in Europe supported their own respective national war efforts, precipitating the breakdown of the Second international.

But there was inside Germany a faction of socialists who held to the principles of opposition to imperialist wars. Aghast at the betrayal of the SPD, gathered for the first time the very next day, to organize a group that would maintain fidelity to the repeatedly endorsed principles of international proletarian solidarity.

This group would become known to history as the Spartacus Group, taking their name from a guy we talked about way back in Episode 36 of the History of Rome, I Am Spartacus.

As the Spartacus group organizes itself. I want to briefly highlight three leaders in particular: Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht.

We’ll start with the most famous of the three, Rosa Luxemburg, who has already made some cameos in our series on the Russian Revolution. 43 years old when World War I broke out, Luxemburg was a long standing force in international socialism. Born into a Jewish family in the Russian controlled part of Poland, she radicalized early, and was already attending underground reading groups by the time she was 15 years old. This put her on the radar of the Okhrana, and in 1889, she fled to Switzerland at the age of 18. There, she enrolled in the University of Zurich, where she was one of the only women in a nearly all-male student body. She studied economics and political science, and earned a doctorate in 1897 in political economy.

But mostly, Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist revolutionary. She entered the socialist scene and became acquainted with all the heavy hitters of the day, and then became the principal theoretician of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. She attended her first international socialist gathering in 1893. Over the years, Luxemburg developed an idiosyncratic version of Marxism that combined a belief in the inevitable collapse of capitalism, the necessity of revolution to deliver the final blow, the priority of class interests over national interests or gender interests, and a commitment to mass struggle, especially in the form of the general strike. Her 1898 pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, marked Luxemburg as one of the most gifted and eloquent opponents of Edward Bernstein’s revisionist version of Marxism.

Throughout the pre-war years, Luxemburg zealously engaged in intra-socialist debates, always attacking everyone from the position of the revolutionary left. She bounced in and out of various prisons, and after moving to Germany, served as a teacher for the SPD, where she instructed, among others, a rising star in the party named Friedrich Ebert.

During these years, Luxemburg met and befriended the second person I want to highlight today, Clara Zetkin. 14 years older than her young friend Luxemburg, she too had radicalized as a student, and then departed for Switzerland and Paris on account of Bismarck’s ban on socialist activities in 1878. Zetkin was committed to the cause of international socialism, but she also worked especially hard on the interests of women as a vital part of the socialist revolution. A fixture of ex-pat German socialism, when Zetkin returned to Germany after the ban on socialism was lifted, she became the editor of the SPDs women’s newspaper, Equality, which she guided for the next 25 years. As a leader of the socialist wing of the International Women’s Movement, Zetkin was hostile to the aristocratic sensibilities of bourgeois liberal feminism, but she was also opposed to her young friend Rosa Luxemburg’s opinion that the women’s question was entirely beside the main point of revolutionary class struggle. Zetkin believed women needed to address this struggle as women, but at the same time, she always fought alongside Luxemburg from the position of the revolutionary left in any larger controversy inside socialist circles about tactics, strategy, and ideology. Together, they would defiantly break with the SPD leadership in August 1914, and help found the antiwar and Pro revolution Spartacus Group.

The third person I need to introduce here is their friend and ally Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht came from socialist royalty. He was the son of Wilheim Liebknecht, a veteran of 1848, lifelong friend of fellow London exile Karl Marx, member of the original Communist League, and founder of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany, and he helped lead the merger with the German workers party Association in 1875, forming the party that would officially rechristen itself as the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1890. That was the life Karl Liebknecht was born into an 1871. An active socialist lawyer, he was a leading voice against German militarism, writing polemics that eventually got him thrown in prison in 1907, where he was still sitting when the voters elected him to the Prussian parliament in 1908. Once out of prison, he was elected in the SPD’s great parliamentary victory of 1912, and so he was actually in the Reichstag when the decisive vote on war credits came up in August 1914. Under heavy pressure to tow the party line, Liebknecht chose to abstain, so as not to violate his anti-war principles, but also so that he didn’t upset the party leadership, which was now being led by the aforementioned Friedrich Ebert, who wanted a unanimous vote from the party to absolutely establish their patriotic loyalty.

Liebknecht did not live in this conflicted space for long, and he joined Luxemburg and Zetkin and other antiwar pro-revolution socialists to form the core of the Spartacus Group. In December 1914, a vote came up in the Reichstag to renew the war credits and this time Liebknecht defiantly voted no, making him the only delegate in the Reichstag to do so. This earned him the eternal enmity of Friedrich Ebert and the other leaders of the SPD, who subsequently conspired with the government in February 1915 to have Liebknecht drafted into the military despite parliamentary immunity from conscription. As further retribution, he was expelled from the SPD, the party that his own father had helped found a generation earlier.

Now, just to be clear, the group they founded wasn’t technically called the Spartacus Group until January 1916, but the organization and its ideals were consistent from the start: oppose capitalism, oppose imperialism, oppose the war, and support any other group in Europe who felt the same, which made them allies of Lenin’s little Bolshevik group. Their activities were straight up illegal during the war years, and most of them were tossed in prison at various points, especially in 1916, when Liebknecht was sentenced to a four year prison term, and Luxemburg and Zetkin were both placed in preventative detention, as much to prevent what they might do, as punish them for what they had done.

But just as they were going into prison, their ideals started to gain wider currency. A faction in the membership of the SPD who had held their noses and voted for war credits in 1914 were by now thoroughly disillusioned with the war after two years spent in a murderous quagmire. This group included major socialist luminaries like Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein. Forming irreconcilable differences with the leadership group headed by Ebert, who continued to support the war, members started quitting or getting expelled from the party. Shortly after the February Revolution hit Russia, these anti-war German socialists came together to form a new party, called the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was then known by its German acronym, the USPD. The Spartacus Group joined the USPD as its radical left-wing.

For the rest of 1917 and 1918, the USPD and the Spartacists supported strikes, protests, and military mutinies against the government and the war, which grew in size and scope as the war continued and de facto military dictatorship in Germany deepened. These were the strikes and mutinies that Lenin and his Bolsheviks were keeping such a close and hopeful eye on.

After Germany’s last ditch offensive in the spring of 1918 failed, and by the fall of 1918, the war was looking hopelessly lost, the political ties binding the German Empire started to strain and snap. And so what I want to do now is plot the course of the German Revolution of 1918. But with specific reference to the map that had been laid out by the Russians in 1917. Because the two events unfolded in remarkably similar ways, but there are enough critical distinctions between the two that they wind up in very different places. So, what I want to do here is keep an eye on the course of the Russian Revolution as we talk about the course of the German Revolution, and compare and contrast the two, to understand why one wound up as the Communist Soviet Union, while the other wound up as the parliamentary Weimar Republic.

So, to start this, in October 1918, we find Kaiser Wilhelm in the same kind of position his cousin Tsar Nicholas had been in in January 1917: presiding over an autocratic empire that was teetering on the brink of collapse, and being pressured to liberalize, democratize, and swap out the leadership as the only way to survive. In Wilhelm’s case, he was facing demands from the advancing allies, now especially the Americans, saying that democratization of the German political system was a precondition of peace negotiations. But the Kaiser was also taking the same kind of advice from the military high command, guys like General Ludendorff, who were eager to throw the messy and humiliating business of surrender over to a bunch of new civilian politicians in order to pin the blame for losing the war on them rather than the military. And this becomes the origin of the infamous stabbed in the back myth, that the military could have won the war had it not been for these dirty politicians.

On October 3rd, the Kaiser appointed the liberal Prince Maximilian of Baden to serve as the new chancellor of Germany, and oversee a transition to a constitutionally responsible government. Which, right away, we see a key difference between the German Revolution and the Russian Revolution. As Willie did in 1918 what Nikky had so stubbornly refused to do in 1917: inaugurate a new government holding parliamentary confidence.

Now, until the end of October, changes to the German political system will come in swift and confusing succession, but nothing yet was particularly revolutionary. That would all change thanks to the Supreme Naval Command. Still believing they could salvage Germans’ position with a final all-out assault on the Royal Navy in the English Channel, the admiral sent an order on October 24th, 1918, for all ships to prepare to sail into this final battle. But when they got this order, the crews instead mutinied. This naval mutiny is the trigger for the German Revolution. After several days of defiance, mutiny, and sabotage, sailors gathered at the naval base in Kiel, ostensibly to protest the rest of some of their comrades, but they were also now in cahoots with radical civilian leaders, and they gathered under banners that read peace and bread. These mutinous sailors were about to become ground zero for a true revolutionary moment. After armed clashes with troops loyal to the government left dead bodies on the ground, 40,000 rebellious sailors took over the Naval base and the adjacent town — and if we glance at our map of the Russian revolution, the Naval mutiny in Kiel is essentially the equivalent to the mutiny of the Petrograd Garrison in February 1917, which tipped a political crisis into a full blown political revolution.

Late in the evening on November the fourth, 1918 sailors and workers in Kiel established a soldiers and workers council, deliberately modeled on the soviets of the Russian Revolution, and then they sent delegations of sailors to other major cities to proselytize the revolution and encourage everybody to set up their own councils, which was just the German word for soviets. Within a matter of days, most of the large coastal cities were in the hands of these revolutionary groups, and then it spread to Hanover, Brunswick, Frankfurt, Munich. Things now moved very fast in a very revolutionary direction; workers and soldiers were setting up councils, and all of this is obviously akin to the spread of the soviets throughout Russia after the establishment of the first Petrograd Soviet at the end of February 1917.

In Berlin, the rapid spread of these councils/soviets was met by hostile alarm from Friedrich Ebert and the other senior leaders of the SPD who absolutely did not want a soviet style revolution in Germany. Ebert believed it was vital to prevent the kind of social revolution that had taken down Russia. He believed it was vital to ensure a smooth and peaceful transition to a new form of government, and that SPD itself would command enough electoral strength to enshrine socialist goals using the ballot box, not the barricade. Standing between the radical left and the oldest establishment, Ebert put himself forward as the one leader who could navigate Germany through this moment without disrupting any administrative functions, enacting mass land confiscation, or nationalizing industry. Socialist changes would come, but they would be carefully managed, and enacted after prolonged deliberation, not in one apocalyptic flash of social revolution.

So the key date of the German Revolution is November 9th, 1918. The Kaiser was now under enormous pressure to abdicate the throne, not just to satisfy the allies, but also his own people, who believed his departure was necessary to secure the aforementioned peace and bread. But Wilhelm was dragging his feet, so Prince Maximilian helped him out the door by simply announcing that the Kaiser and his eldest son had abdicated the throne, even though they really had not. Then, Maximillian resigned in handed his office to Friedrich Ebert, who thus became Minister President of Prussia and Chancellor of Germany. Now, Maximillian had no authority to do any of this; he just did it, and then it was done.

The streets of Berlin, meanwhile, were teaming with protestors and demonstrators and curious onlookers, and word reached the Reichstag building that Karl Liebknecht, who had just been released from prison, planned to seize the political initiative and proclaimed Germany a socialist republic from the seat of the Berlin city government. Catching wind of this, the deputy chairman of the SPD, a guy called Philip Scheidemann, spontaneously preempted the radicals. Over Ebert’s express objections, Scheidemann walked out onto the balcony of the Reichstag and announced to a gathered crowd that Germany was now a republic, long live the German Republic. So thanks to all of these events on November the ninth, Friedrich Ebert now presided over a self-created republican government, which makes November 9th, 1918, akin to March the second, 1917, the moment when leaders of the Russian Duma formed a provisional government amidst Tsar Nicholas’s own abdication. But there is a crucial difference between the two that becomes a very important: in the Russian case, the provisional government was all liberals, it was Kadets and Octobrists; whereas in Germany, they’re all socialists. It would be as if in Russia in February 1917, the Right SRs had formed the very first Russian provisional government [instead of] standing outside of it for so long. Oh, and I should also mention here that the liberal noble Prince Maximillian is basically playing the role the liberal noble Prince Lvov did in Russia, except Maximillian is just going to quit the scene instead of hanging around long enough to become frustrated and disillusioned with everyone and everything.

Trying to take back the political initiative, a group of about a hundred radical shop stewards then occupied the Reichstag building that night, and announced that every factory and military regiment within reach should send delegates the next day to the Circus Busch to elect a council of people’s deputies that would serve as the new government of republican Germany. Unable to stop the spread of this call, and recognizing that this meeting would be held whether he liked it or not. Ebert and the other SPD leaders leaned into this, and tried to get as many of their people as possible elected to the assembly. And so the next day, November 10th, an assembly of workers and soldiers indeed got together and elected a six man council of people’s deputies that was meant to serve as the new government for Germany. But by now the SPD and the USPD had come to an arrangement, and controlling a majority of the delegates at the assembly, they each got themselves three of the six seats on the Council of People’s Deputies, co-opting the intention of the radicals to form a more aggressively revolutionary body. These more radical elements then pulled a surprise move and called for the additional election of something they called the Executive Council of Workers and Soldiers Councils, which would oversee the Council of People’s Deputies, but the SPD and USPD leaders dominated this council too.

So when we map this over to Russia, this assembly on November the 10th, 1918 is clearly the equivalent to the formation of the Petrograd Soviet. And it was deliberately intended as such by the German radical left, who hoped to create a revolutionary body that could overawe Ebert’s government the way the Petrograd Soviet had dominated the Russian provisional government after February. But in the Russian case, the SRs and Mensheviks had won early control of the Petrograd Soviet, while it was liberal Kadets who were running the provisional government. Two different ideological parties, each in control of their own separate institution of government. But here in Germany in 1918, it’s just SPD guys everywhere you look. And so, while there is the faintest outline to the kind of dual power dynamic that defined Russian politics for the first few months after the Russian Revolution, and that certainly what the radical left is hoping happens, it’s just not going to develop the same way in Germany, after this was all settled to his satisfaction, if not exactly joy Ebert got on the horn to General Wilhelm Groener, who had taken over the critical job of quartermaster general of the German military. Ebert and Groener came to a very quick understanding with each other: Ebert promised to keep the autonomy of the military in place and not mess with the army hierarchy at all if Groener and the military brass supported Ebert in his coming fight to stop the radical left from trying to implement something like the Russian Soviets, which they both agreed would be a disaster.

Groener agreed, with far reaching consequences. Ebert now had the support of the military, and was not only temporarily safe from a right-wing military coup, but he could also count on armed soldiers to defend his nascent government if the radicals took up arms. And though it happens just a little bit out of order here, one does not have to squint very hard to see in this phone call between Ebert and Groener the communications between Kerensky and Kornilov in August 1917, which might have had the same effect in the Russian Revolution and forestalled the October Revolution had not Kerensky hung Kornilov out to dry.

Now the day after all this is the infamous 11th of November and the signing of the armistice that officially ended the war. And here more than anywhere we find the key difference between the Russian and German revolutions. The Russian Revolution took place while the war was still ongoing. The whole first wave of revolutionary leaders, whether they were Kadets or SRs or Mensheviks, in fact believed that one of the key objects of the revolution was to simply install better leaders who could win the war. This made the question of war or peace one of the key questions of 1917. And when Kerensky’s June Offensive collapsed in failure, the Bolsheviks were able to make major political gains thanks to their anti-war position. Ebert’s government does not have to worry about maintaining an unpopular war, because the war is over. They have lost. So it’s not the case that radicals can run around arguing that the war should be over because the war is already over.

The other big component here is that because the war was still ongoing in Russia in 1917, the Russian military had to be kept in the field, and units became radicalized and democratized, making them insubordinate and unreliable, and far from being a bulwark defending the government, they would be a major threat to the government. Here in Germany in 1918, there’s no need to keep the army intact. The revolution isn’t going to radicalize military units because the political revolution is coinciding with mass military demobilization. Imagine how the course of the revolution would have been altered had World War I abruptly ended in February 1917. Now it’s actually pretty easy to imagine, because that’s basically what happens in Germany in November 1918.

So then, on the day after that, November 12th, the council Of People’s Deputies published a program for a social democratic government. It ended press censorship, it promised universal suffrage for everyone over the age of 20, including women, it offered amnesty for all political prisoners, it created freedom of association and assembly in the press, and on top of all those liberal civil rights, they also enshrined an eight hour workday as a statutory requirement, and they expanded unemployment, social insurance, and worker compensation benefits. This was all very popular. It lifted the burden of autocratic tyranny, but also provided social guarantees for the working class. This announced program put Ebert’s government on pretty solid popular footing, but they were still afraid of all those councils sprouting up out there, that they might grow into rival centers of power. But this fear was mostly based in ignorance of what was happening at the grassroots level. To take one example, the famous sociologist Max Weber joined a worker’s council in Heidelberg, and happily discovered that most of his colleagues were moderate liberals, just ready to take over distribution of food and support the frontline soldiers returning home, so many of these German councils didn’t resemble bolshevised soviets so much as the old liberal zemstvos. But Ebert and his fellow leaders in the SPD were still in the grips of, uh, y’know, not unreasonable amount of paranoia, and they were especially afraid of an empire-wide convention of councils that was set to convene in Berlin in mid-December. General Groener dutifully sent several divisions of troops to Berlin, but when Ebert tried to use them to prevent the convention of councils from meeting, this group simply self-demobilized; they refused to do anything. The next batch sent in were then too clumsy in their movements, and fired on an unarmed group of demonstrators on December the 16th, which did not stop the convention from meeting, and only reflected poorly on Ebert and his government.

But Ebert had nothing to worry about here. It’s not like the delegates were radical Sparacists. Even Karl Liebknecht failed to win a seat. Everyone in the room was almost uniformly SPD, and on December the 19th, this council voted 344 to 98 against the creation of a Russian style soviet system as the basis of the new constitution. They instead supported the government call for elections for a national assembly, empowered to settle all republican constitutional questions. So, there’s really no dual power here. There’s never going to be a situation where the soviet over here and the provisional government over there are at loggerheads with each other, because everywhere you look, it’s just members of the SPD. They’re all pulling in the same direction.

And, speaking of this forthcoming national assembly to settle all constitutional questions, we saw how bad it was for the Russians to stall and stall on calling their national assembly. Now this stalling was partly due to just incompetence, but it was also because they wanted to wait until the war was over. And then, when the war just kept going, the constituent assembly was endlessly put off .Failing to deliver a democratic constitution in a timely manner meant that it was permanently preempted by the October Revolution.

And this year is another big consequence, I think, of the German revolution happening against the backdrop of peace rather than war. The Germans could move decisively to their constituent assembly without worrying about the effect it may or may not have on national defense. It’s also possible they were more competent.

But though the political tide was clearly running in his favor, Ebert then tried to make a move to further secure his government’s position that very nearly wrecked everything. Now back on November the 11th, a group of radicalized sailors formed what they called the People’s Navy Division. They installed themselves in Berlin to defend the revolution, and in its initial weeks was tolerated by the government, but now Ebert wanted them demobilized. As a first move, the sailors’ wages stopped being paid, and then they were deliberately ignored when they complained about it. Instead of taking this lying down however, on December the 23rd, about a thousand of these sailors marched into the Imperial Chancellery. They occupied the building, and they held the Council of People’s Deputies hostage. Ebert’s response to this was to get on a secret phone line to military headquarters and call for an attack by loyal troops.

So, on the morning of December the 24th, about 800 soldiers tried to take back control of the Chancellery. But here’s the thing: they failed. The sailors successfully repelled them, and the government troops were forced to pull out of the city center entirely. Had the sailors been more politically ambitious, things might have spun in a completely different direction right then and there. Ebert’s alliance with the military clearly hadn’t produced a decisive military force to defend his government, and for the moment, right here on Christmas Eve in 1918, armed radicals were the masters of the government and of the Berlin city center.

But the sailors were not more politically ambitious. All they did was negotiate for their wages to be paid in full, and for a promise not to be demobilized. And that was it. They went home.

But though this incident wasn’t itself a decisive historical moment, it triggered some profound ripples that produced a decisive historical moment. First, Ebert and Groener recognized that the regular army was maybe not as reliable as they had expected. So in response, they accelerated a program of raising what they called the Freikorps, officially sanctioned paramilitary units composed of volunteers from the demobilizing soldiers. In most cases, the officers and soldiers who would volunteer for such service had little to look forward to back in civilian life. They jumped at the chance to stay inside the structure of the military and be allowed to vent their aggressions, now exacerbated by the humiliation of defeat. The Freikorps volunteers also tended to be politically conservative and nationalistic, and they were more than happy to go beat the heads of dirty traitorous socialists in the service of, well, whoever gave them permission to go beat the heads of dirty traitorous socialists.

So the Freikorps don’t map one to one with the Russian Black Hundreds, but they are playing basically the same role. They were going to turn out to be the muscle of right-wing German politics. The Freikorps will, in time, be an early incubator of the kind of fascism that was taking root in post-war Europe. But for now, the military establishment that was in control of them was aligned with Ebert’s government against the radical left, so the Freikorps would find themselves bashing the heads of socialists on behalf of… other socialists. But that would not always be the case.

The other big result of the sailors storming the Chancellery over Christmas was that it fractured the very brief political alliance between the SPD and the USPD on the one hand, and also ended the longer alliance between the USPD and the Spartacists. In protest of Ebert’s actions taken over Christmas, the USPD resigned from the Council of People’s deputies, which left them free to chart a more oppositional course from the outside, but it of course also left the SPD without any internal opposition; they were free to do whatever they wanted without having to placate anyone.

Meanwhile, the Spartacus Group took this moment to break off and go their own way entirely. On December 31st, 1918, they formally refounded themselves as the Communist Party of Germany, and they were looking to be the party of true proletarian revolution. The original Spartacists were joined by other left-wing socialist groups and workers dissatisfied with the tepid course of the revolution thus far. Its leaders were of course the people I introduced at the beginning of the show: Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht. In her initial declaration announcing the formation of the party, Luxemburg laid out what she thought was their program: that they must dedicate all their energy to raising a mass movement from the grassroots up, to build the councils into a network of majoritarian power that would then supplant Ebert’s government. She said, “Comrades, we have here an extensive field to till. We must build from below upward until the workers and soldiers’ councils gather so much strength that the overthrow of the Ebert or any other similar government will be merely the final act in the drama.”

she then said that the revolution would not be a matter of one dramatic blow, but the work of steady agitation and activism. “We have to work from beneath,” she said, “therein is displayed the mass character of our revolution, one which aims at transforming the whole structure of society. It is thus characteristic of the modern proletarian revolution that we must affect the conquest of political power, not from above, but from beneath.” Their ultimate objective would be to stop the compromises with capitalism pursued by moderate socialists in the SPD, and instead pursue real revolutionary change: land redistribution, nationalization of industry, and a dictatorship of the proletariat, which she took to mean just the majority of the people.

But here on New Year’s Eve 1918, Luxemburg did not expect or anticipate an armed uprising. She said that in the end, “strikes will become the central feature and the decisive factor of the revolution.”

But everything spun out of control within a couple of days. The chief of the Berlin police refused to take action against any of the sailors who had stormed the Chancellery, and he was fired. The USPD and the newly rechristened Communist Party then both called for protest demonstrations and set them for Sunday, January 5th. Those demonstrations turned out to be much bigger than anyone anticipated. Thousands of people poured into the streets, and many of them were armed. By that afternoon, train stations were being occupied as well as the offices of newspapers critical of the radical left. Leaders of the USPD and the Communists then hastily gathered at the Berlin police headquarters and formed a revolutionary committee, but they had difficulty agreeing on anything. They had no clear direction and didn’t quite know what they wanted to do. But eventually they settled on taking Luxemburg’s advice. They put out a call for a general strike to begin January 7th. This too turned out to be a big hit with the workers of Berlin, and 500,000 people surged through the streets of Berlin. But for Rosa Luxemburg, this show of mass support should have properly marked the beginning of a larger sustained revolutionary movement. Instead, some hotheads decided this was it, this is the moment, it’s the perfect time to overthrow Ebert’s government and launch a full-blown communist revolution like the Russians had done in October 1917.

Now Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and other communist leaders thought this would be catastrophic, and they spoke out against launching an insurrection, but it was soon out of their hands. Ignoring the leadership, armed insurgencies key buildings, and what we now call the Spartacus Uprising began, launched over the protests and most of the leaders of the Spartacus Group, who could only belatedly hope for the best.

That revolutionary committee meanwhile, that was supposed to be leading this thing couldn’t agree on what to do. When leaders of the USPD reached out to Ebert on January the eighth to negotiate a compromise, the Communist leaders stormed out. The next day, posters started going up around Berlin saying “the hour of reckoning is coming soon.” This is because Ebert had spent all his time rapidly recruiting and arming more Freikorps volunteers. When talks with the USPD broke down, Ebert ordered 3000 Freikorps to counter attack on January the ninth, heavily armed with all the guns and ammunition the army could provide, and it did not take them long to reconquer the barricaded streets and buildings that have been taken by the insurgents, who remained an isolated few, as they had not managed to trigger any kind of mass armed uprising. Somewhere between 150 and 200 people were killed in the fighting, and the rest surrendered. The Spartacus Uprising was over almost as quickly as it had begun. They were going for the October Revolution, but clearly this is far more like the July Days of 1917, when Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership had tried to prevent their followers from staging an armed uprising which they correctly determined was premature and doomed to failure.

The Spartacus Uprising is as far as the radical left is going to get in the German Revolution. There would be no advance from the failure of the July Days to the triumph of the October Revolution. And that’s partly because of what happened a week later: on January 15th, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were discovered hiding out in an apartment building, and they were delivered to the Eden Hotel. Headquarters of the largest. Freikorps unit in the city. Holding the two Communist leaders outside the chain of regular law and order, the Freikorps soldier spent several hours beating and interrogating them. The officer in charge then formally ordered Karl Liebknecht to be transferred to a prison, but along the way, the car stopped, and Liebknecht was ordered to get out. When he did, he was immediately shot in the back, using the tried and true cover story that he had tried to escape.

Rosa Luxemburg’s meanwhile, brought through the lobby of the hotel and severely beaten there by some assembled soldiers before her unconscious body was thrown into a truck. She was unceremoniously shot in the back of the head, and her body was dumped in a canal.

The murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg pretty much marked the end of the line for the radical left wing and the German Revolution. Deprived of their most capable leaders, there would be no equivalent advance from the July Days to the October Revolution. And we also see here, the probable outcome for the Bolsheviks had some Black Hundreds gotten ahold of Lenin and murdered him in July 1917: they would have gotten nowhere; certainly not to the October Revolution.

But even if Luxemburg and Liebknecht had lived, it might not have mattered. Elections to the German National Assembly came off without a hitch on the basis of universal suffrage. Moderate delegates then convened away from the dangerous streets of Berlin in the city of Weimar to craft a republic rooted in parliamentary democracy that refused to follow the more radical Communist example. And thus was born the Weimar Republic.

And not for nothing, but had circumstances been different in Russia in 1917, had the leaders done one or two things differently, had they not been forced to deal with an ongoing war, had Lenin gotten a bullet put into his brain, a parliamentary democracy run by Kadets and Right SRs might very well have been the result of the Russian Revolution too.

Or a right-wing military dictatorship. You know, whichever.

So bringing this all back around so that we can pick things back up in Russia in 1919, the failure of the Spartacus Uprising in Germany was a bitter pill to swallow, especially because no further proletarian revolution appeared imminent in France or Britain or the United States. Everywhere they looked the capitalist and the imperialists remained in power, and in places like Germany were socialists were getting an upper hand, they were fully ready to compromise with the capitalists and the imperialists.

The Russian Communists are now going to have to figure out how they are going to survive while permanently surrounded on all sides by enemies of their revolution.

 

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Episode 10.84: The End of the Old World

With the treaty of Brest-Litovsk securing their eastern front and ensuring vital supplies from the Ukrainian breadbasket, Germany threw everything it had into one final offensive push on the western front in the spring of 1918. They believed this final push was the only way to win a war they were clearly on the verge of losing. But by the summer of 1918, this last great push stalled out, and the Allies spent the final hundred days of World War I pushing the Germans back through a series of rolling defeats. By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers finally burst like rotten pumpkins and collapsed into a messy heap. The Bulgarians signed an armistice on September 29th, the Ottomans, on October 30. The Austro-Hungarian Empire signed their armistice on November 3rd, and then finally, the German signed on November 11th, 1918. This is the famous 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month that ended World War I.

By the time these armistices were signed though, the internal cohesion of the Central Powers was already shattered. The autumn of 1918 was the graveyard of the old world. World War I had already taken down the Roman[ov] dynasty and the Russian Empire, and it now claimed its imperial counterpart. I neglected to mention this at the time, but old Emperor Fronz Yosef, who had been put on the Austrian throne as a teenager during the neo-absolutist reconsolidation following the Revolution of 1848, died in November, 1916 at the age of 86, after 68 years on the throne. His grand nephew Charles succeeded him just long enough to oversee the disillusion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the Allies having made national self-determination for the people living under the dominion of the Central Powers one of their principle tenets of any post-war peace, the nationalities living in those dominion started taking matters into their own hands. They started fulfilling the dreams first conceived during the heady days of 1848. On October 28, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed, on October 29, the state of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs was proclaimed, on its way to union with the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro to create the kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was proclaimed on December 1st. On November 6th, Poles declared the Republic of Poland in Krakow, putting an independent Poland back on the map for the first time since the great partitions. The West Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed on November 1st, 1918, with the intention of staying free of the Republic of Poland, and then uniting with their cousins over in Ukraine. On October 28, the 31st, the Hungarian staged what is called the Aster Revolution, breaking the 1867 dual monarchy compromise with the Austrians on their way to declaring an independent Hungarian People’s Republic on November 16th. Meanwhile, on November the 11th, just a few days earlier, Emperor Charles the First renounced his right to take part in matters of state, and though he studiously avoided the word abdication because he refused to recognize any aggregation of his sovereignty, this renunciation effectively ended 700 years of Habsburg rule. The following day, the Republic of German Austria was proclaimed. The Austro-Hungarian empire is over. The last remnants of the holy Roman Empire are over. That world is done.

Meanwhile, up in Germany, revolts at home and mutinies in the military, most especially in the navy, combined to form the German Revolution of 1918, leading to the proclamation of a republic to replace the monarchy on November 9th. Now, I’m not going to dwell too much on the details here, because we’re going to talk a lot more about it next week, but just to be clear where we are at, the abdication of the kaiser was announced on November the ninth and then confirmed by dear Willie in a written statement on November 28th. This advocation ended the 500 year long reign of the house of Hohenzollern. The armistice signed on November the 11th then acknowledged significant territorial renunciations by the Germans, both in the west and the east. Most importantly for us, it meant the renunciation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and giving back all the things that have been given to them by Lenin’s government back in March. And Lenin’s government, which had only given away so much because there was a gun to their head, eagerly renounced the treaty on their end on November the 13th. So as humiliating as the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was, it wasn’t as catastrophic as it appeared to be at the time, because it was only legally in effect for eight months, and it is now a dead letter.

From the perspective of the Communist leadership in Moscow, all of this appeared very much to be the pieces of historical necessity falling into place. One of the key pillars of Bolshevik ideology was that Russia was merely one facet — and, frankly, a peripheral one at that — that was guaranteed to erupt from the murder/suicide pack of the Imperial powers that we call World War I. Now Lenin and Trotsky’s wing of the party had held the line against the Left Communists and Left SRs, who never wanted to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the first place, and just go fight a revolutionary war, because Lenin and Trotsky considered a revolutionary war fought against the German army to be pure folly. But now that the Central Powers have collapsed, they started to change their tune a little bit. On November the third, Trotsky told the Executive Committee of the Soviet, “a crisis is maturing already in Germany and throughout central Europe.” He said, “perhaps tomorrow the working class of Germany will ask you for help, and you will create not a million strong army, you will create an army of 2 million, since your task will have doubled, tripled.” That same day Lenin wrote his own letter to the Executive Committee saying, “We decided to have an army of one million men by spring. We now need an army of 3 million men. We can have it and we shall have it.” Their revolutionary ideology was absolutely founded on the notion that the Western powers needed to be overthrown in their own socialist revolutions, and especially Germany, which was richer, more advanced economically, technologically, and politically. That that socialist revolution in the west would be the thing that backstopped and guaranteed the socialist revolution in Russia. The historical task of the revolutionaries in Russia was to simply hold the fort long enough for all of that to happen, and to do everything in their power to make sure that it happened, because they needed their proletarian comrades in the west to take possession of the great engines of capitalist imperialism and turn them, not against trying to eradicate the Russian Revolution, but to eradicate the last vestiges of capitalist imperialism.

On November 6th, the Sixth All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened in Moscow, and the next day they symbolically marked the one-year anniversary of the October Revolution. Here, Lenin unveiled a statue of Marx and Engels that would now stand in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and was physical proof of the fact that this was a worldwide revolution involving all the proletarian forces of Europe, not just a parochial Russian affair. The crowd sang La Marseillaise, and the Internationale. The next day Lenin addressed the Congress and said, “We have never been so near to international proletarian revolution as we are now.” And indeed, with revolution breaking out in Germany, that seemed exactly like what was going on. Certainly all Russian foreign policy up to this point, wherever they had embassies had been about fomenting such a revolution, especially in Berlin. You didn’t have to listen very hard to hear the death rattle of the old world. All across central and eastern Europe, new independent nations were declaring themselves, and many of those leaders were aligned with left wing socialist views. But Lenin also warned his comrades that it was not all revolutionary sunshine and socialist roses. That the defeat of the Central Powers was also an extremely hazardous time.

He said, “Our situation has never been so dangerous as it is now. The imperialists were busy among themselves, but now one of the groups has been wiped out by the group of the English, the French, and the Americans. They consider their main task to be to smother Bolshevism, to smother its main center, the Russian Soviet Republic.”

Now, as we will see, this is massively overstating the case. But also as we talked about last week, I think Lenin and the gang had good reasons to believe that this was true. The big new threat was that the withdrawal of the Central Powers meant that both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea would now be wide open to further Allied intervention, especially down in the south where they would have a direct line to supplying, arming, funding, and maybe even providing foreign reinforcements for the volunteer army and the Cossacks. The ascendant Allies, riding high on their victory, would not tolerate communism in Russia. That the French were landing forces in Odessa and Sevastopol by the end of November was proof enough of this.

But the withdrawal of the Central Powers was also a great opportunity for the Communists, especially in all those areas that they had given up in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk: the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine. All of them had been invaded and occupied by the armies of the Central Powers, so there was about to be a major military and political vacuum opening up that Lenin’s government was keen to fill. So, for example, we take the Baltic states, and if you Google things like Estonian War of Independence, Latvian War of Independence and Lithuanian War of Independence, they all start right here in November 1918. In these Baltic states, the new German government pledged to move out, and the Communist government in Moscow prepared to move in. Now this can be read cynically, as simply Russians recreating the Russian Empire by another name, without any need to reference their professed ideologies. But it can also be read idealistically, as the Communist in Moscow believing that, with world socialist revolution on the march, that they must not let these areas fall into the hands of nationalist groups who were so often dominated by moderate reformist socialists, or liberal bourgeois types, or even worse, reactionary landowners. Whichever you believed, Moscow believed it was the Red Army’s job to ensure that the right kind of socialists, aligned with the right kind of revolutionary doctrines, grabbed the reins of power in the Baltic states. So in November and December, the Red Army crossed the lines formerly demarcated by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and that’s what started all of these various wars of independence, and the results were a very mixed bag. Estonia and Lithuania both put up considerable resistance to the Red Army, while in Latvia, the very visible presence of the Latvian riflemen at the forefront of the Red Army meant that it didn’t feel quite so much like a foreign invasion. In all cases, though, Moscow’s goal was to set up local Soviet socialist republics — SSRs — that would align with the Russian Communist Party. That this period marks the beginning of various wars of independence is maybe a hint that enthusiasm to being dominated by Russian Communists from Moscow is not exactly widespread.

Down in Ukraine, things would prove to be even more chaotic and contested as it was the largest and most important of all of the various states the Central Powers were pulling out of, and obviously the Communist government in Moscow would very much like all of that Ukrainian grain to help relieve the pressure of food shortages in all areas controlled by the Communists. Now going into November 1918, Ukraine was still governed by the hetman, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, who had staged a coup against the Ukrainian Rada back in April. But the hetman was obviously a German client, entirely dependent on the military forces of the Central Powers, and when they collapsed his days were numbered. So the same clique of socialist leaning Ukrainian nationalists, who formed the Rada came back in force, and they had more popular support than Skoropadskyi. On December 14th, they took Kiev, drove the hetman out, and re-declared their Ukrainian People’s Republic.

But though they were more popular than the hetman, that wasn’t really saying a ton, and the political legitimacy of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was very shaky, especially with Moscow backing a Communist party of the Ukraine aiming to drive them out and establish a Ukrainian SSR. And more than anything, this opens up several years which are marked by incredibly complicated factional fighting between various groups: nationalists, socialists, communists, and foreign incursions from both Russia and the Allied Powers. The most interesting of these factions obviously being the anarchist group led by Nestor Makhno, and don’t worry all you Nestor Makhno fan boys and fan girls out there, we’ll talk all about your boy in due time.

But while the fallout from the end of World War I was obviously the biggest thing going in November and December 1918, there were also really momentous things happening out in Siberia that would have a major impact on the course of the Russian Civil War, and would seem to further prove that the Allies were hell bent on destroying the Communists. Now, last week we talked about how the red Army had regrouped and advanced towards the Volga, and then the first week of October, they captured Samarra, and sent the SR leaders from that self-declared government to the Constituent Assembly, the Komuch, fleeing east through the Urals and out into Siberia. Many of them headed for the city of Omsk, where a collection of right-wing military officers had conscripted about 38,000 peasants into an army that flew the green and white flag of Siberia. Now by this time, the leaders in Samarra and Omsk had already reached a tentative political alliance in September. Both sides recognized that the Constituent Assembly would still be considered the ultimate sovereign authority, and once it was reconstituted, it would settle all post-revolution and post civil war political affairs. They agreed that the Constituent Assembly would in fact be considered officially back in session if a quorum of 250 delegates were ever assembled in the same place at the same time. In the meantime, they would merge their efforts, and agreed to form a five man directory government that would be based safely in Omsk, which was far from the frontline of the civil war against the Communists, and had plenty of military protection surrounding it. This directory was made up of five men: two SRs, two liberals, and a SR leaning general who was named commander-in-chief of their combined armed forces.

But the SRs of the Komuch believed that the end goal here would be reconvening the Constituent Assembly and bringing something like democratic socialism to Russia. The military officers in Omsk, meanwhile, believed the only way to save Russia was by a military dictatorship, full-stop.

So, because the two sides did not at all agree on where this was going, the compromised directory government was a complete non-entity. It had no money, no supporters, no administrative bureaucracy, no fighting forces, and in fact, practically, nobody even knew it existed. So to say that the directory lasted eight weeks, quote unquote in power would be stretching the meaning of the word power to its absolute breaking point. After Red Army advances on the Volga led many SR political leaders to regroup in the relative safety of Omsk, the city became a hotbed of factional jockeying between the SRs on the one hand and the military officers on the other. Neither group had any faith either in the directory government or each other. Each side suspected the other of planning to overthrow the directory at the earliest opportunity, and they were both right… but the military officers were able to strike first. On November 17, armed Cossacks broke into a meeting of the SRs in Omsk, and arrested several of their leaders, including the two SR directors. The pretext for this raid was that the SRs were planning to overthrow the directory, which the military officers then used as a pretext to overthrow the directory.

On the morning of November 18, the Director’s Council of Ministers gave its blessing to invite one Admiral Alexander Kolchak to become what they grandiosely dubbed the Supreme Ruler of Russia, with pretensions to being the sovereign head of state to the whole of Russia, not just this little military outfit in Siberia. Kolchak accepted, so I guess we better talk about Alexander Kolchak.

Alexander Kolchak was a young admiral. He was just 44 years old when he became the Supreme Ruler of Russia, so he was in the prime of his life, not some doddering old figurehead. He had spent his life in the navy, and first earned public notoriety for his participation in a somewhat ill-fated polar expedition of exploration and scientific investigation from 1900 to 1902. He served in the early stages of the Russo-Japanese War, and he was wounded and taken prisoner at the Siege of Port Arthur. We fast forward to World War I and we find him commanding Naval forces in the Gulf of Riga, where he was promoted to vice admiral in August, 1916, making him the youngest vice admiral in the fleet. When the February Revolution hit, Kolchak was vocally opposed to the democratization of the military, and conservative groups made the young vice admiral a hero… and hinted that he made a suitable candidate for a military dictatorship that would be able to restore dignity, honor, and order to the Russian Empire. Prime minister Kerensky caught wind of this and sent Kolchak on a mission to the United States to get him out of the country as quickly as possible.

So Kolchak was not present for any of the drama surrounding, for example, the Kornilov Affair, which one gets the feeling he very much would have supported. When the October Revolution hit, Kolchak was returning from the United States via Japan, and when he got the news, he went and knocked on the door of the British embassy, and pledged himself to do whatever he could to bring Russia back into the war on the side of the Allies to continue to fight against the Germans, up to and including resigning from the Russian navy and serving in the British army as a private. The following year, with the Allies taking over control of Vladivostok, Kolchak reentered Russia, and was on his way to join the volunteer army, and so it was simply happenstance that he was in Omsk in November 1918 when military coup plotters made their move and needed somebody to hand power to.

Alexander Kolchak’s name was well known in Russia — he was a senior military officer, and his anti-Communist credentials were unimpeachable. He also enjoyed strong contacts among both the British and the Americans, whose supplies would be vital to any forthcoming military campaign. Kolchak’s connection to the British in particular made it very easy to see the coup in Omsk — and all subsequent developments in Siberia — as being the work of Allied puppet masters. Kolchak himself did not appear to have any great political ambitions beyond simply driving the Bolsheviks from power — he was no Napoleon Bonaparte. And so the incident is called Kolchak’s coup, he was probably not even informed of the details beforehand, and only accepted the offer of power out of a sense of patriotic duty. His own personal political ambitions were quite limited, and Kolchak was viewed by almost everyone around him as a political cipher who could be manipulated into pursuing the aims of the advisers closest to him, most of whom turned out to be young, right-leaning Kadets. So in the proclamation accepting power, he said, “my chief aims are the organization of a fighting force, the overthrow of Bolshevism, and the establishment of law and order, so that the Russian people may be able to choose a form of government in accordance with its desires and to realize the high ideas of liberty and freedom.”

This, it was agreed by everyone, was nice and vague.

But that did not mean that Kolchak was an unwilling agent of the White movement or the Allies, nor that he was a passive figurehead, nor that he had any interest in being soft towards the perceived enemies of Russia, which included, in his mind, socialists of all stripes. And so his elevation to power came with terrible consequences for the SRs. And whatever one says about the draconian Red Terror, we can invariably say very similar things about draconian White Terrors. On December the third, the Supreme Ruler of Russia issued a decree that said, “In order to preserve the system and rule of the Supreme Ruler, articles of the criminal code of Imperial Russia were revised. Articles 99 and100 of which established capital punishment for assassination attempts on the Supreme Ruler, and for attempting to overthrow his government.”

This verbiage could be applied to practically any perceived threat at any time, and was the basis of summary executions, wherever Kolchak’s forces went. Oh yeah, these guys, they were plotting to overthrow your government. Blam blam blam. Reigns of terror and summary executions and arbitrary arrests were perpetrated by all sides in the Russian Civil War.

Now there was actually a very real uprising by the SRs in Omsk, but like all SR uprisings, it petered out pretty quickly, and as a result, Kolchak’s forces made hundreds of arrests and doled out pretty indiscriminate executions, including 20 SR delegates who had been elected to the Constituent Assembly, which meant subtracting 20 delegates from the alleged goal of trying to reconvene the Constituent Assembly, which — spoiler alert — that’s not ever going to happen.

Kolchak’s new army then got off to a pretty good start in December 1918. They advanced towards the northern provincial capital of Perm, and threw back a pretty demoralized Red Army unit. There were heavy casualties on both sides, but on Christmas Day 1918, Kolchak’s army captured Perm, which the Communists would then always refer to as the Perm Catastrophe, which exposed major problems inside their nascent Red Army, as they had started with a force somewhere north of 30,000, and wound up with a force down around 10,000. But due to local conditions, the state of the Siberian armed forces, and the fact that they really couldn’t do anything if they didn’t simultaneously advance through the center, Kolchak called a halt to this northern advance on January the sixth; this was so he could concentrate on a push in the center, that would hopefully see them go through the Urals to the Volga, then line up with the Volunteer Army and the Cossacks in the south, whereupon they would all march off together to liberate Moscow from the Communists.

As Admiral Kolchak’s forces gathered strength in the east, down in the south, his allies, the Volunteer Army and the Cossacks, were doing the same. Now since the summer, the Whites in the south had been growing, and the Communist central Committee believed that, especially after the end of World War I, that the southern front was the most dangerous front. The opening of the Black Sea ports to Allied navies meant that they were about to face the possibility of the white armies becoming an unstoppable juggernaut armed to the teeth. For the rest of 1918, for example, Commissar of War Trotsky spent most of his time down on the southern front.

Now fulfilling absolutely no one’s expectations, the Volunteer Army — and in fact, the entire White movement in the south — was now led by General Anton Denikin. While they initially coalesced after the October Revolution, the White armies were led by well-known and charismatic leaders like General Kornilov, and the Cossack general Kaledin. But they were both now dead. Politically, the Whites were led by the venerable General Alekseyev, and indeed the Volunteer Army was initially better known as Alekseyev’s army, but his health started failing over the summer, and he died of heart failure on October the eighth 1918, which meant that without anybody predicting it or intending, it all political and military authority of the White movement fell into the hands of General Denikin, who was more surprised than anybody to find himself holding it.

General Denikin was not precisely the wrong man for the job, but he wasn’t exactly the right man for the job either. He took over a White coalition that was absolutely teaming with divergent interests, and overseeing a population that wasn’t super stoked about what the Reds were offering, and desperately needed some assurances that the Whites weren’t going to be even worse. Denikin responded to this need for subtle delicacy and savvy public relations by retreating into a laser focus on strictly military concerns. He left politics to a few civilian hangers on, who he mostly tried to ignore, but who did helpfully draft a constitution that played lip service to civil rights and political freedom while giving unlimited power to General Denikin to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted.

As a career military officer, Denikin had a certain disdain for politicians, and he tried to be as nonpolitical as possible. And he retreated into the belief that all the political stuff would be solved once the military war was over. But this military war was a civil war, and the civil war was happening in the midst of a wider social revolution. So politics were not just unavoidable, they were a vital key to victory, which Denikin neglected at his peril. He tended to be surrounded by people who came from the gentry classes, who assumed as a matter of course that the shameful uncompensated dispossession of the landowning classes would be reversed wherever the White armies held power. That wasn’t politics, that was just morality and justice. And so wherever the White army showed up, officials attached to the Volunteer Army would work to restore the property of those who had been dispossessed. This meant that in a conflict where the hearts and minds of the people were very much in play, the Whites did very little to win them over. General Denikin himself, to his credit, later acknowledged that this was a major mistake, and he said of the reactionary officials going around trying to undo the revolution in land, “In terms of their psychology and worldview, their customs and their habits, they were so far removed and alienated from the changes that had taken place in the country that they had no idea how to act in the new revolutionary era. For them, it was a question of returning to the past, and they tried to restore the past, both in form and spirit.”

Far too much had happened for that to be the path to victory. If the Whites were going to win the civil war, they were going to have to embrace something like a forward-looking policy, and far too many of them were too intent on looking backward.

The group of leaders around Denikin also didn’t make many friends among non-Russians, the Cossacks being the most immediately important of these as they formed much of the rank and file and cavalry of the Volunteer Army. But also, we’re talking about other nationalities who might have joined them in a broad anti-Red coalition. The White officers in the Volunteer Army were almost to a man committed Russian patriots, fighting to restore the power and dignity of Russia. Now to their credit, they weren’t clamoring to bring back the tsar, but they did want to bring back the old Russian Empire, so they did not so much as hint at anything resembling autonomy for the various nationality groups who were presently out there declaring independence. The Whites might’ve made good common cause with those nationalities against Red Army incursions, but those White officers were temperamentally even more inclined to support such a Russian invasion of old Russian Empire territory as the Communists were. They weren’t even interested in offering political autonomy to the Cossacks, their most important ally, which meant that while they were all fighting on the same side, they were never really together fighting on the same side. These political mistakes would ensure the White movement remained a fractious coalition at cross-purposes with itself, and enjoying very little popular support.

I think partly the hope and expectation on General Denikin was that the civil war was not going to last very long, that it would in fact, be over quite soon. The White leaders believed exactly the same thing that the Communist leaders did: namely that the Allies were about to start pumping supplies and guns to the White armies. Now I don’t want to underestimate allied support for the Whites — they absolutely did pump spies and guns to the White armies — but with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the Allied interventions into Russia were never going to be as wholehearted as any of the Russians expected. In the winter of 1918 and 1919, the Allies had far bigger issues on their plate. The civil war in Russia was just not a high priority. Now it is the case that there were small groups out there in France and in Britain and the United States — people like Winston Churchill, for example — who really were pushing for an immediate all out attack on Bolshevism. But they were in the minority. At least as many British, French, and American leaders liked and supported the idea of the Soviet socialist republics as they appeared in 1917 and 1918. Certainly they much preferred the socialist Reds to the reactionary Whites, who no doubt intended to restore barbarous absolutism. Mostly though, both the general populations and ruling classes of Britain and France and the United States just did not have Russia very high on their list of interests. Everyone was sick of war, sick of fighting, sick of being trapped in destructive quagmires. The unrestrained jubilation that marked the end of World War I. Meant that it was going to be very tough to say, oh yeah, glad the war with Germany is over, now we’re going to go plunge into the middle of the Russian civil war.

So as we go forward, we are never going to see the Allies make the kind of major commitments both sides of the Russian civil war expected them to make. The expeditionary forces they landed in 1918 around the periphery tended to just stay put and not grow. There were some naval blockades, definitely major shipments of munitions, lots of shipments of munitions, but the Allies were not in fact hell bent on destroying Bolshevism, and they were absolutely ready to cut the cord if it looked like destroying Bolshevism was going to require them to get sucked even deeper into the Russian civil war. But next week, we are going to leave the Russian civil war off to one side, and usher in 1919, not in Russia, but in Germany. Because as Lenin said, this was as close as they would ever be to worldwide proletarian revolution. And we need to understand why that worldwide proletarian revolution didn’t happen the way the Russian Communists hoped and expected. Because the fact that it didn’t manifest is going to have far reaching consequences for their entire ideological program.

So next week, we’re headed to Berlin for the beginning, middle and end of the Spartacus uprising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.83: Terror is Necessary

In the summer of 1918, Communist leaders looked out from the vantage point of the Kremlin and saw themselves surrounded by an array of enemies, both foreign and domestic. And because Lenin and his comrades made no distinction between the fortunes of the Communist Party and the fortunes of the Russian Revolution, that meant that the revolution was surrounded by an array of enemies, both foreign and domestic. This list of enemies now included their erstwhile coalition partners, the Left SRs, whose quixotic uprising on July the sixth, drove home the point to Lenin and his government that only the Communist Party could be trusted to defend the revolution. For them, the logic was axiomatic: for the revolution to survive, the Communist regime had to survive.

Lenin was not surprised by the array of threats facing the young Communist regime, nor believed that they could be avoided. The dialectic of events meant that revolution necessarily begat counterrevolution. Although, begat isn’t even the right word, because revolution does not precede counterrevolution temporarily or logically. Counterrevolution is embedded in the very fact of revolution. They are simultaneous events. One cannot stage a revolution such that one will not face a counterrevolution. No sensible revolutionary seeks to avoid conflict with counter-revolutionaries, they seek to win that conflict. So the Communist leadership was historically literate, and they had studied all the revolutionary precursors, most especially the original French Revolution, and more immediately the tragedy of the Paris Commune. Lenin believed that the latter had failed in part for their lack of iron will, that the Communards, in their idealism, dithered with administrative minutiae, instead of quickly arming and striking for Versailles before Versailles struck them. The Communards had hesitated to shed blood, and so, instead their blood was shed. For Lenin, revolutions are kill or be killed propositions, and he did not plan on getting killed.

So, in the summer of 1918, everything was happening pretty much as expected. On the one hand, there were the forces of revolution, with the assumption still in place that Russia was simply the leading edge of a broader international socialist revolution. And on the other hand, there were the forces of counterrevolution, of bourgeois capitalist imperialism, similarly joined by their own kind of international solidarity: international banks, stock exchanges, and exploitive colonial enterprises, managed by the diplomatic corps and defended by military apparatuses. These forces were of course currently enmeshed in a murder/suicide pact called World War I, which is what made international socialist revolution plausible to the point of being an almost guaranteed necessity. But they were still very powerful, still dangerous. And so even while the bourgeois imperialists were engaged in this capitalist civil war called World War I, they would stop at nothing to crush the socialist revolution in its infancy. Which brings us to the component of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War that we have not yet talked about, but which appeared to the Communists to be ironclad proof that their analysis of the situation was correct: in the summer of 1918, the Allied Powers began a whole series of armed interventions into Russian territory.

Now, ironically, the first armed Allied intervention after the October Revolution came at the behest of the young Soviet regime. Remember back in February, when Trotsky said neither war nor peace, and then walked out of Brest-Litovsk, and the central power said, okay, so war, and invaded? Well, recall that in this brief window, the Bolsheviks reached out to the allies, in case the Germans decided to just never stop advancing. We talked about this in Episode 10.78, this is when Lenin said, please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo French imperialism. Well, in the midst of this little window, local Soviet leaders in the far northern port of Murmansk faced a possible threat from encroaching White Finns. The British wanted to prevent Murmansk from falling into the hands of forces allied with the Germans, and they disembarked 170 Marines on March the fourth. The fact that Trotsky had invited the British in was later thrown in his face during the intraparty squabbles of the 1920s. But this very brief window coincidentally closed the same day the British Marines landed in Murmansk when the Russian signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And though the treaty obviously upended the political dynamic, it did not change the Allied interest in putting troops into places like Murmansk.

Their overriding objective was all about winning World War I. They read the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and knew how much of the store Lenin was ready to give away. So while they couldn’t, for example, stop the takeover of the Ukrainian breadbasket, Allied forces could block access to strategic ports, not yet in German hands. They also saw value in holding these ports to possibly run soldiers and supplies to forces inside Russia who were willing to reopen the eastern front. And despite the communist assumption, the initial Allied incursions were not about the forces of counter-revolution gathering to snuff out revolutionary socialism. It was entirely about the strategic imperatives of the war. From everything I have read, I have no doubt whatsoever that had Lenin buckled to left Communist and Left SR pressure to abandon Brest-Litovsk and resume the war against Germany, the pipeline of munitions, resources, and money from Britain, France, and the United States would have opened right back up.

In May 1918, the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion accelerated the ambitions of the Allied interventionists. The whole motivation for the Legion was to keep fighting the Central Powers, which meant that they were in complete strategic alignment with the Allies. But no matter what the Communist believed, it is not the case that the Czechs rose up at the behest of the Allies. It was simply that their interests neatly coincided, and they were obviously now on the same side. Though, it is worth mentioning that the Allies disagreed about what to do with the Czechoslovak legion. The British wanted them to stay in the region to help form the nucleus of a reformed Eastern front that would at least tie down the Central Powers in the spring of 1918; the French meanwhile were hoping to affect their speedy evacuation, and race them around the world. So they could shore up the western front. But more than anything, the Czechoslovak Legion served as an incredibly useful piece of propaganda. All the Allied governments could sell their people on the idea of committing troops to save the brave and beleaguered Czechoslovaks — that’s certainly what American president Woodrow Wilson is going to run with. So in late June, for example, 600 more British Marines landed in Murmansk, this time, not at the request of the Soviets, but in opposition to them. Moscow responded by sending up Red Guards to push them out, leading to the first skirmishes between the Allies and the Communists. The Allies won these skirmishes and were then able to set up a small defensive line about 300 miles south of Murmansk, which they now controlled.

Coinciding with this foreign intervention, other insurrections started breaking out that seemed very closely linked to Allied interests — for example, in the city of Yaroslavl, just about 200 miles northeast of Moscow on the rail line linking Moscow out to the northern ports where Allied navies are now landing troops. On July the sixth, 1918, which just so happened to coincide with the Left SR uprising in Moscow, a group of anticommunist Right SRs staged a successful armed uprising of their own. It was led by Boris Savinkov.

Savinkov had been a part of the SR combat organization during the days of the Revolution of 1905, but ever since then had drifted towards the center, and in 1917 served as deputy minister of war in Kerensky’s government. After October, he became an implacable anticommunist. When his forces took Yaroslavl, they were not benevolent in victory. They summarily executed any Red agents they got their hands on — because let’s never forget both sides in the Russian civil war engaged in ruthlessly punitive brutality. It was the nature of the Russian Civil War.

Savinkov’s uprising was meant to coincide with the Allied invasion of the Port of Arkhangelsk, but miscommunications had led Savinkov to strike too early. And so, within a matter of weeks, Red Army forces retook Yaroslavl, though Savinkov himself managed to flee into exile abroad.

Within days of Savinkov’s revolt, another rebellion broke out that seemed connected to Allied interests, this one more troubling because it involved treasonous betrayal. After the Czechoslovak Legions rose up, the Volga River had become a major front in the burgeoning civil war. The critical forces of the Red Army mobilizing to hold the line on the Volga were put under the command of Mikhail Muravyov. Now, ever since he had volunteered to defend Petrograd in the days after the October Revolution, Muravyov had been among the Red’s most dependable officers. He had never been a Bolshevik, and was never considered a hundred percent politically reliable by Lenin or the other members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but time and again, Muravyov proved his military reliability.

That came to an end in July of 1918. Muravyov had never supported the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and after the Left SR revolt was crushed, he got it in his head to revive the call to cancel the treaty and to have Russian stop fighting Russians, and instead, have everyone go off and fight Germans together. So on July the 10th, 1918, Muravyov publicly defected from the Red Army and led a thousand loyal troops down the Volga River from Kazan to Simbirsk, issuing orders for the rest of his troops to stop fighting the Czech Legions, and instead head west to reform the eastern front. Once Muravyov got to Simbirsk, he occupied several key points in the city, but his revolt was as brief as the Left SRs in Moscow: the very next day, July 11th, he was ambushed in Simbirsk by a mix of Red Guards, Latvian riflemen, and Cheka units, and he was killed in the subsequent exchange of fire.

To replace the dead trader Muravyov, Lenin appointed someone he believed he could trust: the commander of the Latvian riflemen who had just suppressed the Left SR revolt in Moscow. His name, and I apologize if I butcher this, was Jukums Vācietis.

Vācietis set up his headquarters in the city of Kazan, but faced daunting setbacks before he even got his feet wet. The Komuch, that self-declared government in exile of the constituent assembly that had set up shop in Samarra on June the eighth, had started raising what they called the People’s Army, and in conjunction with the Czech Legionaries, had made rapid advances all along the Volga River. At the end of July, they captured Simbirsk, costing the Reds the provincial capital, a key railway junction, and its munitions depot — to say nothing of letting Lenin’s hometown fall into the hands of the enemy — then on August 5th, they descended on Kazan and took the city after two days of street fighting. Vācietis watched several of the officers on his staff defect to the enemy, and then he himself was forced to slip out of the city with a couple of dozen rifleman under the cover of a heavy fog.

For the communist leadership in Moscow, all the threats coming at them in the summer of 1918 were merely aspects of a single phenomenon: the phenomenon of counterrevolution. On July 29th, Lenin told the executive committee of the Soviet, “What we are involved in is a systematic, methodical, and evidently long planned military and financial counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic, which all the representatives of Anglo-French imperialism have been preparing for months.”

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this isn’t really the case. There wasn’t some carefully planned counter-revolution that was being executed from some central location in the halls of western imperialism. But I also don’t think Lenin was crazy to draw this conclusion. The facts on the ground seemed to perfectly conform to his prior beliefs, and there was a broad alliance of anticommunist forces forming out there. It’s just that they were never all tendrils of a single counter-revolutionary leviathan. They were individual snakes in the grass, doing their own things for their own reasons.

But in August, the Allies gave Lenin little reason to doubt that they were not in fact embarking on a single coordinated counterrevolutionary operation. By now, the British presence around Murmansk had grown to six thousand. Then on August the First, Allied ships finally arrived at the northern port of Archangel bearing 1500 British and French Marines. After brief skirmishes between rival political factions in the city drove the Red leaders out, allied Marines disembarked to secure the port. The British and French, however, did not have many more troops to spare, and so they pressed other Allied nations to provide reinforcement. The Americans, Canadians and Italians would all respond, but there wouldn’t be too much to do beyond simply hold the coastal enclaves. It would have been extremely difficult to invade Russia from these northern ports across a thousand miles of not particularly hospitable country, so when the additional Allied reinforcements showed up at these coastal cities, there they would sit.

Of more far reaching impact were events in the far east. By July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion had risen up and taken over Vladivostok, the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad. Nearly every Allied power proceeded to land some kind of expeditionary force in the city, and they had agreed amongst themselves to place about 25,000 troops total to make sure they controlled Vladivostok. The British landed a battalion on August the third; shortly thereafter, 500 French Marines came from their colonial holdings in Asia; between August 15 and August 21, the first 3000 Americans disembarked, the beginning of a force that would eventually grow to over 8,000. The Americans’ stated objective was simply to aid the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion, and they tried to hew to that narrow parameter. But by far, the largest contingent was the Japanese. The Japanese were both eager to extend their own influence in the region, but also justifiably concerned that the British and Americans were planning to box the Japanese out once they had gotten the Russians out of the picture. Now at first, the Allies requested the Japanese sent 7,000 men for this joint Vladivostok mission. The Japanese government then approved 12,000. Eventually they poured over 70,000 troops into the area. Without question, the Japanese were the largest influx of foreign troops into Russia during the civil war.

With this apparent leviathan of counter-revolution enveloping the Soviet Republic, Lenin concluded the time had come to follow the lead of their Jacobin forebears, who had faced a similar multi-front crisis in 1792 and1793. It didn’t really matter if the Terror was right or wrong, moral or immoral; it was necessary, and that was all that mattered. As we’ve noted, Lenin prided himself on being able to do the hard thing if it was necessary. He wasn’t going to let sentimentality or morality prevent him from doing that which needed to be done, because if sentimentality or morality caused him to flinch, that would mean they would lose. The revolution would be overthrown. And that would not mean that there would not be a Terror, it would simply mean that the terror would be inflicted by the Whites, rather than the Reds.

Lenin believed a Terror was necessary not just to kill opponents, but also to snap the population to attention, to ensure that areas under Red control stayed under Red control, to make sure people didn’t waiver from their revolutionary commitments, to make sure that conscripts into the Red Army maintained discipline, even if they didn’t want to be a part of the Red Army.

But also yes, to root out and exterminate enemies of the revolution.

Now, even before the Red Terror officially commenced, Lenin had already drafted what is now an infamous order on August the 11th. It was sent to loyal cadres in the city of Penza, where there had been some local resistance to grain requisitioning. “Comrades!” “Lenin’s” communique read, “The Kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. You must make an example of these people.” Then he gave them orders in four bullet points:

1. Hang. I mean, hang publicly so that people can see it. At least 100 Kulaks, rich bastards, and known blood suckers.

2. Publish their names.

3. Seize all their grain.

4. Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday’s telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty Kulaks and that we will continue to do so.

Yours, Lenin

P.S. Find tougher people.

This communiqué also gets to another component of the Terror, which is, trying to draw a sharp distinction between us, the good guys and those, the bad guys, the rich bastards, the bloodsuckers. This distinction would make the Terror, not merely something the population would endure with trembling fear, but also maybe even actively support.

Meanwhile out on the war front, things started to turn in the Red’s favor, and Trotsky was right in the thick of it. The commissar of war was now cruising around in a mobile train command center, and on August 28th was at the Romanov Bridge, a huge bridge that spanned the Volga 20 miles west of the city of Kazan. He was there surveying the scene when 2000 forces of the People’s Army marched out of Kazan and tried to take it over. But they had marched all day by the time they reached the bridge and were so tired that when they got there, the Red Army forces under Trotsky fought them off. But it was not a clean victory. One regiment broke and fled in the middle of the battle, and the next day, showing his own clear affirmation for uncompromising discipline and will, Trotsky had the commander of the offending regiment shot, along with one out of every 10 men. After its brief hiatus following the February Revolution, the death penalty was back with a vengeance.

The victory at the bridge meant General Vācietis had a clear path to retake the city of Kazan, and Lenin suggested to Trotsky that if Vācietis stalled, delayed, or hesitated in any way, that he should be shot; this too hearkening back to the good old days of the French revolutionary armies.

But while all this was going on, far more momentous events unfolded in Moscow.

Lenin was very much more in favor of killing than being killed, so he rarely left the safety of the Kremlin. But on August 30th, he gave a speech at a munitions factory on the southern outskirts of Moscow. After the speech, he was walking out of the building towards a waiting car. A woman called out Lenin’s name, and when he turned, she pulled out a gun and fired three shots at him. One of the shots missed and went through his coat, another one lodged in his shoulder, but the other one was the bad one. It passed through his neck, and partially punctured a lung. Lenin dropped in a bloody heap on the ground as confusion exploded all around him. Still conscious, Lenin refused to go to a hospital because he didn’t trust anyone there, and he demanded he be taken to the Kremlin and that doctors be brought to him. Now given the scope of the injuries, and the inadequate medical facilities at the Kremlin, there seemed to be very little chance that Lenin would survive this. I mean, if you move these bullets just a centimeter, he’s dead before he even hits the ground, and history starts doing its summary assessment of the life and career of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was assassinated at the age of 48 here on August 30th, 1918.

But the bullets landed where they did. And he did not die that day. Through that magical combination of luck and will, he survived.

Now as for the would be assassin, it turned out to be a woman named Fanny Kaplan. At least, that’s the official story. Fanny Kaplan was a longstanding member of the SRs. She had joined the party as a teenager in 1905 and been arrested in 1906 as a part of a bomb plot. After 11 trying years in Siberian exile, she was set free in the political amnesties following the February Revolution. Kaplan had no love for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and she had completely soured on their vision for revolution after October. With the outset of deep political repression in the summer of 1918, she and several SR comrades — who she refused to subsequently name — decided to start assassinating people. She was assigned Lenin.

There were a bunch of arrests in the wave of the shooting, and under questioning Kaplan made the following recorded confession:

My name is Fanny Kaplan. Today, I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the revolution. I was exiled to Siberia for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labor. After the revolution I was freed. I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.

This confession was good enough for a speedy conviction; Fanny Kaplan was taken out and shot in the back of the head on September 3rd.

Now, the thing about this is so far as I can tell, there were no actual witnesses saying, oh yes, I saw that woman there, Fanny Kaplan fire the three shots at Lenin. Nor was she wrestled to the ground gun in hand right at the moment that it all happened. So, there are lingering alternate theories that maybe she wasn’t actually the shooter, and that she either willingly gave herself up as the shooter to protect her comrades, or that the very clear and straightforward confession she offered was extracted after some good old fashioned enhanced interrogation techniques. The further details about Kaplan and the assassination attempt came from one of her comrades who turned informant a few years later and was the star witness for the public trials of the SRs in 1922. And yes, that witness confirms and elaborates on all these details, but he isn’t exactly the most reliable source either. Now, I’m not trying to inject conspiracy theories into this, I’m just reporting that what actually happened is surprisingly muddled. Uh, if you’re ever on jeopardy and they say this SR shot Lenin on August 30th, 1918, the answer is Fanny Kaplan, that’s the historical answer.

So Lenin managed to live, but he is now confined to a recovery bed. And in that bed, he absolutely resolved at the time had come for Terror. Now, Cheka was already out there arresting people and interrogating people and executing people, but it’s all about to get ramped up to vast national policy. Just a few days after the assassination attempt on September 3rd, Pravda published an appeal to the working class, which said that the people must crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror. And it said the defenses could be slight, but invite swift and permanent retribution. “Anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp.”

Then on September 5th, the Peoples’ Commissars issued the following decree:

The Council of Peoples’ Commissars, having heard the report of the chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution Speculation and Crime [which is by the way, just the official name of Cheka] about the activities of this commission finds that in the present situation the safeguarding of the rear by means of terror is necessary; that it is necessary to send a greater number of responsible party comrades to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution speculation and Crime in order to strengthen its work, and introduce into it a more systematic character; that it is necessary to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons associated with White Guard organizations, plots, and rebellions are liable to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those shot and the reasons for shooting them.

This decree of September 5th, 1918 is the legal embarkation point for what becomes the Red Terror and the foundations for a generally repressive police state.

So, the Red Terror is going to last for years, and go through periods of winding up and winding down, and obviously the first several weeks and months after the decree were a period of major windup. There is a lot of conflicting information out there about casualties and victims; some people tend to downplay how many people were killed, other people obviously exaggerate it beyond all reason. The Communists were often fastidious record-keepers about who was being killed, where, and why, but oftentimes local decisions were simply made on the fly. Groups of people were taken to the outskirts of town and shot. The who, what, when, and why of their deaths never recorded. Among the first victims were those who had already been rounded up and held in custody, whether as hostages or as potential threats to the regime; they were executed. Lots of SRs were executed. There were also large police sweeps to pick up all kinds of suspects, people were just rounded up and crammed into prisons. There were little revolutionary tribunals operating at the local level, haphazardly and ruthlessly. Now very often, yes, they were identifying real threats to the Communist regime, arresting them and executing them — or they were picking up people from rival political parties. But as often as not, the basis for an arrest is extremely flimsy: a single denunciation from an anonymous informant; maybe somebody is arrested for the crime of being a foreigner. And as history has seen in several different times and locations, sometimes people are arrested for having the same name as somebody who the government is looking for, that happens a lot during the initial phase of the Red Terror. And then of course as we’ve also seen many times throughout history going all the way back to, let’s say, the Sullan Proscriptions and people like Crassus and Catiline, where denunciations and arrests are driven entirely by greed and avarice, or maybe a ruthless desire to get ahead, settling personal grudges, settling old scores, none of which had anything to do with politics. Now, this is all just the very beginning of it, and as we move forward, there will be dungeons and tortures and executions, and the whole thing will become an absurd, paranoid blanket spreading out over everything. Initially justified by the context of the civil war, it would become a permanent feature of post-revolutionary Soviet life.

As the Cheka fanned out and fulfilled its mandate to grow its operation and systematically impose a reign of terror, the Red Army advanced on the Volga. They recaptured Simbirsk on September the second, and then on September the 12th took Kazan, which meant, by the by, that General Vācietis did not become an early victim of the Red Terror, which he surely would have had he failed, and instead is on his way to being promoted to commander in chief of the whole Red Army.

In the face of this onslaught, the Komuch collapsed as a potential threat to the Communist regime. The People’s Army they created topped out at just 30,000 soldiers and they couldn’t get any more as the Red Army poured reinforcements into the region. In the first week of October 1918, with the Red Army closing in on Samarra, the Komuch disbanded, and everyone fled east, seeking the protection of White armies that were forming inside Siberia.

Meanwhile, the Czechoslovaks grew demoralized and frustrated. They’d never wanted to get involved in a Russian civil war in the first place, but it tolerated it because the Reds were putting up practically no resistance. Now that it was turning into a real war, they wanted out. And as they reoriented themselves back to their original goal of trying to get out of Russia, the Allies continued to bring forces into Russia, under the cover of getting the Czechoslovaks Legions out of Russia. On September the fourth, 4,500 Americans arrived at Arkhangelsk — they were officially dubbed the American Expeditionary Force, and unofficially they were called the Polar Bear Expedition — and then more troops flooded into Vladivostok, most especially the Japanese. But if you take a quick glance over at the calendar, you know that in next week’s episode, everything is about to get rocked by another major event that is going to re-destabilize the whole Eurasian continent. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is just around the corner. And I have taken pains to impress upon you that everything that we have understood so far about the Russian Revolution has to be understood in the context of World War I.

So, how are things going to change when World War I isn’t a thing anymore?

 

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Episode 10.82: The House of Special Purpose

Way back in Episode 10.62, I bid a very grateful adieu to Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov, whose incompetent shenanigans finally penetrated the last shred of my composure. You’ll notice we haven’t heard a peep from them since. This is partly yes, because I was sick of talking about them, but there is some historical justification for their absence from the story. After Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, he and his family became remarkably irrelevant. On the international front, the Allied Powers, eager to have new management in charge of the eastern front, exerted no diplomatic pressure on behalf of the Romanovs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the lines, the Central Powers did not add the restoration of the Kaiser’s cousins to their list of war aims. Domestically, the imperial couple had alienated, disappointed, and disillusioned so many people that there was no outraged movement fixated on the overthrown tsar. There were no serious plots to rescue them, certainly none to restore them to power. Even right-wingers who joined the White movement after October 1917 rightly saw Nicholas and Alexandra as fatally discredited, running around saying we fight for Tsar Nicholas was a pretty good way to get no one to volunteer for your volunteer army. Meanwhile, in the post February revolution, political dynamics, the governing coalitions of Octobrists, Kadets, Right SRs, and Mensheviks, were neither driven by a thirst for revolutionary vengeance on the one hand, nor a willingness to just let the ex-imperial family walk free on the other. With far more important things to worry about, the various provisional governments, just let the Romanovs hangout in a state of limbo. And then finally, on the far left, the Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and anarchists aimed their post-February passions, polemics, and weapons at the provisional government. The immediate enemy was Kerensky, Kornilov, and the Cossacks, not Nicholas and Alexandra. After the February Revolution, the Romanovs ceased to be the center of anyone’s political calculations, either bore them or against them. It is amazing how quickly, after more than 20 years on the throne, and carrying the historical weight of a 300 year old dynasty, Nicholas and Alexandra became quite simply irrelevant. They had become little more than a loose end to tie up, and today, we are going to tie up that loose end.

Initially, the Romanovs were placed under house arrest at their ancestral residence at Tsarskoye Selo just outside of Petrograd. There, Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia, plus their only son Aleksei, enjoyed a pretty carefree and comfortable life. Through a kind of of passive inertia, the provisional government continued to pay out state subsidies for the ex-imperial family to live on, even though they were now legally private citizens. Nicholas in particular seemed absolutely rejuvenated by the abdication and was as happy as he had ever been. No longer a helplessly deteriorating insomniac with the weight of the world on his shoulders, he relaxed into the responsibility free life he had always wanted. Alexander Kerensky met with the former tsar several times during the first months of their house arrest and said, “All those who watched him in his captivity were unanimous in saying that Nicholas the Second seemed generally to be very good tempered and appeared to enjoy his new manner of life. It seemed as if a heavy burden had fallen from his shoulders and he was greatly relieved.”

So even if there was some huge coordinated effort to restore Nicholas to power, which there absolutely was not, Nicholas himself would have been a very reluctant participant. This initial idyllic phase of their post-abdication house arrest ended in mid August 1917. With the failure of Kerensky’s June offensive, the Russian army dissolving, and the political situation deteriorating rapidly, the family’s life at the old Alexander palace came to an end. Tsarskoye Selo was after all very close to Petrograd, and after the insurrectionary violence during the July Days, Prime Minister Kerensky decided to move the family deeper into the Russian interior. He said it was for the family’s safety, which is almost certainly true, but let’s also not forget that after the failure of June offensive, the Germans were looking at an increasingly clear path to Petrograd. It would not take much for them to capture both the capital and the Romanovs. So in mid August 1917, Kerensky ordered the family moved out to Western Siberia.

On August 13th, 1917, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children departed the Alexander palace for the last time. Their new home would be the remote town of Tobolsk. They traveled first by train to the city of Tyumen, the nearest city with a railroad station. After disembarking, it was another 150 miles by carriage and ferry boat to Tobolsk, which was the point. With no railroad station, it was not an easy place to get in or out of. But remote did not mean primitive. Upon arrival, the Romanovs were put up at the governor’s palace, a well provisioned and pretty nice house. It wasn’t the Alexander Palace of course, but it also wasn’t a straw hut. Here, their life of carefree ease continued. They brought with them a whole cadre of retainers and servants: two valets, six chambermaids, 10 footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a butler, a steward, a nurse, a clerk, a barber, and two pet dogs joined them in the house. The family read books and played games, Nicholas and Alexei cut firewood. Far removed from the trouble or danger of responsibility, they lived like affluent country gentry. Obviously they maintained hope that one day friends on the outside would help them escape to someplace truly safe, but it’s not like they were in immediate danger. Or even immediate discomfort.

Their situation did not even change much after the October Revolution came along. The family eventually heard the news, but the October Revolution spread by way of Red Guard detachments fanning out from Petrograd and Moscow by way of the railroad. And as I just said, Tobolsk itself was 150 miles from the nearest railroad station. So it’d takes several months before Red Guards appeared. Besides, to the limited extent the Romanovs received any kind of political news at all in late 1917, they probably would have heard the conventional wisdom of nearly all non-Bolshevik observers: the Bolsheviks are not going to last. After new year’s 1918, with the one-year anniversary of the abdication approaching, the lives of the Romanovs finally took a real turn for the worse. Defying all expectations, the Bolsheviks lasted. After successfully shuttering the Constituent Assembly in January. Lenin’s government became more self-confident, and started working through all the responsibilities they had inherited.

There were a million little policy questions they needed to answer, and one of them, which no government had answered since March 1917, is what do we actually do with the Romanovs? The People’s Commissars had no ready answer, but at a minimum, the family would no longer be allowed to live a life of luxury at the people’s expense anymore. At the end of January 1918, the guard to the governor’s mansion put the family under much tighter daily restrictions. Then in mid February, the People’s Commissars announced that the Romanov allowance would be cut to 600 rubles a week. This forced them to give up such luxuries as butter and coffee, and also let go almost their entire household staff, who they could no longer afford to pay.

But that only covered the terms of their confinement, not what was ultimately going to happen to them. Now the most obvious thing would be to put Nicholas on trial for crimes against the people. Russian revolutionaries of every stripe were steeped in the history of the French Revolution, and they knew that the great public trial of Louis the 16th was a pretty important plot point. Trotsky in particular seems to have expected a public trial to prove beyond all doubt the guilt of the ex-tsar. Then they would execute him publicly for crimes against his people, demonstrating revolutionary justice that would serve as an inspiration for the workers of the world. Trotsky naturally cast himself as the main character of this theatrical show trial. He would play the part of the brilliant prosecutor, skewering the haplessly feeble — but yet also monstrously terrible — former tsar. Trotsky said he envisioned, “an open court that would unfold a picture of the entire reign — peasant policy, labor, nationalities, culture, the two wars, etc. The proceedings would be broadcast to the nation by radio, in the villages accounts of the proceedings would be read and commented upon daily.”

But with everything else going on in the spring of 1918, the People’s Commissars made no specific plans to stage this trial. They did not even know what would happen if they brought Nicholas back to Moscow. It might spark an uncontrollable lynch mob. It might spark an uncontrollable uprising to set him free — now, maybe not. But without any real pressure to come up with a final plan, the People’s Commissars procrastinated, and they set the decision aside for another day.

The pressure to come up with a final plan ultimately started building from local circumstances east of the Ural Mountains. In February, a Congress of Soviets from the Ural region convened in the major industrial city of Yekaterinburg, which elected a Bolshevik dominated executive committee. The Ural Bolsheviks tended to be more hard line and radical than their comrades in Moscow, and they were also more immediately annoyed that Bloody Nicholas and his family were allowed to just hang out in their backyard like nothing had ever had ever happened. They started petitioning Moscow to transfer the Romanovs to Yekaterinburg, where they would be held in the kind of real prison they deserved. This was a matter of some delicacy for the Central Committee back in Moscow, because they were aware many of their comrades in the Urals were itching to answer the question of what to do about the Romanovs with a few well-placed bullets. The Central Committee of the party in Moscow. Wasn’t sure that’s what they wanted to happen, but they also didn’t want to cause any schisms with the Ural Bolsheviks, nor provoke them into doing something they’d all later regret.

Pressure mounted further when Red Guard detachments finally arrived in Tobolsk in late March, the problem being that the Red Guards were not on the same page. One group of about 250 were sent from Yekaterinburg, while another 400 arrived representing the rival city of Omsk. Neither detachment was particularly disciplined, nor were they interested in subordinating themselves to the other’s authority. Meanwhile, the guard units at the governor’s palace were getting awfully restless, because their wages hadn’t been paid for an obnoxiously long time. With reports about all this in hand, Moscow finally appointed a guy called Vassily Yakovlev to go take command of the whole situation. Yakovlev arrived in Tobolsk on April 22nd with his own detachment of soldiers, imposed some discipline and paid off the wages of the angry guards. But he was not there to maintain the status quo. There is a lot of mysterious confusion about all decisions surrounding the Ex-Imperial family at this point, but Yakovlev’s mission appears to have been to collect the Romanovs and bring them back to Moscow. The most likely explanation being that at this point, the People’s Commissars still planned to put Nicholas on public trial.

That very night, Nicholas was told to pack his bags. He was not told what his final destination would be, but was told that anybody who wanted to was free to depart with him, Aleksei had recently aggravated his hemophilia and couldn’t be moved, so the whole family traveling together was out of the question. At first, Alexandra was torn between accompanying her husband and staying with her son, but she was convinced by the others to go with Nicholas to support him in whatever may come. Showing how out of touch the couple had become — not that they were ever actually in touch — they believed that the reason Nicholas was being fetched was to force him to sign the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which they both loathed. They appeared quite unaware of the fact that Nicholas’s signature had not been required for anything for quite some time.

Since the rivers were not yet free of ice, they had to travel by carriage over crummy roads for two days, which was miserable, but it did lead them through the hometown of their old friend Rasputin. Alexandra noted in her diary, “Stood before our friend’s house. Saw his family and friends looking out the window at us.”

When they got to Tyumen, they boarded a train that would take them through you, Kettering Borg. But at this point you cough laugh was concerned. Nicholas and Alexandra might not make it out of the city alive.

He informed Moscow. He was going to faint like he was going through Yekaterinburg, but then take a very roundabout path to the capital through Omsk, which meant speeding off a couple hundred miles southeast. When news reached Yekaterinburg that Nicholas and Alexandra were suddenly on an eastbound train, it set off alarm bells for the local Communists, who now suspected Yakovlev was a traitor and planning to spirit the imperial family to Vladivostok, where they could make a getaway via the Pacific Ocean. So Moscow dealt with dueling communiques, each side warning them that the other side had nefarious intentions. One was accused of preparing to shoot the couple on sight, the other accused of playing Russian Scarlet Pimpernel. Moscow finally decided that, at least for the moment, the Romanovs would be transferred to the custody of the Yekaterinburg Soviet, on the promise that nothing would happen to them without direct instructions from Moscow. Yakovlev relented, reversed course again, and headed back northwest. On April 30, an angry mob greeted Nicholas and Alexandra at the Yekaterinburg train station, but they were in fact placed in safe custody and not shot on sight. Their new home had been commandeered the day before from a retired businessman named Nikolai Ipatiev. After the house was requisitioned, it was somewhat menacingly redubbed “the house of special purpose.” Demonstrating either the indecision of the leaders back in Moscow, or that they had maybe already secretly made their decision and just weren’t ready to act yet, Nicholas and Alexandra would not continue on to Moscow. They would remain in the house of special purpose for the time being, and we now know that for the time being meant for the rest of their short lives.

As they sat in the house of special purpose, the world exploded all around them. The Czechoslovak Legions went into revolt at Chelyabinsk on May 14th, which was a pretty big deal locally, as Chelyabinsk was just 130 miles south of Yekaterinburg. But it didn’t immediately change anything. The imperial couple was neither hastily transferred to Moscow, nor sent back to the railroad-less Tobolsk. In fact, on May 23rd, the rest of the children completed their own journey and joined their parents. All the Romanovs, plus their last remaining handful of servants, were now together again under one roof.

Their days of easy house arrest, however, were now over. The house of special purpose operated on prison rules. A large wooden palisade was built around the entire house to prevent anyone from seeing in or out. Then, to prevent any kind of communication, the windows were painted over with whitewash. The family was guarded round the clock by guards both inside the house and outside patrolling the grounds. They could only leave their chambers for meals, and were even followed into the bathroom. Now, despite the constant hostile surliness of the guards, the officers in charge did seem intent preventing any overt abuses, and the diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra both indicate their conditions were stifling and uncomfortable, but not necessarily cruel and abusive. Nicholas finally sat down and read War and Peace for the first time.

By mid June 1918, however, the situation for the Reds in the Ural region grew into a full-on crisis. That SR group down in Samarra had just declared itself the valid government to the Constituent Assembly backed up by the Czechoslovak Legions, who now pretty much controlled the entire Trans-Siberian railway. The Cossacks and volunteer army were on the march in the south, the Communist outposts in the Urals were in danger of being completely cut off. At some point in the midst of all this, Lenin and the other leading Communists shifted away from the idea of staging a great big show and towards the idea of just tying up loose ends the old fashioned way.

The final decision appears to have been made in the first week of July 1918. The most influential leader of the Ural communists had come to Moscow for the Fifth Congress of Soviets, and he was among the more forceful advocates for just doing it and being done with it. Doing it and being done with what, you might ask. Well, you shouldn’t have to ask. Whether the surprise assassination of Count Mirbach and the revolt of the left SRs on July the Sixth played any role in the decision-making isn’t clear, but it is worth noting that a loyal Cheka officer had already taken over command of the house of special purpose on July 4th before all that went down. Then on July 16th, it was communicated from Yekaterinburg back to Moscow that plans were in place, and due to prevailing military circumstances — those circumstances, being that the Czechoslovak Legion was surrounding them and the city would soon fall — that they were prepared to go ahead with you know what as soon as Moscow transmitted a confirmation order.

Now, before we go on, we should note that while the Czechoslovak Legion was advancing and they would capture Yekaterinburg in a week, trains had obviously been going back and forth to Moscow no problem right through the first week of July. So it’s really not the case that, oh, gee whiz evacuating the family is just impossible. Now, maybe it was impossible by July 16th, but if they had wanted to, they could have moved the family at any point before that. If they had wanted to.

So we know from everything that happens next that the requested confirmation order from Moscow came in that very night of July 16. Now there is no documentary evidence for this order. There is no piece of paper hiding in any archive out there proving that the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow gave the order to execute the Romanovs. But, as we’ll discuss here in a second, the conclusion to be drawn is not that they didn’t order the execution, but that they destroyed all evidence that they ordered the execution.

After receiving this confirmation, the Cheka officer commanding the house of special purpose ordered the Romanovs and their last few servant rousted after midnight. They were told there had been some shooting in town and that they were all going to move to the basement for their safety. The family had no reason to doubt this story and complied. So at some point after one in the morning on what was now technically July 17th, 1918, 11 people assembled in the basement of the house. Nicolas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Aleksei, plus their doctor and three remaining servants. The room was not very large, it was like 15 feet by 20 feet, with only a single small window. Still not suspecting anything, they requested two chairs be brought down one for Aleksei and one for Alexandra, a request that was granted. Then suddenly, the Cheka commander entered the small room flanked by 10 men, all armed with revolvers. Without any warning or ceremony, he pulled out a piece of paper and read a death sentence.

Nicolas could only respond, “What? What?” before the Cheka commander shot him point blank in the chest, killing him instantly. Alexandra attempted to cross herself, but was similarly shot point blank and died instantly. Unfortunately, their shockingly quick deaths made them the lucky ones. Each of the executioners had been assigned a different person to kill, but when they entered the room, most of them were not standing directly across from their assigned victim. They weren’t that organized. So they all pulled their guns out and started firing quite wildly. The room filled with smoke and blood and screaming.

After the first round of shooting though, only about half the victims were dead. The rest were in various states of wounded terror. Now, I’m not going to go into all the grizzly details here, but it did require another fifteen minutes of additional pistol shots and repeated bayonet plunges to finally kill all eleven men, women, and children in the room. Once everybody was finally dead, the bodies were loaded into a truck and driven to an abandoned mine shaft that had been earlier identified as the best place to dispose of the remains. There, they were met by a group of about 25 men who had been called in to quickly help bury the bodies, and this group was apparently incensed because they thought they had been called into join the execution, not simply help cover it up and they were very disappointed. There was then a great deal of scuffling between the men and the commanding officers as the bodies were stripped and searched for valuables — and there were valuables, the ladies had secretly sewn diamonds into their corsets. Once this was done, everyone departed, but the next day the commander concluded the mineshaft wasn’t actually deep enough, and so he came back with a party the next day, dug everything back up, and loaded it onto a different truck to take it to a different, deeper mineshaft. But along the way, the truck got stuck in the mud, and so they decided to just dig some holes and bury the corpses, though before they finally dumped the bodies, they poured sulfuric acid all over the faces to prevent identification of the bodies.

Now, the final resting place of the Romanovs was known locally, but it was not revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. After sitting around for nearly 75 years, a team dug up the bones in 1992, ran some DNA tests, and successfully identified most of the remains of the Romanov family.

When confirmation of the executions reached Moscow, the People’s Commissars were in the midst of debating national health policy. That discussion was briefly paused for the announcement that the tsar was dead. After a brief silence, Lenin simply said, “We shall now proceed to read the draft decree article by article.” And then they went back to business as if they had just been told a parcel of mail had been delivered. The first official acknowledgement came from the party newspaper on July 19th, which only said that the tsar was dead. The famous British super spy. Bruce Lockhart was in Moscow at the time and reported that when they were told the tsar was dead, “The population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”

There was no grief, remorse, or regret. There was no outrage in the streets, nor was there any cheering in the streets. There was just nothing. It was a big nothing. Now the total lack of response may have been because the people were only told that the tsar himself was dead, not that the whole family had been killed. That July 19th announcement straight up lied and said, “The wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place.” This marked the beginning of a whole web of lies about what had happened in the house of special purpose on July 17th. For all his talk about being willing to do the hard and necessary thing bravely and unflinchingly without sentiment or guilt, Lenin very much refused to admit he had ordered the execution not just of the tsar, but also women, children, and some servants. The Soviet government officially maintained that the rest of the family was still alive well into the mid-1920s — like, yes, they are alive and well, but no, you can’t see them or talk to them. Not only did they deny what they had done, the Communist Party also concocted a cover story about who had done it. The official version of events was that the leaders of the Ural regional Soviet Congress had ordered the execution on their own initiative, and it had only been approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party after the fact. The official story would be maintained until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the assassination of the tsar and his family were the sole responsibility of the leaders in Yekaterinburg, not Moscow. But that story never fit any other established facts, evidence, witness accounts, or, frankly, common sense. Trotsky, for instance, was off running the civil war at this point, and he wasn’t around Moscow for the final decisions, but later recounted in his diary about how he found out about the executions from the Central Committee Party Secretary Yakov Sverdlov.

> Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: “Oh yes, and where’s the tsar?”

“Finished,” he replied. “He has been shot.”

“And where’s the family?”

“The family along with him.”

“All of them?,” I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise.

“All,” Sverdlov replied. “Why?”

He awaited my reaction. I made no reply.

” And who decided the matter?” I inquired.

“We decided it here. Ilyich thought that we should not leave the White a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances.”

I asked no more questions and considered the matter closed.

Now, this was written in 1935, and Trotsky certainly had his own agenda at that point, but this anecdote fits the facts, the circumstances, the record, and the personalities of everyone involved far more than the story of, hey, we were surprised as anybody that the whole family got offed in the middle of the night.

Now, while the Soviet regime kept up the story that Moscow had nothing to do with it right until the bitter end, their story that only Nicholas had been killed was blown up in 1926. After Siberia briefly fell completely out of Soviet control during the civil war, Admiral Kolchak — who we’ll be getting to soon enough — ordered an investigation. A guy called Sokolov spent two years interviewing witnesses, accumulating evidence, and searching for the grave sites to find out who had done what to the Romanovs, where, when, and how. Now, he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 as the civil war turned decisively in favor of the Reds, but he published everything he had accumulated in Paris in 1926, forcing the Soviet government to admit that the Romanovs were dead. All of them. But the years of official denials spread rumors and myths that some of them had gotten away. Most especially, these myths centered around the youngest daughter, Anastasia. But she didn’t live. She was dead the whole time. It was quite a grizzly death too, I might add, if you’re ever inclined to read the details.

So, that’s the end of the Romanovs. They are now dead and buried. Not just metaphorically, but literally. And on the whole, and I think their executions were pointless, unnecessary, and serves no real purpose. Now I’m not going to lose a ton of sleep over the grizzly fate of one family that had sat perched atop a pretty ruthless military and political apparatus that kept them in power by inflicting lots of grizzly fates on lots of different families who we’ve never heard of. But that doesn’t mean that their execution was righteous, necessary, or even useful. Trotsky said that Lenin didn’t want to leave the Whites with a live banner. But what would the Whites have done with that live banner? Probably nothing except be annoyed that they were the ones who now had to figure out what to do with the Romanovs. Indeed, the Romanovs were probably more of a threat to the Communists as dead martyrs than live political actors. When they were dead, they couldn’t keep bungling and screwing everything up. This is why the Communists went to such lengths to deny the murders and bury the bodies under a bunch of sulfuric acid. Now, there may have been some revolutionary utility to the idea of a public execution of Nicholas following a great public prosecution, but by killing them all in the dead of night, the Communists denied themselves even that opportunity. And instead of getting to proudly brag about serving revolutionary justice to a tyrant, they spent the next years and decades covering it up, hiding it. .Mumbling not very convincing lies about what they had done. So it’s not just enemies of the Communists who treated the murders of the Romanovs as a shameful crime. The Communists themselves treated it like it was a shameful crime.

And as for the old revolutionary truism, voiced most famously by Robespierre, that for the Republic to live, the king must die — I mean, lots of successful revolutions have wound up with the ruling monarchs booted off into exile and thereafter posing no future threat to the new regime. Republics have lived and monarchies have died without the monarchs themselves getting killed off in the process. The argument that a political revolution to overthrow a monarchy will only succeed if the specific human currently raining as monarch dies in the process is disproven by plenty of historical revolutions, revolutions we’ve covered on the show — King Charles the 10th of France, Louis Philippe, Napoleon the Third. Meanwhile, plenty of other revolutions have ultimately failed even after the former monarch was executed. Charles the First, say hello to Charles the Second.

The monarch literally living or dying is a variable that just float independently of any causal relationship to the larger cycle of revolutionary events. And besides, the whole operating principle of the monarchy is that the chain of custody never breaks. The king is dead, long live the king. So when you kill one guy who’s currently king, another guy’s just going to claim to be king. There’s right now a claimant to the Romanov dynasty out there, just as there are Stuarts and Bourbons and Orleans and Bonapartists. A monarchy doesn’t end with the death of the last king, but rather when enough people stopped believing in the monarchy. And in July 1918, the Russian people were already there. It didn’t matter whether Nicholas Romanov lived or died, the monarchy was dead. So I think the murders were wrong because they were pointless and unnecessary and, well, murder is wrong. In this case, it was an early signal that the brutal crimes committed in the name of the tsar, the crimes, which may have justified his execution in the mind to the revolutionaries, then and now, were now going to be played out in reverse.

And just as the execution of Louis the 16th was the initial harbinger of the Jacobin Terror, the execution of the Romanovs was a harbinger of the red Terror.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.81: The Revolt of the Left SRs

Hello, and welcome back from holiday hiatus. I hope everyone is good, or at the very least, getting through it. Before we get going, I have one bit of business and one upcoming event to discuss. The bit of businesses is, as you probably noticed this week, there were two ads attached to the beginning of the show, rather than just one, that’s a thing that’ll start happening more in 2022, just be aware. But also be aware of that I remain committed to not inserting mid roll ads into this thing — once the music starts, the content will proceed uninterrupted. I can’t promise that’ll be the case for my future podcast endeavors, as the podcast industry is making my mid-roll holdout position increasingly untenable, but at least for the round of the Revolutions podcast, there aren’t going to be any mid-roll ads.

On the event front, I am very excited to tell you that on Tuesday, January 18th, I will be playing the role of interviewer/conversation partner for Jonathan Katz to discuss his new book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. If you remember from way back in the final episode of the Haitian revolution series, I said that if you want to understand the burden and expansion of America’s empire, that everybody needs to go investigate the life and career of Smedley Butler. I even spelled his name for you. Well, now we have a thorough modern up-to-date account of the life and career Smedley Butler. Gangsters of Capitalism as a sensational read, and Katz did a great job exploring not just Butler’s historical life and times, but also the ongoing legacy of those life and times in the present day. So this is going to be a digital event, with politics and prose, on Tuesday, January 18th. I’l drop a link with all the information in the show notes, but truly, put this on your calendar, it’s going to be me and Jonathan Katz talking Gangsters of Capitalism, which obviously you should all buy and read.

Okay, so on with the show. We left off with Lenin’s communist government grappling with major economic, political, and social upheavals in the spring of 1918. Civil war was breaking out all around them; the Czech Legions had taken over the Trans-Siberian Railway; people in the cities were starving; industrial production had collapsed. In the context of this crisis, the government of the People’s Commissars unveiled new policies on almost all fronts that we have retroactively called war communism. Now there is an ongoing historical debate how much of this policy shift between the fall of 1917 and the spring of 1918 was the result of the People’s Commissars trying to survive the emergency of civil war and urban famine, and how much of this was just the Bolsheviks-turned-communists taking the mask off and doing what they had always intended to do after they tricked everybody into supporting them back in October with a bunch of decrees they never intended to be their permanent policies. But whichever explanation you prefer, the change in course was very real, and one group in particular — who clearly believed all those Bolshevik decrees back in October — now felt deeply betrayed. And that was the Left SRs.

The Left SRs as a party were defined by their decision to support the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. Their presence inside the government, their votes in the Soviet executive, their vocal support for the Communists in the streets and in the villages, legitimized the government to the People’s Commissars and effectively countered accusations against Lenin, Trotsky, and the gang that they were trying to build a one party dictatorship. After all, it wasn’t a one party dictatorship, there were two parties. And what the second party brought to the table was, for example, access to the peasantry. The Communist Party had essentially zero operational presence outside the cities, and it was the Left SRs who provided a supportive link to the rural peasantry, who still, after all made up a vast majority of the population of Russia.

And initially, the Left SRs could offer this support without feeling queasy about it. The land decree Lenin had issued on October 26 was just him copying and pasting the SR land program. The Left SRs also supported worker control of factories, the end of any compromise with the bourgeoisie and the liberals, and all power to the Soviets. All of which was rapturously declared in the assembly hall of the Smolny Institute in those first heady days of late October and early November. Now the Left SRs had their disagreements with the Bolsheviks, but those were quibbles compared to the big pieces the October Revolution seemed to be locking in place. But after the Left SRs supported the Bolshevik dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918, the relationship between the two parties started to sour.

The first biggest and most directly consequential difference between them was the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Left SRs hated the treaty. They believed, not without good reason, that it turned Russia into a subordinate colonial satellite of the German Empire. They also believed that it was a betrayal of the Bolshevik promise of peace without annexations or indemnities, as it allowed the Central Powers to effectively annex like a third of the former Russian Empire. They also believed that it sold out their brother and in the territory sacrificed to German occupation in the west, to stay nothing of their revolutionary comrades through Europe. The Left SRs agreed with the left Communist critique of the treaty, that ending the imperialist war was not supposed to mean utter capitulation to the Kaiser. If that was the only option, it was far better to embrace the fortunes of revolutionary war, and sweep a revolutionary army across Europe, to tear down imperial capitalism everywhere, root and branch. When Lenin got his way and the treaty was signed in March 1918, the Left SR commissars inside the government resigned rather than go along with it.

Even years later, the Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova told Emma Goldman that the treaty was the Bolsheviks’ first and greatest sin. “And as concerns the revolution itself,” Goldman wrote, summarizing what Spiridonova had told her, “it was precisely the Brest Treaty which struck it a fatal blow. Aside from the betrayal of Finland, White Russia, Latvia, and the Ukraine, which were turned over to the mercy of the Germans by the Brest piece, the peasant saw thousands of their brothers slain and had to submit to being robbed and plundered. The simple peasant mind could not understand the complete reversal of the former Bolshevik slogans of no ‘indemnity and no annexations,’ but even the simplest peasant could understand that his toil and his blood were to pay the indemnities imposed by the Brest conditions.” Spiridonova believed that the treaty fatally poisoned the revolutionary waters. “The peasants grew bitter and antagonistic to the Soviet regime,” she said. “Disheartened and discouraged, they turned from the revolution. As to the effect of the Brest piece upon the German workers, how could they continue in their faith in the Russian revolution in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks negotiated and accepted the peace terms with the German masters over the heads of the German proletariat? The historic fact remains that the Brest piece was the beginning of the end of the Russian revolution. No doubt other factors contributed to the debacle, but Brest was the most fatal of them.”

As a rejoinder to this, Lenin would note out point out two things: first, that the Germans’ obstacle- free invasion of Russian territory after the Russians stalled on signing the treaty in late February 1918 was proof positive that any call to launch a revolutionary war was pure fantasy. It wasn’t just that it was a different option or a less preferable option, but that it wasn’t an option at all. And second, that Spiridonova and the Left SRs generally overstated the hostility of the Russian peasantry to the treaty. They wanted peace. They had been voting for peace with their feet for like a year. And when the Left SRs go into revolt in the name of resuming the war, as they are about to do in this episode, no one’s going to rise with them. Now Spiridonova wasn’t wrong that the peasantry was growing bitter and antagonistic towards the Soviet regime, but this had far more to do with Communist land policy than Communist foreign policy.

Spiridonova and the Central Committee of the Left SRs knew the anger and bitterness of the peasantry very well, as they were presently fielding innumerable complaints from the peasantry about the advent of the food dictatorship and armed requisition of grain. Then on June 11th, 1918, the Communist government unveiled a new institution called the Committees of Poor Peasants or as they were called, the Kombedy. The Kombedy were the beginning of Lenin’s attempt to import class warfare into the rural areas by pitting landless peasants who lived on wage labor against Kulaks, the better off peasants who hired those landless workers. Now we’re going to talk more about this next week, but in addition to ratcheting up coercive pressure in the rural areas, the Kombedy looked like they were being established to supplant all the local Soviets that had grown up since 1917 and which represented all peasant interests, not just wage labor peasant interests. These local Soviets also just so happened to be dominated by the SRs, and they formed an institutional base of power for the SRs independent of the Communists. And that base of power now appeared targeted for demolition.

Now in general, the Left SRs had more libertarianish instincts than their Communist comrades, and the Left SRs were becoming concerned about the whole tilt of Communist policy. The worker control of factories that had been proclaimed right after the October Revolution was now being replaced by nationalization, centralization, the return of bourgeois managers and hierarchical factories. The new Red Army that was being formed was not being formed on the principle of voluntary enlistment and democratized regiments, both of which seem to be key gains of the revolution, but instead going back to the old ways of forced conscription, traditional military discipline, and even the active recruitment of former tsarist officers. Meanwhile, the Cheka, the effectively unaccountable secret police meant to protect the government from political threats, was rapidly growing in size, scope, and ruthlessness. To placate the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks had given them key positions inside the Cheka, but the Left SRs appear to have taken up those positions with the almost single purpose of curbing Bolshevik abuses. It became, for example, Left SR policy for party members in the Cheka to veto nearly every death sentence that came across their desks. Now, this is not to say that the Left SRs had any problem murdering people — they just wanted to murder the right people: nobles, bourgeoisie, bankers, imperialist, capitalists; not salt of the earth peasants who simply didn’t want to give up their last reserves of grain to a bunch of thugs holding bayonets to their throats.

So, all of this made the Left SRs incredibly concerned about the intentions of the Communists by about June 1918. And this was not just about bickering among various party leaders. The concerns of the Left SRs reflected a widespread and growing backlash to the behavior of the Peoples’ Commissars. A fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets was scheduled to convene in July of 1918, and both the Communists and the Left SRs considered it a distinct possibility that the Left SRs would come into the Congress wielding a majority of the votes. Believing that the wind was at their backs, the Left SRs decided to force the government of the People’s Commissars to change their policies. Most dramatically, they planned to use the Congress to force the abrogation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and demand Lenin’s government re-declare war on Germany. As we just heard Maria Spiridonova express, they believe the peace treaty was the poisoned route sapping the vitality of the revolution that they had signed up for. Indeed, the Left SR leadership considered the resumption of war to be the vital course correction the revolution needed, and they plan to go to any length to achieve it.

On June 24, the Left SR Central Committee resolved. If they did not win enough votes in the Fifth Congress to abrogate the treaty, they would force the resumption of war by other means. They adopted a resolution which said, “The Central Committee believes it to be both practical and possible to organize a series of terrorist acts against the leading representatives of German imperialism. In order to realize this, the forces of the party must be organized, and all necessary precautions taken so that the peasantry and the working classes will join the movement and actively help the party. This must be done after Moscow gives a signal. Such a signal may be an act of terrorism, or can take another form.”

This same resolution spelled out what they hope to achieve by this, which was not the overthrow of Lenin’s government, but simply forcing that government into a massive shift in policy. “We regard our policy,” the resolution said, “as an attack on the current policy of the council of Peoples’ Commissars but definitely not as a fight against the Bolsheviks themselves.”

So really what’s going on here is an attempt by the Left SRs to revive the dual power dynamic that had prevailed in 1917 between the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government. And if you’ll remember, it was said that the job of the Soviet was to point a gun at the head of the provisional government and force them to do what the Soviet wanted, rather than overthrow and displace them. And that’s essentially what the Left SRs planned to do. They wanted to take up the role that had been played by the Petrograd Soviet 1917: point a gun at the head of the Peoples’ Commissars, and forced them to change their policy.

The Left SRs did not much hide what they were up to. They sent agents into the barracks and factories of Moscow to either win active support, or at the very least secure neutrality in case of a coming conflict. And they were pretty successful, as disillusionment with Lenin’s government was on the rise. On June 29th, the front page of the party newspaper contained an appeal to Left SR party members to report to their regional offices for orders, instructions, and military training. On June 30th, Maria Spiridonova publicly declared that the only thing that could save the revolution now was an armed uprising. They were quite open about this, just as the Bolsheviks had been very open in the lead up to October about what they planned to do. People are often under the mistaken impression that bold political insurrections must be preceded by hyper secretive codes of silence. But as often as not, these things are published, discussed, and planned right out in the open.

The Fifth Congress of Soviets opened on July 4th, 1918, in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. The Left SR delegates discovered that they compose something like 35% of the seats. Now it’s entirely likely they actually won a greater share of seats, but that the Communist controlled credentials committee may have approved a number of Communist delegates with incredibly dubious credentials, just to, uh, pad their numbers. But regardless, there was still some hope among the Left SRs that the Left Communist opposition to the peace treaty would join them. And the Left SR leaders got up one after the other and issued a series of blistering denunciations of the peace, culminating with the motion to tear up the treaty and re-declare war on Germany. But despite their own angry misgivings with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left Communist delegates chose not to break party discipline and they voted against the Left SR motion. It was defeated. The treaty stood, war would not be re-declared. With this critical vote lost, the Left SR delegates promptly walked out of the room. That very night, they initiated their plans for the act of terrorism that would be the signal for a nationwide popular revolt. They ordered a hit on the German ambassador to Russia: Count Wilhelm von Mirbach.

The Left SRs had laid their plans to assassinate the ambassador quite well. And while they were openly signaling their intentions to stage some kind of uprising, they did not openly announce their intention to assassinate Mirbach, which came as quite a surprise to everyone. As I said earlier, the Left SRs had been given a number of positions inside the Cheka, and they now used those positions both to organize the hit and prepare for an insurrection they expected to follow. The deputy director of the Cheka was a Left SR named Pyotr Alexandrovich; the commander of the Cheka’s cavalry detachment was a guy named Dimitri Popov. They organized Cheka units composed almost entirely of Left SRs to be armed and ready to move. The two men tasked with actually carrying out the assassination were Yakov Blumkin, head of the Cheka’s German counter intelligence division, and Nikolai Andreyev, who was a photographer by trade. With all these senior Cheka officials in on the plot, it was easy to secure necessary papers and a believable story for Blumkin and Andreyev to get inside the German embassy. They arrived on the afternoon of July 6th, saying they had come to discuss the case of Lieutenant Roger Mirbach, a German officer suspected of espionage. This was a sensitive case, they said, as the suspect was presumed to be a member of the ambassador’s family, and they said it was vital for them to speak to the ambassador directly.

Now all their paperwork checked out, and this got them in the building, but Count Mirbach himself tried to get a subordinate official along with a staff translator to handle the meeting. But Blumkin insisted he had been instructed to only speak with the ambassador, so Count Mirbach reluctantly entered the room. He said that he much preferred all of this to be handled in writing, whereupon Blumkin and Andreyev opened their briefcases and pulled out revolvers. They started firing. Point blank range, and incredibly they missed with all of these point blank shots. The three Germans in the room dove for cover and Mirbach himself nearly got away through an adjoining room, but Andreyev managed to hit him with another bullet, and Blumkin tossed a bomb, blowing the wounded ambassador sideways. The two assassins then hustled out the window, up over a fence, and into a waiting car. They made a totally clean getaway.

They left behind a German embassy now consumed by blood and fire. The ambassador laid dead. No one in the building knew who the assailants were, why they had done it, whether this would be an isolated incident, or the beginning of an all out attack on Germans in Russia. In the Kremlin, Lenin was informed of the murder around 3:30 in the afternoon, and immediately a string of Peoples’ Commissars converged on the German embassy; first, to find out what had happened, and second, to assure the Germans that the government had nothing to do with it and would punish those responsible. Lenin himself came down around 5:00 PM, answering a demand from the German that he personally apologize for the murder of their ambassador, which was an unusual order from a foreign embassy to a head of state, but Lenin came down and complied, though witnesses reported the apology was cold and perfunctory, and he was mostly interested in the details of the crime itself. Lenin was very shaken to discover the assassins had clearly gained access to the ambassador with the help of top officials in the Cheka, which did not bode well for his own personal safety.

After the assassination, armed Left SR detachment started to move out and occupy key parts of Moscow, including the main Cheka headquarters, and the post and telegraph office, where they publicly broadcast their responsibility for the assassination, and called for a general popular uprising. They had at their disposal about 2000 sailors and cavalry, along with eight artillery guns, 64 heavy machine guns, and a half dozen armored cars. When the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky — who we’ll also talk about more next week as we start getting into the Red Terror days — headed down to the barracks of the cavalry detachment and demanded the two assassins be handed over at once. Instead, the men inside placed him under arrest and held him hostage. One Left SR boasted to Dzerzhinsky, “You stand before a fait accompli. The Brest treaty is over. A war with Germany is unavoidable.”

Meanwhile, Lenin was back at the Kremlin doing some nuclear grade fretting. He was one of the few people who understood just how shaky the Communist government actually was. For all their boasting and propaganda and decrees, at this moment, in Moscow on July 6th, 1918, the Left SRs could have quite easily taken over the Kremlin and shot Lenin and all his comrades had they wanted to. Lenin knew this better than anyone. The only troops he could really trust were a division of Latvian rifleman, who during 1917, had decided to tie their own future fortunes to the Bolsheviks, and ever since had proved to be Lenin’s most loyal and reliable troops. The Latvian riflemen were the only ones he really trusted to serve as his personal bodyguards. The Left SRs had chosen their day to assassinate Count Mirbach well, because it happened to be St John’s Day, a Latvian national holiday, and most of the Latvian rifleman were out on the outskirts of town celebrating, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of about 700 men. So for all the political momentum that had been building behind the Left SRs for the past few months, and the now practically open path to overthrowing the government if they want it to, the Left SRs didn’t really want to overthrow the government. This was not meant to be a coup. The assassination of Count Mirbach was supposed to fatally break relations between Germany and Russia and also spark irresistible, popular pressure that would force Lenin to re-declare war on Germany. And frankly, everything was going according to plan right into the evening of July 6th. But then it started to go sideways. A popular uprising did not materialize, and the Left SR insurrection fatally stalled out.

At around 7:00 PM, Maria Spiridonova and other Left SR leaders went down to the Bolshoi Theater and called on the Fifth Congress of Soviets to reconsider their unwillingness to re-declare war on Germany, but the Communist majority still refused to budge. And as the Left SRs delivered speeches to nervous but ultimately deaf ears, Latvian rifleman surrounded the building. The Communist delegates were allowed to depart, but the Left SRs were cooped up inside. They had, in fact, helpfully congregated themselves for a mass arrest. As Bukharin later said to Left SR leader Isaac Steinberg, who had been commissar of justice ithe government before resigning after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come arrest us. As you did not do it, we decided to arrest you instead.”

This was hardly the end of it, though. In terms of raw forces, the Left SRs still outnumbered the Communists nearly three to one. At midnight, the commander of the Latvian rifleman went to confer with Lenin and described the following scene:

The Kremlin was dark and empty. We were led into the meeting hall of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars and asked to wait. The fairly spacious premises in which I now found myself for the first time were illuminated by a single electric bulb suspended under the ceiling somewhere in the corner. The window curtains were drawn, the atmosphere reminded me of the front in the theater of military operations. A few minutes later, the door at the opposite end of the room opened and comrade Lenin entered. He approached me with quick steps and asked in a low voice, “Comrade, will we hold out till morning?”

Having asked the question, Lenin kept on staring at me. I had become accustomed that day to the unexpected, but Comrade Lenin’s question took me a back with its sharp formulation. Why was it important to hold out until the morning? Won’t we hold out to the end? Was our situation perhaps so precarious that my commissars had concealed from me it’s true nature?

Lenin’s own pale fear that a few thousand armed men were actually too much for his regime to handle did not align with Communist party pronouncements about the breadth and depth of their power, which they had apparently led even their most loyal operatives to believe. But the commander of the Latvian rifleman went about his business. He surveyed his available forces and found them augmented only by some Hungarian prisoners of war who had turned communist in the prison camps — they were led by a guy called Béla Kun, who offered to fight for the government — but as that was not nearly enough, the Latvian rifleman elected to hold off their counter attack until close to dawn, when the bulk of their forces who had been celebrating on the outskirts of town would be back in the central city. At 2:00 AM, the commander returned to the Kremlin.

“This time,” he said, “Comrade Lenin entered by the same door and approached me with the same quick steps. I took several paces towards him and reported, ” No later than 12 noon on July seven, we shall triumph all along the line. Lenin took my right hand into both of his and said, pressing it very hard, “Thank you, comrade. You have made me very happy.”

At about five o’clock in the morning, about 3,300 men were armed and ready to go, and they launched their counter attack. The Left SR detachments fought tenaciously for what was by now a collapsing lost cause. There was no popular uprising. They had not forced the government to change policy. War with Germany was not in fact now inevitable. It took six or seven hours worth of fighting in the streets, but the Latvian commander was right: by noon on July 7th, they had triumphed all along the line. The Left SRs were defeated.

Over the next several days, hundreds of Left SRs were arrested in Moscow, Petrograd, and other major cities. But in general, the punishment doled out by the government of Peoples’ Commissars was incredibly light. They summarily executed without trial a baker’s dozen of combat leaders from the ranks of the Cheka, including Deputy Director Alexandrovich. But as they interrogated other detainees, they just released anyone who claimed that they opposed the Central Committee’s decision to go into revolt or those who hadn’t actively participated. Plenty of other leaders were allowed to slip somewhat uncontested into the underground. Maria Spiridonova was held in custody at the Kremlin and would go on trial in November. She received a very light one year sentence for the crime of ordering the assassination of a credentialed diplomat in the service of literally trying to start a war. Now that is not the end of Maria Spiridonova’s persecution at the hands of the Communists, but in this initial context, this is a very light sentence. The Left SRs were treated very lightly for all this. And the general suspicion among both domestic and foreign observers is that the Communists, despite having weathered this brief storm, did not believe themselves strong enough or secure enough to just out and out persecute the Left SRs with a much heavier hand, if for no other reason than Left SRs were obviously quite adept at terrorist assassination, and it only takes a handful of people interested in vengeance to start picking off commissars of the people like they are ministers of the tsar.

But though the individual punishments were light the failure of the revolt of the Left SRs marks the end of them as a political party. Their membership split three ways, with some of them condemning their former comrades and reaffirming their support for the Communists. Others headed into the underground, and mostly focused on staging guerrilla, terrorist acts and places occupied by the Germans like Ukraine. Meanwhile, just a little while later, one of the assassins of Count Mirbach, Yakov Blumkin, came out of the underground. He comes back and he joined the Communist Party, and would join Trotsky’s staff, and would only be killed in 1930 on Stalin’s order, on account of his connections to Trotsky, not for his assassination of Count Mirbach.

So to round out today’s episode, the Left SRs made a number of crucially incorrect assumptions that led to an across the board failure of their plan. The main one being that they believe that the peace between Germany and Russia was so tenuous that something is trivial as the assassination of an ambassador would provoke Germany back into war, or, that Lenin and his government would allow themselves to be forced back into war. The truth was, both the German government and the Russian government, each for their own reasons, believe that maintaining peace between the two was absolutely vital. At this very moment, the Germans are off launching their spring offensive against the Allies in the west, their final, last ditch effort to win the war. They could absolutely not be distracted by the resumption of hostilities on their eastern front. Lenin’s government, meanwhile, realized that resuming the war against Germany would be the absolute end of them, and besides, they didn’t really have an army to fight them anyway.

There was also very clearly a misunderstanding about how hostile the people of Russia were to the peace. Sure, it was ignoble, and maybe even a little humiliating, but it was nothing compared to the horrors of war that they had been forced to endure. And then finally, the uprising failed for kind of the same reason the Bolsheviks attempted uprising during July 1917 had failed: they didn’t really have a clear plan for what to do if their intent to intimidate the government into doing what they wanted failed. And when the Communists refused to be intimidated, there wasn’t really a next step to take.

The July 6th uprising of the Left SRs is in many ways, a small wave amidst a much larger storm tossing around Lenin’s government. It came, it went, they moved on to bigger challenges. But it does mark a major milestone in the Russian Revolution, and the history of Russia generally, because the Left SRs are going to be expelled from every committee, congress, and position of authority they held. And as they were the only party besides the Communist Party presently participating in the administration of things, their expulsion marks the beginning of true one party rule in Russia. From here on out, the communist party will be the only party.

And next week, the Communists are going to draft a new constitution for Russia, and then set about ensuring that they will remain, forever after, the only game in town.

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~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.17: Emancipation and Labor

So I’m sure you have noticed by now that this week’s episode sounds different than normal. My microphone gave up the ghost on me so I have had to improvise a temporary solution to get the job done for right now. I am going back to the United States on Wednesday morning for the Sound Education Conference and apparently buy a new microphone just got added to my list of things to do while I’m there. So this isn’t ideal, I know, but I think we can all just with it together for the moment.

In our last episode, we introduced a whole bunch of new people and new ideas, and I hope you were able to keep them all straight. We retraced the tumultuous 1870s and followed the shifts in revolutionary tactics. First, they tried to slowly and peacefully educate the peasants towards mass social revolution, as per Pyotr Lavrov. Then they switched to a quick and violent vanguard party political revolution as Pyotr Tkachev. But when People’s Will finally succeeded in killing Tsar Alexander the Second in 1881, they found that Jacobin terrorism had brought Russia no closer to socialist revolution than Lavrov’s patient school master strategy had.

So. Where do we go from here? Where can we go from here?

Well, Georgi Plekhanov, Pablo Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, and Lev Deutsch believe they have the answer. And while I’m here, I should say that I received both praise and concern over my pronunciation of Deutsch. Some people said, yeah, you nailed it; other people said in Russian, it would be more properly Deytch, but to be consistent, I’m just going to use Doiych again because he disappears after today anyway, and we won’t have to worry about it.

So we left this little group in early 1881, having found their temporary life as expats in Switzerland becoming a permanent life as exiles in Switzerland. Because the response to his father’s assassination from new Emperor Alexander the Third, the 26 year old son of the now blown to bits Alexander the Second, was uncompromising repression. His father, the Tsar Liberator, had embraced political and social reform. He had emancipated the serfs, created the semi-democratic zemstvo, built an entirely new progressive judicial system, and for his trouble, he had been targeted for death by ungrateful and probably psychopathic revolutionaries. Almost as soon as the lump of flesh that had once been his father was cold, Alexander the Third turned from reform to reaction. Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. It was back, and it was back with a vengeance.

There will be more to talk about on this front, but of most pressing concern for us here today is the arrival of a new political police to seek and destroy the underground enemies of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Because remember, even before his eventual assassination, Alexander the Second had given up on the Third Section. They had been okay at monitoring the upper classes, but they were impotent in the face of underground terrorist groups like People’s Will. Russia needed a new political police for this new era, and shortly before his death, Alexander the Second mostly dismantled the Third Section and reassigned their powers to a new department of state police inside the Ministry of the Interior.

Now what replaced the dismantled third section was the infamous Okhrana. Officially known as the Department of Protecting Order and Public Peace, the Okhrana started as a small St. Petersburg office of 12 detectives that had been created back in 1866 after the first near-miss assassination attempt on Alexander the Second. Well, after the successful did-not-miss assassination attempt of 1881, Alexander the Third created two more offices in Moscow and Warsaw. To ensure nothing hindered the work of this newly reorganized secret police apparatus, in August of 1881, the tsar issued the Statute on Measures to Preserve Order and Public Peace, which gave the police broad powers of surveillance, arrest, prosecution, and punishment. The statute was meant to be a temporary measure in the emergency wake of the tsar liberator’s assassination, and it was drafted to expire after three years. But the Statute on Measures to Preserve Order and Public Peace was perpetually renewed every three years for an additional three years. And it would keep being renewed right up until 1917. So the Russian Empire was now, effectively, a police state.

The effect of all this on the People’s Will organization was swift and devastating. The burgeoning Okhrana rounded up anyone who might’ve been even tangentially linked to People’s Will, smashed their presses, hanged anyone they thought a ringleader, and exiled the rest to Siberia. In the short term, it meant that People’s Will was finished as a viable revolutionary organization. Though as we will see in a moment, it took a while to figure that out, and there were still pockets remaining out there, more committed than ever to continuing the terrorist campaign, in their bitter and hopeless desperation latching on to violence practically for the sake of violence.

The long-term effect was that any new revolutionary organization in Russia was going to have to contend with the wily Okhrana apparatus, and they were creative about their tactics. They were not just about surveillance and arrest, they planted longterm spies and agents provocateur, they co-opted and misdirected and controlled left-wing movements with slush funds and secret financing channels that duped would be radicals into joining organizations that were actually monitored and directed by the Okhrana. We’ll talk about that all later.

So for the small cadre that formed Black Repartition, they could only watch this unfold helplessly from their new base of operations in Switzerland. And this was exactly the kind of thing they had feared from a movement built on aggressive terrorist violence: an apocalyptic state backlash.

But by the time they arrived in Switzerland, they were not only disagreeing with their estranged comrades over revolutionary tactics, but also revolutionary theory. When they organized themselves in 1879, they declared their ideological adherence to scientific socialism, which for them meant not just Marx, but the whole array of western socialists writers coming out of Germany and France and Britain. This distinguished them from People’s Will, who adhered to narodist populism, built partly on the idea that the Russian peasant was a unique and special entity on whose behalf the revolution would be staged. So this means that we’re starting to recapitulate the old westernizer/slavophile debate that had raged in the 1830s and 1840s, and which really had been an ongoing debate among educated Russians going all the way back to Peter the Great. Should Russia look to quote unquote more advanced Europe for answers, or were concepts like backward and behind meaningless because Russia was its own unique thing, playing out its own unique history?

After they arrived in Switzerland in 1880, Plekhanov buried himself in a three-year long intensive study of economics, history, philosophy, and political science to develop a new theory that would guide Russia towards its revolutionary destiny. From which he emerged convinced that the really hard work of synthesizing economics, history, philosophy, and political science into a new revolutionary doctrine had already been done by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And that the answer to all of Russia’s problems was found in Marxism.

So Marx and Engels were already well-known in the Russian intelligentsia, both above board intellectuals and underground radicals. Most of their early work was banned of course, but the weighty tome that was Capital was legally published in Russia in March of 1872. The conclusion of the censors was that it was a doorstop, filled with boring statistical analysis that few would read, and even fewer would understand. And even if they did understand it, Capital was clearly an attack on western style industrial capitalism, and we’ve got none of that here, so it’s not like any of this is even applicable to Russia. So they let it be published. And the Russian edition was the first foreign edition of Capital ever published. Marx himself was very pleased when the initial print run of 3000 copies sold out in a single year. The reason Capital turned out to be so popular among the Russian intelligentsia was not because it described the situation in Russia, but because it was an exquisitely detailed description of the horrors of western capitalism. And as I just mentioned, one of the driving ideas behind the narodism was the belief that the existing communal spirit of the historic Russian village could be harnessed to bypass all the horrors described so eloquently by Marx. So Capital became a cautionary tale. It’s not like anybody was reading Marx as a blueprint for the Russian revolution. Plekhanov, meanwhile, read Marx and said, I have a blueprint for the Russian revolution. And that’s why Plekhanov gets to go down as the father of Russian Marxism.

But as Plekhanov and his friends turn towards Marxism in the early 1880s, they engaged in a dialogue with their still kind of comrades in what was left of People’s Will to try to reform a unified revolutionary party. They had, after all, been together in Land and Liberty right up until 1879. But neither side showed a burning desire to mend fences. Plekhanov was already developing an acid pen, and his treatment of the narodist theories and tactics that had so obviously failed was dismissive and caustic. For their part, the remaining at-large members of People’s Will dug in even harder on their Jacobin terrorism. And if this insistence on staying the course seemed crazy to the members of Black Repartition, just imagine how crazy Black Repartition’s claim that they should plot a new revolutionary course based on some old German’s analysis of industrial capitalism seemed to the members of People’s Will.

The talks went nowhere.

So the members of Black Repartition decided to cut their ties and boldly move in a new direction. In September of 1883. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Deustch got together in Geneva, and they formed a new society they dubbed: the Emancipation of Labor Group. The Emancipation of Labor Group would be an explicitly Marxist society. Their principle objective would be to spread Marxist ideas into Russia, to reorient the entire ideological underpinning of Russian revolution away from the failed utopianism of anarchism and narodism and toward the advanced scientific socialism of Marx. They specifically organized themselves as a propaganda operation, focused on disseminating and teaching Marx’s theory. The plan was to translate the work of Marx and Engels into Russian, and then write new books and pamphlets elaborating on their ideas to make it intelligible and relevant to a Russian audience. This kind of education-based revolution fit right in with Lavrov’s theories, and they invited him to join the group, but he declined. Lavrov was not a Marxist.

The one other guy they did get to join was this kid named Vasily Ignatov, who was able to contribute some seed money to get the group off the ground. Now, half the time, Ignatov is not even mentioned among the founders, since he contributed little more than money and then he died in 1885, but for the record, he was like the fifth beetle of the Emancipation of Labor Group.

By his own self-assertion, and the agreement of his comrades, Plekhanov would serve as an intellectual leader of the new group, and he set to work laying out their new Marx’s program for Russia in three early works. First, the official statement of principles that accompanied the formation of the new group, and also a pamphlet that was published around the same time called Socialism and the Political Struggle. Both of those were published in 1883. These were followed by a longer book called Our Differences published in 1885.

In these early works, Plekhanov staked out their position relative to previous theorists and activists, like Herzen, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, and Tkachev, and mostly attacking the unscientific utopian fantasies of the narodists and the anarchists. And indeed the thing Plekhanov probably found most exciting about Marx was that Marx was offering a scientific theory of economics, society, and history. Plekhanov believed Marx had done for social relations what Newton had done for physics and what Darwin was doing for biology. The scientific nature of the theories is what made them so profoundly important.

The most important of these profoundly important scientific truth is that Marx had discovered, was the theory of historical materialism. Plekhanov came to believe that the stages of history outlined by Marx were inevitable and inexorable, which meant that when describing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx may have been talking about the past history of places like France and Britain, but because Russia had not yet emerged from their medieval mode of production, Marx was also describing a future for Russia yet to come. He was like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. Plekhanov believed historical materialism had universal application, so while the populists and the anarchists believed that Russia could avoid the horrors of western industrial capitalism thanks to their own unique culture and history, Plekhanov said no, that is impossible. Marx has described a path of socio-economic development that cannot be avoided. You cannot skip from feudalism to socialism. Because again, when Marx said that the revolutionary class in feudal society was the bourgeoisie, and that they were the only ones who could topple feudalism and further develop the forces of production, Plekhanov believed him. And it was not until after the bourgeoisie had overthrown feudal aristocracy that the next revolutionary class, the urban proletariat, could rise up to fulfill their own historical destiny.

As a result of his belief in the scientific, universal truth of historical materialism, Plekhanov advanced the controversial doctrine of two revolutions. Because to get to the socialist revolution, they were all aiming at, there must first be a bourgeois democratic revolution, which meant the capitalist mode of production must come to Russia. Now this theory is going to be a tough sell to Russian radicals who have just spent the last few decades agreeing that the industrial capitalist mode of production sounded really crappy, and it was to be avoided at all costs. Remember: the basic premise of Tkachev’s now or never imperative was that the revolution had to be carried out before capitalism arrived in Russia, otherwise it would be too late. Plekhanov reversed that position. Capitalism had to come to Russia before the socialist revolution could be carried out. So socialists should join with the bourgeoisie in the historical materialist approved overthrow of tsarist autocracy. Then, the socialist must endure a period of bourgeois capitalist rule in order to develop the forces of production to the point where the proletarian socialists could stage their own second revolution. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is what young Marx was arguing during the early days of the revolution of 1848. We talked about this in Episode 10.2, that the workers must join with the liberal democrats to overthrow the monarchies of Germany before the next revolution, the workers’ revolution, could be staged, and it was a theory of Marx himself grew disenchanted with by 1849.

One of the other big things that drew Plekhanov to Marx was that Marx positively savaged the ideological fixation on the revolutionary potential of the peasants. Personal experience had turned Plekhanov into a convinced skeptic of the revolutionary potential of the peasant, and he found in Marx the theoretical justification for this conclusion. So Plekhanov fundamentally disagreed with Lavrov about this. He believed there was no hope in trying to educate the peasants to revolution, it can’t be done! And more importantly, it didn’t need to be done. Because according to historical materialism, what was going to happen was that the centralizing forces of capitalism were going to draw the peasants from their rural villages into the cities, where they would be turned into the urban proletariat, and thus become the future revolutionary class. Because unlike the hopeless sack of potatoes that was the peasantry, you could cultivate the revolutionary class consciousness of the urban proletariat. Thus the anarchist’s claim that the Russian peasant villages were the future of Russia was all wrong. Those villages were in fact, in archaic relic of the past that had to be destroyed.

Now, as we saw last week, this disenchantment with the peasants was shared by Pyotr Tkachev. But Plekhanov and Tkachev drew different tactical conclusions. As we talked about last week, Tkachev said the peasants are hopeless, that’s why we need a vanguard party of hyper disciplined revolutionaries to do the work of toppling the tsar. Plekhanov blasted this because, first of all, it tried to do an end run around historical materialism. A small group of terrorists could not initiate a socialist revolution by blowing up the tsar. Feudalism could only be toppled by the historical forces of bourgeois capitalism, that was how the first revolution had to go. And even when it came time for the second socialist revolution of the proletariat, that had to be carried out as a mass movement of workers once they had to become the largest class of boardwalk capitalist society. The dictatorship of the proletariat was not a dictatorship in the sense that Blanqui or Tkachev used the term, a tiny all-powerful revolutionary committee, but it was instead a true democratic majority capturing control of the state from the minority bourgeois capitalists.

So in the debate between mass movement versus small vanguard party, the Emancipation of Labor Group were firmly in the mass movement camp. So all of these beliefs and positions we’ve just talked about mean that the Emancipation of Labor Group is mostly in alignment with German social democrats. Now, the definition of social democrat and social democracy has changed a bit over the years, but in the terminology of the 1870s and 1880s, it meant socialists who were willing to engage in parliamentary politics. To build so-called labor parties. To stand for election. To advocate democratic civil rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association. They also agitated for practical labor reforms, safer conditions, higher wages, the eight hour day. Now this kind of activity was scorned by more radical socialists and especially the anarchists, who thought this kind of political work granted legitimacy to the bourgeois state, and that supporting labor reforms would sap the necessary revolutionary energy of the working classes without actually emancipating them. Social democrats, the Emancipation of Labor Group among them, believed that the state could and should be engaged with, especially as a necessary step in the doctrine of two revolutions.

So in the initial proclamation of principles for the emancipation of Labor Group, they said that the first goal would be establishing a democratic constitution for the state. This was also important not just as a step in historical materialism but also because of the Emancipation of Labor Group held democratic principles. They did not advocate small dictatorial committees. Again, when they advocated for the dictatorship of the proletariat, they meant majority rule democracy. The Emancipation of Labor Group was conscious of the disdain held by radical Russian revolutionaries of this watered down German social democracy, and it’s partly why they called themselves the Emancipation of Labor Group, and not the more obvious, and more accurate, Russian social democrats.

Not that it really mattered. It is safe to say that initially, this all landed somewhere between a thud and a whimper. Mostly, it just didn’t land at all. Those revolutionaries still left in Russia were all still with People’s Will, whether out of stubbornness or true belief. And the scathing attacks from Plekhanov were not going to coax anyone towards his new ideas. Even without the acerbic language, he was still advocating literary study and propagandizing, not direct revolutionary action one. Old Bakuninist veteran scoffed that they weren’t even revolutionaries anymore, they were sociologists. Old Lavrov, meanwhile, was livid at their activities because he believed that in these difficult post-assassination years, that the remaining revolutionaries had to focus on maintaining a broad platform of unity that kept everybody together. The Emancipation of Labor Group seemed to focus on sharpening and exacerbating internal divisions.

Meanwhile, those who got past all of that still couldn’t quite grasp how Marxist doctrine was ever going to work in Russia. Or this argument about how we have to embrace the horrors of western capitalism? I mean, dude, I’m a revolutionary because that’s what I’m opposed to, not because I want to invite it into my backyard.

Striking out at home, the Emancipation of Labor Group also got very little love from western socialists in Germany and France and Britain, who were equally frustrated that they were focused on the wrong things. From the perspective of western socialists, Russian tsardom meant only one thing: it was the war chest, arsenal, and bunker of last resort for reactionary conservatism everywhere in Europe. The tsar had agents in every capital, money was paid to western politicians to oppose socialism and anarchism and even liberalism. Marx personally hated the tsar so much that he believed every single conspiracy theory about malevolent Russian interference, no matter how farfetched. Not that Russian diplomacy wasn’t heavy on supporting reactionary politics in the west, it was. It’s just that it wasn’t all true. I mean, Marx openly believed that William Gladstone had been on the tsar’s payroll.

So what the western socialists wanted revolutionaries in Russia to do was toppled the tsar. That’s it. That’s all they really cared about. Peasants, workers, mass movements, small vanguard parties, we don’t care, just get it done. So they were happy to support a movement like People’s Hand, which had a singular focus on toppling the tsar. They didn’t want to hear about the slow process of historical materialism needing to play out in Russia, especially not from the Emancipation of Labor Group, whose attacks on their former comrades threatened the unity of the Russian revolutionary underground.

Arguably the most disheartening thing of all though, was the attitude of Marx and Engels themselves. They’re still alive and kicking out there. At various points in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Vera Zasulich exchanged letters with both men, and their replies were not exactly encouraging. For one thing, Marx and Engels were among those western socialists who just wanted the hated tsar to fall by any means necessary. For the good of humanity, that, and that alone, needed to be the focus of the revolutionaries in Russia. But on top of that, Marx and Engels also tended to believe that Russia was not on the same historical materialist path as western Europe, and they considered the kind of arguments Plekhanov would be making in the 1880s and 1890s a misuse of their work. And they said so. Marx warned Zasulich not to mix western theory with Russian culture and history. Russia was not even in the feudal mode of production at the moment. Politically and economically, feudal culture is a transactional arrangement between autonomous families and a landowning aristocracy. Russia had never had these kinds of transactional arrangements. Russia had always been the tsar’s property, everyone else just lived there.

What Marx and Engels believed was that Russia was off on this dead end of evolutionary historical development called the Asiatic mode of production. And I mentioned this mode very briefly in Episode 10.4, when I was introducing the stages of historical materialism, and I’ll just quote myself here to remind you: there are slightly modified versions that involve an Asiatic mode and a barbarian mode that existed in the area between tribal and ancient. But I’ll set those aside for now.

Well, the time has come to pick them up, at least the Asiatic mode.

Marx and Engels only discuss the Asiatic mode of production in a few scant and not very deep passages. But they dubbed it Asiatic because they were trying to describe certain civilizations that grew up on the Asian continent after the Neolithic revolution in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Indus Valley, and China. Politically the Asiatic mode was defined by a ruler presented as the theocratic incarnation of the gods on earth. Economically, this god king owned all the land, and was able to marshal huge workforces to build large capital cities, huge monuments, and infrastructure projects, most especially, large and complex irrigation systems to make the land more productive. Technological and cultural progress would have given the Asiatic civilizations, writing, mathematics, record keeping, calendars, and sophisticated engineering, all of which would be utilized by a central bureaucracy that ruled a population, mostly confined to small communities that knew only their own timeless little village, and whose only political role was total obedience to the god kings. This sense of eternal timelessness pervaded this alleged Asiatic mode of production, and lacking the willingness or the desire to further develop the forces of production, which remember for Marx, is the motor force of history, the Asiatic civilizations eventually decay and pass away, even if it takes thousands of years. Now, I’m not endorsing any of this as a theory, I’m just saying this was an idea Marx and Engels had been kicking around since the 1850s.

And so, when Marx and Engels looked at Russian tsardom, they saw the Asiatic mode of production: isolated, timeless communities acting as obedient slaves to a god king who exercises power through a central bureaucracy, and a society with no strong concept of private property. They were very skeptical of guys like Bakunin who argued that the timeless Russian commune could be the basis of future socialist society, because Marx and Engels believed those communes were part of the foundational essence of a dead end Asiatic civilization. And they were skeptical of anyone who argued a robust bourgeois class could emerge out of this environment. The pieces just weren’t there, culturally, economically, or psychologically.

Now Marx and Engels did provide a preface to a new Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto Plekhanov drafted in 1882. And they said that toppling the tsar through violent insurrection was possible, and might hopefully serve as a “signal for a proletarian revolution in the west.” And if it did, then it was possible that the effects of that proletarian revolution in the west would rebound back to Russia, and allow the economic forces underlying their historical commune to develop, and serve as the basis of Russian communist society. But there is no hint that they thought Russia was itself on some inexorable road to proletarian revolution. Now Marx died in March of 1883, just before the Emancipation of Labor Group was officially formed, but Engels kept right on living. And throughout the 1880s, this very first Russian Marxist society did not exactly earn his hardy approval or endorsement.

So it was rough going in the early years. The Emancipation of Labor Group had no real allies, they had no contacts in Russia to spread their work, they were all dirt poor and struggling to feed themselves and their families. But they kept at it. Zasulich translated Marx’s own works to make sure the primary source material was available. Plekhanov wrote his pamphlets and books, explaining why they were right and everyone else was wrong. Axelrod studied western labor movements and developed personal working relationships with German social democrats like Edward Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. And finally, Lev Deutsch was the logistical organizer, fundraiser, and chief smuggler.

But the results were discouraging. Deutsch returned from one trip to Russia saying that there were less than ten people in the whole empire who cared about what they were doing. Then in 1884, the group was dealt a serious setback, when Deutsch was arrested in Germany on a smuggling run. It was general policy not to extradite political targets back to Russia, but Deutsch still had an attempted murder charge on his head, making him a little more than a common criminal. Extradited back to Russia, he was tried and sentenced. But surprisingly, he wasn’t hanged; he was sent into perpetual exile in Siberia. His devastated comrades in Switzerland assumed they would never see him again. Though, spoiler alert: he would later write a memoir called 16 Years in Siberia, in case you’re wondering exactly how long his perpetual exile wound up lasting.

But really for the rest of the 1880s, it was down to just the three of them. Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. Now, they were not totally friendless. Younger Russian students studying in Switzerland were interested in their ideas. But it’s fair to say that by the dawn of 1890, the Emancipation of Labor Group had zero influence on socialist politics at home or abroad. But much to everyone’s shock, the forces of history turned in their favor. Plekhanov suddenly appeared to be a mad prophet who had predicted a great flood, and who everyone had laughed at, and then the flood suddenly came.

And next week, we’re going to talk about that flood. Because while the industrial capitalist mode of production was going to have trouble coming around on its own, if it was spurred by, say, an energetic finance minister who was tasked with modernizing Russia so it can compete with western rivals economically and politically, if that happened, then the resulting industrial boom might look exactly like the historical materialist transformation Plekhanov had been talking about, and many up and coming radicals would look around and agree that the growing urban proletariat, not the dying rural peasantry, was the revolutionary future of Russia.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.16: The Russian Colony

Today, we are finally going to start mixing together our general history of Russia with those introductory episodes we did on 19th century revolutionary theory. We are going to mix them together like baking soda and vinegar to create a couple of those science fair volcanoes. The first one is labeled 1905, that one won’t really work and will just kind of froth itself into a disappointing mess. The second one is labeled 1917. That one is going to get the fire department called. Now that metaphor took like seven drafts to get right, so you better not be rolling your eyes out there. To begin this mixing process, we are actually going to replay the events of last week’s episode from the perspective of a very specific set of people: those who would push toward the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, not from inside Russia, but from abroad. And even more specifically, from the so-called Russian colony in Switzerland. The Russian colony had a radical wing, dedicated to advancing revolution in Russia by way of proclamations and pamphlets and books. And it featured, among other luminaries, the scruffy old anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but we are much more interested in the generation that will follow Bakunin, the generation who had succeeded the so-called men of the forties as the driving force of revolutionary theory and practice. And it is through this next generation that we will open up a whole new chapter in our series on the Russian Revolution.

We begin this new chapter with a man named Pavel Axelrod. Now I’m introducing Pavel Axelrod first, not because he’s the most important person in our story, though he is pretty important, but because through the 1870s, he very helpfully bounces back and forth between Russia and Switzerland and meets every person and engages in every debate that I want to talk about today. So let’s begin with Pavel Axelrod.

Pavel Axelrod was born in Chernigov in Northern Ukraine in 1850. He was Jewish and his parents were pretty poor, making Axelrod relatively unique among his radical comrades in that he did not come from the more elite rungs of society. He was not just for the people, he was of the people. He started dipping his toe into radical ideas as a teenager, and when he went off to Kiev University, he read an eclectic mix of western authors: John Stuart Mill. The German social Democrat Ferdinand Lassalle, he also read stuff coming out of the Russian émigré community like Bakunin, who we already know, and Pyotr Lavrov, who we are about to meet.

An idealistic young radical, Axelrod spent his free time working at literacy programs for workers. He also took a job tutoring the daughters of a guy named Isaac Kaminer, himself a Ukrainian Jew who was a notable local physician with a radical socialist bent. Axelrod said it was here at the Kaminer home that he first encountered the work of Karl Marx, though he admitted he did not really understand it at the time. More important than Axelrod’s encounter with Marx though was his encounter with Nadezhda Kaminer, one of the young women he was tutoring. Nadezhda was herself rapidly radicalizing, and the two were very soon engaged, beginning a lifelong revolutionary partnership.

The political and emotional inclinations of the young couple naturally led them to support the Going to the People in the mad summer of 1874. But Axelrod took on a unique mission: there were rumors of a Robin Hood-like bandit running around out there, raiding rich estates and distributing the proceeds to the poor. And there was some hope that, if the rumors were true, that a guy like that would be a great candidate to run a peasant revolution. So basically Axelrod went off looking for Pancho Villa, but never found him. When he came home in September 1874, he found his old network of like-minded friends decimated by arrests and flights and disillusionment. Believing he too was very likely to be arrested, Axelrod split for Berlin where Nadezhda joined him a few weeks later. The couple then headed to Geneva in January of 1875, where they were officially married. Now life was difficult in Switzerland, and through these years, they lived on the knife’s edge of real poverty, but in between working crummy jobs for low pay, they also entered the intellectual and social milieu that was the revolutionary wing of Switzerland’s Russian colony.

By the time the Axelrods arrived in 1875, the most famous member of the Russian colony, Mikhail Bakunin was mostly in retirement, with his influence on the politics of northern Europe on the wane thanks to the split of the first international a few years earlier. But Bakuninist anarchist groups were still flourishing in Italy and Spain, and his message fit in very nicely with Russian narodism, the Russian populism we talked about last week, which had a special emphasis on getting the peasants to erupt from their communal villages to throw off the superfluous and parasitic tsarist state. A lot of Bakunin’s worldview was in fact shaped by the model of the Russian communal villages he carried around in his head. And Bakunin had no doubt that such a popular revolution would come. He said that the Russian peasant was revolutionary by instinct and socialist by nature.

Old Bakunin was not the only game in town though, and in 1872, another radical immigrant named Pyotr Lavrov had arrived in Zurich to challenge the intellectual ascendancy of Bakuninist anarchism. Lavrov was almost 50 when he settled in Switzerland. He had been born back in 1826, endowed with a polymath’s intellect, and he had spent 20 years teaching mathematics while using his free time to study everything else. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Lavrov directed his vast knowledge of natural science, history, economics, and psychology towards radical politics. This got him in big trouble and an 1868 Lavrov was exiled to the Ural mountains, but he escaped and fled west, eventually finding his way to Paris. Now, more radical than ever, he joined the First International in 1870, and was still in Paris when many of his friends in the International staged the insurrection that created the Paris Commune in 1871. A thrilled supporter of the commune, Lavrov decamped Paris to go drum up support abroad. But of course the whole thing fell apart in one very bloody week, and Lavrov never came back. When he settled in Zurich in 1872, he quickly established himself as an alternative to Bakunin inside the socialist and anarchist circles of the Russian colony.

Now Lavrov and Bakunin shared a lot in common. They both wanted to destroy the tsarist state root and branch. They dreamed of remaking the existing social order. They both identified the peasant commune, autonomously governed and collectively owned, as the natural future for Russia. They also thought that politics as such was a waste of time, energy and spirit. Theirs was not a struggle for the right to vote, for freedom of the press, or for an eight hour day. This was about a complete and thorough going revolutionary rebirth.

So not unlike the Marx/Bakunin conflict, the Lavrov/Bakunin conflict was not so much about where do we want to go, but how do we get there? Lavrov insisted on a course of slow, steady education of the people, that knowledge was power. Indeed, knowledge was the only power that could lead to a successful revolution. Lavrov thus assigned a special role to the intelligentsia: to educate, prepare, and propagandize the peasants, to raise their revolutionary consciousness. He described the task of the radical intelligentsia as that of a penitent who must make amends for the historical crime of subjecting the peasants to millennia of ignorant impoverishment. Lavrov’s ideas helped fuel the Going to the People, and he was not dissuaded by its resolute failure. In his mind, the going to the People had been altogether too brief and too superficial. He had said long term commitment, not go to summer camp.

Bakunin of course thought this was all wrong. The problem with the Going to the People was the presumption that the peasants needed any further education at all. They don’t need a bunch of idealistic but misguided rich kids coming around at teach them about revolution. For Bakunin, anyone who doesn’t like their landlord is a potential revolutionary. The only role Bakunin assigned to the intelligentsia was to be ready to act as a communication link between these spontaneous local rebellions he predicted would get going any day now. This was a prediction he would keep making pretty much until the day he died in July of 1876.

But this argument between Bakunin and Lavrov was about whether the peasants needed to be educated, and how long it would be until they were ready for revolution. But there was fundamental agreement between Bakunin and Lavrov that the revolution would come from below, that it had to come from below. It had to be by the people, in order for it to be for the people.

But there was this other dude out there who entered the Russian colony preaching an altogether different and very enticing message: this was Pyotr Tkachev. Born in the lower rungs of the gentry in 1844, Tkachev got involved in radical politics as a teenager, and was arrested for the first time in 1861 for participating in some student strikes in St. Petersburg. And it was while imprisoned for this that he was fed even more radical ideas. When Tkachev got out of prison, he fell into the circle surrounding the soon to be infamous Sergei Nechaev, who we talked about last week. And so was among those rounded up in the fallout of the murder Nechaev committed in 1869.

Tkachev had nothing to do with the murder though, and was eventually released from prison, but he still wound up exiled from Russia. So coming out of Nechaev’s hardcore world of compact disciplined revolutionary action Tkachev came to Switzerland telling everyone that it was hopeless to wait for the people, impossible to educate and cultivate them the way Lavrov demanded. The revolution must be carried out by a small, utterly committed revolutionary vanguard party who could topple the repressive tsarist apparatus and create a revolutionary dictatorship. This program gets Tkachev described as a Jacobin, or a Russian Blanquist, since this is exactly the theory that Blanqui preached. And the foundation of that theory is that while the revolution was for the people, it could not be by the people. And for Tkachev, ignoring the people was an asset, not a liability. He believed that unless some kind of unified revolutionary dictatorship was established with the power to remake society, the temperamental resistance to change inherent in all people would simply be an impossible obstacle to overcome. He especially thought that Bakunin’s idea that destroying the central government without having anything to go in its place would lead to disastrous chaos.

Now the other key point about Tkachev is that he believed the revolution had to be carried out right now, immediately, ASAP. And we’re going to talk about this a bit more next week, but Tkachev believed the revolution had to be accomplished before western style industrial capitalism set in, and all of these guys suspected that western style industrial capitalism was coming to Russia. Tkachev believed that once that happened, the anti-revolutionary forces would simply be too strong. Now, partly owing to the death of Bakunin in 1876, and partly owing to the course of events back in Russia, Tkachev wound up becoming very popular among the post Going to the People radicals who would soon be forming People’s Will.

So I’m going back now to Pavel Axelrod. Axelrod himself mostly fell in with the Bakuninists after arriving in Switzerland, Lavrov was too passive. Tkachev too much an authoritarian Jacobin. And in criticizing Tkachev, Axelrod would use the same eternally devastating observation made by Bakuninists everywhere: that if you’ve asked the most ardent revolutionary with absolute power, they become a tyrant within a year, guaranteed. That there is a low probability they will use absolute power to advance liberation and socialism, and a high probability they will use it to just stay in power at all costs. That’s how these things go.

So as a promising young Bakuninist, Axelrod was sent back to Russia in 1875 on a mission. First, he was to make contact with other anarchist groups in Russia and encourage their members to volunteer for the army. This was both about getting anarchists inside the military to radicalize the rank and file, and about getting military training that would be very helpful when the revolution came. But Axelrod was also tasked with seeing what he could do about steering this thing called the Chigirin Affair. Some peasants in Ukraine had gotten very upset, and they were in low grade insurrection against their local officials. But these insurrectionary peasants were operating under the assumption that their good father the tsar supported them in their efforts. A few revolutionaries proposed using this insurrection to the movement’s advantage: let’s print phony but official looking proclamations from this are saying, yes, go into revolt. I am with you. I support you. The idea was that any de-stabilizing revolt was good. But Axelrod was there repping the émigré Bakuninists and saying, don’t tell people that support from the tsar is a necessary condition for them to go into revolt. This does nothing to help with our real long-term problem of getting them to overcome their traditional sentimental, and in Bakuninist eyes, ignorant attachment to the tsar.

Among those encouraging the exploitation of the Chigirin peasants was an old acquaintance of Axelrod’s named Lev Deutsch. And I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that, but that’s his name? D E U T S C H Deutsch. So I’m going to say Deutsch. Deutsch was five years younger than Axelrod. He was born in Tulchyn in 1855 to a jewish father and a peasant mother. He started out young and idealistic, and got swept up in the desire to educate and liberate the people. So at the age of 19, Deutsch had joined the Going to the People, believing that once they were enlightened to the realities of the world that the peasants would naturally rise up and overthrow their oppressors, the revolution would probably be over by Christmas. This is not how it went. And Deutsch himself managed to avoid getting arrested, but like Axelrod, he came home again in the summer of 1875 and found his old friends and comrades either arrested, fled, or turning their backs on radical politics.

But Deutsch didn’t want to give up. And when this little insurrectionary crisis started brewing in Chigirin, he wanted to stoke and use that energy any way possible. And though Axelrod tut tutted the plan, he and Deutsch further cemented a friendship, a comradeship, that would last for the rest of their lives. And before moving on, Axelrod probably played a role in encouraging Deutsch to volunteer for the Russian army, which he did in October, 1875, becoming a private and self- assigning himself, the mission to radicalize his regimen and learn all he could about military logistics, tactics, and weaponry.

Axelrod, meanwhile, kept moving from city to city, trying to make contact with revolutionary groups and keep them on the pure Bakuninist path. By the end of 1875, he was in St. Petersburg, where he met probably the most important person we’ll talk about here today, certainly more important than Axelrod himself: Georgi Plekhanov. When they met, Axelrod was an experienced revolutionary of 25, while Plekhanov was a yet-unbaptized 19-year-old student. Plekhanov missed going to the people, and was only just now really finding his way into revolutionary politics. The eldest son of a small land owning family may own 270 acres and 50 serfs, Plekhanov spent the first seven years of his education in a military academy, where he was noted mostly for being intelligent, well-liked, and well-behaved. In 1873, Plekhanov transferred to the Metallurgical Institute in St. Petersburg, a university focused on mining and engineering, and found himself drawn to the exciting modern ideas coming out of France and Germany. Prior to meeting Axelrod, Plekhanov mostly dreamed of traveling abroad to advance his education, and both Axelrod, and Plekhanov implied that it was this encounter here in 1875, that set Plekhanov off on his path to revolution. But this wasn’t some kind of abrupt, overnight conversion, as Axelrod’s biographer, Abraham Asher, points out, they only met because the Plekhanov’s house was considered a safe place for an itinerant revolutionary like Axelrod to crash, which means he already had one foot in the door.

During their initial conversations, Axelrod discovered in Plekhanov an intelligent, well-read, passionate, creative articulate mind that would be of enormous value to the revolution, so he encouraged Plekhanov to give up petty thoughts of going abroad to complete his education. He was needed here, now, at home. The cause was the thing. Axelrod then kept moving, and Plekhanov stayed behind in St. Petersburg. When the new Land and Liberty party formed in 1876 and held their first public demonstration at the end of the year, Plekhanov was there. He gave a fiery speech denouncing the tsar, then had to disappear underground. He never did finish his degree.

By early 1876, Axelrod was back in Switzerland, where he found the Russian colony splitting between the still faithful Bakuninists, the slow and steady Lavrovists, and Tkachev’s Jacobin militancy, with Tkachev now taking a decisive lead. Axelrod himself remained somewhere between Lavrov and Bakunin, still believing absolutely that if a social revolution was going to come, it would have to be staged and carried out by the people themselves. Tkachev’s revolutionary dictatorship was sure to be short on revolutionary and long on dictatorship. But he was never a doctrinaire Bakuninist, and certainly agreed with Lavrov that the people did require further political education, that they would never just be spontaneously and magically anarchist revolutionaries. But this meant a program of slow and steady cultivation of forces that could erupt when the time was right. But as we saw last week, this puts Axelrod at odds with those back in Russia, who are well on their way towards forming People’s Will; men and women who were concluding that they couldn’t count on the people, that they couldn’t wait that long. We have to destroy the Imperial government by violent revolution and seize power, and we have to do it, like, yesterday.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, many of those coming to this conclusion were coming to this conclusion because they were locked up for their role in the debacle that was the failed Going to the People. I mean, it’s not like they hadn’t tried it Lavrov’s way, it just hadn’t worked. One of those in prison was an old friend of Lev Deutsch’s, which is how Lev Deutsch’s recently launched military career lasted all of about four months. When he found out he was in a position to help, Deutsch helped. In February 1876, Deutsch sprang his buddy from prison and then deserted from the army. Now on the run, living under an assumed name, Deutsch joined a militant revolutionary cell in Kiev, which led, in June of 1876, to the most infamous moment in his own revolutionary career.

An old comrade picked up in the Going to the People had been released very quickly — no harm, no foul. And it was widely suspected this guy had given up every name he could think of in exchange for clemency. In his memoir, Deutsch says, if the guy had just retired from radical politics quietly, no one would have harmed a hair on his head. But instead this guy came around looking to rejoin the party. Some newer members let him in, but Deutsch and another guy recognized this probable informant and resolved to take care of the rat permanently. They invited this guy on a trip to Odessa, and on the road beat him nearly to death and left his body on the side of the road with a note pinned to his chest that said, roughly, this is what happens to rats.

But unfortunately for Deutsch, they beat this guy nearly to death, not to death. The guy lived, and he spilled a bunch more names. Deutsch himself once again managed to get away, but most of his immediate comrades were rounded up. Deutsch himself then returned to the area around Chigirin, where he rejoined the effort to trick the peasants into going into revolt in the name of the tsar. But though they successfully recruited — or tricked, however you want to say it — some 2000 people into this phony scheme, it was eventually betrayed, and everything fell apart by the summer of 1877, and Deutsch was finally arrested. He was facing a certain death sentence, but he managed to escape from prison in May of 1878 and go on the lam again. By that point, both the government and the revolutionaries had been thrown into violent confusion, thanks to the near assassination of Governor General Trepov in January of 1878, and then the shocking acquittal of the assailant a few months later, 27-year-old veteran revolutionary Vera Zasulich.

Now for the sake of moving through events last week, I only noted the assassination attempt and its consequences, but I do now need to fully introduce the doer of the deed. Vera Zasulich had been born in Smolensk in 1851 into a family of relatively impoverished lower gentry. Her father died when she was three and little Vera was sent off to live with wealthier relatives who saw to her education. Intelligent, precocious, and with an instinctively rebellious spirit, she graduated school in 1866 and went off to St. Petersburg to work as a clerk. As a young woman in the 1860s who was intelligent, precocious, and with an instinctively rebellious spirit, she was drawn into the nihilist circles where men and women considered themselves equals, unbound by the old repressive patriarchal family structures. Her two sisters soon joined her in these progressive egalitarian circles. Fully radicalized before she turned 20 years old, Zasulich spent her off hours working as a literacy tutor to educate workers towards dignity and self-confidence. And it was at one of these literacy workshops in the late 1860s that she encountered the soon to be infamous Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev tried to recruit Zasulich into his little cell, but she remained aloof. He kept after it though, and a few months later, he declared that he was madly in love with her, which Zasulich dismissed as him trying to manipulate her on behalf of his own agenda, and she remained aloof. But not aloof enough.

She did let Nechaev use her address to send and receive mail, and so when he murdered that guy and skipped town in 1869, Zasulich was also caught up in the resulting police sweep and spent the next few years in prison. When she was released, she settled in Kiev and immediately resumed her radical activities, joining that same militant revolutionary cell in Kiev that Deutsch would join just a few years later. In Kiev, Zasulich was highly regarded as a natural leader, sincere, magnetic, and committed to the cause. She spent her time working as a typesetter for an underground press operation. And it was while following the course of the trial of the 193 in 1877 that she and a friend of hers resolved on the double murder pact that we talked about last week. And while her friend failed to kill the prosecutor in the trial of the 193, Zasulich returned to St. Petersburg. She got into see Trepov, she pulled out a revolver, and she shot him point blank in the chest.

This assassination attempt, and the even more amazing acquittal a few months later made Zasulich a legend in the underground, a woman who had the courage and the guts to do what was necessary. But the interesting twist is that this is simultaneously the moment when Zasulich herself turned away from advocating terrorist violence as an effective means of revolution. The debate about terrorism, which had begun when she shot Trepov in January of 1878, intensified in April, 1879, when Alexander Soloviev nearly shot the tsar — that’s the time Alexander dodged five bullets running away from his would be assassin in a frantic zigzag. The majority of revolutionaries out there regretted only that the tsar yet lived. They were all now fully on board with the idea that the tsar must die. So they embraced Tkachev, and his call for an immediate vanguard style revolution to kill the tsar, overthrow the government and seize power.

But as we also talked about last week, there was that smaller minority group who still followed something along the Trepov and Bakunin lines: that the revolution had to originate from below. The tsar had to be toppled by an earthquake, not a lead pipe to the back of the head. And looky here, wouldn’t you know it, the core of that minority group was: all the people we’ve talked about today. Pavel Axelrod, Lev Deutsch, Vera Zasulich, and emerging as their main intellectual leader, Georgi Plekhanov, who had by now had his revolutionary baptism by way of two brief stints in jail. They continued to insist that propagandizing education and building the revolution from below was essential.

In August of 1879, the split inside the Land and liberty party became permanent. The majority formed People’s Will and went off to wage their terror campaign on behalf of a political revolution, while the smaller group around Plekhanov formed Black Repartition. Based in St. Petersburg and aiming to keep up their own separate propaganda efforts, the whole crew came together in the same place at the same time very briefly in the fall of 1879. But there was a lot of heat on Plekhanov and Zasulich and Deutsch, and they resolved to temporarily leave the country, inviting Axelrod to stay behind in the capital and act as editor of their press operation. But I am now required by law to tell you that when this group departed for their quote unquote temporary sojourn in January of 1880, that they would not in fact, return to Russia for 37 long years.

Now Axelrod wasn’t far behind his friends, their press was seized almost immediately by the police and he had to go back underground. And with almost everyone left in Russia now on board with People’s Will Axelrod left for Switzerland in June of 1880. Which turned out to be just in time, because the cops burst in on his last known address just a few days later.

Now in among the Russian colony of Switzerland, the members of Black Repartition continued to argue for their side of the split with People’s Will. They tried in vain to convince their comrades that this path of terrorist violence would backfire. Whatever hopes they had that their exile would be temporary were blown to pieces along with Tsar Alexander the second in March of 1881. The aftermath of that assassination was repression, reaction, and a shattering of People’s Will as a viable revolutionary organization, just as the members of Black Repartition had predicted.

And next week we will open with that swift and thoroughgoing repression, and the reaction from our little cadre that is still Black Repartition. It was no longer safe for them to come home. It would probably never be safe for them to come home. And as the split with what was left of People’s Will became permanent, they decided to form a new revolutionary party based on new reading they had been doing in their now accidentally permanent exile. Dubbing themselves the Group for the Emancipation of Labor, they would be the founders of the first party of Russian Marxists.

 

 

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Episode 10.15: The Tsar Must Die

Before we get going this week, I want to remind everybody that I will be at the Sound Education Conference from September the ninth to the 12th. I’ll be giving my own talk and then also doing a panel with the History of Byzantium. I also have interviews lined up with great podcasts like the Eastern Border and Pax Britannica, so you’ll also get to hear me coming out of multiple other podcasts in the near future and I’ll bump any and all interviews that come out of this. I hope to see you there.

So where we left it last time was in the midst of this era of great reform. When the emancipation of the serfs was followed by political and judicial reforms, all under the auspices of the Tsar Liberator. But where we really left things was that the expectations created by this era of great reform would soon be going unmet.

Now Alexander the Second had loosened censorship a little bit in the leadup to emancipation and public discussion of ideas and events were now moderately tolerated, as long as they stayed within certain bounds. This discussion was most gratifyingly embraced by a small but growing segment of the population that was just now being dubbed the intelligentsia, a term I’m sure you’re all familiar with, that was being coined right now here in Russia, in the mid 19th century. The intelligentsia described a group of non-elite, non-noble, or at least lower noble educated men of society. The lawyers and doctors and businessmen who were beginning to assert their own tastes and preoccupations ideas and desires into Russian culture. They were now both the creators and audience for books, art, literature, philosophy, poetry, and music, and this was in contrast to the old noble patronage model, where the tastes preoccupations ideas and desires of the aristocracy reign supreme. The intelligentsia tended to be pretty liberal in its outlook, especially those joining the conversation in this age of great reform. They were keen to improve Russian society, and they lauded the tsar’s good work, but they also didn’t want to rock the boat too much after all, their own property and position might be at stake.

There was, however, a more radical faction inside this intelligentsia who wanted more than just liberal reform, who would not cheerlead the great reforms the government was unrolling, but rather criticize them for not going far enough, or for not being implemented fully. These radicals, as you can imagine, tended to be younger and more plebeian. They were too young to have really been stamped by the military autocracy of Nicholas the First, and they now are arrived as energetic teenagers and 20-somethings in the late 1850s and early 1860s, in an environment that encouraged reform and rejuvenation and reappraisal, and some of them hoped, revolution.

These young radicals were a long way from the liberal noble Decemberists. They were also well removed from the now middle-aged and middle-class intellectuals who had gone through the 1830s and 1840s in various semi-secret literary societies who dared to read prescribed books and articles. This new younger set was a irrevent, iconoclastic, and ready for action.

Their hero was a guy named Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky was the lowborn son of a priest, who graduated from seminary and then took a master’s degree in literature from St. Petersburg university. He was in his late twenties when the tsar announced the goal of emancipating the serfs, and was by then already coming into his own as a journalist. He was a student of western ideas and new socialist writers like Fourier; he had read and absorbed his exile countrymen like Herzen and Bakunin. But he also moved away from strict philosophy and economics, and also absorbed the rapid advances being made in the natural sciences. We are now in the age of Darwin, so he was less interested in abstract German philosophy and more interested in concrete, evolutionary biology, Chernyshevsky wanted to elevate and center the narod, which we would translate as the people, and serves as a kind of idealized abstraction, not unlike the German volk. Chernyshevsky synthesized a set of political principles that define the next generation of social and political battles: narodnichestvo, or to westernize it, so I don’t have to keep trying to pronounce it: narodism. Chernyshevsky envisioned a kind of agrarian socialism that could spring naturally from the already existent village communes. He was personally and temperamentally a revolutionary, but kept his prose mostly clear of those kinds of suggestions, though he did warn against trusting too much in the tsar’s emancipation scheme. True liberty could never be handed down from above, it would have to be seized from below. Despite being very careful about his published utterances though, Chernyshevsky was ultimately arrested by the Third Section in 1862, and they convicted him on some trumped up charges and sentenced him to exile in Siberia.

The crazy thing though, is that while locked up in the St. Peter St. Paul fortress waiting to be tried, the authorities let Chernyshevsky keep writing, and he produced a novel called What is to Be Done. Then even more incredibly, they allowed this novel to be published in 1863, presumably the censors were like hung over that morning, and didn’t feel like reading it. What is to Be Done tells the story of a young woman who escapes from an arranged marriage, but it is mostly a vehicle for expressing a semi-utopian vision for the future that was built around communal factories. This new utopian order would help end poverty and break down the old and clearly outmoded political, social, and family structures of the present day. What is to Be Done was a landmark event for our budding young social and political revolutionaries of the post-emancipation world. If the title, What is to Be Done, rings a bell, that’s because Lenin said he read the book five times over a single summer and titled his own famous 1902 pamphlet What is to Be Done as an homage that would have been well-known to all his readers. Everyone read Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done, and everyone had something to say about it: Dostoevsky ridiculed it, Tolstoy wrote his own nonfiction track that is often translated into English as What is to Be Done, which outlined his own Christian pacifist anarchism.

But that is the novel’s later legacy. Back here in the 1860s, Chernyshevsky himself was exiled to Siberia, and the young radicals gained a martyr and a legend that gave the novel he left behind an even more urgent, emotional heft. Young radicals treated it as a kind of Bible, and they copied their own dress and styles and attitudes around various characters in the book. And these kids were now creating a little counterculture youth movement for themselves. They deliberately dressed sloppily and were rude in posture and appearance. Men grew their hair long, women cut their’s short. And women were active and enthusiastic participants in this radical counterculture. As of 1859, women were allowed to go to university, and so one of the defining traits of this generation is their equalitarian and feminist flair. They started living together in communal groups, both for ideological and economic reasons. And most scandalously, for polite society, the men and women were living together as equals outside the bonds of marriage. Freeing themselves, at least psychologically from a society they were highly critical of, they indulged in hedonistic and leisurely pursuits. They were a bunch of hippie punks, basically.

Because of this, they came to be called nihilists, which came from the 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. But these young nihilists didn’t believe in nothing, as the name seems to imply, they just didn’t believe in the same things their parents did. And since time immemorial, flummoxed older generations have always accused younger generations of believing in nothing when they found themselves unable to comprehend what they were looking at, which was simply an alternative set of values. So, this is just standard issue is nothing sacred hand-wringing from the oldsters, to which the youngsters would reply it’s not that nothing is sacred, it’s that different things are sacred.

So, what they did believe in was narodism, this new style of revolutionary populism, agrarian socialism run by truly free people. And in this era, a little proto-party called Land in Liberty showed up to espouse those principles. Pamphlets and declarations floated around the underground advocating radical social change: they should reject existing social conventions, educate the peasants about their glorious place at the center of a coming socialist utopia, and topple the parasitic and unnecessary tsarist regime. This younger and more radical faction of the intelligentsia believed that their role was to be the intellectual leaders of a social revolution. They would use the tools found in the first Russia, modern enlightened education, to elevate the other Russia. The second Russia, the mass of Russia, which currently labored in ignorant superstition, they wanted to take that other Russia and make it the center of a real Russia, a post-imperial socialist Russia. I mean, the peasants were already doing collective ownership and managing their own affairs perfectly well, all we need to do is get rid of the tsar.

There was a debate though, about how best to achieve this. Some said, we must go out and educate the peasants, then the revolution will grow inexorably from below. Others said, we must directly attack the imperial state because the state strEngels the minds and sometimes the bodies of the people and prevents them from realizing their natural freedom. In 1866, a minor noble from the Volga region named Dmitry Karakozov decided to cut to the chase. Karakozov had personally concluded that for the revolution to live, the tsar must die. It was nothing personal against Alexander the Second specifically, nor did he think that killing Alexander would in and of itself do anything? Karakozov believed the peasantry was inhibited by superstitious beliefs about the mystical power of the tsar as a quasi-deity, and what he hoped to do was break that spell to prove the emperor was a mortal like everyone else. And once that spell was broken, the people would rise up.

So the tsar was leaving the summer garden on April the Fourth, 1866, when Karakozov approached, pulled out a revolver, and started firing. But he missed. The tsar was not even wounded. Quickly arrested, Alexander came and spoke directly to Karakozov and asked if Karakozov was a Polish nationalist. Karakozov said, no, I am a proud Russian. Which spooked the hell out of the Tsar Liberator, who was pretty sure he had been doing a good job, and hardly in need of being assassinated.

This assassination attempt could not have backfired harder. Rather than triggering a popular uprising, it triggered a reactionary backlash. A heavier hand was put in charge of the Third Section. Liberals were purged from the government. A harsh white terror descended against radicals who were not really given the benefit of the tsar’s new judicial system. Most of them had to run for it, which is the partial origin story of a whole new generation of Russian revolutionaries in exile who we will talk about next week.

The era of great reform that Alexander had kicked off with his speech in Moscow in 1856 ended with those gunshots in 1866. But though this assassination attempt, triggered not revolution but reaction, it was not the end of radical nihilist revolutionaries in Russia. Indeed, this is right when the most infamous of them all shows up: Sergei Nechaev.

Nechaev got into radical politics as a teenager, reading smuggled Bakunin and Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done. Joining in the going fad, he modeled himself after a strict and uncompromising revolutionary character from the book. An extremist from the jump, Nechaev hosted meetings that featured historical idols like Robespierre and Saint-Just, men who had seen what needed to be done and had done it. But in addition to being a hardcore revolutionary, each Nechaev was also part con artist and habitual fabulist. He went abroad in 1869, amidst a flurry of purposefully self-manufactured rumors that he had been arrested. Arriving in Switzerland, he sought out the great old man Bakunin and came bearing another pack of lies: namely that he represented the central committee of a revolutionary network in Russia.

No such committee or network existed.

But Bakunin was excited by Nechaev’s evident, dedicated enthusiasm, and took them on as a protege, much to the delight of Karl Marx, who merrily criticized Bakunin’s association with this unsavory kid who was already dogged by rumors of fanatical craziness, dishonesty, and self-serving recklessness.

While in Switzerland in the spring of 1869, the Nechaev penned the famous, or infamous, Catechism of a Revolutionary. Which is as blunt and uncompromising a statement of revolutionary principle as you are ever likely to read. Those who wanted to join the revolution must dedicate themselves to it with every fiber of their being. The revolution must be put before friends, family love, even the truth. There was no greater exemplar of the ends justify the means than Nechaev, who frankly makes Auguste Blanqui look like Louis Blanc. This was not about embracing immorality, but definitely about embracing amorality. The only compass point was how can this advance the revolution. And it opens, the revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought, and the single passion, for revolution.

But after sneaking back into Russia, Nechaev engaged in some means, that even the greatest of ends, would have a hard time justifying. One of his followers started questioning Nechaev’s story about this secret revolutionary committee no one else had ever heard of, and openly questioning Nechaev’s tactics. So Nechaev decided this guy had to go. Telling their other comrades the guy was an informer, Nechaev and a few accomplices lured him into a trap, killed him, and dumped his body.

A subsequent murder investigation uncovered Nechaev’s little revolutionary ring. Nechaev himself managed to skip town while his duped accomplices were all arrested. Returning to Switzerland, Nechaev was initially welcomed back with open arms by Bakunin, but then his bullshit and his lies and his duplicity caught up with him. Because, as it turns out, revolutionaries do owe each other trust and comradeship, they can’t just use each other. Bakunin distanced himself from Nechaev who was then rebuked by the International. And remember, the International is supposed to be this umbrella organization where everyone is welcome. Well, yeah, everyone, except that guy, we’ve got nothing to do with him.

Mostly friendless, Nechaev was arrested in Switzerland in August of 1872, and then extradited back to Russia to stand trial. He spent the next 10 years in prison, believing he was still working towards the revolution, but he would die in prison in 1882. And though he was an extreme case and something of a black sheep personally, elements of the Catechism of a Revolutionary are going to be picked up by those who came after him. So Nechaev was an infamous, but still influential, figure in revolutionary circles.

Meanwhile, Nechaev’s contemporaries had moved away from his kind of violent fanaticism. Most had taken the white terror as proof that violent direct action was counterproductive. We should plant ideas, not bombs. If we’re going to have a social revolution in favor of decentralized agrarian socialism, we probably need to get the peasants to understand what we’re trying to do.

So in the summer of 1874, we get this famous event called the Going to the People. Thousands of young narodst radicals spontaneously left their homes and jobs and universities in the major cities, and they fanned out to go live among the people. The plan, if there was a plan, was to teach their new neighbors advanced ideas of revolutionary self-consciousness and self-determination. Initially driven by a kind of missionary zeal, the whole thing turned out to be a fiasco. Those who went to the people had never actually met the people, and they found the peasants unreceptive to their ministrations. Disillusionment set in very quickly. The villagers turned out to be dull, conservative, and very suspicious of these strange men and women showing up one day spouting all kinds of heretical nonsense. These kids spoke against the tsar, and the church, bedrocks of traditional life. And the gender equality that was taken for granted amongst these radicals was bizarre and out of place in the traditional villages. Many peasants just arrested the interlopers and handed them over to the authorities. Over about two years, something like 1600 people were arrested and held on the charge of being, you know, vaguely suspicious. By 1876, the Going to the People was going down as an embarrassing debacle. As the Marxist historian Alan Woods puts it: they went to the people, and the people sent them back.

The failure of the Going to the People swung the strategic pendulum away from cultivating revolution from the people below, and back toward direct political action against the powers above. So in 1876, a new revolutionary party called Land and Liberty was founded. They took their name from the earlier 1860s group, but otherwise were completely new. This would not be some loose knit literary society, but a disciplined revolutionary party. This new party was a gifted a huge PR coup by the tsar himself when it came time to punish some of those detained during the Going to the People. Hoping to use the new open trial court system to discredit all of these lunatic kids, the authorities convened a mass trial that became known as the trial of the 193. The press was invited in to cover this trial extensively.

But rather than discrediting the radicals, they each stood up and gave passionate speeches, accurately denouncing the reality of conditions in Russia, and generally ginning up sympathy among anybody who was reading about the trial and the newspaper. The kicker came when the verdict was handed down and there wasn’t even enough evidence to convict like 150 of them, because they hadn’t really done anything provably wrong. The net effect of all this was to further radicalize the radicals. Not only had many of them now been held for years without really having done anything wrong, but it also seemed like maybe the regime was not nearly as powerful as it thought it was, that maybe it could be toppled.

While the trial of the 193 was ongoing in the summer of 1877, there was another little incident where one of the political prisoners was publicly flogged for not removing his cap in the presence of St. Petersburg Governor Fyodor Trepov. The flogging outraged public opinion it also outraged a young woman and her friend, who were already talking themselves into assassinating the prosecutor in the trial of the 193. Now Trepov was also targeted. In January of 1878, our young woman managed to get into Trepov’s office when he made himself available to the public. She walked in, pulled out a gun and shot him. But though she hit Trepov he lived, and the young woman was arrested. Incredibly though, when she stood trial, her case was presided over by a liberal judge, and heard by a sympathetic jury. Then her lawyer successfully made the trial about the victim Trepov, not the would-be assassin, who he said had acted from the noblest of motives. And she was, shockingly, acquitted.

But well aware that the authorities would no doubt rearrest her at the first opportunity, she skipped town, beginning a sojourn that would carry her into prolonged political exile. And many of you out there already know that I have just introduced Vera Zasulich, who we will meet back up with next time, to discuss her foundational role in creating the first Russian Marxist Society in 1883.

After these events, Land and Liberty started fracturing over the question of the utility of political terrorism. There had been other bombings and assassination attempts, some successful, some not, and a majority of Land and Liberty thought this now necessary, a form of self-defense or a righteous verdict they were handing down against guilty tyrants. And the violence was not indiscriminate attacks on civilians. They targeted specific ministers, police officers, provisional governors, and, naturally, the tsar himself. But a smaller minority wanted to focus on propagandizing, organizing, educating, and winning the war of ideas. That all of this violence was a counterproductive distraction, and worse, it was leading to severe reprisals that were crippling their ability to organize further, and alienating them from respectable opinion.

The final split came with the third near-miss assassination attempt of the tsar in 1879, the second attempt, I should mention, was by Polish nationalist whose gun misfired in Paris when the tsar was with Emperor Napoleon the Third for the 1867 Universal Exposition. The third attempt though was here in 1879, and committed by a member of Land and Liberty, who came with the tsar with a revolver, but the emperor saw the weapon in time and dodged five bullets while running away. This latest assassination attempt had two effects: first, certain security powers were taken away from the ones feared and vaunted Third Section. They had been unable to detect or prevent far too many things of late. The other was a permanent split inside Land and Liberty.

A minority faction redubbed itself Black Repartition, and concluded violence was bad and counterproductive. They would focus on their ideological writing and thinking and propagandizing, and they disassociated themselves from the violent majority, and many of them wound up emigrating either to Switzerland or England. Those who remained, now committed to terrorism, restyled themselves Narodnaya Volya, which has always translated in English as, the People’s Will. Now shed of moderates, People’s Will was an overtly political terrorist organization, run by a central committee, and composed of somewhere north of 500 dependable members, of whom about 15% were women. They had cells in every major city, as well as key army garrisons and naval yards. In August 1879, People’s Will passed a death sentence on the tsar, and for the next two years, Russia was a running low-grade warzone. The revolutionaries would kill a governor or a police officer, the state would retaliate. Guns were being pulled out of overcoats, bombs were going off. There were shootouts in the streets, jailbreaks from the prisons, raids on homes and offices. But the goal of People’s Will was not just, kill ’em all. Ideologically the rationale for all this was an aggressive kind of anarchism, that the repressive state apparatus needed to be disorganized, it needed to be attacked until it collapsed. Once this was done, the peasants would be free to self-organize into agrarian socialism that didn’t require them to pay things like redemption payments. So People’s Will believed that political freedom was the key to social change, and political freedom was to be had by destroying the state, and most especially, by killing the tsar.

Emperor Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator, was slow to accept that this threat was really real. For personal, logistical, and political reasons, he didn’t want to alter his habits or routine, even as he avoided near miss assassination attempt number four, a bomb planted to derail his train in December of 1879 that failed only because they missed the train. Then just a few months later in February of 1880, a People’s Will operative went undercover into the Winter Palace disguised as a carpenter, and he managed to plant a bomb in the dining room that was set to host the tsar and his court. The bomb exploded on time, killing 11 and wounding 30, and missed the tsar this time only because Alexander was by chance late to dinner. That was near miss number five. And it would be the last near miss.

After the Winter Palace bombing, the emperor finally realized that this was a major crisis and he needed to respond. First he closed down the Third Section entirely. This was the end of the line for the department that had been created by his father in the wake of the Decemberist revolt back in 1826. The Third Section had been okay tracking high level bureaucrats and grumbling nobles, but were clearly incompetent when it came to tracking down these lower-class terrorists. Dealing with them would require the creation of a whole new secret political police.

The other thing the tsar did was elevate Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, who counseled the tsar to take a two-pronged approach to all this: first, ruthlessly eradicate the People’s Will and any other revolutionary group. But pair that by announcing the resumption of great reform efforts. Ultimately Loris-Melikov wanted to create a national consultative legislature modeled on and built out of the zemstvos that we talked about last week. So with one hand, choke the enemies we have. With the other, draft reforms that will stop young potential revolutionaries from thinking they need to become revolutionaries at all. The very last decree Tsar Alexander the Second signed was approval for a slate of reforms that he himself acknowledged were the first step towards a political constitution.

But he wasn’t going to live to see any of those possible reforms enacted, nor would they ever be enacted. With this new reform plan possibly having its intended effect of reducing the urgency of revolutionary action, People’s Will put everything they had into killing the tsar. On March the first 1881, the sixth time would be the charm. The tsar’s entourage was traveling along the Catherine Canal in St. Petersburg when a man pushed through the crowd and hurdled a package at the emperor’s coach. The package turned out to be a bomb. It exploded and killed some soldiers and bystanders, but only damaged the tsar’s bulletproof coach, a gift from Emperor Napoleon the Third, dontcha know. When the dazed tsar got out to survey the damage, a second man pushed through the crowd with a second bomb. He tossed it at the tsar’s feet. The explosion was point blank enough that the bomber himself was killed in the explosion. The emperor, meanwhile, was merely torn to pieces: leg blown off, guts hanging out, all that good stuff. His dying body was dragged back to the Winter Palace and the Tsar Liberator died in the very study where he had once signed the Emancipation Decree.

When he breathed his last bloody breath, he was attended by his family, including his own son Alexander, now set to rule as Tsar Alexander the Third, and his 12 year old grandson, little Nicky, who was now heir to the throne. And it would be hard not to draw a lesson from the fate of his dead grandfather, who had done all of these great reforms, and for his benevolent efforts had been blown to bits by a terrorist bomb.

But we will come back to little Nicky later, because next week, we are going to follow our now threading threads of 19th century revolutionary philosophy and the course of Russian history as they combine into a single narrative. The age of great reform died with the Tsar Liberator in 1881. Now would be a time of a ruthless reaction. But in secret corners of the empire and most especially abroad in the salons of exiled Russian radicals, the candle of revolution would be kept flickering, and it would be maintained long enough to pass it along to the next generation. A generation of boys and girls who were currently a bunch of kids running around in short pants.

But who would, in just a few years, bring the Russian Empire to its knees.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.80: The Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion

Last time we pivoted from revolution to civil war by talking about the peripheral crescent off to the west and south that would become major centers of conflict over the next several years. This week, we are going to start by returning to the Russian heartland to cover how the Soviet government in Moscow navigated their own pivot from revolution to civil war, which for the record, Lenin and the gang didn’t really see much of a distinction between the two. For them, class war was civil war, and civil war was class war. They were not two peas in a pod, they were literally just the one pea, going by two different names. But though Lenin expected and even embraced civil war, I don’t think he suspected how big that civil war was going to get. Because no one expected a wildcard called the Czechoslovak Legion to blow the whole thing sky high.

So given everything we’ve discussed over the past few episodes with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its humiliating abandonment of huge swaths of territory, I might have tempted you into believing Lenin’s government was only left in charge of a small chunk of territory, some little blob connecting Moscow to Petrograd that amounted to a little more than a glorified city state. But this is really super not the case. Soviet Russia was huge. It encompassed about a million square miles and contained more than 60 million people. It was, in fact, still the largest single political entity in the European orbit, both in area and population. Soviet Russia was bigger than France, was bigger than Germany, it was certainly bigger than any of the individual peripheral bits they had renounced at Brest-Litovsk. And, spoiler alert, it’s going to be one of the big reasons they ultimately win the civil war.

But here in the spring of 1918, the potential resources and manpower the Soviet government could harness from this vast territory was just that: it was potential. The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 did not magically solve all the social, economic, and political dysfunction that had plagued Russia since the start of the war — and also, I suppose, the several centuries before that. Inflation and scarcity, the two big problems that had sparked the February Revolution in the first place, remained ongoing issues. The only difference after October was the Bolsheviks could no longer blame the powers that be for the dysfunction, because they now were the powers that be. They would need a solution, or they would follow the governments of Tsar Nicholas, Prince Lvov, and Alexander Kerensky into the dustbin of history.

By far the biggest immediate problem in Soviet Russia was food scarcity in the cities. One year earlier, food scarcity had been so bad that people overthrew a 300 year old monarchy. Now, it might even be worse. Because though the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk left Soviet Russia with a great deal of territory, it still costs them the produce from major agricultural centers like Ukraine and the Trans-Caucuses. And then, as we’ll talk about here in a minute, they are also about to be cut off from the additional fertile regions around the Volga River.

Meanwhile, inside Soviet Russia, the Decree on Land led local villages to absorb and parcel out the huge land estates in their neighborhoods, whereupon they imported their traditional systems of agriculture, small plots worked by individual families oriented toward subsistence farming, without much care or concern for producing the amount of grain needed to fill empty bellies in the city. And even when and where there was a surplus of grain, it was a challenge to procure and transport it. The rail system had fallen into a state of acute disrepair, and was presently running at like a quarter of its potential capacity. Plus, there was a problem of acquisition. The peasants didn’t want to sell their grain for worthless paper money, and any attempt to force them to sell for worthless paper money led them to simply hide their grain, rather than give it away for nothing. The food scarcity problem was exacerbated by another acute economic problem the Soviet government had to grapple with: a manufacturing crisis. Since the war started in 1914, factories, plants, and mines had all been oriented towards wartime production: guns, munitions, and uniforms replaced regular old consumer goods. And as we talked about in Episode 10.blank, industrial production also massively ramped up when the war started, so the ranks of the urban working class has exploded by like blank percent. This is where so much of the energy and momentum of the Revolution in 1917 had come from. But now the war was over, leading to three interrelated problems.

First, factories were shutting down as war time demand collapsed.

Second, factories repurposed for wartime production could not return to manufacturing regular old consumer goods just at the drop of a hat, and

Third, even those factories that could have remained open were often idle on account of ongoing shortages and fuel and raw materials.

So this led to a growing unemployment and underemployment crisis. In the spring of 1918, unemployed workers either lingered, hungrily and dangerously in the cities, or they decamped back to their home villages.

In response to the disorganized and hungry chaos of the winter of 1917-1918, a spontaneously self-organized phenomenon appeared. This was the bag men. The bag men were individuals who filled bags with small tradable goods, hopped on trains to rural areas, and then bartered and exchanged those goods for food. Then they came back to the cities to either sell what they had acquired, or as often as not, make deliveries to the people who had given them the tradable goods to go out and exchange for food. Now, one single bag man was just one guy, carrying some bags. He was limited to what a single person could carry. But as this became the most reliable way for an urban family to get food, the ranks of the bag men grew exponentially and soon hundreds of thousands of them were swarming back and forth from city to country and back. Over the weeks and months, the phenomenon took on a bit of organized cohesion. Bag men started traveling in groups, usually armed, co-ops sprouted up in both town and country to reliably facilitate exchange and delivery. Inside the factories, which were now controlled by worker committees, the hungry workers abandoned whatever they were supposed to be doing and turned to off the books manufacturing of tradable goods that the household peasants actually wanted. They made stoves, knives, work tools, candle holders, axes, plows, and especially cigarette lighters, a much coveted novelty. To make these goods, they often cannibalized the machinery in the factory itself.

So over the winter of 1917-1918, the people self-organized a chaotic, if passably effective, barter economy under the rubric of the initial decrees that had been issued by the Bolsheviks. Worker run factories were deciding to produce goods for trade, that they would then trade for food, from peasants who owned their own land. Co-ops and bag men sprouted up serving as the means of exchange and delivery.

But there was one small hiccup: this is not exactly the Bolshevik vision for what post-revolutionary socialism is meant to look like. The Bolsheviks were, after all, not anarchists. They had always advocated nationalization of both land and industry. They tended to argue in favor of large scale national collectivization of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. That is how they would take a backward medieval society like Russia and turn it into a modern and advanced socialist society, without the prolonged period of boardwalk capitalist rule demanded by their rivals, the Mensheviks and SRs. The Bolsheviks also tended to be very hostile to the idea of market activity in general, assuming that it was an exploitive feature of capitalism that would have no place in the society they were building. They portrayed the bag men, for example, as greedy parasites and speculators, exploiting the food crisis for their own selfish advantage.

So the policies the Soviet government started rolling out in the spring of 1918 thus aimed to bring organization and control to an anarchistic system growing up organically under their feet. And we call this collection of policies, war communism.

Now, just to be clear, no one called it war communism at the time, this is a term we use to retroactively describe the system. Other thing we need to be clear about, it’s barely a system at all. The term war communism encompasses several different policies enacted by different commissars as the Soviet government improvised responses to simultaneous crises on multiple fronts. One thing we know about Lenin is that practical improvisation is going to trump rigid doctrine every time. So as war communism gets going, it’s not like they’re out there systematically implementing a color coded timetable they had dreamed up back in Switzerland. It also gets called war communism because it’s so closely linked to the Soviet mobilization for civil war. They needed to turn all those potential resources and manpower into actual resources and manpower, and the blunt instrument of war communism is how they decided to do it. Now, there is a big ongoing historical debate about the nature of war communism, and its relationship to Bolshevik ideology, whether it represents an aberration, a culmination, a detour, a mistake, a necessity, random flailing, or Machiavellian plotting. The answer, in my opinion, is yes.

So for today, I want to talk about two big parts of war communism. First, on May 9th, 1918, the government declared a food dictatorship. The food dictatorship blew up the peasants’ claim to ownership over the grain they were now selling. The government appointed by the Soviet of Worker Soldiers and Peasant Deputies representing the workers, soldiers, and peasants of Russia, claimed the responsibility for acquiring and delivering food to the cities.

Food was a right. Food belonged to everyone, not merely the peasants who grew it. To implement the food dictatorship, the Soviet formed food detachments, armed companies who would travel out to the rural areas and simply take surplus grain and bring it back to the cities. There’d be no more buying and selling, no more trading, no more bag men. But, you can imagine what happened when these food detachments started fanning out. They used incredibly heavy handed tactics to extract grain and food they believed the selfish peasants were withholding. There are tons of stories about food detachments trashing houses, burning buildings, assaulting people, raping women, and murdering people who stood in their way. And then as they loaded up the quote unquote surplus, they often did not care whether or not they were taking actual surplus. Most of the time they were taking the food the peasants needed to feed themselves. So the brief honeymoon period of peace between the urban and rural populations after the October Revolution is now over, and it is going to get very messy from here on out.

The other part of war communism I want to talk about today is the increasing nationalization and centralization of manufacturing. Unhappy workers went out organizing strikes not on behalf of the Bolsheviks, but against them. In their opinion, nothing had changed since October and in many real ways, things had only gotten worse. So they started forming what were called Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives who worked outside the system of Soviets of workers deputies. Menshevik and SR activists were happy to enter this movement to stir up trouble against the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1918, one striking group declared, “the Soviet government has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the worker socialism and instead has brought them empty factories and destitution.”

In response, the Soviet government started implementing wider nationalization and central administration of factories. Controversially, they granted the need to bring back many of the experienced managers and restore the old top-down structures of authority. Worker mismanagement was seen by the government as one of the primary causes of the empty factories and the destitution they complained about. So, after about six months, the brief experiment of worker controlled factories gave way to the return of centralized hierarchy, with old plant managers offered high salaries to come back and run the factories, only now their salary would be paid by the state rather than a private owner.

So the food dictatorship and nationalization of industry are two big pillars of war communism, and they are going to lay the groundwork for what the October Revolution ultimately means for Russia.

But now I want to transition away from the communism part of war communism, and back to the war part of war communism. Because in May 1918, the Soviet government found itself besieged on all sides and facing a very real military threat to its existence, most especially as a result of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion.

So what the heck is the Czechoslovak Legion? The Czechoslovak Legion was formed at the beginning of World War I by Czechs and Slovaks living in Russian territory, eager to go fight the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They harbored nationalist dreams that had been kindled in the springtime of the peoples in 1848, and they hoped 1914 would prove to be the winter of empire, and they were hoping to join their brethren living under Austro-Hungarian rule as an independent nation. Initially it was just a couple companies of volunteers, but the Czechoslovak Legion turned out to be as dependable a fighting unit as existed on the Russian side. This proved, especially true as the Russian side collapsed in the summer of 1917. The Czechoslovak Legion was one of the few groups involved in the Kerensky Offensive to perform with anything resembling heroic determination. After their success, Kerensky’s government gave permission to representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council, a political lobbying group advocating their national cause, to go recruit Czech and Slovak prisoners of war being held in Russian POW camps. It was not a hard sell, and in short order, the Czechoslovak Legion ballooned to more than 40,000 men, most of them stationed in Ukraine.

After the failure of the Kerensky offensive, the Russian army of course plunged into terminal decline. But unlike the Russian soldiers, whose revolutionary hopes and military disillusionment were leading them to desert the army in droves, the one overriding hope of the Czechs and Slovaks — that is, national independence — remained unfulfilled, so they wanted to keep fighting. When the Central Powers invaded Ukraine in late February 1918 to force the Russians to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Czechoslovak Legion was again, like, the only military force, opposing them with anything resembling energetic discipline. They fought with particularly stubborn tenacity, because all of those who had been recruited out of the POW camps were considered deserters guilty of treason by the Austro-Hungarian military. They would be summarily executed if captured. After Brest-Litovsk, the Legion still had high morale and discipline cohesion, and they wanted to figure out a way to stay in the war against the Central Powers, because it was still their war, even if the Russians had now bailed. So they decided they wanted to provide reinforcements for the Allies on the western front. But, small problem, they couldn’t go west by heading west, there were enormous enemy army standing between them and France. So they settled on a very ambitious plan: go west by heading east. First, they would travel 6,000 miles east of Vladivostok. Then they would board ships that would take them across the Pacific, then they would traverse the Americas, then cross the Atlantic and land in Western Europe, completing a near total circumnavigation of the globe. Now the Soviet government and the legionaries didn’t trust or like each other, but on March the 25th, the Soviet government granted them safe passage to Vladivostok. Berlin and Vienna would not be happy to learn that the Russians were letting a formidable opponent of the Central Powers move on to fight them on a different front, but Lenin and Trotsky and the other Soviet leaders balance this with the knowledge that the Czechoslovak Legion also post a threat to them. So they decided it was safer to see the Legion off, rather than force them to stay.

As the Legion started to move east along the Trans-Siberian railway over the course of April and early May 1918, they did not simply move as one giant force of 42,000 men. They traveled in separate smaller groups, depending on the capacity of the railroad at any given moment. By May 1918, the company’s furthest along had reached Vladivostok, while those furthest behind had barely left European Russia. In his very good book on the Russian civil war, Evan Maudsley illustrates the scope of the spread for an American audience — and if you’re not a part of the American audience, just bear with me, and also, probably you’ll find this interesting too. But if you were to put a pin where New York City is on a map of North America and say, this is where the legionary group that’s furthest east is, then their western most comrades would be at a point 1300 miles west of San Francisco. West of San Francisco. 1300 miles out into the middle of the Pacific. That is the scope of the distance we’re talking about here.

Now so far, there’s no problem. The 42,000 legionaries are departing peacefully. But, problems erupted in mid May. Despite the deal with the government in Moscow, local Soviet authorities were suspicious and hostile of these heavily armed Czechs and Slovaks passing through town. Sometimes the legionaries were delayed for long periods while they waited for trains. This led to a great deal of irritated frustration and impatience on both sides. Finally, on May 14th, 1918, a group of legionaries moving east encountered a group of Hungarian prisoners of war traveling west. The legionaries were obviously on their way to Vladivostok, the Hungarians were being repatriated by the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They ran into each other in the city of Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural Mountains. The Hungarians considered these Czechs and Slovaks to be traitors, while the legionaries were like, traitors to what? It may be your empire, but it’s not our empire. Insults were hurled, fighting broke out. The municipal Russian authorities then stepped in and arrested some of the Czech leaders. Outraged legionaries then staged an armed attack to rescue their brothers from jail, and in the process wound up taking effective military control of the city.

Now this might have not been a big deal, but for the response of the Soviet government. Trotsky has by now resigned as commissar of foreign affairs and taken up his job as commissar of the army and navy. Believing the revolt of the Czechoslovak legionaries was part of a wider effort by anti-Soviet elements to foment counter-revolutionary uprisings along the critical Trans-Siberian railway Trotsky sent out an order on May 25th demanding the immediate disarmament of the Legion. His order was blunt:

“Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot.”

This turns out to have been something of a blunder. Local Soviet forces were going to find themselves inferior to the Czechoslovak legionaries whenever and wherever they encountered each other. And in fact, for all of 1918, wherever the Czechoslovak Legions were, they were the best trained, most disciplined, and most effective fighting force in the field. That’s why they’re uprising is such a big deal. So at the moment, anybody who tried to implement Comrade Trotsky’s order was not going to shoot armed Czechoslovaks on the spot, they were going to get shot by armed Czechoslovaks on the spot.

After the seizure of Chelyabinsk, word went up and down the Trans-Siberian railway to other Legionnaire units, and wherever they happen to be, they pulled out their rifles and machine guns and took over. The Legion soon controlled almost the entire length of the Trans-Siberian railway. This is a very big deal.

Now, the point that links the revolt of the Czechoslovak legions to the Russian civil war is the city of Samarra, situated about 600 miles southeast of Moscow, where the Volga River meets the Samarra River. The city in particular and the Volga region in general had been one of the main bases of SR popular peasant support, and a group of SR delegates to the constituent assembly had regrouped there in the aftermath of the closing of the constituent assembly back in January. Here, they hoped to plug themselves into a large and hostile reaction to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, and they dreamed of establishing a rival government to the Soviets by claiming the superior sovereign authority of the constituent assembly. But they spent the first couple months of 1918 supremely disappointed, because as we’ve seen, even areas where there was a real SR population? They didn’t care much about the constituent assembly per se. They just wanted land and local autonomy, both of which the Bolsheviks had promised.

The other problem for the SR leadership was that they couldn’t rally anybody to fight for them. They couldn’t even rally enough armed supporters to take over Samarra, which at the moment was only tenuously held by a Soviet aligned municipal government defended by about 2000 Red Guards. And not for nothing, but if you’re claiming to be the legitimate government of a country and you can’t get anybody who’s willing to kill or die for you, well, how legitimate are you? Because one of the unspoken tests of political legitimacy is, can you find enough people willing to kill or die for you.

In early June 1918 though, after the revolt in Chelyabinsk, a large cluster of about 8,000 Czechoslovak legionaries started rolling east to meet up with their brothers on the far side of the Urals. Now the legionaries had never been keen to stick around in Russia, nor did they really want to get caught up in a civil war, but the SR leaders in Samarra made the point that they all agreed on one thing, that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a humiliating disaster. If the SR government reclaimed power from the Bolsheviks — who were, after all, probably on the German payroll — they might be able to reopen the eastern front and fight on the same side again. The SR leaders made some extravagant claims about already securing French support, and they convinced the 8,000 legionaries to roll into Samarra on June 8th and take over the city from the meager force of Red Guards, practically without firing a shot.

I mean, they fired a few shots, but it was practically without firing a shot.

With the legionaries standing behind them with rifles and machine guns, the SR leadership then declared themselves to be the committee members of the constituent assembly, ever after called by the Russian abbreviation, the Komuch. The Komuch called upon all constituent assembly delegates to convene in Samarra to reconstitute a quorum in order to stake a claim to being the true, legal government of Russia. Initially, the Komuch was just a small five man committee, but it would grow over the next several months as many delegates did in fact, heed the call, including the chairman of the constituent assembly, Victor Chernov, whose name still counted for something. And also, old Breshkovskaya, who had long since shed her most radical and violent tendencies, but she showed up to lend the Komuch her impeccable revolutionary aura. Their simple stated goal was the restoration of constitutional democracy, which had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks in January.

These events then directly influenced events in the far east in Siberia. With a north/south frontline of a civil war being drawn down the length of the Volga, coupled with the fact that the Czech legionaries now controlled the Trans-Siberian railroad, most of Siberia fell out of Soviet control. Shortly after the canceling of the constituent assembly, some SRs had set up what they called the provisional Siberian government in Vladivostok, while more conservative monarchist and nationalist elements had set up a rival Siberian organization in Omsk. The Vladivostok SRs refused to recognize the more conservative Whites in Omsk, and that nonrecognition was mutual. To the extent that there remained an officer corps and remnants of the old imperial army out in Siberia, they all naturally gravitated towards Omsk, where they hoped to rebuild not just an anti-Bolshevik force, but an anti-Red force, to drive out all the hated socialists, and restore something like dignity to the Russian Empire.

The group in Omsk would soon be joined by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who is presently in the midst of his own odd sojourn around the world towards his date with historical destiny. But that’s for later.

By June 1918, Soviet Russia was now surrounded. With the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the formation of the Komuch on the Volga, and an alternate Siberian government down in the far east, their eastern border now fell well short of the Ural Mountains. Down south, General Denikin’s volunteer army was growing alongside a Don Cossack army. In the Caucuses, the Menshevik led Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic was presently ascendant. And then obviously along their western border, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic, and Finland were all teaming with armies of the Central Powers. And this is to say nothing of the Allied Powers, who were making their first concerted efforts to influence events inside Russia, using the Czechoslovak Legions and other White Armies to maybe get rid of the communists, and reopen the eastern front.

So that brings us to the other big thing that emerges out of Soviet Russia in the spring of 1918, the Red Army. Now of course the old Imperial Army had been demobilized and simply ceased to exist, so in the first phase of their conflict after the October Revolution, the Soviets had relied on enthusiastic Red Guard detachments and regiments of soldiers who had been brought into the framework of the military revolutionary committee. Technically the government had issued its first decree forming a new Red Army back in January, but that force was still entirely reliant on volunteers. Lenin himself personally enjoyed a brief moment of hope in April 1918, that after Kornilov was killed, the civil war that necessarily accompanied the revolution was maybe already over. But instead, it came roaring back to life with a dangerous vengeance. The Red Army was not recruiting volunteers fast enough to wage the multi-front and multinational war that was now confronting Soviet Russia, especially as foreign powers were probably backing the sides arrayed against them.

With the defeats and setbacks of May and June, most especially the Czechoslovak revolt, the Soviets needed a more professional and disciplined army. A handful of enthusiastic volunteers were no longer enough to save the revolution, they needed a million man army.

Trotsky was one of the key architects of the new Red Army. He abandoned all pretense of democratization and volunteerism, and instead set about building a very traditional army. After resigning as commissar of foreign affairs, Trotsky had become commissar of the army and navy, a position he would hold until 1925. And for all of Trotsky’s historical reputation as like Brainy Smurf, the intellectual, the writer, the orator, his role as the organizer and leader of the Red Army and the Russian Civil War was probably his greatest contribution to the Russian Revolution. And that’s saying a lot. Alongside Trotsky at this early phase was an old Imperial officer, named Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, who served as chief of field staff and military director of the Supreme Military Council of the Soviet government. Bonch-Bruevich may not have been a dyed in the wool communist, but his younger brother was. His younger brother had served for years as Lenin’s private secretary, and so General Bonch-Bruevich was trusted enough to organize a real army. And he did a pretty decent job of it, developing both the logistical and strategic architecture of the Red Army.

Several controversial decisions went into the formation of the Red Army. First, the reintroduction of conscription. The Red Army needed men, a lot of men, and they needed them right now. Continuing to try to fill the ranks on an all volunteer basis was not going to work. In April 1918, the Soviet government decreed universal military training for all men of military age. Then, on May 29th, after the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, the government ordered their first major levée of troops. To fill this levée, they relied on the conscription lists of the tzars, and simply put it to work for the Red Army. Conscription triggered a lot of resistance out there, but it was not wholly resisted. Economic conditions were pretty bad out there. Unemployment was high, many former soldiers returned to their old villages and found nothing to return to. They saw the Red Army offering wages and coats and boots, they shrugged their shoulders, and went back to war.

But perhaps an even more controversial decision was the aggressive recruitment of former imperial military officers. These guys were generally considered a bulwark of the old regime, but they were also the only ones who knew how to organize, lead, and run an army. So setting aside ideological objections, Trotsky and Bonch-Bruevich threw open the doors for the old officer corps, pitching the Red Army as a force being mobilized to defend Russia from foreign threats, which any patriotic Russian officer could get behind. Of course, it didn’t hurt that with mass demobilization in the end of the war, most of these officers had lost their wages, careers, pensions, and sense of purpose. So even if they too had ideological objections to the Soviet government — and many of them did — they were basically being offered their old jobs back, and they took them. In the first month of the civil war, nearly 10,000 such officers signed up; by the end of 1918, there were 22,000. Now, you might be asking yourself, how on earth can the Communists trust these people with their Red Army? And the answer is, they didn’t. Which is why at the same time you get the further development of political commissars. The political commissars would be assigned to keep an eye on the officers and countersign all their orders to ensure political reliability. Trotsky also let it be known that the family and friends of these officers would be kept under watch. He said, “let the turncoats realize that at the same time they are betraying their own families, their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children. He was deadly serious about this, as were the Cheka, the organization tasked with ensuring everyone’s political reliability. Not just officers, everybody. By any and all means necessary.

Next time, we will advance into the summer of 1918. With opposition to Soviet authority in Russia growing, the government systematically outlawed all political parties — not just the Kadets, but also the Mensheviks and the right SRs. And with their own hopes and dreams getting tossed aside by Lenin’s government, the left SRs, who had joined the Bolsheviks in October, broke with the regime and attempted to stage a new October 1917 in July 1918. And when it failed, one party Communist rule in Russia would be permanently cemented.

But I say next time, because Saturnalia is upon us once again, and I will be taking the next two weeks off for the holidays. Now, if you need a last minute gift idea, by all means Hero of Two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette and the age of revolution is right there, just saying. But other than that, I hope everyone out there is happy and healthy, and I wish you a very happy Saturnalia, and a very happy new year, and I will see you in 2022. .

 

 

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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.

 

 

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~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.78: Neither War nor Peace

Last week we left off in Brest-Litovsk on January the fifth, 1918, with the Central Powers unrolling a radically re-imagined map of Eastern Europe depicting the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, and telling the Russian negotiating team, accept this map as the basis of peace or else. As this map represented abject capitulation to the Central Powers, Russian Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky knew it could have explosive political implications for the Bolsheviks back home. He told the Central Powers he would have to speak directly to his government, and later that day, boarded a train to return to Petrograd.

Meanwhile, on that same afternoon of January 5th, 1918, his comrades were dealing with another matter that could have explosive political implications. This was the day, the long awaited Constituent Assembly, promised ever since the moment Nicholas abdicated the throne, finally convened. It was finally, finally time for a democratically elected assembly of the nation to write a new post-revolutionary constitution for Russia. More immediately, this might very well spell the end of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik party. There was a halfway decent chance that by the time Trotsky got back to Petrograd, he would no longer be commissar of foreign affairs. There may even be a warrant out for his arrest.

When the election results for the Constituent Assembly were announced in December, the frustrated rivals of the Bolsheviks thrilled at the knowledge that they would finally be able to oust Lenin’s unnatural government. The right SRs would control the largest block of votes, and they ran their printing presses night and day pumping out pamphlets, placards, newspapers, and leaflets, all trumpeting the slogan, all power to the Constituent Assembly. This was meant to replace and overcome the old slogan co-opted by the Bolsheviks, all power to the Soviets. The right SRs also sent activists into the trenches and to the barracks and the factories to talk up the Constituent Assembly as the sacred culmination of the revolution. But for all the right SRs talk about defending the Constituent Assembly, all they would do is talk about defending the Constituent Assembly. When militant members of the party showed the SR Central Committee their plan to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky, the central committee forbade the plot. When about 10,000 SR-aligned soldiers in Petrograd volunteered to stage an arm demonstration coinciding with the opening of the Constituent Assembly — to remind the Bolsheviks they weren’t the only ones who knew how to use a machine gun — the SR Central Committee rejected the offer. No guns, no violence. They believed the universally recognized sanctity of the constituent assembly would be all the protection it needed. And besides, civil war among the socialists would only benefit the counter-revolution. This latter point may well have been true, but it led the right SRs and their allies to unilaterally disarm on the eve of a major political showdown. When the SR regiments were told they could only demonstrate if they came out unarmed, they told the messenger, “Are you making fun of us comrade? You are asking us to a demonstration, but tell us to come without weapons. And the Bolsheviks? Are they little children? They will for sure fire at unarmed people. And we, are we supposed to open our mouths and give them our heads for targets? Or will you order us to run like rabbits?” If they were deprived of the means of fighting back, they would not come out at all. And so when the time came, they did not come out at all.

The Bolsheviks on the other hand, obviously had no scruples about coming out under arms. On January the third, Lenin’s government placed Petrograd under martial law. They prohibited public assemblies, and issued proclamations ordering soldiers to stay in their barracks and workers to stay in their factories. On January 5th, the day that Constituent Assembly opened, an SR delegate described the scene as he approached the Tauride Palace. The closer one approached, the fewer pedestrians were seen, and the more soldiers, Red Army men, and sailors. They were armed to the teeth, guns slung over the shoulder, bombs, grenades, and bullets in front and on the side, everywhere, everywhere that could be attached or inserted. The entire square in front of the Tauride Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, and field kitchens. Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell mell. The number of armed men and weapons, the sound of clanking, created the impression of an encampment, getting ready either to defend itself or to attack.

Opposed to this clanking Bolshevik encampment was an SR-organized street demonstration under strict orders: no guns, no violence. Now perhaps as many as 50,000 people turned out for this demonstration, though, that is the high side of the estimate. Whatever the number was, though, it was less than the organizers had hoped for. They were also disappointed by the crowd’s composition. It was almost entirely middle-class professionals, basically the educated white collar types who had been on strike since the October Revolution. There were no workers. There were no common soldiers. It was not exactly a march of the masses that the SRs envisioned. As the demonstrators approached the neighborhood of the Tauride Palace, they encountered armed soldiers operating under the flag of martial law.

In at least two separate incidents, the soldiers opened fire on the unarmed procession, scattering them chaotically, and killing somewhere between 10 and 20 people. For all that it happened in 1917, this was actually the first time Russian soldiers had fired on unarmed demonstrators since the February Revolution. There was some brief hope among the SRs and the professional middle classes that this new Bloody Sunday would finally, fatally discredit the Bolsheviks; that the nation would rise in outrage against Lenin and his murderous thugs, revealed to be no different than the tsar and his Cossacks.

But, uh, here’s the thing: nobody cared. Nobody is going to care about any of this.

Meanwhile, inside the Tauride Palace, 463 deputies assembled for the opening session, roughly half the total number elected. Of those in the hall, there were 259 right SRs, 136 Bolsheviks, and 48 left SRs. This gave the right SRs, for the moment, an outright majority. Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik Central Committee were on hand to direct what they reasonably believed to be an incredibly precarious moment for their government — a government they had self-enshrined back in October. Given the SR majority, the venerable Victor Chernov was elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly.

But from the beginning, the session was unruly. The Bolsheviks were by now masters of vocal and physical disruption: whenever non-Bolshevik speakers rose, Bolshevik deputies jeered, hooted, booed and interrupted. The hall was also full of armed soldiers who were there to ‘provide security’ — all of them actively sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. What’s more, the soldiers had gotten into the vodka at a welcome banquet for delegates and they drank continuously for the next 12 hours. If they heard things they didn’t like, or saw people they didn’t like, they would point their guns at them, for drunken and menacing amusement.

Lenin’s strategy for the constituent assembly was to introduce a poison pill as soon as possible. This poison pill was a document called The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses. The very first article stated, “Russia is hereby proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. All power, centrally and locally, is vested in the Soviets.” it then proceeded through short bullets, ratifying everything the Bolsheviks had done since October, and concluding with the statement, “The constituent assembly considers that now power must be vested wholly and entirely in the working people and their authorized representatives, the Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. Supporting Soviet power and the decrees of the council of peoples commissars, the Constituent Assembly considers that its own task is confined to establishing the fundamental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.”

If the Constituent Assembly approved this document, it meant they were abdicating their right to craft their own constitution. It simply handed all sovereign legitimacy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had taken control of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers and Peasants’ Deputies. As Lenin expected, the SR majority defeated this motion 237 to 136. And with this done, the Bolsheviks declared that the Constituent Assembly was controlled by counter-revolutionary enemies of the Soviet, and staged a walkout. All of this was going a hundred percent according to plan, and the Bolshevik Central Committee convened in another room in the Tauride Palace. While Chernov and the SRs gave long-winded speeches in the main assembly hall, the Bolshevik leaders drafted a proclamation, dissolving the Constituent Assembly. This done, Lenin then issued instructions to the soldiers guarding the palace: don’t use force against any of the delegates. Don’t prevent anyone from leaving, but absolutely do not allow any new people in the building.

The session continued all night, but finally, at four o’clock in the morning of what was now January, the sixth, an armed sailor strode up to the Tribune just as Victor Chernov was in the middle of approving the confiscation of land without confiscation. The sailor unceremoniously interrupted Chernov and told him to stop talking and shut it down for the night. Chernov spent about twenty minutes trying to keep things going — and he had the support of his fellow delegates, but he did not have the support of the armed and drunken soldiers filling the assembly hall, shouting, “Enough, enough,” and “Down with Chernov,” So the delegates voted to adjourn.

Technically the SRs adjourned the constituent assembly until 5:00 PM. But when they left, the guards locked up the building and then blocked anyone trying to get in. Later that morning, Pravda published the government decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly. They justified this by saying “The right Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik parties are in fact carrying on outside the Constituent Assembly a most desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their press for its overthrow, and describing as arbitrary and unlawful the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters by force of the working classes, which is essential in the interest of emancipation from exploitation. They are defending the saboteurs, the servants of capital, and are going as far as undisguised calls to terrorism, which certain unidentified groups have already begun. It is obvious that under such circumstances, the remaining part of the constituent assembly could only serve as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power.”

Now, it didn’t really matter that this is kind of the opposite of what the SR Central Committee had been doing over the last several weeks. Yes, they wanted a government enshrined by the Constituent Assembly to replace the Soviet government led by Lenin — but they were absolutely and explicitly trying to dampen down calls for violence. But like I said, that didn’t matter. And after a single session, lasting just about 12 hours, the long awaited Constituent Assembly never reconvened. That was it. It was done.

Now you might be asking yourself, how on earth can Lenin and the Bolsheviks get away with this? Hasn’t everyone been waiting for the Constituent Assembly since March? Didn’t most of the voters vote against the Bolsheviks? How can they just brazenly shut down the assembly without triggering like a mass uprising?

Well, here’s the thing: by January, 1918, the vast majority of Russians, including all of those tens of millions of voters, didn’t really care about the Constituent Assembly. At the local level, it was regarded as some far off assembly of elite intellectuals doing god knows what. The Decree on Peace satisfied the soldiers and sailors. The regulation on worker control satisfied urban labor. The Decree on Land was all the rural peasants had ever wanted. And remember too, for all of these groups, their local Soviets were the one political institution that continued to have real legitimacy. They were not far away assemblies of elite intellectuals, but local assemblies, composed of their own people. So when the news arrived that the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved because they opposed Soviet power — which is, after all, what Lenin had set them up to do — well, then who needs them? Who cares? All power to the Soviets.

On top of all that, Lenin was ready with the great alternative to the Constituent Assembly. On January 10th, the executive committee of the Soviets convened the Third All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, deliberately convened at that moment to act as the popular alternative to what was now portrayed as a nefariously anti-Soviet Constituent Assembly. They also convened a Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies, composed almost entirely now of Bolshevik and left SR delegates. Those delegates voted on January 13 to merge with the Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, which also just so happened to be composed almost entirely of Bolsheviks and left SRs. Once these two congresses merged, they became the single All Russian Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants’ Deputies, and they claimed the mantle of legitimate popular sovereignty.

It would not be unreasonable to call this Congress the founding of the Soviet Union. The Congress overwhelmingly approved the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited Peoples, whose first article was, “Russia is hereby proclaimed a republic of soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants’ deputies.” The second article then said, “The Russian Soviet republic is established on the principle of a free union of free nations as a federation of Soviet national republics.” And though there would be a few nomenclature shifts along the way, this is really the origin point to the Soviet Union, and why it’s called the Soviet Union. It also laid the permanent foundation of Russian communism. The Congress abolished private ownership of land, granted the Supreme Economic Council authority to convert factories, mines, railways, and other means of production and transport into state property, consolidated all banks into a single state institution. As a general statement of political and economic ideology, they said their fundamental aim was “… to abolish all exploitation of man by man, to completely eliminate the division of society into classes, to mercilessly crush the resistance of the exploiters, to establish a socialist organization of society, and to achieve the victory of socialism in all countries.”

As this auspicious Soviet Congress wrapped up Lenin, addressed them: “Comrades,” he said, “before the Third Congress of Soviets closes, we must establish with complete impartiality the momentous part it has had to play in the history of the international revolution and of mankind. There are incontestable grounds for saying that the Third Congress of Soviets has opened a new epoch in world history, and there is growing awareness of it significance in these times of world revolution. It has consolidated the organization of the new state power which was created by the October Revolution, and has projected the lines of future socialist construction for the whole world, for the working people of all countries. The new system of the socialist Soviet Republic as a federation of free republics of the different nations inhabiting Russia has been finally accepted in this country in the sphere of domestic politics.”

But as Lenin and his government were set to embark on this new epoch in world history, after apparently winning the political war at home, they faced a looming threat from abroad that might tend to turn this from an epoch into a tiny blip. The armies of the Central Power were massed on the Russian border, representing the or else if the Russians did not sign the terms of the treaty Trotsky brought back with him from Brest-Litovsk. And so we now turn our attention from domestic politics to foreign affairs.

Just days after successfully shuttering the Constituent Assembly, a group of about eighty Bolshevik leaders convened to discuss the terms of the peace. Three factions emerged from this discussion. The smallest was led by Lenin, who advocated signing the terms, now, without delay or argument. Lenin’s read on the situation was the Russian army was in no position to fight. He said, “There is no doubt that it will be a shameful peace, but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away.” For the moment, he said they needed to focus on ensuring the revolution survived in Russia. “Germany has only just now pregnant with revolution,” he said, “but we have already given birth to a completely healthy baby.” Besides, he said, “The bourgeoisie has to be throttled, and for that, we need both hands free.” In Lenin’s opinion resuming the war with Germany would be absolutely catastrophic.

But Lenin once again found himself opposed by a majority of his own party. Most Bolsheviks favored turning this imperialist war into a revolutionary war, to do as the Jacobins had done in 1792, and call upon the people to defend the revolution, and then march off and crushed the fragile old powers of Europe. This faction was led most passionately by Nikolai Bukharin, who had joined the party as a teenager after the Revolution of 1905. After years of loyal service to the party in exile, Bukharin became one of the most influential political leaders in Moscow in 1917, and he directed the Bolshevik takeover of Moscow in the midst of the October Revolution. As a reward for this, he was now editor of Pravda. Bukharin was also now the leading voice of what would be called the left communists, who organized around total opposition to peace with the Central Powers, and the immediate declaration of revolutionary war to the death.

In between Lenin and Bukharin was Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky. He concurred with Lenin that the Russian army was an absolutely no position to fight a war, but he was also acutely aware that if the Bolsheviks did not prove their hostile independence from German imperialism, and shut down rumors, that they were just a bunch of paid German agents, the revolutionary project both at home and abroad would be wrecked. So Trotsky formulated a novel slogan: neither war nor peace. The Russians would reject the German terms, and then simply announce that so far as they were concerned, the war was over. The inner circle of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party was wary of both Lenin’s demand for peace at almost any price and Bukharin’s call for revolutionary war, and so they voted to endorse Trotsky’s diplomatic novelty, neither war nor peace.

So Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk and the talks resumed on January 15. Trotsky went right back to trying to play for time with all the rhetorical stalling he could muster, hoping against hope the German proletariat would rise up and make all of this a moot point. But by now, even the patiently tolerant Baron Von Kuhlman was getting extremely annoyed at the stalling. Finally, on January 27th, the Baron received a telegram from the kaiser demanding action. “This must be ended as soon as possible,” the kaiser wrote. “Trotsky must sign by 8:00 PM tomorrow without procrastination peace on our terms. In the event of refusal or attempts to procrastination and other pretexts, the negotiations are broken off at eight o’clock on the night of January 28th, and the armistice will be terminated.” That same day at another negotiating table in Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers negotiated a peace with representatives of the Ukrainian Rada, now recognized as the independent Republic of Ukraine. In exchange for peace and recognition, the Rada pledged massive shipments of grain to feed the famished populations of Germany and Austria. They also gave permission for the armies of the Central Powers to enter Ukraine, which was pretty important, because on that same day, a small army of Red Guards led by Moravia — the guy who led the defense of Petrograd at the battle of Pulkovo — pushed its way into Kiev and took control of the city on behalf of a Bolshevik aligned Ukrainian soviet, which denounced the rod has claim to political legitimacy. Civil war in Ukraine was now well underway, and both sides would need all the help they could get.

Meanwhile, back at the Russian negotiating table, Trotsky came back on January the 28th to respond to the final final ultimatum. Almost everybody expected him to just sign the treaty, there was nothing else for him to do. But instead, Trotsky carried his program of neither war nor peace to its logical and somewhat absurd conclusion: he said Russia would not sign the ignoble terms as presented by the Central Powers, and they would not be an accomplice to the dismemberment and destruction of the Russian Empire.

So would they go back to fighting?

No, absolutely not. Trotsky announced to a stunned audience, “We are demobilizing our army. We refuse to sign a peace based on annexations. We declared that the state of war between the central empires and Russia is at an end.” The war was over, but there would be no peace treaty. Baron von Kühlmann exclaimed, “This is unheard of!” but there was nothing he could actually do in that moment. Trotsky and the rest of his negotiating team got on the train and left.

Now as the German leaders huddled to figure out how to respond to this, I must stop briefly here and insert every historians’ favorite Soviet decree. On January the 25th, 1918 Pravda announced a new policy that would take effect at the end of the month. This decree read:

In order to establish in Russia the same way of counting time as used by almost all civilized people, the Council of the Peoples’ Commissars decrees the introduction of the new calendar into lay use after the end of the month of January of this year. Accordingly, one, the first day after 31 January of this year is to be counted not as the 1st of February, but as the 14th of February. The second day counted as the 15th, and so on.

That’s right. This is the moment Russia drops the Julian calendar and adopts the Gregorian calendar. So they went from January 31st, 1918 to February 14th, 1918, and that was that. From here on out, there will be no more triple cross checking different sources and books to make sure the proper dating chronology is being followed. From here on out, all dates everywhere will be the same. Thank god. Long live the revolution.

While the calendars were unifying, the kaiser got his advisors together. Though nobody wanted to resume the war against the Russians, Hindenburg and Ludendorff told the kaiser that all of their plans for a final campaign in the west in the spring of 1918 required the absolute guarantee the Russian army was finished, and it required access to Ukrainian agriculture. They couldn’t afford to fight on the eastern front, but they also couldn’t afford not to fight on the eastern front. So on February 17th, 1918 of the now blessedly unified calendar, the Central Powers launched an offensive campaign against Russia. The Germans advanced from west to east; the Austrians moved from southwest to northeast; the Turks move from south to north; all of them advancing rapidly through territory undefended by any army. One German commander remarked at the outset of this campaign, “This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced. It is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, and trains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event, the charm of novelty.”

With an unstoppable invasion now under way, the Bolshevik Central Committee convened on February 18th, and Lenin finally secured a one vote majority for his motion to sign the peace treaty right now, immediately, no more delays. The deciding vote came from Trotsky. Neither war nor peace had now run its course, and peace was the only viable option left. Lenin transmitted Russia’s surrender without delay, but then the Central Powers just ignored him. They did not respond. Their armies simply kept advancing. In the north German armies entered Lavonia; in the center, enemy forces entered Minsk and Pskov; in the south, Austrian, Hungarian, and Turkish armies kept pushing into Russian territory. This went on for days and days and days without them ever acknowledging the Russian willingness to sign the peace treaty. With the total envelopment of Russia now on the table, Lenin finally admitted they might have no choice but to fight back. On February 22nd, the government published a decree under the headline, “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger.” Point one announced a sort of Russian levée en masse, declaring, ” The country’s entire manpower and resources are placed entirely at the service of revolutionary defense.” This levée en masse called for a scorched earth defensive war waged by all Russians everywhere. It hearkened back to the great patriotic war against Napoleon. Workers and peasants were ordered to engage in all manner of sabotage and self destruction to deny the invaders access to food resources or industrial technology. After calling for mass labor efforts to build trenches, defenses and fortifications, point six of the decree said, “These battalions are to include all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class, men and women, under the supervision of Red Guards. Those who resist are to be shot.” Then the eighth and final point read, “Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, and German spies are to be shot on the spot.”

These two points, making summary execution the first, last, and final punishment for hindering the defense of the revolution, gave the recently established Cheka the legal mechanism they would use to mercilessly defend the Soviet government going forward. It can also reasonably said to mark the beginning of the coming Red Terror.

In the midst of this now declared national emergency, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks also reached out to the Allies, to see if they might be interested in supporting them. And unlike the Decree on Peace, which the Allies ignored, the British and French responded very quickly that they were absolutely willing to give whatever monetary and material aid necessary to help Lenin’s government fight the Central Powers and keep the eastern front of the war alive. Like I said before, at this point, any ideological or clash of civilization-style considerations were absolutely irrelevant to the decision-makers of the Allied Powers. They were willing to support anybody who promised to keep Russia in the war. For his part, Lenin was certainly not going to let ideological purity get in the way of access to vital resources to defend the Soviet government. Caught up in other business, Lenin voted in favor of accepting allied aid in absentia, writing a note to Trotsky that read, “Please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” But all of this became irrelevant that same day. The Germans transmitted new terms on February 23rd, which were far harsher than they had been in December. And though Bukharin, the left Bolsheviks, and the left SRs wanted to keep fighting Lenin, convinced the majority of the Central Committee that they needed to sign whatever the Germans put in front of them. Right now. Or it would be the end of all of them.

So, a Russian delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk on March the first — and I should mention that Trotsky resigned as commissar of foreign affairs so that he wouldn’t have to be the one to sign this ignoble piece. When the team arrived, they announced that they would sign whatever the Central Powers put in front of them, a kind of final protest to prove that they were doing this with a bayonet to their throat and a gun to their head. But this time, it was the Central Powers who stalled, and while they kept the Russians waiting, their armies entered Kiev, and evicted the small force of Soviet Red Guards. Finally, on March the third, 1918, the Russian Soviet Republic and the representatives of the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

It was a doozy of a treaty. With the stroke of a pen, the Russians renounced 750,000 square miles, abandoning essentially all territory Russia had acquired since the 1600s. They renounced all claims to Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Transcaucasia, all of which would become either nominally independent states under German protection, or in many cases directly annexed into the German Empire. This amounted to roughly a third of the total population of the Russian Empire, a third of their most productive agricultural land, a quarter of their industrial capacity, a quarter of their railroad tracks, and three quarters of their coal and iron deposits. The treaty also granted German national special economic exemptions inside of Russia, leaving German owned property exempt from any nationalization efforts on the part of the Soviet government. This I should mention immediately led to a massive sell-off of Russian owned property, industry factories, and estates to German buyers, turning Russia overnight into something of a colony of German capital.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk probably saved the Soviet government, but it did so at an almost unfathomable cost. Right, left, and center, all howled upon reading the terms of one of the most pathetically abject capitulations in the history of modern diplomacy. It of course infuriated patriots and nationalists, as it surrendered a gobsmacking amount of wealth land in people to the Germans. It also infuriated the growing coalition of left communists, who believed Lenin had treacherously sold out the international proletariat, extinguished all hopes for worldwide revolutionary, and turned Russia into an exploited colony of German imperialism. The treaty would in time cause the permanent rupture of the Bolsheviks and the left SRs, who hated the treaty with every fiber of their being. But for Lenin, however ignoble the treaty, however pathetic the treaty, it was a necessary treaty. It was necessary both for the sake of the Soviet socialist government, but also for global socialist revolution. In response to critics from the left, Lenin could point out the simple fact that while they called for a levée en masse, the people were not actually willing to take up arms. The peace might be unpopular among the political leadership, but war was even more unpopular among the masses. And for all its negative aspects, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had one unmistakable virtue: the Soviet government was left in tact. The revolutionary baby was not smothered in the crib. Between the Third Congress of the Soviets enshrining what amounts to a Soviet constitution, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where the Soviet government won international recognition, Lenin believed he had a small but fertile plot where the seed of future worldwide socialist revolution could be planted, tended, and sewed.

But, before they could export their produce abroad, they must first harvest it at home.