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Episode 10.92: Long Live the Bolsheviks, Death to the Communists

Last time we followed the Polish-Soviet War to the ceasefire that effectively ended the fighting in mid-October 1920. This week, we need to turn our attention back to event inside Russia, because one of the big reasons Lenin was so keen to bring the Polish-Soviet War to an end before winter set in was because things were not going so great on the home front. In the three years since the October Revolution, the people of Russia had endured enormous hardships, and born often horrendous treatment by the Communist regime, because they all faced enemies foreign and domestic, which threatened to overthrow the Communists. And as we’ve seen over and over again, for all the faults of the Communists, the workers and peasants of Russia always seem to rate them as the lesser evil.

Well, by the middle of 1920, most of those enemies seemed to be defeated, and with no greater evil to hold up in comparison, the workers and peasants of Russia appraised the Communists on their own merits with an undistracted eye and found them wanting. And so the Communists now faced threats not from White Armies or western allies or rival neighbors, but from their own people.

But before we get into all that, we do need to wrap up one major loose end, because throughout 1920 there was still a White army out there in the field, keeping the flame of civil war burning. After the failure of the Moscow Directive campaign in 1919 General Denikin resigned his command and departed Russia. And he named as his successor General Pyotr Wrangel, who had been one of his best generals, and who had since established a base in Crimea, making the peninsula the last bit of territory under White control. In the spring of 1920, Wrangel had about 30 to 35,000 troops left under his command, but he appeared at least on the surface to understand that the biggest reason the Whites had been losing the civil war was due to their political strategies, not their military strategies. The problem, as I just mentioned, is that the people of Russia always seem to consider the Whites to be a greater evil than the Reds. So he declared his intention to wage a different kind of war. “It is not by triumphal march from Crimea to Moscow that Russia can be freed,” he told the press from his base in Crimea, “but by the creation, on no matter how small a fragment of Russian soil, of such a government, with such conditions of life, that the Russian people now groaning under the Red yoke will inevitably submit to its attractions.”

What this meant was showing the people that the Whites did not represent the restoration of the old tsarist regime — and more importantly, that they did not stand for undoing all the land redistribution that had gone on since 1917. And he later said in his memoirs, “The question had to be settled for an important psychological reason. We had to tear the enemy’s principle weapon to propaganda from him. We had to allay the peasant suspicions that our object in fighting the Reds was none other than to restore the rights of the great landed proprietors and to take reprisals against those who had infringed on those rights.”

So, okay. So far, so good. He’s got a good bead on what’s gone wrong. But even as Wrangel asserted the necessity of demonstrating their benign intention and their understanding of the needs of the people of Russia, the officers and politicians and officials who surrounded him failed in this basic task. So for example, they finally did publish a land law in late May, that at least on its surface appeared to be something that would reconcile them to the realities of post-revolutionary Russia, but in pages and pages of fine print the land transfers would require annual payments to the dispossessed former landlords that might take a generation or more to pay off. It also looked like in many cases people wouldn’t even get that far. There were a thousand tiny loopholes written in that would allow former owners to exempt their specific properties from all these transfers. So even as Wrangel trumpeted the need to recognize the needs of the peasants, the people around him just couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge the revolution in land. More visibly, they couldn’t bring themselves to play nice, to demonstrate that they were not out to take reprisals against those who had supported the revolution. So in Crimea, Wrangel’s government initiated a low grade White Terror, aimed at anyone who was even mildly critical of the Whites. They imprisoned thousands of workers and peasants for suspected Bolshevik sympathies, hundreds were summarily executed for alleged subversive activities. Included in these roundups were also staunchly liberal journalists and professionals who had been loudly anti-Communist since 1917 and had spent the last few years serving in the ranks of the Whites.

But the men around Wrangel lumped them all together and refuse to recognize a difference between liberalism and communism. So if the goal was to deliver, “such a government with such conditions of life that the Russian people now groaning under the red yoke will inevitably submit to its attractions,” then they were failing miserably, and would thus fail miserably. On the military front, Wrangel initially planned no offensive operations. He just wanted to hold onto Crimea and grow political support slowly and steadily by offering a superior alternative to the Communists. His army numbered in the tens of thousands, against a Red Army that was now peaking at 5 million soldiers by the summer of 1920. But his calculations changed when the Poles invaded Ukraine. With the Red Army now forced to turn its attention to their western front. Their southern. Front was clearly vulnerable.

So on June sixth, Wrangel launched a little military operation, moving troops, both by land and sea up into mainland Russia, aiming to move further into the region around the Don River. The Reds of course were so focused on their war with Poland, that the Whites got away with this. And for whatever marginal gain it offered him militarily, it cost him politically. Old patriotic officers like General Brusilov were appalled Wrangel would be so cynical as to launch an attack while Russia fought for its life against Poland. So as the Russians mobilized under patriotic banners in the spring and summer of 1920, it was easy to paint Wrangel as a tool of foreign powers fighting mostly for his own self aggrandizement at the cost of mother Russia herself. If he intended to win the civil war by playing politics, Wrangel was off to a terrible start.

Now when you step back and look at the big picture, it is pretty wild that even at this late hour, the Whites couldn’t muster a superior alternative to the red yoke. Because the red yoke was getting awfully uncomfortable, very heavy and often fatal. The policies the Communists had pursued since 1917 to survive the various crises they faced were becoming truly intolerable. Now granted, after six plus years of world war, civil war, and social revolution, it is not fair to lay the blame for the devastation of the Russian economy, or the suffering of the Russian people, solely at the feet of the Communists. But as the military emergencies passed in 1920, people did want to know what the Communists were going to do about all this. Were they going to continue the oppressive regime of war communism, or transition to some new policies? Because while the Reds had always represented the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils… is still evil. And so the Reds were going to have to start providing better answers than, hey, at least we’re better than the Whites.

The general collapse of the Russian economy since the beginning of World War I was vast and deep. The material devastation of its industry and infrastructure had taken Russia back practically to the days before the Witte Boom of the 1890s. Crisscrossing armies, political mismanagement, general unrest, chaos, sabotage, and accidents had left Russia’s industrial sector in complete ruins. Coal production was just 25% what it had been in 1913. Oil fields were operating at a third of their pre-war level. Mining operations for other vital resources were just a fraction of what they had been. The Allied naval blockades that were only just now beginning to let up had prevented the importation of technology, machinery, replacement parts, and a host of other necessary goods that Russia had relied upon to build up its industrial sector in the first place.

So factories that might otherwise have been running had to cut back on production due to a shortage of both supplies and fuel. Exacerbating all this was the devastation to the railroads: various armies, guerrilla partisans, and terrorists cells had destroyed bridges, torn up rail lines and blown up engines. This was on top of the virtual cessation of regular maintenance and upkeep. So the transportation networks of Russia were running at just a fraction of what they had been before the war. So even if there had been an abundance of fuel and materials, it was just extremely difficult to get anything anywhere else. So by the end of 1920, this all added up to the fact that industrial output in Russia was running at just 20% what it had been in 1913.

All of this meant the industrial working class of Russia, the political and economic base of Communism, was in terrible shape. Life in the cities was horrendous. The scarcity of food and fuel and the necessities of life was at least as bad as it had been in the lead up to the February Revolution. The Communists had continued to print paper rubles with reckless abandon, making wages paid in money effectively worthless. By the end of 1920, the purchasing power of wages for factory workers in Petrograd had fallen to less than 10% what they had been before World War I — a time, let’s not forget, when the cities were constantly on the verge of revolutionary insurrection. Now mostly workers now had to be paid with ration cards for food or allotment of physical goods that could then be bartered for other things, because Russia was now operating almost entirely on an in-kind economy. And that was even if you could get work to be paid for. With factories shutting down or reducing to part-time production, hundreds of thousands of workers were left underemployed or unemployed. Unable to survive in the city, they mostly decamped in the direction of their ancestral villages. Between October 1917 and August 1920, the population of Petrograd went from over 2 million to just 750,000. Moscow, meanwhile, lost 50% of its population over the same period. As you may recall, communism is supposed to come about when the unstoppable growth of modern industry turns all the rural peasants into urban proletarians. Well, after three years of Communist revolution in Russia, the exact opposite had happened. The urban proletariat was turning back into rural peasants, and this was going to be a problem for the communist regime in Moscow.

Those workers who remained workers, meanwhile, were getting awfully pissed at where the communist regime in Moscow was taking the revolution that had allegedly been waged on their behalf. The initial Bolshevik decrees of late 1917 had promised worker empowerment, control over factories, and a general democratization of management, but this had given way to a system of nationalized ownership, centralized management, and the re-introduction of hierarchical systems where the boss has made all the rules and the workers were supposed to just put their heads down and comply. Now for years all of this had been justified by the never-ending emergency of civil war, because everybody did understand that it would be worse if the Whites restored the capitalists to power. But now this threat was receding and the justification for mistreatment of the workers was receding with it. And so in 1920, labor unrest started to grow. In the first half of 1920, 3/4s of all Russian factories were hit by some kind of strike. And their angry resentment intensifie dwhen the Communist authorities greeted these strikes not with friendly understanding, but angry crackdowns. Striking workers were punished harshly. They were arrested. Their leaders were often shot by the Cheka, who in the eyes of the working classes were now becoming virtually indistinguishable from the tsar’s Okhrana — except perhaps that the Cheka was more brutal.

And the thing is, the Bolsheviks had never intended to implement the system of worker owned and operated factories that their declarations of 1917 seemed to indicate. And in retrospect, we can all see clearly that those declarations were mostly about securing support from the workers for the October Revolution. But some members of the Communist Party, particularly those around Trotsky, now laid plans to move beyond even the basic nationalization and centralization program. In Trotsky’s estimation, the one institution that had really shined over the past several years was the Red Army. Trotsky believed that the military might now serve as the model for the economy as a whole; that if they wanted to avoid capitalist trappings like wages and markets and profit to drive economic production, that a good alternative might be adopting the methods, discipline and organization of the army. Trotsky firmly believed that had the Red Army continued to rely on volunteers to fill its ranks — an army-wide democracy to make decisions — that they would have lost the civil war. That while the move to forced conscription, professionalization, and iron discipline may not have been popular, it had been the thing that brought them victory.

So now Trotsky envisioned a similar move in the civilian economy. He wanted to make the central government akin to a general staff planning campaigns and battles, and organizing the people and to companies and brigades and divisions to carry out orders. Trotsky envisioned the militarization of the economy in quite literal terms: if shoes needed to be manufactured or railroads built or timber cut down, then Soviet leaders could draw up a plan to go win these battles on what was now referred to as ‘the economic front.’ So as the Red Army campaigns against Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin wound down at the beginning of 1920, Trotsky reorganized soldiers who were on the verge of demobilization into what were called labor armies. The first labor army was formed in January 1920, the second labor army formed in February. They were put to work chopping timber, repairing railroads, procuring food, all under strict military discipline.

Trotsky’s plans, however, were not universally embraced by his fellow comrades, and indeed a growing number sympathized with the workers, who were, after all, supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the socialist revolution, and instead seemed to be as maltreated and exploited as ever, and were now going to be conscripted against their will into an economic war. The militarization scheme would only make things worse. Would a justified strike be marked down as disobeying orders? Would somebody who slept in for work be considered a desert, her and shot on sight? This was all crazy. So a group loosely organized itself into what we now call the Workers’ Opposition, those who wanted to defend the proletariat as human beings, as workers, rather than as some abstract entity that justified the Communist regime. As a practical objective, the Workers’ Opposition focused on maintaining the independence and autonomy of labor unions. Now, leaders like Trotsky now treated unions as an anachronisms — they were necessary under capitalism to organize the workers and grow power. But now that the Communist Party was in power, and they were the party of the workers, unions were unnecessary. They should in fact be subordinated to the state, because the state was after all run by the party of the workers. Now, intellectually, this all sounds very neat, but those Communist Party members who had come from the working classes rather than from the intelligentsia were not so convinced. A guy called Alexander Shliapnikov, who had risen as a labor leader in Petrograd’s Vyborg district to become the first commissar of Labor, was at the forefront of this movement. He was joined by Sergei Medvedev, who had started working in factories as a teenager back before the revolution of 1905, and then at the beginning of 1921 they were joined by Alexandra Kollontai, who was not exactly working class, but who had become a leading critic inside the inner circle of the Communist Party against the kind of authoritarian bureaucracy that appeared to be setting in. The Workers’ Opposition plan to fight tooth and nail to prevent all of this from becoming permanent.

Now, if the workers in the city were getting disillusioned with the Communists, the peasants out in rural Russia were already well past furious. They had been enduring forced requisitioning for years, and as the wars continued and the economy collapsed, things only got worse. Confrontations between peasants and the food detachments were often bitter and bloody. Soldiers ransacked villages, abusing men, women, and children. They held family members for ransom until withheld grain was produced. This often led the peasants to simply stop working the fields to produce anything more than what they needed for their basic survival, because the food detachments were only supposed to be carting off their surpluses. If they didn’t make surpluses, there wouldn’t be anything to cart off. This contributed to a general collapse in the agricultural sector, paralleling the collapse in the industrial sector. By 1920, the amount of land that was being harvested in Russia had dropped to about 60% of what it had been prior to World War I. Now general chaos, death, famine, and crisscrossing armies had done their bit to drive so much land out of cultivation, but with the realities of war communism leaving the peasants without any incentive whatsoever to grow more food than they absolutely needed, they just stopped doing it.

This unfortunately caused even worse problems. The Communists now took it for granted that the peasants were deliberately hiding their excess grain, and so they set their demands according. So though, yes, the peasants did absolutely hide food and fodder, in the big picture, food detachments were now coming in and calling surplus things that were not actually surplus. It was just the food they needed to live on. Lenin later admitted as much, and said, “The essence of war communism was that we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses, and sometimes not only the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasant needed for feed. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the workers.”

So obviously the leadership in Moscow considers this all regrettable but necessary; the peasants considered it infuriating and cruel. And so they started fighting back. In 1918, roughly 2000 food requisitioners were killed by angry peasants. In 1919, that number grew to 5000. By 1920, it had grown to 8,000, and general revolt was very much in the air.

Contributing to the peasant anger was the Communist response to the agricultural shortfalls. And that was the introduction of collective farms. Now we are not yet to the truly infamous collectivization process, but as we’ve previously discussed, the Bolsheviks had always been aiming for nationalization of all the land, and centralized administration of large industrial farms. They believed that was the future of post-revolutionary Russia. Their adoption of the SR land program, which called for giving the land directly to the peasants, had always been a temporary program to win peasant support in the wake of the October Revolution. Lenin absolutely admitted as much at the time. Now, initially the peasants very much took possession of the land in their neighborhoods, but as the Communist Party found its footing, and the Soviet regime entrenched itself a bit, they started holding back certain estates, and reorganizing them to run as collective farms, often worked by those unemployed laborers who were fleeing the cities. By December 1920, there were 16,000 state run farms encompassing nearly 10 million acres of land, with 1 million people working them. All of this was an affront to the local peasants, who expected and demanded to take that land over.

In 1920, the low grade resistance and skirmishing started blowing up into much bigger rebellions. Hundreds of little local uprisings broke out across Soviet territory. In Ukraine, around the Volga River, over in Western Siberia, down in the Caucuses. It really looks like as soon as the peasants were confident that the Whites were gone and no longer threatened to overthrow the Revolution completely, that it was safe to start resisting the Communists, to start fighting over what post-revolutionary Russia ought to look like. And as we’ve seen before, they often rose up under banners like “Soviets without Communism.” But always and everywhere, they demand it an end to the forest requisitioning and the food detachments. Moderate demands were for a regularly assessed tax, with the peasants then allowed to trade or sell whatever surplus was left over. More radical demands were for the complete overthrow of the Communists. In plenty of places, the rebranding of the Bolsheviks as the Communists had never been fully appreciated, and so they would rise up shouting things like “long live the Bolsheviks, death to the Communists!” because they believed they were two separate groups — that the Bolsheviks had given them land, and now these treacherous Communists were trying to take it away.

The most immediately threatening of these peasant uprisings broke out in the Tambov region Southeast of Moscow. This is the spot I mentioned a few episodes back that was so alienated by their treatment at the hands of the Whites in 1919 that the locals offered the Whites no support against the Reds, even though they were going to launch a huge uprising against the Reds just a year later.

Well, here we are, it’s a year later.

The uprising started in August 1920, when food detachments came around demanding allotments that would leave the locals with just about 10% of what they would actually need to survive. When the Red soldiers got violent and beat an old man to death in front of an entire village, the villagers got real mad. They were really, really mad because the grain that they had been abused into handing over was then taken to a nearby train depot, where it sat… and rotted, on account of how crummy the train system had become. As the uprising in Tambov spread, old guard SRs started coming out of the woodwork to take over. The most important of these leaders was Alexander Antonov, a radical Left SR who had been driven underground after his party’s break with the Bolsheviks, and who had prosecuted a low grade terrorist campaign ever since. He had been sentenced to death by the Communists, and had attained a certain cult status as he managed to continuously outwit, outfox, and escape his Communist Pursuers. As there were only about 3000 total Red Army soldiers garrisoning the whole province, Antonov was able to effectively overwhelm both them and the initial reinforcements sent in to support them. By the time the fall of 1920 arrived, Antonov’s insurrectionary army was numbering in the tens of thousands, and they were waging a full-blown and highly effective guerrilla war. Their movement would still be growing unchecked by the end of 1920, and they organized a political apparatus to go along with it called the League of Working Peasants. This league issued a manifesto in December 1920 that demanded not just free trade and free movement of goods, and of course the end of grain requisitioning but also a litany of SR inspired ideas, points that the Bolsheviks had once upon a time readily endorsed, but had long since abandoned. For example, the convening of a democratically elected constituent assembly. Worker control of factories. Self-determination for all nationalities of the former Russian Empire. Guarantees of political and civil liberties. And of course, the full implementation of the law on socialization of the land — which is to say, confirming the land decree of 1917 as the law of the land, and abandoning nationalization, centralization, and collectivization.

Antanov’s rebels in Tambov fought under the Red flag, and they clearly posed a major threat to the Communists going into 1921, because unlike the Whites, they offered an extremely popular socialist program for the future of Russia, one that might tend to make the Communists the greater of two evils.

To wrap this up today, we’ll go back to where we started with Pyotr Wrangel’s little White Army hovering around down in the south. Now, since this is about to be the end of them, I don’t want to leave without noting one last time how extremely funny it is that even with all of this popular anger against the Communists, people being so angry at them that they are going into open rebellion, that none of those insurrectionary groups even considered joining forces with the Whites. They just wouldn’t do it. Because even now, the Reds may be bad, but the Whites were even worse. And so Wrangel’s little push up out of Crimea never went anywhere or accomplished anything. His strategy to win the war politically did not so much fall on deaf ears, as on the ears of people who could still hear loud and clear what the Whites represented. And so, he garnered no popular support. Nobody new joined him; nobody old, rejoined him. And so as the Polish-Soviet War cooled off in October 1920, the Red Army could turn its attentions south with an overwhelming vengeance. They were able to turn 130,000 men against just 35,000 Whites, and easily push them back into Crimea. The frontal brunt of this Red attack was joined by Nestor Makhno’s Black Army, even though up in Ukraine, the Reds and the Blacks were already at each other’s throats again; that is how much they collectively hated the Whites. So after falling back, the Whites held the geographically defensible isthmus into Crimea, but Wrangel had concluded the one shot he had of emerging victorious in the civil war had now been fired, and it had missed.

The defense of Crimea was entirely about buying time for his people to evacuate. In late October and early November 1920, 150,000 refugees congregated at several Crimean ports and boarded more than a hundred British, French, and Russian ships, most of them bound for Constantinople. After everyone got away, Wrangel himself boarded a ship on November the 11th, a ship poetically dubbed the General Kornilov. And like Denikin before him, Wrangel departed Russia for permanent exile. The last White Army had given up.

A sad epilogue to this story is that General Brusilov, who had been genuinely irritated at Wrangel for attacking during the war against Poland, and was himself living proof that the Reds accepted patriotic defections, the Communists distributed flyers in Crimea over Brusilov’s signature telling officers if they did not evacuate but stayed in Russia and joined the Reds, that they would be fine. They would be integrated into the army. A couple of hundred did so — they believed what was written in the flyer — but when the Red Army showed up, they were all arrested and summarily shot. One last little atrocity in a civil war defined by mutual atrocities.

So going into the winter of 1920-1921, the military threats to Soviet Russia were really receding into the rearview mirror. And the main threat to the Communists was now from all of those worker and peasant uprisings. Now with the military emergencies over, something was going to have to give, but unfortunately it would not give soon enough. And next week, the greatest threat to the Communists would not be their ideological and class enemies, nor even the peasants and workers who had supported the revolution without ever being card carrying Bolsheviks, but instead, from their closest friends and most steadfast allies. No single group had been more important to the Bolsheviks, more stalwart in their support, who boasted more impeccable revolutionary credentials than the sailors of Kronstadt.

But next week, their patience too will finally snap. And they will break, angry and disillusioned into revolt.

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Episode 10.91: The Battle of Warsaw

Last time we saw how Red victories over the Whites and the Russian Civil War paved the way not to peace, but to war of another kind, this time war with Poland. There was in fact a nearly seamless transition from the one conflict to the other, as the officers and soldiers who had pushed back Kolchak and Denikin were transferred over to the long neglected western front to face the ambitions of Poland. The two sides and the resulting Polish-Soviet War had mutually exclusive visions for the future of eastern Europe. The Russian Communists, riding high on their victory over the Whites, rekindled their dream of rolling the proletarian revolution west towards Germany, and they plan to establish a network of Soviet socialist republics under Moscow’s leadership.

The Poles, meanwhile, wanted to expand their borders east, rebuild the old boundaries of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, and bring almost all of Eastern Europe under Warsaw’s leadership. With the Russians still untangling their civil war in the spring of 1920, the Polish army under Józef Piłsudski launched a daring offensive that saw them capture most of Eastern Ukraine, and by the first week of May, see their armies marching into Kiev.

Now, though the Poles were pretty much going to stop there — like they were not threatening to March on Moscow and overthrow the Communist government — their advance still represented a dire threat to the Russian Communists, both from their national perspective as Russians, and international perspective as Communists. As I mentioned last week, they viewed the Polish War as the third campaign of the entente and believed Britain, France, and the other Allies were using the Poles to fight Russian Communism as they had previously and unsuccessfully used Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin. So the Polish advance was really taken to be the advance of the Allies, who would then install pliant puppets on the borders, threatening both Russia’s traditional territorial integrity and their ongoing socialist revolution.

Now in general, the Soviet government in Moscow had struggled to truly rally the people to fight for their side, to get them to fight for the ideological program of Communism. As we’ve seen, the best they were ever able to do during the Russian Civil War was get people to say, oh, well, when it comes down to it, I guess the Reds are the lesser of two evils. So, in facing the Poles, the government in Moscow focus less on political ideology and far more on good old fashioned patriotism. Their papers trumpeted the threat to Russia posed by a foreign invader, and called upon the people of Russia to rally not so much in an ideological defense of the revolution, but in a patriotic defense of Mother Russia. Joining the Reds in this effort was now old General Aleksei Brusilov. Brusilov was one of the few great military heroes to emerge from World War I, and his word still carried a lot of weight, both among his former fellow officers of the tsarist army, and the common people of Russia. Brusilov had spent the last few years laying low, reconciled, if not precisely sympathetic to, the Bolshevik revolution. But in the spring of 1920, he emerged to publicly encourage his military colleagues and the citizens of Russia generally to set aside their political differences and join the Red Army. On May the 30th, Brusilov published an appeal in Pravda that was formally addressed to all former officers, wherever they may be.

And in this address, he said, “Forget the wrongs you have suffered. It is now your duty to defend our beloved Russia with all your strength, and to give your lives to save her from irretrievable subjugation.” Now, this is a bit of an overstatement, but Brusilov’s point was generally that the Russian Civil War was kind of being put in the rear view mirror and they were all going to have to move forward together, and right now they faced a threat together, the threat posed by a resurgent Poland. Brusilov himself was then appointed chairman of a new advisory council of military officers, and he would remain in the service of the Revolutionary Military Council until his death in 1926.

The patriotic calls in the spring of 1920 proved highly successful, and the Reds quickly raised an 100,000 soldiers, as well as 14,000 officers to join the war against Poland. The usefulness of intermixing Russian patriotism with Russian communism was plainly evident, and it would be used to great effect in the years and decades to come. There is a reason Stalin called the war against the Nazis the Great Patriotic War.

Before this patriotic war, the Communists mobilized a huge army on two fronts: one called the western group mobilized in Belarus, and the other, known as the southwestern group, in Ukraine. In total, they got together 400,000 for the western front and 350,000 in the southwestern front, although how many of those were actually combat ready was debatable both then and now. The foremost task of the soldiers on these two fronts was to run the Polish army back out of the disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine. But if all went well, they were to continue pushing to the outer boundaries of the former Russian Empire and capture Warsaw. With a communist aligned government installed in Poland, the revolutionary landbridge to Germany would be established. And though the Spartacist Uprising had ended in demoralizing failure, in 1920, Weimar Germany remained a chaotic mess of revolutionaries, reactionaries, and separatists, with the final political outcome of the fall of the German Empire still very much in doubt. As Pravda trumpeted in May 1920 under the headline “Go West,” they said, “Through the corpse of White Poland lies the way to the world inferno. On bayonets, we will carry happiness and peace to working humanity.” Because you know, happiness and peace always comes at the point of a bayonet.

The Red Army launched its counter offensives against the Polish Army in two staggered waves. First, down in Ukraine at the end of May, they opened up a battle for control of the Dnieper River. The Polish forces in the region may have nominally held Kiev, but they were way out ahead of themselves, and far too overextended. Plus their supposedly local Ukrainian ally, Symon Petliura, led only a small and relatively insignificant army, and he enjoyed no local influence to speak of. The Red Army, meanwhile, was led from the front by General Budyonny, and his First Cavalry Army, those guys who had proven so decisively effective during the campaign against Denikin the year before. Budyonny won a critical breakthrough in the lines on June the fifth, and Pilsudski had to order the evacuation of Kiev on June 10th. Now Pilsudski had planned to send forces from Ukraine up north to reinforce the defensive lines in Belarus, but the Red Army successes in Ukraine precluded that possibility. Over the next 10 weeks, the Red Army in Ukraine steadily advanced towards the western city of Lviv, where they expected to soon stand poised to join their comrades moving freely across Belarus for a mass convergence on Warsaw.

The Red Army advancing through Belarus was moving just as easily. The Polish defensive plans called for occupying the vast networks of the German trenches leftover from World War I — which remembers only 18 months in the rear view mirror. But they did not have sufficient manpower and they were spread far too thin. The Reds launched their offensive on July 5th, and quickly sent the Polish army tumbling backward. After breaking through the first line of Polish defense, the Reds recaptured Minsk on July 11th, then they broke through the second line of the Polish defenses and captured Vilnius on July 14th. Then the third Polish line of defense fell, and the Reds captured Grodno at the end of July. Marching with bold confidence, the Red Army now stood just to the east of the so-called Curzon Line, the line the Allied Powers had marked down as the eastern border of Poland. Not recognizing the validity of this demarcation at all, the Red Army simply continued to advance west, and orders went out confirming that their final destination was now Warsaw.

As the Red Army marched, the Soviet leadership’s confidence soared. Lenin became positively giddy at the idea that the depressing setbacks for international revolution in the immediate wake of World War I were not proving to be mere hiccups. He could once again trumpet worldwide socialism as a historical inevitability. In Pravda, Nikolai Bukharin wrote that they would move beyond Warsaw right up to London and Paris. And for every mile further the Red Army marched west, the exhortations to patriotic defense of the motherland against a foreign invader grew weaker, and the triumphant declarations of the revolutionary advance of socialism grew louder. They started taking the capture of Warsaw for granted, and Communist plans now looked ahead to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. The summer of 1920 was the last true high point of the belief that Russia would be the launchpad of the international revolution, something to be aggressively exported abroad, rather than merely protected and cultivated at home.

The brief spell of being dizzy with success just so happened to coincide with the Second Congress of the Communist International, which met in Moscow from July 19 to August 7th. Now, unlike the extremely ad hoc First Congress, which was not even sure if it could count itself as a founding congress, the Second Congress had 218 delegates, including representatives from Germany and France, as well as 30 delegates representing Asian countries like India, China, Indonesia, and Korea. Now Russia was still under a general Allied blockade, and delegates mostly had to sneak their way across the various borders using smugglers or false passports. Once assembled though, Lenin proposed to them 21 conditions for membership in the Communist International, which was going to set up the organizational basis for the final split with the Social Democrats and other moderate socialist groups. And more than anything, Lenin wanted this Congress to be the final divorce between the Communists and the Social Democrats. So point 7 read:

The parties that wish to belong to the Communist International have the obligation of recognizing the necessity of a complete break with reformism and centrist politics, and of spreading this break among the widest possible circles of their party members.

Then point 15 read:

Parties that have still retain their old social democratic programs have the obligation of changing those programs as quickly as possible, and working out a new communist program corresponding to the particular conditions in the country, and in accordance with the decisions of the Communist International.

The point was to greet a strong, clear, independent and uncompromising communist identity that would lead them away from the traps of reformism and social chauvinism, which in their minds had been the fatal virus that had infected the Second International. Representing the appearance of the delegates from the Asian countries, the Second Congress of the Communist international is also where we first start getting the idea floated that maybe the path that global communist revolution did not lay west, towards Berlin and Paris, but instead east, into places like China and India, where they would be able to completely destabilize the European imperial order. The delegates agreed to support national liberation movements in all their forms, whether if they were explicitly communist or not, because destabilizing European imperialism could only help the larger communist cause. While in Moscow, the delegates eagerly followed daily reports from the front lines of the Polish-Soviet War as the Red Army approached Warsaw. It led them all to believe that this new Communist International might be on the verge of completely displacing the newly formed League of Nations, which they obviously considered nothing more than a front for imperialist capitalism.

Meanwhile, in the corridors of western power — that is the headquarters of all those imperialist capitalists — the leaders of the Allies were getting awfully frustrated by the people of eastern Europe, because they seem to be taking this whole notion of self-determination literally. Neither the French, nor the British were enthused about all these border wars in eastern and central Europe, and they were very put out by countries like Poland, which were meant to be little more than grateful clients states of Britain and France, but who ignored them and chased their own ambitions. So yes, the French provided the Poles with money and munitions and officers to fight the Russians, but they were very annoyed by the fact that all of this aid was being used for offensive operations beyond the Curzon Line. Aggressive Polish ambitions in Ukraine and Belarus and Lithuania had invited this counter offensive by the Russian Communists who might now march all the way to the border with Germany and completely disrupt the post-war political settlements the Allies had put in place, and maybe even drag them into a war with Russia that neither the French, nor especially the British, wanted. With the Polish army falling back and the Red Army advancing, the Poles now went to the allies and asked for help negotiating an end to the conflict, which the Allies agreed to on the condition that Polish forces withdraw to the border intended to delineate their eastern ethnographic frontier, arbitrarily determined to be the aforementioned Curzon Line. Further, the Poles had to agree that all territorial disputes in the borderlands between Poland and Russia would be left to the Allies to decide. They would be the ones who decided who went where, not the people on the ground.

On July 11th, British foreign secretary George Curzon — he of the Curzon Line — sent a telegram to Russian Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin requesting the Red Army halt at the Bug River and accept it as a temporary border with Poland, implying that the allies would actively aid the Poles to defend this line if Russia kept advancing. On July 17th, Chicherin rejected the British mediation offer, and declared that Russia would only negotiate directly with Poland. Frankly, the Allies had no business meddling in eastern European affairs and had no right to go around drawing boundaries. Both the British and the French responded to this with more definitive promises of aid to the Polish Army, and at the end of July, they sent what is called the Interallied Mission to Poland. The Allied governments assumed that this mission would take a leading role in the Polish War, that they would become something of a defacto general staff of the Polish Army, but when they got there, they found that the Poles, for all their aid requests, were uninterested in simply taking orders from British or French officers. And the French managed to bungle their relationship with the Poles even further, and they encouraged the Polish government to recognize and support the Russian Whites in Crimea now led by Pyotr Wrangel. We’ll talk more about this next week, but Russian White policy continued to deny the right of independent Poland to even exist, so the French were not exactly winning friends and allies among the Polish leadership.

The Red Army, meanwhile, captured Brest on July 29th, and then reach the Bug River on July 30th. Now the Bug River does have some historical significance as a loose geographical dividing line between east and west, with those east of the river tending to be Orthodox Christian, while those on the west side of the river being Catholic. And it meant that if the Red Army crossed this river, that they would be moving into territory that was well beyond their cultural limits. Suddenly the framework of this being a patriotic war of national defense hopped over to the other side. Whereas in the spring, Russian patriotism was mobilized to defend against the foreign invasion of the Poles, now it was Polish patriotism being mobilized to defend against foreign invasion by the Russians.

Now like any army of this type, the Red Army attempted to portray itself as a liberating army, freeing the peasants and the workers of Poland from the clutches of the old landed aristocracy and the new exploitive capitalists. But, as always, liberation at bayonet point is a pretty tough sell, especially because the Russians were now the ones with long extended supply lines operating well beyond their own home frontiers and forced to feed and supply themselves by local requisitioning. So, when the Red Army showed up, the local Polish population did not see liberators, but oppressors and occupiers. As Lenin later lamented to German Communist Clara Zetkin, ” They had to requisition bread from the Polish peasants and middle classes. And in the Red Army, the Poles saw enemies, not brothers and liberators. The Poles thought and acted not in a social revolutionary way, but as nationalists. The revolution in Poland which we counted on did not take place. What happened instead was that the Polish peasants and workers did not rally to the Red Army, but to the Polish Army.”

Now, originally the Russian plan was for the armies they had operating Ukraine to come up and support the western army advancing on Warsaw. But this seemingly sensible and obvious approach was preempted by communist overconfidence. Still believing that the revolution in Poland they counted on would come to pass, and obviously lulled into believing the Red Army would just steamroll the Polish army, the Red Army in Ukraine was directed to capture the city of Lviv in far western Ukraine. The capture of Lviv would then be a launch point for further adventures abroad. This meant that instead of getting closer together, the two Russian armies out there grew further apart. The armies now approaching Warsaw were left unsupported due to a misreading of the situation and it costs them badly needed reinforcements. There’s a good case to be made that it costs them the Battle of Warsaw. Now, just before the final battle, Polish and Soviet negotiators met in Minsk to possibly hammer out a ceasefire, but the Russians, riding high on their momentum, issued demands that were far too harsh for the Poles to accept, as it would turn Poland into a Soviet dependent state. So talks went nowhere. All matters would be decided on the battlefield, and it would all come down to the Battle of Warsaw.

The Battle of Warsaw was a huge affair, with somewhere between 225,000 and 275,000 troops participating, evenly split between the two sides. After advancing toward the city over several days, the Red Army launched its final assault on the city on August 12th. The plan was to send one force directly west towards Warsaw, while others would sweep up around and cross the Vistula River north to outflank and surround the capital. But the fighting by the Poles was much stiffer than the Russians anticipated. The people were not rallying to the Red Army or to the communist revolution, but to the defense of their homeland. Within a few days, it was obvious the Red battle plan wasn’t going according to plan. The armies down in Ukraine were ordered to go northwest to reinforce the assault, but General Budyonny, apparently following orders from Comrade Stalin refused to obey. Stalin was one of the leading political commissars down on the Ukrainian front, and he had his own political and military ambitions. He seems to have been seduced by the idea that the Poles were already as good as defeated, and he didn’t want to get stuck in a merely supportive role in an all but guaranteed victory up by Warsaw, and instead insisted they continue to focus on capturing the city of Lviv, partly to stick laurels in his own cap.

But with the Red Army around Warsaw actually badly in need of reinforcements, Stalin and Budyonny missed the chance to be the glorious saviors of the cause who wrote in to save the day. After several days spent fending off the Russians, Pilsudski launched an all or nothing counter attack that would sweep up and around from the south and come at the Red Army from the rear. He launched this attack on August the 16th and in the midst of the fighting, the Red Army broke into confused retreat. Different armies and divisions broke in completely different directions. Two of the main armies apparently disintegrated entirely. The Red Army high command was cut off from accurate communications with their forces in the field, and they issued commands that had little or nothing to do with the actual strategic or tactical situation facing their soldiers. Disoriented and demoralized and hit from all sides, the Red Army started falling back from Warsaw in disarray. Their sure victory turned into a massive and stunning defeat.

As late as August 19th, the Red high command tried to hold the line and regroup for another assault, but it was already too late. Their units were spread out far and wide, cut off from each other, many of them in chaotic retreat. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers simply gave up and surrendered around Warsaw. Tens of thousands more wound up crossing the border into east Prussia, where they were detained and interned by the Germans. The estimated Russian losses in the battle of Warsaw were something like 10,000 killed, 500 missing, 30,000 wounded and 66,000 taken prisoner. It was, by all accounts, a devastating military defeat. It was also a shocking turnaround from the high hopes they had had just a few days earlier. The reds believed they were about to capture all of Poland, and now they were falling back hundreds of miles east to the Neman River in Belarus. The battle of Warsaw was a huge victory for the Poles, and for Pilsudski in particular, who had been enduring heavy criticism for his handling of the war to date, though, his critics were eager to deny him even this great victory, and they called the Battle of Warsaw, the Miracle on the Vistula, and they attributed the salvation of Poland to divine providence, and specifically the Virgin Mary, rather than the political and military acumen of Józef Piłsudski.

So with the Polish army once again advancing while the Red Army retreated, we can see that the Polish-Soviet War unfolded as a great sloshing Back and forth of armies across eastern Europe. First, the Red Army had sloshed west over the winter of 1918-1919 during the Target: Vistula days. This triggered the counter slosh east as the Polish army advanced in the summer of 1919, and the Red Army fell back, until the frontline was practically on the Russian border by the spring of 1920. Then there was the counter-counter slosh back west, as the Red Army advanced and the Polish Army retreated all the way to the gates of Warsaw by the summer of 1920. And now, here in the late summer and early fall of 1920, we have the final counter-counter-counter slosh back east. The Poles pushed the Reds back across the Bug River, which just a few weeks earlier, the Allies had tried to get the Red Army not to cross, and which maybe at this point the Red Army kind of wishes it hadn’t crossed. The Russians then tried to make a stand around the city of Gradno on the Neman River, but in the subsequent battles at the end of September, the second largest battles after the battle Warsaw, the Red Army was again outflanked and forced to retreat deeper into Belarus. By now, the Poles were also on the march down in Ukraine, and they forced the whole frontline in the Polish-Soviet War hundreds of miles east by the beginning of October.

This sudden about face and the Miracle of the Vistula led both sides to reconsider peace. Now Piłsudski was adamantly opposed to making a peace with Russia. He believed he had the Red Army on the run, and his dream of that vast Polish-led Intermarium Confederation still burned in his heart. But most Polish leaders believed that would be a mistake. They had just stared total annihilation in the face, and now that they had restored some geographic breathing room for themselves, they sought only the confirmation of a sovereign and independent Poland recognized by Russia. Over in Russia, some quarters of the Communist leadership believed in trying to regroup and keep fighting — Poland was after all, still the land bridge to Germany, a bridge that had to be crossed in order to carry out international communist revolution — and had they wanted to, they probably still could have kept fighting. Their western forces were in a state of disarray at the moment, but they still had millions of soldiers under arms spread throughout Russia. Had they really wanted to, they could have regrouped and launched a counter-counter-counter-counter slosh in the spring of 1921. But the ever practical Lenin believed that this might be nothing less than political suicide. That if they tried it, they wouldn’t make it through the winter. As we’ll discuss more next week, the burdens of war communism were becoming intolerable to the people of Russia, and as Lenin said to Clara Zetkin, “I myself believe that our position did not force us to make a peace at any price. We could have held out over the winter, but I thought it wiser to come to terms with the enemy. The temporary sacrifice of a hard peace appeared to me to be preferable to a continuation of the war. Soviet Russia can only win if it shows that it carries on war to defend the revolution, that it has no intention to seize land, suppress nations, or embark on imperialist adventure. But ought we above all unless absolutely compelled to have exposed the Russian people to the terror and suffering of another winter of war? No. The thought of the agonies of another winter of war were unbearable. We had to make a peace.”

By October 1920, then, leaders in both Poland and Russia concluded they wanted to end the war. And when their respective negotiators sat down in the city of Riga, they were both looking for a stable peace, rather than the fulfillment of all their heart’s desires. Both sides, in fact, abandon their primary objectives. The Poles gave up on the idea of expanding their borders to the old limits of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russians gave up on the idea of trying to install a communist regime in Poland. A preliminary ceasefire was signed on October 12th, which took effect on October 18th. Now there was still some sporadic fighting and jockeying for position over the winter of 1920-1921, but both sides were ultimately committed to ending the war and settling into the negotiated peace that left neither with what they wanted, but with enough to walk away clean. Poland put its army on peace time footing in January before the final peace treaty was even signed, partly because the Red Army had begun a program of mass demobilization before the winter even set in. Though the final peace treaty would not be signed until March 1921, the Polish-Soviet War was over.

The immediate impact of the Polish-Soviet War and its lasting legacy are mostly about what didn’t happen, rather than what did. Because when you look at the final maps of the Treaty of Riga, after all this sloshing about, everyone is kind of right back where they started. Something like a hundred thousand people were killed, there was massive material and economic devastation, there was incalculable traumas inflicted on both soldiers and civilians as the armies marched back and forth across eastern Europe, and for what? Kind of looks like for nothing. Kind of looks like they could have done none of that and wound up in exactly the same place. So the legacy of the war is wrapped up in the fact that it headed off the dramatic scenarios that would have resulted from a clear victory for either side. Polish victory might have led to a legitimately resurgent Poland occupying a massive space on the maps of Europe, no longer a contested borderland between Germany, Austria, and Russia, but a major power in its own right, ascendant at a time when Germany, Austria, and Russia were all reeling from the collapse of their respective empires. Who knows how that would have changed the near future of European war and diplomacy.

On the other hand — and this is the legacy more commonly pointed to — had the Red Army won the battle of Warsaw and successfully installed a communist regime in Poland, who knows what they might have accomplished in neighboring Germany. Maybe their communist revolution would have kept marching to Berlin, and then to Paris and London. With this threat on the table, the Allies probably would have been forced into a direct war with Russia they did not want, but which they probably would have deemed unavoidable to prevent western Europe from going Red. As it stands, the battle of Warsaw is treated in some quarters as one of the most important battles in European history, as the moment when communism was blocked from entering western Europe. And certainly we can see a clear departure in both domestic and foreign policy in Russia come the spring of 1921. These changes were not entirely caused by the defeat in Warsaw, but certainly there were very much informed by it.

Now, all this talk of the Miracle on the Vistula halting the spread of evil atheist communism can obviously go too far, especially because it’s not clear how much even a victorious Russia, at that time, and under the conditions that prevailed in 1921, would have been able to truly exert their authority over a hypothetically communist Poland, nor how much support the local Polish communists would have even had. Which is to say, once installed, they might have been overthrown in a fortnight. And so, yes, the battle of Warsaw is the historical moment when the spread of communism is halted, but it’s by no means the only possible historical moment when that might’ve happened. But hypotheticals aside, the Battle of Warsaw was that moment. It was the historical moment when the spread of communism was halted, and it is thus a critical moment in the timeline of the Russian Revolution and European history.

Now, next week, we’ll turn our attention back to domestic concerns in Russia, as Lenin himself was already doing as he pushed to make peace with Poland. Since October 1917, the communists had imposed a harsh reign on the people of Russia. Three years of emergency conditions and ongoing war had justified those conditions, but the people were getting awfully sick of the burdens imposed on them, and going into the winter of 1920-1921, the most acute threat to the Communist government in Moscow was not the Allies or conservative Whites or the Poles, but the very workers and peasants on whose behalf they claimed to rule.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.22: Vladimir and Nadya

So here we are at episode 22 into our series on the Russian Revolution, and I am just now getting to the people who will be the main characters going forward, and to the guy who would probably be the main character if this were ever, say, adapted as a prestige television show, just throwing that out there. But if you have friends who like to wait until I am done with a series before bingeing it all at once, be sure to tell them that we are at episode 22 of the Russian Revolution and we have just gotten to the early life of Lenin.

So this new group of characters came from a generation who were too young to have been a part of the radical upheavals of the 1870s. They were just kids when Tsar Alexander the Second was assassinated; they were in grammar school through the reactionary 1880s. But by the time Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended the throne in 1894, it was their turn to be the young 20-something student radicals offended by the society within which they had been raised, and who were determined, in the face of, like, all of Russian history, to be the cohort that finally finally pulled off a revolution. And today we are going to introduce two of these up and coming revolutionaries who will, in fact, in the future, actually pull off the revolution: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history as Lenin, and his wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on April the 10th, 1870 in Simbirsk, a small provincial city on the Volga River. The Ulyanovs were an upwardly mobile family, not rich by any means, but fine specimens of a respectable and prosperous provincial middle-class. Vladimir’s paternal grandfather had been a serf who managed to transcend his status sometime around 1800. His son, Ilya Ulyanov, Vladimir’s father, had then received a good education and graduated in 1854, joining the civil service as an inspector of schools. An energetic and reform minded bureaucrat, Ilya Ulyanov entered state service just as Tsar Alexander the Second was ascending the throne and preparing his period of capital G capital R Great Reform. Himself only a generation removed from serfdom, ulyanov was thrilled by almost everything the Tsar Liberator did. The emancipation of the serfs was a work of profound, enlightened justice, and the directives to create the zemstvo and improve local primary education gave his life purpose. Settling in Simbirsk, Ulyanov traveled the region, setting up and monitoring new primary and grammar schools all through the 1860s and 1870s. He was happy, fulfilled and respected.

Vladimir’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna, came from a good family herself. Her father was a doctor and her mother, a German descended Protestant from the Balkans. Now, given that Vladimir’s paternal grandmother was probably of Kalmyk descent — the Kalmyk were people who trace back to the Mongolians on the Volga — Vladimir’s ethnic ancestry told the demographic story of the Russian empire. After his death, this demographic story was given additional drama when one of Lenin’s sisters discovered that their maternal great-grandfather had actually been a Jew who converted to Orthodoxy and then raised his kids Christian. When Stalin was presented with this revelation, he ordered the information suppressed. Now, Lenin himself had no real anti-semitic tendencies to speak of, and his sister actually wanted to publicize this genealogical revelation to cut down on anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia, but Stalin was an anti-Semite, so the information was suppressed.

But getting back to his mother, Maria Alexandrovna gave birth to eight babies, six of whom lived, of whom Vladimir was third oldest. She held small c conservative-ish bourgeois values, but insisted that her three boys and three girls receive equal and equally rigorous educations. She instilled in them a passion for learning, and a competitive spirit to succeed. And even though she never really understood her children’s politics, she was not surprised that they followed their mind and their hearts into radical revolutionary action. And whatever happened in the future, she would always support her kids with money and aid and the necessary begging of forgiveness from the authorities, which there would be quite a lot of. So the elder Ulyanovs had a conservative, liberal disposition; their children really did not.

Young Vladimir was raised by both his parents to work hard, study hard and excel at everything, and from an early age, he was blunt, sarcastic and arrogant, but he could always back this up with high marks and superior ability. A fellow student later said that Vladimir was esteemed, but he wasn’t exactly liked, and he had few real friends. He was on the verge of his 11th birthday when the Tsar Liberator was assassinated on March the first 1881. This was a shocking event that had his father weeping off and on for days. The emotional blow of his revered tsar getting killed paved the way for professional setbacks, as the new reactionary regime of Tsar Alexander the Third preferred returning primary education to the church, so dad’s career of opening more modern secular schools stalled out, and became far less fulfilling. But he kept working as hard as he possibly could, and probably working too hard, because his health began to fail him in his early fifties. In January, 1886, he went into his office one day, had a stroke, and died. Vladimir was just 15 years old.

I have yet to read a single biography of Lenin, or even the briefest biographical sketch, come to think of it that does not transition out of his father’s death with a line like, but his father’s death was immediately followed by an even greater emotional blow. And you know what, why reinvent the wheel? His father’s death was immediately followed by an even greater emotional blow: his older brother Alexander, known to all as Sasha, was the alpha of a brood of Ulyanov children who were something resembling a little band of prodigies. A deadly serious student, Sasha always got top marks, was head of his class, and went off to university in St. Petersburg, pursuing a degree in the natural sciences. All his professors agreed they were witnessing the beginning of a brilliant career.

Now Sasha’s academic focus was on the biology of worms, but kind of out of nowhere, his real passion suddenly became radical politics. Now, this is 1886, and remember the old People’s Will network has been broken, and the radical revolutionaries are at their nadir. So Sasha’s move into radicalism was self-directed and pretty self-organized. It was really just him and some friends. And though they would adopt the name People’s Will for their group, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the original People Will. Their tactics, however, did follow the original group’s line. Sasha and his friends wanted a mass mobilized socialist party operating out in the open, but that was simply not possible under the reactionary repression of the current regime. Without the opportunity to voice their opinions, or even put to work their elite educations on behalf of the country they loved, they had no choice but to attack the regime until it either collapsed or allowed for political freedom. So they followed in the spiritual footsteps of the original People’s Will: they formed a small cell of revolutionary comrades and concocted a terrorist plot to kill the tsar. Sasha sold a watch he had won as an academic prize and used the money to buy components and supplies to make bombs to blow up the tsar.

Now, usually in these days, a half-baked plot like this would be uncovered early by the Okhrana, or just as often, the would be assassins would find the job too hard or too risky. But Sasha followed through. He succeeded in acquiring the supplies and building the bombs, and he and his fellow conspirators planned to use them on March the first 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of the Tsar Liberator.

But it did not work out.

Though the assassins were ready, the tsar did not appear where they thought he was going to appear. Then one of them was picked up on an unrelated charge of being suspicious in public, and it wasn’t until he was in custody that the police realized he was carrying a bomb. The guy confessed to everything, and the other fourteen conspirators who were in on this plot were picked up, including Sasha, who then proceeded to nobly attempt to take responsibility for everything, saying it was all his idea and all his work.

Back home in Simbirsk, the family was shocked at how far and how fast Sasha had gotten mixed up in such big trouble. His mother did everything she could to try to get him released, or merely exiled, or given some other reduced sentence. But this isn’t like he had been found with banned books, or busted leading a seditious discussion circle. By Sasha’s own admission, he was a bomb maker who was making bombs to kill the tsar, this is real life stuff. So ten of his fellow accomplices were ultimately sentenced to terms of prisoner exile, but Sasha and four others were sentenced to be hanged. And right to the very end, his mother thought there’s our would commute the sentence now that the boys had had the fear of God and death put in them. But clemency never came. On May the eighth, 1887, Alexander Ulyanov and four of his friends were hanged.

The execution of Sasha was a shock to the Ulyanovs and their neighbors. Though he and his younger brother, Vladimir were very different people, and were never exactly friends, Vladimir had always looked up to, to the point of worshiped, his older brother. Everyone in the family had. And though he almost never spoke about any of this in the future, it left Vladimir hostile and embittered towards the state that had murdered his brother. In his mind. Sasha’s only real crime had been bravely standing up to an evil regime. So, who knows how much of his life and career was personal.

Adding to this resentful bitterness was that after the scandal broke in town, the respectable and polite families in Simbirsk iced the Ulyanovs out. They stopped coming around, they stopped inviting the family to parties, or including them in anything but whispered gossip behind their backs. The social treatment was so bad that has only recently widowed mother sold the family house, and they all moved out of town for good. And it has been remarked on more than one occasion that this treatment may have played a role in Vladimir’s future deep, deep hatred of hypocritical, bourgeois liberals. Treacherous to face bastards who cannot ever be trusted, that was his consistent and unshakable belief. Now, perhaps this reads too much into it, but then again, deep-seated beliefs do have to come from somewhere.

Now we cannot go on before mentioning the story that Lenin’s sister Maria told after Lenin’s death. She said that upon hearing the news of Sasha’s execution, that Vladimir shook his head and said, “No, we will go another way, Sasha.” Which then became something of a colloquial aphorism in Soviet Russia.

Now the story itself is for sure, a later invention. Maria was only nine, Vladimir was a teenager who had never yet showed any interest in politics. But while the story and the quote were an invention, it did capture a basic truth: Lenin would always have a healthy disdain for the kind of elite People’s Will terrorism that Sasha had attempted, and in the attempt, proved once again how inadequate a strategy it was. And though he wouldn’t necessarily turn his nose up at plots to assassinate tsarist officials, the future Lenin would never think it was the main work of revolution.

One lesson Vladimir, or any of his siblings, did not take away from the execution of their brother was to stay out of politics. When Vladimir arrived at the University of Kazan in the fall of 1887, he immediately joined student activist groups and took part in demonstrations, one of which was so big that more than 150 kids were arrested. But even though he was not a leader of this demonstration, Vladimir was one of the few to be expelled for his involvement, because holy hell, this guy’s Ulyanov, and he’s the brother of that guy we just hanged for trying to kill the tsar. Now kicked out of school, Vladimir was ordered to confine himself to a country estate owned by his extended family, where he wound up spending almost the entirety of 1888. And he spent this time in forced idleness reading, and reading, and reading some more. And it was during this period that he finally came across What is to Be Done by Chernyshevsky. Vladimir loved What is to Be Done, he loved it so much he read it six times over the summer, and he was enthralled by the main ultra dedicated revolutionary character, the same character who had once inspired Nechayev. So Vladimir loved What is to Be Done, he loved it so much that in the future he literally carried a small picture of Chernyshevsky with him in his wallet, a claim that could not be made by Marx, or Engels, or even his wife. And in a very real way, it was Chernyshevsky more than Marx who turned Vladimir into Lenin.

But that is not to say he did not also fall in love with Marx and Engels. He did. In fact, he does it right now. His mother managed to get the defacto house arrest lifted, and the family moved back to Kazan. And though Vladimir was not allowed to return to university, he continued to educate himself, though he was assisted by local radical discussion groups that he continued to slip in and out of.

So in 1889, he got his hands on his first copy of Capital, and the Communist Manifesto, and some Plekhanov, which he read, and which thrilled him. From this point on he’s a full-throated Marxist. Now we will obviously have plenty of time to talk all about Lenin’s understanding of Marxism in theory and in practice, but suffice it to say that he believed what he was reading gave him a historical blueprint for a great heroic struggle that would inevitably see the people triumph over evil despotism.

Now understandably, his mother was not too keen on the direction he was headed and she purchased a country estate partly in the hopes of turning her son into a productive landed farmer. But Vladimir did not take to farming, and farming did not take to Vladimir. So instead, he managed to get permission to take law exams, even though he was not a graduate of any university, and after a year of intensive self-directed study, he aced the exam in the spring of 1891 with top marks, doing on his own in 12 months what it usually took a student about four years of law school to accomplish. Say what you want about Lenin, he was not dumb.

But this small triumph was knocked down by another tragedy. His sister Olga, the sibling with whom Vladimir was closest, and who I’ve read was considered the real genius of the family, which is saying something, slowly succumbed to typhoid. Vladimir lived with her at this point, and nursed her, but to no avail, and she died in may of 1891 practically in his arms. He was devastated. Shortly after passing the law exams and burying his sister came the great famine of 1891 to 1892. And here there are conflicting accounts about Vladimir’s attitude. All of these attitudes were reported much later, and all of them were meant to either attack or defend him. If you hate Lenin, the story is that he openly opposed relief efforts for the peasants, that he insisted the famine was a progressive historical force that would help destroy the archaic villages and drive the rural peasantry into the cities where they would grow the ranks of his beloved urban proletariat. This version has Lenin glorying in human suffering in order to have his way. Now, if you like Lenin, you say all of that is made up, and it doesn’t actually fit with his beliefs or his actions, because during these same years, he would be arguing in debates that any social democratic party worth its salt must address the daily miseries of the people they were trying to convert, and it feels off that he would say we should oppose something like famine relief.

Now both sides can point to Lenin’s later conduct, both cruel or compassionate, that backs up their version of the Lenin-opposed-famine-relief story. Now, do I think it’s at least plausible that he saw the failed relief and mass suffering as politically advantageous? Sure. Because it was.

In 1893, Vladimir finally moved to the big city for good. He arrived in St. Petersburg in August, got hooked up with a not-too-difficult associate lawyer’s position that allowed him to spend most of his time around the small but growing Marxist reading circles. And in these circles, he quickly earned a reputation for a ruthless debating style — withering, surgical, sarcastic acerbic, blunt, and supremely self-confident. He did not believe that debate was for persuading your opponent, it was for demolishing your opponent. And whether they liked him or hated him, the people in these radical circles started noticing this guy Vladimir Ilyich, this new guy who had just shown up. And one of those who heard of his growing reputation was a young woman who was already established inside the St. Petersburg Marxist circles: Nadya Krupskaya.

Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was born in St. Petersburg on February the 14th, 1869. So she was just about a year older than her future husband. Her family had also been pretty respectable and upwardly mobile, at least at the time of her birth. Her father, Konstantin, was the orphan son of landless nobles whose upbringing had been underwritten by the state, and so he got funneled into the army officer corps. In 1863, Konstantin was shipped off to help suppress a revolt in Poland that saw him both perform well and probably emerge with some sympathy for the Poles. But the serving well part was more important, and he was transferred off to study law in St. Petersburg, where he met his wife, Elizaveta Vasilyevna. She too had been the orphan daughter of respectable nobility, and had gotten a good education that qualified her to serve as a governess, which is what she was doing for the ten years before she met Konstantin. And though she would always be a devoutly orthodox wife and mother, she had little good to say about the kind of noble family she had lived among. Certainly, she passed onto her young daughter a love of hard work and education, and a hatred of the casual cruelty of the idle rich.

Graduating with his law degree, Konstantin was then shipped back to Warsaw with his wife and new baby, little Nadya, to serve in the imperial administration in Poland. And during his tenure in Warsaw, he operated with something of an enlightened hand. He helped open a hospital, protect jews from persecution, and laid down rules that regulated labor practices. His wife, Elizaveta meanwhile, similarly engaged with the local culture, and she even wrote a successful children’s book in Polish, all of which seems to have caught the wary eye of somebody higher up in the bureaucratic chain of command, or more likely the eye of somebody who was complaining about the labor regulations, because in 1874, Konstantin was brought before an imperial assessor and officially reprimanded for exceeding his authority. He appealed the decision, but this appeal took time, and in that time, his career in the civil service was totally derailed. So while ages zero to five for little Nadya were stable and happy, ages five to ten were disjointed, difficult, and lonely, as the family followed her increasingly bitter and discouraged father from job to job, unable to find a place to settle down, all the while nursing a grudge against the state that had wronged him. Probably during these troubled years of the mid 1870s, Konstantin developed friendly relations with people who were at least adjacent to the radicals and people’s Will, though he never did wind up on anybody’s watch list.

As the family moved around chasing jobs, Nadya became a lonely bookworm. But she was first brought out of her growing shell in the summer of 1880 when she came into contact with an energetic and idealistic young teacher. The 11-year-old Nadya latched onto this teacher, and was allowed to hang out and sit in on classes that were above her level. And it was this teacher who first introduced Nadya to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, an enormously influential and beloved Russian writer who had died just a few years earlier. Nekrasov did for Nadya what Chernyshevsky had done for Lenin, it was a passion stirring moment of contact with something special and magical, and right up until her death, it was Nekrasov who held pride of place in Krupskaya’s heart. And when she penned her own first political polemic, she opened it with one of his lines: “Thy lot is hard, a woman’s lot, a harder lot can scarce be found. ”

But Nadya’s summer in poetic bliss soon ended. The family moved on to St. Petersburg and shortly thereafter she learned that this beloved teacher had been arrested for owning subversive literature, and I have no idea what happened to her. After arriving in St. Petersburg though, Nadya found another place to flourish: the Obolensky Gymnasium was a progressive school run by reformist liberals with deep pocketed patrons. It was something resembling a permanent home after five years of itinerant wandering. Nadya made friends and started getting pretty good grades, and it was during this period that she herself read Chernyshevsky, though it never hit her as hard as some of her contemporaries, including of course her future husband. Her father’s health had deteriorated under the strain of his circumstances though, and while he eventually did win his appeal after six years persistent effort — it turns out he was wrongly disciplined — it was too late to save his career, and it was too late to save him. He contracted tuberculosis, and after a long period of wasting away, finally died in 1883 at the age of just 45. Nadya and her mother were left alone. And I hate to keep calling back to Lenin, but Nadya would never forgive the state for humiliating slandering and driving her father to ruin and then to death, so this is all personal for her too.

The immediate circumstances for mother and daughter were not terrible, though. Elizaveta was always able to get steady work as a teacher, and Nadya herself now picked up money tutoring and they lived in a respectable three room apartment, solidly if sparsely, middle-class. Elizaveta continued to instill in her daughter a love of education and a sense of social obligation to help and improve those around her, especially by passing her education along to others.

So eventually this mentality is going to take her towards radical Marxist politics, but Nadya Krupskaya took a bit of a detour through Tolstoy’s anarcho-christianity. Now, unfortunately we do not have the time nor do I have anything like a firm grasp on Tolstoy’s on anarcho-christianity to delve too deep into this, but luckily, neither did Nadya. She had no use for Tolstoy’s evangelical beliefs, his views on women, or his disdain for science, but she did like a lot of his other beliefs, most especially his thoughts on education, which stressed spontaneity and curiosity and emotional connection over rigid memorization and harsh discipline. Nadya admired Tolstoy enough that she wrote him what amounts to a fan letter and briefly participated as a proofreader in a program that Tolstoy spearheaded to publish cheap additions of great books, and she edited an edition of the Count of Monte Cristo. The possibility of using progressive education to improve the masses was alluring, and by the time Nadya was 20, it was poetry and literature and teaching that gave direction to her ambitions about how she could have an impact on the world.

Once she graduated from gymnasium though, Nadya arrived at her own famous conversion to Marxism moment, and every great Soviet biography has to have a great conversion to Marx as a moment. For Nadya, this came in 1890 at the age of 21. She joined a small radical discussion circle, and after reading and delivering a report on Lavrov’s historical letters, she asked about these guys Marx and Engels she had been hearing about, and was given a small bundle of books to read. Ironically though, this bundle was selected by a comrade who happened to be into narodism, and who hoped to prove to Nadya that Marx was full of beans. So along with Capital, she got a critique of Marxism by an narodist idealogue, and a few other books. And even after the revolution, Nadya admitted that reading the first two chapters of Marx’s Capital was like reading Greek, and she had no background in economics or philosophy or political science. But she kept reading and got to the parts that talked about the conditions that the workers had to endure, and that did grab her. And by the time she was done, she believed that Marx had effectively laid out an analysis of what was wrong with the world, what could be done about it, and most, especially who was to blame. And it was capitalism, and in Russia, the tsar. And in a straightforward way, Nadya Krupskaya accepted that they were the enemy and that she needed to spend her life fighting them.

On a more practical level, in 1891 she found her calling working as a night school teacher in the very poor working class districts of St. Petersburg, teaching anything from basic literacy to math, history, literature, and geography. She loved the work, and in 1893, she was elected director of the program by her fellow teachers. Now, given the nature of this work, it should come as no surprise that most of the faculty and administrators were reformist liberals. A few of them were narodist populists, and a handful, like Nadya, were Marxists. Now they could not use the classroom to organize politically, but lessons could be steered in certain directions, and if a particular worker was interested in learning more, then names and addresses could be surreptitiously passed along. Nadya’s own education continued through this period, as she both had to learn additional materials to teach her students, but she also learned from her students. What their life was like, who they were, what their problems were. And it gave her invaluable insight and judgment, insight that many of her bourgeois radical comrades never quite grasped, as many of them remained the kind of coffee house radicals who never met the people they supposedly idolized and were fighting for.

Now by this point, Nadya and a few of her friends had moved into a reading circle headed by an old Narodist turned Marxist named Stefan Radchenko. And it was in this group that she first heard about this character of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, brother of a hanged martyr, who was bulldozing his way through the radical debate circuit. And then it was in this Radchenko group that they met for the first time in February, 1894, and it could not have been a more classic meet cute. He read from passages from a book he was writing called What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats, which was an anti narodist track that would be the first book published under the pen name Lenin. Now Nadya thought this was all fine, but then after the reading, he made a sarcastic jab about the value of teaching the workers literature, which was clearly a pointless fool’s errand, and which happened to be her great passion in life. So as we know, from every romantic comedy ever written, this awkward moment of initial off-putting behavior was only ever going to result in wedding bells.

But the wedding was still a while off yet. For the next few years, Nadya and Vladimir would be merely comrades, at this stage, not fighting a war against the tsar so much as against other radicals who were trying to pitch the wrong brand of revolution. And so next week we will pick back up with them as they hook up with another key player in the fight against revolutionary philistines, Julius Martel.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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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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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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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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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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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

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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.