History of the Soviet Union

3

War Communism

Even after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, it was not clear what form of government the Bolsheviks would be able to install, what its relations would be with local soviets as local centres of power, nor what kind of support it would receive from the various sectors of the population. The Bolsheviks had called for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, but Lenin clearly had reservations about that slogan, and the manner in which he had established Sovnarkom did not augur well for the future of decentralized government. The Bolsheviks had also talked a great deal of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and had called their new government a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’; but how was the proletariat to put their new-found authority into effect? What was to be the relation between the new centralized institutions of the Soviet government (admittedly as yet largely on paper) and bodies like trade unions and factory committees, which had their own narrower interests to defend?

The Bolsheviks had absolutely no clear answer to these questions. As we have seen, they were divided over how and even whether to seize power.

Even Lenin himself had no clear conception of how he was going to run the enormous, divided, war-torn country. He fully admitted this. Not long before the seizure of power, he said, ‘We do not pretend that Marx or Marxists know the road to socialism in detail. That is nonsense. We know the direction of the road, we know what class forces lead along it, but concretely, practically, this will be shown by the experience of millions when they decide to act.’ He did have a general vision, expounded in State and Revolution, of ordinary workers and peasants taking over the smoothly running mechanism of the imperialist economy. He evoked this vision frequently in the early days of the new regime, in language which mixed democratic voluntarism with ruthless authoritarianism. ‘Comrade workers,’ he exhorted them on 5 November 1917, ‘remember that you yourselves are administering the state. Nobody is going to help you if you do not yourselves unite and take over all state affairs. Rally round your soviets: make them strong. Get to work right there, at the grass roots, without waiting for orders. Institute the strictest revolutionary order, suppress without mercy the anarchic excesses of drunken hooligans, counterrevolutionary cadets [yunkera], Kornilovites, etc. Institute rigorous supervision over production and accounting over products. Arrest and deliver to the tribunal of the revolutionary people whoever dares to raise his hand against the people’s cause.’ This was the language of the utopian, confident that he is already on the threshold of the ideal society.

Some of the very early Bolshevik legislation did seem to be putting this vision into practice by creating or strengthening institutions through which workers, peasants and soldiers could gain greater control over their own fate and also over the running of the country.

1. The land decree of 26 October 1917 abolished all private landownership without compensation, and called on village and volost (rural district) land committees to redistribute the land thus secured to the peasants on an egalitarian basis. The decree was couched in the words of a Peasant Congress of June 1917. It reflected the Socialist Revolutionary programme and gave the peasants what most of them wanted at the time, while making no mention of the ultimate Bolshevik aim of nationalization of the land.

2. The decree of 14 November 1917 on workers’ control gave elected factory committees the power of supervision (kontrol) over industrial and commercial enterprises, for which purpose commercial secrecy was to be abolished.

3. Decrees of November and December 1917 abolished all ranks, insignia and hierarchical greetings in the army and subordinated all military formations to elected committees of soldiers, among whose duties would be the election of their officers.

4. Existing judicial institutions were replaced, in a decree of 22 November 1917, by ‘people’s courts’, whose judges would be elected by the working population. Special revolutionary tribunals were to be elected forthwith by the soviets to deal with counterrevolutionary activity, profiteering, speculation and sabotage.

On the other hand, some of the Bolsheviks’ very earliest measures pointed in the other direction, towards tighter central authority. On 2 December 1917 a Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up, almost universally known by its initials, VSNKh (or Vesenkha), to ‘elaborate general norms and a plan for regulating the economic life of the country’ as well as to ‘reconcile and coordinate’ the activities of other economic agencies, among them the trade unions and factory committees. In January 1918 the factory committees were converted into local branches of the trade unions, and the whole structure subordinated to Vesenkha. This was not necessarily done against the wishes of the workers themselves: indeed there is a good deal of evidence that, to keep production going at all in the desperately difficult economic circumstances, many factory committees were only too glad to seek support from some larger entity. Nevertheless, in practice it meant that the economy was becoming very centralized even before the civil war broke out.

The same was true of the decision to set up the Cheka — or, to give it its full name, the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle with Counterrevolution and Sabotage — instituted by Sovnarkom on 7 December 1917. Its immediate task was to combat looting, hooliganism and black market trading, which had increased alarmingly, and to keep watch on organizations known to be opposed to the Bolsheviks. In its early appeals it tried to mobilize the population in the same style as Lenin: ‘The Commission appeals to all workers, soldiers and peasants to come to its aid in the struggle with enemies of the Revolution. Send all news and facts about organizations and individual persons whose activity is harmful to the Revolution and the people’s power to the Commission …’ In practice, the Cheka was never subordinated to any soviet institution, nor indeed to any party body, only to Sovnarkom, and was able to extend its powers unchecked.

Another source of uncertainty about the new Soviet regime was its relation to the outside world. Lenin had encouraged the seizure of power in the expectation that its example would provoke workers’ revolutions in other countries of Europe, especially in Germany. As the months passed and this did not happen, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to have to honour their pledge to end the war, not through negotiations with a friendly, socialist Germany, but by reaching some kind of agreement with the old imperial Germany. Given the weakness of the Russian army, which the Bolsheviks themselves had fostered, this could only mean acceptance of whatever terms the German generals cared to dictate. Trotsky, as the newly appointed commissar for foreign affairs, tried to put the new-style ‘public diplomacy’ into effect by addressing the German people directly over the heads of their leaders, but his words produced no immediate effect.

The dilemma of how to deal with this situation very nearly tore the Bolshevik Party in two once again. The Germans were demanding the Baltic provinces and the whole of Bielorussia and the Ukraine, which meant losing a substantial proportion of Russia’s industrial and agricultural wealth. The Left Communists, led by Bukharin, argued that to accept this meant capitulating to imperialism and losing a golden opportunity to continue the world revolution which October had started. Bukharin agreed with Lenin that the Russian army was no longer capable of holding back the Germans in regular warfare, but he rejected this concept of warfare:

Comrade Lenin has chosen to define revolutionary war exclusively as a war of large armies with defeats in accordance with all the rules of military science. We propose that war from our side–at least to start with–will inevitably be a partisan war of flying detachments. … In the very process of the struggle … more and more of the masses will gradually be drawn over to our side, while in the imperialist camp, on the contrary, there will be ever increasing elements of disintegration. The peasants will be drawn into the struggle when they hear, see and know that their land, boots and grain are being taken from them–this is the only real perspective.

Bukharin’s views certainly had wide support in the party. They may appear quixotic, but his recipe for involving the masses, especially the peasants, in the revolution through partisan warfare against an occupying power does closely resemble the methods of later successful Communist leaders, such as Mao, Tito and Ho Chiminh. Lenin, however, took the line of strict Realpolitik. The most precious possession of the world revolution, he argued, was that a Soviet government existed in Russia. That, above all, must not be placed in jeopardy. It followed that the only possible policy was to gain a ‘breathing space’ by capitulating to the German demands and preserving what could be preserved while postponing international revolution to the distant future.

In this controversy we see Lenin on the opposite side from the one he took in October. Then he had been an internationalist in perspective, trusting to the revolutionary élan of the workers all over the world. Now he became distrustful of any working-class revolutionary spirit not guided by the Bolshevik Party (as in What is to be Done? so many years before) and retreated into the one ‘socialist fortress’. The party eventually accepted his arguments, and Soviet Russia signed a treaty at Brest-Litovsk, acceding in full to the German demands. Much flowed from that decision, especially the creation of a relatively conventional army (see below) and the abandonment of ‘open diplomacy’. One might even see here the first glimmerings of ‘socialism in one country’, later to be developed by Stalin. However that may be, Germany’s subsequent defeat by the Western Allies rescued Lenin from the most damaging consequences of his decision: the Germans withdrew from the occupied territories after November 1918.

The Left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed with the Left Communists on this issue and resigned from the government in indignation, calling the Brest-Litovsk Treaty a ‘betrayal’. Thenceforth the Bolsheviks exercised literally ‘one-party rule’. As if to mark this break, they renamed themselves the Communist Party (in memory of the Paris Commune).

The Bolsheviks’ method of seizing and consolidating power led naturally to civil war. This was something Lenin had always accepted. He had repeatedly urged that the First World War should be turned into a class struggle or ‘international civil war’. The same logic underlay his determination in 1917 to shun all agreements with other parties, even from the socialist camp, and to promote a violent seizure of power single-handed.

It took some time, however, for the various anti-Bolshevik forces to grasp the reality of the situation, and to retrieve themselves from their initial reverses. Senior officers from the Imperial Army made their way to the Don Cossack territory in the south, where they tried to assemble an anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army. Because of the divisions among the Cossacks, however, it took them a long time to secure a base area. Long before they did so, an opportunity for anti-Bolshevik activity was created in quite another part of Russia, namely Siberia. Following the termination of hostilities on the German front, the Czech Legion was being evacuated on the Trans-Siberian Railway, when fighting broke out between them and Red Guards at Chelyabinsk. Using the telegraph system, the Czechs managed to gain control over the entire length of the railway. Since this is the one vital artery of Siberia, that meant the whole of that enormous territory, together with the Urals and part of the Volga basin, became an area where anti-Bolshevik forces could gather.

The first to take advantage of the situation were the Socialist Revolutionaries. Since the October revolution they had been uncertain and divided about how to meet the Bolshevik threat. On walking out of the Second Congress of Soviets they had declared the seizure of power ‘a crime against homeland and revolution, which means the beginning of civil war’. But they had been reluctant to back this declaration with actions. One inhibiting factor was the fear of finding themselves along with the ‘Kornilovites’ on the side of counterrevolution: they still felt the lingering ties of socialist brotherhood with the Bolsheviks. All the same some Socialist Revolutionaries, without the approval of their Central Committee, did organize the assassination of the German ambassador and attempted to seize power by a coup in the new capital, Moscow, in July 1918. This coup was supplemented by an armed rising in Yaroslavl and one or two other northern towns, timed to coincide with an Allied landing at Arkhangelsk. The landing, however, was postponed, and the risings put down.

Taking advantage of the Czech revolt, the Socialist Revolutionaries set up a government at Samara on the Volga, which they called the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch. As their title implied, they wanted to reconvene the Constituent Assembly on non-Bolshevik territory. They saw themselves as a ‘third force’, between the emerging ‘Red’ and ‘White’ orientations. Their programme declared, for example, that the land was ‘irrevocably the property of the people’, which was not to the taste of most of the generals. In Omsk a Provisional Government headed by the Kadet, P. Vologodsky, promised, on the contrary, that all nationalized property, including land, would be restored to its former owners. The two governments eventually reached a compromise and formed a joint Directory, but this in its turn was overthrown by officers and Cossacks, who objected to its (moderately) left-wing programme, and installed Admiral Kolchak as supreme ruler and ‘commander-in-chief of all the land and naval forces of Russia’. In this way political uncertainty and disunity undermined the efforts of the Whites, while the attempts to found a ‘third force’ all failed, since such a force always needed support from army officers, which meant the Whites.

The emerging White armies did have some degree of foreign support, from Russia’s former allies, especially Britain and France. The effectiveness of this support should not, however, be exaggerated. The truth was that Allied governments, though worried by the incipient power vacuum in Russia, and by the growth of communism there, were not sure what they wanted to achieve, nor of the best means for doing so. In the summer and autumn of 1918 the main aim was to get the Russians back into the war against Germany. When that objective lapsed in November 1918, some Western politicians still took the view that it was necessary to rid Russia of Bolshevism, which might otherwise sweep Europe like the plague (Trotsky’s vision in reverse). The majority, on the other hand, felt that after a long war the first priority must be to bring the troops home at last, and that in any case anti-communism was a policy that would split public opinion at home. Some British soldiers, indeed, mutinied. For that reason, most Allied troops left Russia during 1919, though the Japanese stayed on longer in the Far East, where they had more durable geopolitical interests.

Perhaps the most important contribution the Allies made was to supply the Whites with arms, ammunition and equipment, without which they could scarely have mounted an effective military challenge to the Communists. On the other hand, they never committed enough men to make a decisive difference to the outcome of the war, and, by committing what they did, they opened the Whites to the charge of being unpatriotic, of encouraging foreigners to intervene in Russian affairs. They also gave the Communists impeccable grounds for believing, as Lenin had warned them, that the imperialists were out to crush the young Soviet state. The foundations of many a myth were laid by the Allied intervention.

The Whites were able, at any rate, to mount a very serious threat to the Soviet Republic. Two moments of crisis stand out in particular. The first was in August 1918, when the Czechs and other White forces captured Kazan, on the Volga. This was some four hundred miles from Moscow, but there was no significant force of the infant Red Army ready to interpose itself, so that the capital was very vulnerable. Trotsky, now commissar for war, rushed in what was to become his famous armoured train, to assemble a force to defend the town of Svyazhsk, on the road to Moscow. He succeeded in doing so, and in recapturing Kazan. This was when he issued his command, ‘I give a warning: if a unit retreats, the commissar will be shot, then the commander.’ This crisis gave the decisive impulse towards the creation of a full-scale Red Army, as well as to the declaration of the Red Terror (see below, page 70).

The second period when it seemed as if the Reds might be defeated was in the autumn of 1919. The Volunteer Army, having finally become a formidable force under General Denikin, took advantage of a Cossack rising against the Reds to conquer most of the south and the Ukraine, and by October had advanced as far as Chernigov and Orel, the latter less than two hundred miles from Moscow. At the same time, General Yudenich, using the Baltic region as a base, advanced on Petrograd, and penetrated as far as the suburbs of the city by October. In both cases the Red Army proved equal to the challenge, and was able to drive the attackers back.

The Whites were, then, ultimately unsuccessful. This was partly because of political disunity, as has been suggested: at the very least they failed to act as a focus for all the various anti-Bolshevik forces. They failed even to attract a mass following among the population, though both the workers and the peasants were becoming very disillusioned with Bolshevik rule as it had turned out in practice. The Whites’ political programmes were vague and inadequate: they did nothing to reassure the peasants that the land they had won in 1917 would not be taken away from them again in the event of a White victory. They failed to offer the workers a secure status for the trade unions, factory committees and other new representative organizations of 1917. In fact their only consistent political message was ‘Russia one and indivisible’–which of course alienated the non-Russian nationalities who might otherwise have been inclined to support the Whites as Bolshevik nationality policy began to reveal itself in practice.

All this might not have mattered so much if the Whites had demonstrated by their behaviour towards the population that they were fairer and more responsible rulers than the Bolsheviks. But this was not the case. Dependent for quartering and food supplies on the regions where they were fighting, they requisitioned and pillaged less systematically, but scarcely less ruthlessly, than the Bolsheviks. They never glorified in terror as a system of rule, but they often applied it nevertheless. Moreover, the White generals continually lost control of their subordinates, so that, even if Kolchak and Denikin were themselves morally blameless, they proved powerless to prevent their armies committing excesses. As Kolchak wrote to his wife: ‘Many of the Whites are no better than the Bolsheviks. They have no conscience, no sense of honour or duty, only a cynical spirit of competition and money-grabbing.’ That was no recipe for winning a civil war, especially against opponents who were such masters of political propaganda.

The creation of the Red Army was one of the clearest examples of the way in which the Communists reversed the slogans of the revolution. The Bolsheviks had come to power by undermining the old army. Insofar as they had thought about what might replace it, they had envisaged an armed people’s militia, on the model of the Red Guards. This was what made the Left Communists’ programme for a ‘revolutionary war’ against the Germans so logical and appealing. Even for some time after Lenin had secured the defeat of that idea at Brest-Litovsk, the regime left itself with only a small new army, the so-called Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, structured on the principles the Bolsheviks had proclaimed in 1917: there were no insignia or ranks, and each unit was run by an elected committee, one of whose jobs was to choose officers. Military discipline was recognized only in active combat, and even there unit commanders had to operate for the time being without the sanction of the death penalty.

This structure, however, did not last for long. During the confusion of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the Germans actually resumed their advance for a time. This was a cruel reminder of just how helpless and quixotic the new Russian army was. Trotsky decided to scrap it, and to rebuild on more traditional principles. He set up a Supreme Military Council, under the tsarist General Bonch-Bruevich, to organize the task of creating a new army. A network of military commissariats was distributed over Red-controlled territory to raise recruits, at first voluntarily, then, after the Czech revolt, by compulsory conscription. Most of the Red Guard and militia units were disbanded as unreliable, with a few party members drawn from each to constitute the nucleus of newly formed and conventionally constituted regiments. But who was to command the new units? The party did not possess anywhere near enough men with the necessary degree of military training and experience to lead troops in modern warfare. With Lenin’s support, Trotsky turned to officers of the old Imperial Army, at least those who had not fled to serve with the Whites: their insignia and ranks were not restored, but otherwise they were given the disciplinary powers to which they had been accustomed, up to and including the death penalty. There was no longer any nonsense about ‘soldiers’ committees’: they were simply abolished and replaced by ‘political commissars’. These were party-approved appointees, placed at the side of the officers–some of whom, at least initially, were reluctant to serve the Reds–to ensure their loyalty, pass on political instructions and raise the level of political consciousness among the conscripts. The commissar was explicitly not subordinated to the officer but was his equal, with the right to execute him if he committed treason towards the Red Army.

Trotsky’s methods aroused much criticism, both in and outside the party. In VTsIK the Menshevik, Dan, exclaimed, ‘Thus the Napoleons make their appearance’, while inside the party a so-called Military Opposition called for a return to the militia principle and the dismissal of old-regime officers. However that might be, Trotsky did create an effective fighting organization under ultimate party control. Considering how hastily it was put together, and the magnitude of the tasks it faced, the Red Army fought remarkably well, and it can probably be asserted that morale inside it was better than in any other section of the Russian population. Its troops were, of course, better fed than almost anyone else at the time, and service in the Red Army was an excellent means of advancing oneself in the new society. Hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in the Red Army joined the party, and some of them later advanced through it to positions of power and responsibility in the new society. Trotsky, in fact, did his best to ensure that Red soldiers were given special training and promoted to command positions as soon as possible. By the end of the civil war, these new promotees constituted two-thirds of the officer corps: among them were some destined to become household names during the Second World War. All this had a profound effect upon the social structure of the party (see below, pages 86–7).

The revolutionary regime’s other main instrument was the Cheka. As we have seen, this was established in such a way that it was not subject to the supervision either of the party or of the soviets. It arose outside even the rough and ready legal norms which the new regime set before itself. It might be said, indeed, that the Cheka directly embodied Lenin’s ambivalence about democracy and authoritarianism. ‘The workers and soldiers’, he exhorted the presidium of the Petrograd Soviet in January 1918, ‘must realize that no one will help them except themselves. Malpractices are blatant, profiteering is monstrous, but what have the masses of soldiers and peasants done to combat this? Unless the masses are aroused to spontaneous action, we won’t get anywhere. … Until we apply terror to speculators–shooting on the spot–we won’t get anywhere.’