The Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives

235 Pages·1996·21.95 MB·English

by  V. P. Butt

THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR
Also by A. B. Murphy
ASPECTIVAL USAGE IN RUSSIAN
INlRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY TO SHOLOKHOV'S
TlKHlY DON
MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKO: A Literary Project
Also by G. R. Swain
EASTERN EUROPE SINCE 1945 (co-author)
THE ORIGINS OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR
RUSSIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE LEGAL LABOUR
MOVEMENT,1906-14
The Russian Civil War
Documents from the Soviet Archives
Edited by
v.
P. Butt
Senior Scientific Collaborator
Institute of Russian History
Russian Academy of Sciences
A. B. Murphy
Professor Emeritus of Russian
University of Ulster
N. A. Myshov
Senior Scientific Collaborator and ChiefA rchivist
Russian State Military Archive
and
G. R. Swain
Professor ofH istory
University of the West of England
First published in Great Britain 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-333-59319-6 ISBN 978-1-349-25026-4 (eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-25026-4
First published in the United States of America 1996 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-16337-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Russian civil war: documents from the Soviet archives / edited by
V. P. Butt ... ret al.l
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-16337-2 (cloth)
I. Soviet Union-History-Revolution, 1917-1921-Sources.
I. Butt, V. P.
DK265.A5372 1996
947.084'I-dc20 96-19904
CIP
Selection, editorial matter and translation © V. P. Butt, A. B. Murphy,
N. A. Myshov and G. R. Swain 1996
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London WIP 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
10987654321
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96
Contents
Introduction vii
Glossary of Russian Terms xvi
1 The Directory 1
2 The Don Rebellion 45
3 The Kaleidoscope of War 82
4 The Labour Armies of the Soviet Republic 124
5 The Final Curtain 175
Index 207
v

Introduction
For historians of Russia interested in the twentieth century it was until
recently traditional to include in the preface to any book a disclaimer
about the problems caused by the closure of the Soviet archives. For
historians of the Russian Civil War such comments were de rigueur. Thus
over twenty-five years ago John Bradley wrote in The Civil War in Russia,
1917-20 (Batsford, 1975) that the Soviet Government's policy concerning
the Russian archives meant 'nothing fresh and revealing can be expected
from that source' (p. 7), while as late as 1990 Bruce Lincoln could bemoan
in his Red Victory (Simon & Schuster, 1990) that 'parts of Russia's Civil
War story will almost certainly never be told for the documents remain
locked away in the Soviet archives' (p. 13). That has all changed. The
opening of the Soviet archives in the years since Mikhail Gorbachev's
term as President of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent collapse of the
Soviet Union itself, have enabled scholars to gain new perspectives on the
Russian Civil War.
The Civil War was a rather strange episode in the historiography of
twentieth-century Russia. It saw an unlikely degree of agreement between
Western and Soviet scholars on its origins and the reasons for the Bolshevik
triumph. Whereas on most aspects of Russian history in the twentieth cen
tury Western and Soviet scholars took diametrically opposite views on how
to interpret events, the Civil War period witnessed something quite different.
Western and Soviet scholars were pretty much at one.
Take, for example, Bruce Lincoln's Red Victory. He writes in the pre-
face (p. 12):
The Bolsheviks' desperate struggle to survive during the Russian Civil
War shaped the Soviet system of government and dictated its future
course. Only by placing all human and natural resources within reach at
the service of a government that spoke in the name of the people but
acted in the interest of the Communist Party did Lenin and his comrades
defeat their enemies. These included soldiers from fourteen countries,
the armed forces of nearly a dozen national groups that struggled to
establish independent governments upon the lands that once had been
part of the Russian Empire, and a half-dozen White armies that formed on
Russia's frontiers between 1918 and 1920. To comprehend the Soviet
Union of today, it is important to understand how the Bolsheviks tri
umphed against such crushing odds and how that struggle shaped their
vision of the future.
vii
Vlll Introduction
Apart from the reference to the Communist Party, few Soviet scholars
would have been unhappy with such a summary.
Of course, there have been differences of interpretation. Evan Mawdsley
has done much in his definitive study, The Russian Civil War (Allen &
Unwin, 1987), to qualify the received wisdom on a number of issues.
In particular he had debunked the myth of the fourteen interventionist
powers (foreign intervention was half-hearted and ineffective); he had
made clear that the Red Army won not simply as a result of its military
skill, but because it was far bigger than the White armies; and he had
reminded us that, more than the Reds winning the Civil War, the Whites
lost it since they represented nothing but the old pre-revolutionary ruling
elite. But, with the honourable exception of Mawdsley, the differences
between historians tend to be nuances within the same broad approach.
For most, the Civil War was a heroic period in Russian history, before
things started to go wrong, as it were. The Civil War took place before the
emergence of Stalin as leader of the Russian Communist Party and saw
Trotsky playing the leading role on the Bolshevik side in both building the
Red Army and marshalling it towards victory. Progressive opinion in the
West and Soviet propaganda could therefore be at one.
Among the points on which Western and Soviet scholars were agreed
were the following. One, that the 'democratic' phase of the Civil War, over
the summer of 1918, was a meaningless interlude; the only group cap
able of defeating the Bolsheviks were the White generals. The Bolsheviks'
democratic opponents, if referred to at all, were depicted as ineffectual
idealists who could talk but not fight. The true Civil War was fought
between the Bolsheviks, who represented progress, and reactionary White
generals, who were supported in their attempt to restore the old regime by
the rampant imperialist ambitions of almost every conceivable European
and world power. Another point of agreement was that the Bolsheviks,
partly through their exceptional propaganda but also through their pro
gressive social policies, succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the
bulk of the Russian population. And finally, it was agreed that, if a little
brutally, Trotsky succeeded in turning the Red Army from a rabble to an
incomparable fighting force.
All historians agree that, to paraphrase Bruce Lincoln, Russia's Civil
War experience determined the framework within which the Russian peo
ple thought and governed throughout the Soviet period; what the newly
released documents on the Civil War reveal is that the events of 1918-22
reflected struggles and tensions in Russian society far more complex than
the simple Red-White struggle of 'progress' versus 'reaction', and fore
shadow all the horrors of the Stalin period. They remind us first that many
Introduction IX
of the Whites were not 'White' at all, and that the Civil War began as a
war between the Bolsheviks and their socialist opponents - the 'peasant'
socialist SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) - who did not simply talk but
created the People's Army which at times had the Red Army on the run
and always held its own. They show how the antipathy towards peasant
socialism led the Bolsheviks to be suspicious of Russia's entire rural
population, making it tremendously difficult to adopt a social policy in the
countryside which could win even lukewarm support.
They show how this failing was linked to the Bolsheviks' essentially
urban ideology, and how that ideology was central to Bolshevism. The
first attempt at post-war reconstruction took place according to the dictates
of Bolshevik ideology, and the firm conviction that world revolution was
only a matter of months away. They show a regime founded on terror, and
which relied on terror throughout the war. They show that while the Red
Army was able to defeat the Whites, it was not the disciplined army of
Bolshevik propaganda. Desertion, low morale and poor supplies dogged it
at every level; and the much vaunted commissar system of political edu
cation scarcely operated. Finally, they show us the limitations and other
worldliness of the Bolsheviks' White opponents.
THE COURSE OF THE WAR
The Russian Civil War began the moment the Bolsheviks seized power on
the night of 24-25 October 1917. Within a week forces loyal to Kerensky's
Provisional Government tried to wrest power from the Bolsheviks at the
Battle of Pulkovo Heights on the outskirts of Petrograd. Few, however,
were keen for a fight and Lenin's promise to hold elections to the Con
stituent Assembly and form a coalition administration with the Left SRs
was sufficient to restore relative calm. In the run-up to the opening of the
Constituent Assembly the only forces committed to war were the future
White generals, those associated with General Lavr Kornilov's attempt to
seize power from Kerensky in August 1917; by December 1917 these had
gathered on the river Don, but by February 1918 they were in full retreat
to a safe area in the distant Kuban. These first armed incidents, however,
did point to the two very different groups which were prepared to take up
arms against the Bolshevik regime. Kerensky's supporters were SRs, fel
low socialists committed to Russia's democratic revolution of February
1917; the White generals on the Don had no time for democracy, and while
not all of them wanted to restore the Tsar's autocratic monarchy, all wanted
a dictatorial regime of some sort.