A People's Tragedy (121 page)

Ivan Maisky, the Menshevik Minister of Labour, counted 4,000 political prisoners. The town dumas and zemstvos were restored and the Soviets, as class organs, barred from politics. The Komuch also declared its support for a 'democratic federation', which won it plaudits from the Bashkir and Tatar communities in the Volga region.30

In the industrial field, the Komuch, like the Provisional Government, tried to steer a middle course between labour and capital, and ended up satisfying neither. Class divisions were too strong. The workers rejected the Komuch as 'bourgeois' and passed defiantly Bolshevik resolutions in the Soviet. The factory committees were stripped of their powers and control of the factories was transferred to their former owners or (where they were absent) to government-appointed managers. The banks were returned to private control. Free trade was restored and a Council of Trade and Industry, dominated by industrialists, was set up to help formulate economic policy. But even this was not enough to convince the middle classes that the Komuch was not dangerously

'socialist'. They could see only that the eight-hour day was still guaranteed; that the trade unions and the Soviet were still in operation; and that the red flag still hung from the Komuch buildings. What, they asked, was the point of replacing the Bolsheviks with a 'semi-Bolshevik' regime like the Komuch? Why replace the Reds with these 'Pinks'

when you could have the Whites instead?

During the early days of the Komuch the Samara middle classes, thankful for the overthrow of the Soviet, had approved a government loan. But they soon switched their support to the White counter-revolution in the east. The Komuch was forced to raise taxes from the sale of vodka — always unpopular with the workers. It also printed money which fuelled inflation. The peasants reduced their food sales to the cities, as money lost its value, forcing the Komuch to introduce bread rationing. Its urban base collapsed even further. Only the tiny provincial intelligentsia stayed with it to the end.

During the August Duma elections the pro-government parties polled a derisory 15 per cent; two-thirds of the electorate did not even bother to vote. Democracy was resoundingly silent.31

Despite the SRs' expectations, the Volga peasantry proved no more supportive of their government. Had the SRs been willing to support the peasant revolution, things might have been different. But that would have meant recognizing the peasant Soviets — and the Komuch leaders were not prepared to go that far. They were determined to replace the Soviets with the volost

zemstvos, in which all the rural classes, including the nobility, were represented on an equal basis. But as in 1917, the zemstvo elections were boycotted by the mass of the peasants, who were already committed to their Soviets as organs of direct village self-rule. Even where the zemstvos were elected, it was often difficult for them to function because the rural intelligentsia and officialdom had largely disappeared from the villages since the revolution, while the peasant communes refused to pay their taxes. In some villages the Soviet remained in power but referred to itself as the 'zemstvo' in communiques with the Komuch.* The Komuch was powerless to stamp out this charade, even when it sent in troops. The peasants were too firmly committed to the Soviets as the guarantors of their revolution on the land.

The Komuch was equally reluctant to sanction the peasants' seizures of the gentry's land. True, it upheld the land reform passed at the first and only session of the Constituent Assembly which had recognized the abolition of all landed property. But a subsequent decree, passed on 22 July, enabled the former landowners to reclaim any winter fields which they had sown. This in effect meant reversing one-third of the peasant requisitions of arable land. Troops often had to be called in to enforce the decree. Its aim had been to 'reinforce the rule of law' after the 'anarchic' peasant land seizures during the previous winter and spring, but instead the impression was created, especially among the poorest peasants, who had been given most of the gentry's fields, that the Komuch wanted to restore the old regime on the land. They could be forgiven for this interpretation since some of the local squires saw the decree as a licence to take the law into their own hands. With the help of an army brigade, or their own private militia, they would seize back their property; sometimes they even had the peasant leaders flogged in public to 'teach them a lesson'.32

* * * Of all the Komuch's policies, none was more unpopular than the call-up for the People's Army. In any civil war the success of the contenders depends on their relative abilities to mobilize the local population. This test the Komuch failed in no uncertain fashion.

During the summer, the Komuch and Czech forces were able to conquer territory almost at will. The Reds were chronically weak, without food supplies or a proper army. Ufa fell to the Czechs on 6 July; Simbirsk, Lenin's birthplace, on the 22nd; and Kazan, with its huge tsarist gold reserve, on 6 August. Two days later the munitions workers of Izhevsk, 150 miles to the north of Kazan, rose up against the Soviet and declared their sympathy for the Komuch. It was the biggest ever workers' uprising against the Bolsheviks — and a major

* Such deception was facilitated by the fact that in 1918 most of the Soviets were still using the old zemstvo stationery.

embarrassment for the regime. The revolt soon spread to the neighbouring countryside, where many of the workers' families still lived. Volunteer detachments were formed to fight the Reds. This was the height of the Komuch's fortunes. It now controlled an area the size of mainland Italy, with a population of fourteen million people.

But the Komuch's military potential was always very fragile. The Czech Legion was unwilling to fight in Russia indefinitely. Its soldiers were tired and wanted to go home, and their morale declined further as the Reds became better organized. By the middle of August, the Czech units were falling apart. Some of the soldiers were socialists and they went over to the Reds, who barraged them with propaganda; others simply gave up fighting and sold off their supplies to the local population. The Czech Legion broke down into bands of petty profiteers.

It was all the more essential, then, that the Komuch should raise its own troops from the Volga population. One of its first acts had been to appeal for volunteers. In the towns some 8,000 people — most of them students and cadets, but also refugees and the unemployed without other means of support — responded to the call. But in the countryside the number of volunteers was tiny: the majority of the peasantry wanted nothing to do with the 'fratricidal' civil war. Whilst they were willing to defend the revolution in their own localities — and for this they formed their own peasant companies — most of them looked on the war as a remote struggle between the urban parties. 'The mood of the peasants is indifferent,' declared a recruiting officer of the People's Army; 'they just want to be left to themselves. The Bolsheviks were here —

that's good, they say; the Bolsheviks went away — that's no shame, they say. As long as there is bread then let's pray to God, and who needs the Guards? Let them fight it out by themselves, we will stand aside. It is well known that playing it by ear is the best side to be on.' At the Samara peasant assembly, organized by the Komuch in September, the delegates declared that they would 'not fight their own brothers, only enemies'. They

'refused to support a war between the political parties' and urged the Komuch 'to come to an agreement with the Bolsheviks'. One delegate proposed that 'the continuation of the civil war ought to be decided by a referendum, and until we know the opinion of the whole population we do not have a moral right to vote on this resolution [to support the war]'.33

To the mass of the peasants, whose political horizons were limited to the narrow confines of their villages, the national goals of the Komuch were quite alien. The restoration of the Constituent Assembly meant little to them when they already had the land and their freedom. The Komuch's call for the renewal of the war against Germany, six months after the fighting had ceased, clashed with the peasantry's parochial pacifism. 'The war with Germany and all wars are bad,' resolved the peasants of one village. 'If we do not fight, then the

German soldiers will not take our territory,' reasoned the peasants of another. The district police chief of Samara concluded that 'the population is poorly enlightened about the aims of the People's Army... The idea has taken root that the "bourgeois" have started a new war because the "peace" signed by the Bolsheviks is unfavourable to them; but that the peasantry "has suffered no loss" and will not do so if it allows the bourgeoisie to fight by themselves.'34

Such class antagonisms were worsened by the attitudes of the People's Army officers.

The fate of the Komuch would have been different had it been able to find its own loyal corps of democratic officers; the army commissars of 1917 would have fitted the bill perfectly. But very few of them were now left: some, like Linde, had been engulfed by the revolution; others, like Os'kin, had joined the Reds. There were no more citizen-patriots of the type who had rallied behind Kerensky; the idea of the 'democratic officer'

was now merely oxy-moronic* The Komuch had no choice but to make do with the officers who volunteered for it. Colonel Galkin, a typical military bureaucrat of the tsarist era, was placed in charge of the People's Army. His headquarters became a stronghold of Rightist and monarchist officers, a Trojan horse of White counterrevolution inside the democratic citadel. The Komuch leaders were fully aware of this but, as Klimushkin put it, 'we were so sure of the force of democracy that we were not afraid of the officers' plans'. Under Galkin, the tsarist system of military discipline was restored. Officers even wore a scaled-down version of their epaulettes.

Many of them were the sons of local squires and sometimes wreaked a violent revenge on the villages that had seized their familes' estates.35 No wonder the peasants were not keen on the so-called People's Army.

The poor response to the appeal for volunteers forced the Komuch to resort to conscription at the end of June. Fearful that the older peasants would be infected by the Bolshevism which had swept through the army in 1917, it called up those aged under twenty-one. Yet even they showed the familiar symptoms of insubordination. Only one in three of the conscripted men turned up at the recruiting stations: the rest were

'deserters'. The appearance rate was lowest in the western districts bordering the Front, which says a great deal about the reasons for the Bolshevik victory. In contrast to their opponents, the Bolsheviks were usually able, at least at the critical moments of the civil war, to mobilize the peasantry just behind the Front. However much the peasants disliked the Reds, they feared a restoration of the old landed regime much more. Neither the Komuch nor the Whites were ever able to penetrate the central zone of Soviet power, where the peasant revolution was most firmly rooted.

All the civil war armies suffered from chronic problems of desertion, but the People's Army suffered more than most, largely as a result of having to

* The Komuch did make an effort to recruit the services of Brusilov; but this came to nothing.

improvise an army at the Front. Whereas the Bolsheviks had been in power for ten months before the major fighting began, the Komuch was barely ten weeks old when it faced the first Red onslaught. There was never enough time to build up a proper military infrastructure. Too often there were no uniforms or guns for the new recruits. Soldiers received little proper training before being put into battle, so that panic often broke out in the ranks at the first moment of danger. During August and September, the height of the harvest season, thousands of soldiers ran back to their farms, just at the moment when the Reds were launching their offensive. The Komuch tried to stem the desertions by sending punitive Cossack detachments into the villages. Military field courts, reminiscent of Stolypin's notorious tribunals in 1905—6, were given sweeping powers to punish the deserters and their families. Peasant leaders were publicly flogged and hanged; hostages were taken to force the deserters out of hiding; and whole villages were burned to the ground when soldiers failed to give themselves up. To the peasants, all this must have seemed like a return of the old regime with a vengeance.

The effect of repression was merely to strengthen the peasantry's resistance and drive many of them into the arms of the Reds. Villagers formed brigades, often organized by the Soviet, in order to resist the People's Army and its punitive detachments. These village 'armies' went to war with rusty guns, pitchforks and axes, and odd pieces of artillery mounted on peasant carts. Some fought as partisan units alongside the Red Army and later became regular detachments of it. The Domashki village brigade was a classic example. It fought against the Cossacks on the southern steppelands of Samara before becoming the nucleus of the 219th Domashki Rifle Division, a regular detachment of the Fourth Red Army. The Pugachev, Novouzensk, Krasnokutsk and Kurilovo Regiments had similar origins. The soldiers in these regiments were relatives and neighbours. In the Kurilovo Regiment there was a father and six sons. This cohesion was unmatched by any other fighting force in the civil war, with the exception of the Cossack detachments, which were similar in many ways.36 This was the stuff of the legend of Chapaev, the main Red commander of these partisans, upon which three generations of Soviet children were to be brought up.

* * * Without an effective army, it was only a matter of time before the Komuch lost its hold on the Volga region. During the summer the Reds had gradually built up their forces for a Volga campaign: it was here that the Red Army took shape as a regular conscript army. Worker detachments were raised in Moscow and the other towns of the central Soviet zone and despatched to the Eastern Army Group on the right bank of the Volga. On Lenin's orders, 30,000 troops were transferred from the anti-German screens in the west. He gambled (correctly, as