By Peter Kenez

The old order had ceased to function and the country faced extraordinary difficulties. Both the socialist and the nonsocialist camps were deeply divided over how to deal with the problems. Within a short time, however, out of the dozens of competing points of view, only two – the Bolsheviks and the military counterrevolutionaries – remained serious contenders. The Socialist Revolutionaries, who undoubtedly possessed the support of the majority of the Russian people, never had a chance. The moderate socialist politicians had no way of turning electoral support into regiments. They did not possess an ideology, or a mentality, that would enable them to take the necessarily harsh steps to resolve the national crisis.

The civil war, therefore, was soon reduced to a contest between the Whites and the Reds. On one side were revolutionary intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, who had suffered repression during the tsarist regime and were committed to change on the basis of their deeply held Marxist beliefs. They were politicians of a new type, who clearly understood the need for mass mobilization and propaganda. On the other side, the leadership was made up exclusively of army officers, men who had been at home in tsarist Russia, who were contemptuous of politics, and who envisaged military solutions to most problems. They had no vision of a future Russia but felt it necessary to combat the Bolsheviks, for they believed that communist rule would bring only evil to the fatherland. However different the two groups were, they faced the same problems: how to provide the country with a functioning administration, provide food for the starving, make the railroads run; in short, how to overcome anarchy.

The anti-Bolsheviks were slow to organize. The ex-leaders of the Kornilov mutiny, who had subsequently been imprisoned, used the confusion created by the Bolshevik rising to escape from their confinement and flee to the Cossack district of the Don. They were soon joined by the tsar’s ex-chief of staff, General Alekseev. This small group of officers included many, but by no means all, of the most prominent leaders of the Russian forces during the war. They came to the Cossack district of the Don because there was no other region in Russia where they could find security. The Cossacks, descendants of freebooters, by the early twentieth century had become rich peasants; they were receiving taxation and landholding privileges from the tsarist government in return for heavier military obligation. Unlike other Russian peasants, they enjoyed a tradition of self-government. Now they felt their privileges threatened by the less fortunate fellow inhabitants of their districts, the Russian peasants.

These Russian peasants were much poorer, owned much less land, and often had to rent from Cossacks. They resented their Cossack exploiters, and were willing listeners to Bolshevik appeals. The Don and the Kuban districts were embarking upon their own civil war, a contest for power that partially overlapped the larger national struggle. The Cossacks came to play a decisively important role in the White movement, largely because the White generals did not have another force to count on; they never succeeded in winning over the majority of the Russian people, the peasants. During the first few months of 1918 the generals attracted only a pitifully small following. After several months of organizing, the incipient White movement’s military force, the volunteer army, had only about 3,000 fighters, mostly officers. It reflects the weakness of the new Bolshevik government that it did not have the strength even to disperse such a minuscule army; a civil war is always a struggle between the weak and the weaker. Later during the spring it was the Germans, ironically, who enabled the Whites to survive. German policy was to encourage anti-Bolsheviks in the peripheries of the country, while tolerating Bolsheviks at the center. A country torn by civil war best served German interests. One consequence of this policy was their support for a conservative Cossack government on the Don. Thus the White generals, who had not so long ago denounced the Bolsheviks as German agents and sworn loyalty to the allies, now became the main beneficiaries of the policies of the enemies of their fatherland.

A turning point in the history of the civil war was the rebellion of the Czech troops, surely one of its most curious episodes. The Habsburg monarchy, Russia’s enemy in the First World War, was like imperial Russia, a multinational empire. The large Slav minority within it felt oppressed, and at the time of the war showed little loyalty to the Habsburgs. A large number of Czech soldiers, for example, easily allowed themselves to be captured by the Russians. The tsarist government hesitated to play the nationality card. They refused to form an army from these prisoners of war and allow them to fight on their side. That situation changed in 1917: Kerensky had no scruples on this score and encouraged the Czechs to form an independent corps and fight the Germans. The Czechs were enthusiastic soldiers, for they rightly believed that only the defeat of the central powers, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, would allow them to form an independent state. When the Russian army fell apart, this tiny force alone wanted to continue fighting, but the Brest-Litovsk treaty made it impossible for them to continue their struggle. After long negotiations with the Soviet government, it was decided to allow them to travel to the Western front through Siberia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Czechs, however, never reached their destination, because while traveling through Siberia they started to fight the Bolsheviks. In May 1918 Bolshevik rule in Siberia was still so weak that fifty thousand Czechs could overthrow it. This totally unexpected development allowed the anti-Bolsheviks to establish themselves and organize. After a great deal of quibbling the Whites established a liberal regime in which the Socialist Revolutionaries played a major role. However, this government lasted only for a short time. In November 1918 the military overthrew the socialist government and named Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, the ex-chief of the Black Sea fleet, as supreme ruler.

The end of the war in Europe had far-reaching consequences for the course of the civil war in Russia. As long as the allies and the central powers were fighting one another, they looked at their involvement in Russia as far less important. Although the allied governments regarded the Bolsheviks and everything they stood for with fear and loathing, had the Bolsheviks continued the war against the Germans, they could have received allied support. The allies first assisted the Whites with the illusory hope that the anti- German front might be reconstructed. The British and the Americans, who in early 1918 sent small detachments to the Far North in Murmansk and Archangel and to the Far East in Vladivostok, justified their intervention in Russian affairs in terms of their need to fight the Germans.

Once World War I ended, any rationale for the intervention fell away while the opportunities for practical aid to the anti-Bolsheviks vastly improved. Immediately after the defeat of the Germans, French troops landed in Odessa, and shortly after in the Crimea. The British sent small detachments to the Caucasus and to Central Asia, and soon began the delivery of valuable military hardware to Kolchak and to Anton Denikin, the commander of the volunteer army.

The Bolsheviks, of course, then and ever since, had a great incentive to believe, or at least to pretend to believe, that they were fighting not against domestic enemies but against the combined forces of world imperialism. It became an article of faith in Soviet historiography that the young Soviet state struggled against the combined forces of world imperialism. In fact the contribution of foreigners to the outcome of the civil war was slight. Foreign governments had only the vaguest understanding of Russian affairs; they based their policies and dispensed their advice on the basis of false premises. But however much the allies would have liked to overthrow the Bolsheviks, given the politics of postwar Europe they were not in a position to do so. French troops were the only ones who actually did a bit of fighting, and their performance was dismal. They did more harm than good to the White cause. British military aid, and to a lesser extent American, was undoubtedly helpful to Denikin and Kolchak; but such aid could only prolong the war.

German withdrawal increased the scope of the fighting. Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks rushed into the vacuum, hoping to take advantage of the opportunity. The greatest threat to Bolshevik rule in the first months of 1919 came from the East. As Kolchak marched West, it seemed that he might be able to link up with Denikin in the South. The Red army managed to turn the tide on the Eastern front in June 1919, but the Bolsheviks could not yet relax. That summer Denikin occupied Ukraine, and in October he reached Orel, about 250 miles from Moscow. At the same time Lenin’s regime faced a new danger. General Nikolai Iudenich had organized yet another anti-Bolshevik army in Estonia that now threatened Petrograd. October 1919 was a decisive moment in the civil war. The Reds at this crucial time managed to mobilize new forces and to stop both Iudenich and Denikin. Denikin’s lines had become overextended and were mercilessly harassed by Ukrainian anarchist partisans, most significantly Nestor Makhno.

By 1920 it was fairly certain that the Reds would ultimately win. In the spring of 1920, Denikin once again was restricted to the Kuban. He succeeded in getting his troops to the Crimea, but then went into exile. Petr Wrangel, the last commander, an able and charismatic figure, could pin his hopes only on outside circumstances. Poland, which became an independent country at the end of the war, had great territorial ambitions at Russia’s expense. The Polish leader, Joseph Pilsudski, believing he could get a better deal from the Bolsheviks than from the victorious Whites, waited until the defeat of the main White forces and then started his campaign. The Russo-Polish war, which inspired nationalist passions on both sides, saw changing military fortunes; at one point the victorious Red army threatened the Polish capital. The war ultimately ended in the compromise peace of Riga in March 1921. Following the decisive phase of the Polish campaign, the Red army defeated Wrangel and forced him and the remnants of his army into exile. By the end of 1920 the Bolsheviks had defeated all their enemies with the exception of a few scattered peasant bands.

The Causes of Bolshevik Victory

Although the Bolsheviks ultimately won the civil war, their victory at the outset was by no means assured, nor did it seem so to weary contemporaries. Several times the survival of the revolutionary government hung in the balance. In the spring of 1918, for example, the regime was almost overcome by sheer anarchy; the next spring, Kolchak seemed unstoppable; and in the fall of 1919, the combined forces of Denikin and Iudenich presented such a military threat that many expected Lenin’s regime to soon collapse.

The Whites enjoyed many significant advantages. They had the support of the church. Their armies were almost always better led, and they did not have to fear treason among their officers. In the prevailing conditions, where the front line moved quickly, the Cossack cavalry was an extremely valuable force. The Whites occupied better agricultural lands, and had to feed the populations of fewer large cities. These factors, combined with allied aid, made living conditions better in White-held territories. When the Whites occupied a city, the price of bread almost always fell. Naturally, at a time of starvation, lower food prices had a great appeal and far-reaching political significance.

Still, the Bolsheviks won at least in part because of the weakness of their enemies. The Whites did not have an attractive ideology or the right frame of mind to accomplish their most important task: imposing order on an unwilling population. Since they saw their task as primarily a military one, they made no serious attempt to win over the population with an attractive vision of the future. Indeed, they themselves lacked such a vision. The generals had been comfortable in imperial Russia, and although the more enlightened among them realized that some reforms might be necessary, they all fervently wished that the revolutions of 1917 had never happened.

When they were forced to articulate their goals, the Whites had to fall back on a newly developed and exaggerated sense of nationalism. They proclaimed that they were fighting for “Russia.” The trouble with such an ideology was that it had little appeal to those who were politically the most important, the peasants. Perhaps even more significantly, it fatally alienated the national minorities, who might have become useful allies in an anti- Bolshevik crusade. Since the Whites of necessity were fighting in areas largely inhabited by non-Russians, hostility from the minorities had fateful consequences.

The disintegration of the once-powerful empire, and the obvious weakness of the central authorities, resulted in an extraordinarily rapid growth of national self-consciousness among the minorities. Politicians who had professed to be internationalists and socialists now came into power in newly independent states and came to embrace the nationalist cause with passion. The Bolsheviks and the anti-Bolsheviks adopted different policies toward the newly established states on the peripheries. The Bolshevik attitude was a great deal more expedient: as long as they had no power to prevent the establishment of these states, they did not openly oppose them. They seemed to have accepted the principle of national self-determination, although adding that it applied as long as it served the interest of the proletariat. The Whites would make no comparable concession.

The Russian peasants were not moved by a nationalist ideology; they were interested in getting the lands of the landlords. White politicians labored for many months to come up with a land reform plan. They were slow to produce one, for they did not fully appreciate the political significance of winning over the land-hungry peasants. By the time they published a land reform project, in the summer of 1920, it was far too late. Even this plan offered very little. After all, the Whites drew their social support from the right and could not alienate their supporters. The peasants saw that in the wake of the White armies, the landlords and ex-tsarist officials reappeared to reclaim their wealth and power. No matter what White politicians said in their manifestos, the peasants correctly understood that the Whites stood for restoration.

But the Bolsheviks won the civil war not only because of the weaknesses and errors of their opponents. Their understanding of the needs of the moment and the principles of revolutionary politics helped them as well. The political program with which they came to power could not be realized, and therefore the revolutionaries constantly had to improvise. But fortunately for them, their background and their ideology allowed them to improvise successfully.

The Bolsheviks, as Marxist-Leninists, instinctively understood the significance of organization and mass mobilization. They worked tirelessly and ceaselessly both to bring their program to the workers and peasants and to create organizational forms that could restore order. A major share of the credit for winning the civil war belonged to the party. Originally an organization of revolutionaries, it was quickly transformed into an instrument of rule. In the circumstances it would be wrong to think of it as a tightly knit, disciplined, and hierarchical organization. Top leaders frequently quarreled, and the center often had only nominal control over the distant cities. Nevertheless, as an organizational base it conferred on the Bolsheviks an inestimable advantage. The party was involved in every aspect of national life: it was responsible for developing a strategy for winning the struggle; it was a recruitment agency that brought forward able and ambitious cadres; it was the chief indoctrination agency; in enemy-controlled territories, it organized an underground; and perhaps most importantly, it attempted to supervise the work of other governmental and social institutions.

Bolshevik organizational skills and principles were best shown in the creation and building of the Red army, which was Trotsky’s great achievement. Both Trotsky and Lenin quickly realized that contrary to utopian notions they themselves had entertained, the services of experts were essential for running a modern state. In the case of the military, this meant that the young Soviet state needed the expertise of the officers of the ex-imperial army. These men had to be forced or cajoled into the service of an ideology that they in almost all instances found distasteful. Furthermore, the policy entailed risks: it created indignation among some old communists, and the officers were by no means fully reliable. Treason was a constant danger. Yet Trotsky was correct: only a disciplined force, led by professional men, could defeat the enemy.

By the end of the civil war the Bolsheviks, using extensive propaganda in addition to conscription, had built an army of five million – incomparably larger than the combined forces of their enemies. Only a small percentage of this army ever served in battles; the rest provided support and administrative services. At a time of anarchy, the new state needed all the support it could get. The Cheka also made a contribution to the Bolshevik victory. Terror was equally bloody on both sides; Reds and Whites alike committed acts of extraordinary brutality. However, political repression by the two sides had a different character. The Whites, whose views were more appropriate to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century, had little appreciation of the role of ideas in politics and tolerated far greater diversity of political opinions. The Cheka, by contrast, allowed only one political organization, and one political point of view, that of the Leninists.

The Bolsheviks successfully tailored their social and economic policies to the needs of winning the war. Lenin presented his famous decree on land on the day following his victory. As a concession to the peasants, the decree legalized previous land seizures and allowed the peasants to cultivate previous landlord lands as their own private property. Lenin, the great realist, clearly saw the political benefits. Yet, despite the fact that the Reds gave them land and the Whites gave them nothing, the Bolsheviks could win only a few active supporters among the peasants. The great weakness of the Bolshevik position was that they needed to feed their cities but had nothing to give the peasants in exchange for grain. In such circumstances the principles of a free market obviously could not operate, and the Bolsheviks requisitioned grain by force. This policy was bound to alienate the peasants, but it is hard to see what else the revolutionaries could have done.

The economic policies introduced by the Bolsheviks in the middle of 1918, chief among them the suspension of a market mechanism for grain, were called war communism. This system mobilized the economy for the purpose of winning the war by means of coercion. The Bolsheviks nationalized trade and industry. Although such developments were clearly the result of improvisation, at the time theorists professed to see in the disappearance of private enterprise and even money a step toward the coming of communist society. The system caused great misery and hardship for the population and in the long run led to the devastation of the national economy. Nevertheless, in the short run it was effective: factories did produce enough arms to fight the enemy, and people in the cities were fed, however poorly.

The Bolshevik revolution, like all great revolutions, was fought for social equality. The revolutionaries did a great deal to recruit a new political elite. Young and ambitious peasants and workers, through a mixture of conviction and careerism, threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. They were able to approach their fellow workers and peasants far more successfully than any White propagandist. By mobilizing this hitherto untapped source of talent, the Bolsheviks gained a great deal. Conscious Bolshevik policies, as well as the misery imposed by war and war communism, did in fact greatly reduce inequality.