The Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives PDF
Preview The Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives
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) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25026-4 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.
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