From the Introduction
Every book on the Russian Civil War is essentially a study
of the causes of the victor's victory and the loser's defeat. Even the
historian who aims at nothing more than telling the story of the struggle
at least implicitly provides us with an explanation of the outcome. In Western historiography there
is general agreement on the main causes of Bolshevik victory, and most
historians would agree with the following summary. The Bolsheviks possessed
superior leadership. Lenin was a master of political strategy and Trotskii
had great organizational ability, which he showed in creating the Red
Army and leading it to victory. The Bolsheviks also took advantage of
the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Russian people, an enthusiasm fired
by the injustices they had suffered under an outdated political and
social system; the crucible of a modern war revealed just how outdated
it was. Lenin's appropriation of the agrarian program of the Social
Revolutionaries induced the peasants to prefer the Bolsheviks to their
enemies. And whereas the Bolsheviks were relatively united, their enemies
were divided by personal animosities, ideologies, and memories of previous
conflicts. The Bolsheviks, who occupied the center of the country, had
a great strategic advantage: their enemies had to base their movements
on the peripheries, inhabited largely by non-Russians; the Red Army
could send reinforcements to any segment of the front that w as most
directly threatened, but the Whites could not coordinate their military
moves. But such a simple enumeration of
causes is hardly satisfactory. After all, w hat evidence do we have,
for instance, that the peasants preferred the Bolsheviks, except the
fact that the Bolsheviks ultimately won? Besides, is it not possible
that the Bolsheviks won in spite of the attitude of the peasants? How
is one to balance the importance of the favorable strategic position
of the Bolsheviks against the significance of Allied aid, which obviously
greatly benefited the Whites? It is true that the anti-Bolshevik camp
was deeply divided, but perhaps the White advantage of having a large
pool of experienced administrators and trained officers was an adequate
compensation. Most important, how is one to rank the various explanations?
Which cause should we consider primary? This book, too, is an attempt to
explain the outcome of the Civil War. However, I will try to develop
a primary or general explanation for the defeat of the Whites, one broad
enough to include a number of the others previously mentioned. In the
process of describing the defeat of the Whites I hope to work out a
new framework for looking at the Civil War. Instead of regarding it
as a purely military contest between two opposing armies, I will approach
it as a political competition between the two major antagonists in which
each tried to impose its will on a reluctant people. The winner in this
competition was the winner of the Civil War. The Revolution represented the disintegration
of traditional authority. The institutions, the ideology, and the leaders
by which the tsarist regime governed the country at the time of an extremely
demanding war proved inadequate. The March revolution gave an opportunity
to the liberal intelligentsia to experiment with a new system, but the
events of 1917 proved conclusively that the Provisional Government was
no more able to hold the country together than its defunct predecessor.
The victorious liberals not only failed to reverse the process of disintegration,
but themselves contributed to anarchy. Under the circumstances, the
accomplishment of the The Civil War was a period of boundless
anarchy; but it was also a time when groups of men experimented with
institutions and ideologies which would help them to overcome anarchy.
One might have thought that the democratic socialists, whose program
was clearly favored by a majority of Russians, would have had the best
chance of rallying the people. Yet within a year the Socialist Revolutionaries
and the Mensheviks had lost all positions of power and influence, proving
that an attractive ideology is only one component for establishing a
successful government. Most socialists drew the unavoidable conclusions
and, depending on their ideologies and personalities, joined cither
the Whites or the Reds, the two surviving antagonists. Russia could hardly have produced
two more different groups of people than the leaders of the Reds and
the Whites. On one side were the revolutionary intellectuals who had
spent years in jail or in exile and who were profoundly committed to
change. They were articulate, they lived their politics, and they believed
it was in their power to mold society into something better than they
had found. The other side consisted of army officers, men who had felt
basically at home in tsarist Russia, who disliked politics, and who
envisaged only military solutions to problems. They had no vision of
a future Russia, yet they deeply felt that Bolshevik rule would bring
only evil to their country. Obviously the two groups hated and despised
one another. However little these men shared
in background and ideology, they did share common problems. For whatever
their long-term goals, the immediate task for Whites and Reds alike
was to create a functioning administrative machinery which would enable
them to carry out their decisions, to organize an army, to collect food,
and to make railroads run and factories produce; briefly, to bring order
out of chaos. The central argument of this book
is that the Whites lost the Civil War above all because they failed
to build those institutions which would have enabled them to administer
the territories under their nominal rule. This failure can be understood
only in a comparative context. After all, Bolshevik rule was also shaky
in these years. Bolshevik weakness made the civil war inevitable and
the survival of the Whites for three years possible. But a civil conflict
is always a struggle between the weak and the weaker. In this conflict
the Whites in the end proved inferior: their administrative confusion
w as greater, and their territories even more engulfed by anarchy. To be able to govern means to have
authority. The problem of a country in the throes of a civil war is
that the two components of authority, legitimacy and force, are in short
supply. The task is to build authority. But how can one acquire legitimacy,
and where is the force to come from? The more a government's right to
rule is questioned and the less it is able to coerce, the more it has
to appeal to the people. In order to stay in power it must present itself
as the defender of the aspirations of the masses. At the same time it
has to organize a coercive apparatus. For that purpose it must mobilize
a highly motivated group of activists willing to perform unattractive
tasks, such as staffing the secret police. Propaganda and organization are
essential elements for winning a civil war. But the leaders of the Whites
were military men who never properly understood the political nature
of the war in which they were engaged, and thus did not understand the
tasks confronting them. Their inbred contempt for politics was a fatal
disability, for they were forced to compete with masters of political
manipulation. It may be that the White cause was hopeless from the beginning.
After all, the enemies of the November revolution could not easily outbid
the Bolsheviks. No White general could have countenanced the agrarian
revolution which was taking place in the villages. The Whites and the
Reds had to rely on different social classes, and this reliance imposed
severe limitations on their programs. Nevertheless, it is clear that
the White leaders played their hand poorly. In Red Attack White Resistance,
I summarized the difficulties the Bolsheviks had to surmount during
the first year of the struggle and described in detail the birth of
the White movement. In November 1917 there were few people in Russia
or abroad who believed that the Bolsheviks, with their outlandish ideas
and Utopian plans, could hold on to power and succeed w here more traditional
statesmen had failed. But the Bolsheviks did succeed. Their leaders
possessed political talent and determination, and their enemies were
weak, divided, and demoralized. Lenin's government survived one crisis
after another. In January 1918 this government showed its lack of democratic
scruples as it dismissed the Constituent Assembly, the fruit of Russia's
only free election. In the following month the new regime had to face
a far more dangerous threat: the German army. Only large territorial
concessions could stop the effortlessly advancing enemy; but these concessions,
made to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, led to a break with the Bolsheviks'
only coalition partners, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and even
threatened the unity of the Party. The worst crisis came in the last
spring and early summer of 1918. The Bolsheviks' inability to feed the
people resulted in such misery and dissatisfaction that their base of
power was close to crumbling away completely; Russia w as on the brink
of total anarchy. This was the time when large-scale anti-Bolshevik
forces started to organize and the Civil War began in earnest. The first
serious military opponents of Bolshevik rule formed a strange group.
The Provisional Government had organized a small army out of the willing
prisoners of war of Czech and Slovak extraction who wanted to fight
for the birth of their own country. After the Brest-Litovsk peace, this
army of approximately forty thousand men w anted to be transported to
Western Europe in order to continue the fight against Germany. Their
remarkable odyssey had an unexpected result: the Czechs rebelled against
their hosts and within a short time they gained control of the entire
Trans-Siberian railroad; forty thousand men became the masters of Siberia.
Under Czech protection, the Socialist Revolutionaries organized a government
and an army. For a while this new army advanced victoriously and the
Bolsheviks lived through very anxious days. Trotskii's defeat of the
enemy at Sviazhsk, not far from Kazan, at the end of August 1918 is
considered one of the decisive battles of the Civil War. At the same time a bewildering variety
of anti-Bolshevik forces organized in South Russia. The Ukraine was
in the hands of the Germans, who administered it through their reactionary
puppet, Hetman Skoropadskii. The newly formed Caucasian states all assumed
an anti-Bolshevik stance. The Don Cossacks of Ataman Krasnov, with German
aid and protection, soon liberated the entire Don Voisko (army). Perhaps most important, the Volunteer Army, which
had been established by Russia's most prominent generals soon after
the November Revolution, in the summer grew into a serious force. The
army was protected from the main Bolshevik armies by the Don Cossacks,
and—ironically in view of the army's loyalty to the Allies—by the Germans.
Under these favorable circumstances the Whites could organize their
forces in the relative security of the Kuban. In August they captured
the capital of the district, Ekaterinodar, which was to remain their
headquarters for many months. November 1918 was a turning point
in the history of the Civil War. In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak overthrew
a government in which the Socialist Revolutionaries had participated.
After this coup, Russia's most popular party never again played a major
role. Even more important for the course of the Civil War was the end
of the war in Europe. This enabled the Allies to pay more attention
to Russia. As a result, paradoxically, the intervention, which began
within the context of the European war, greatly expanded after November
1918. The spirit of the anti-Bolsheviks was lifted by the prospect of
large-scale support from foreign friends. They optimistically assumed
that the powers which had defeated the greatest army in the world, the
German, now would quickly remove Lenin and his comrades. Yet the immediate beneficiaries
of German defeat w ere the Bolsheviks. As the German troops withdrew
from the Ukraine, the Red Army quickly occupied the country. The Bolsheviks,
unlike their enemies, possessed the forces to take advantage of the
power vacuum. German defeat was followed by revolutionary risings, and
the Bolsheviks confidently expected that the socialist victory in Berlin
was only a prologue to a communist revolution. It seemed that their
days of terrible isolation were nearing an end. This book takes up the story where
the previous volumes left off. In 1919 the Volunteer Army grew from
a regional force into a major army which in October came close to occupying
Moscow. But the success proved ephemeral, and in March 1920 the White
movement was on the verge of collapse. During the period of victories
and defeats the White leadership experimented with policies and institutional
changes. Studying these shifts we become aware of the varieties possible
even within military counterrevolution. In the spring of 1920 General
Wrangel took General Denikin's place as Commander-in-Chief, but he succeeded
in staving off defeat only for a few months. In November 1920 the remnants
of the Volunteer Army evacuated the Crimea, and this event finally ended
the three-year-old Civil War. In deciding the outcome of the struggle,
political failures were more decisive than military ones, and so I consider
my main tasks to be these: to describe the administrative apparatus
of the Whites, to reconstruct the world view of the men who organized
and ran the institutions, and to analyze the White social and economic
policies. Of course, in the chaos of the Civil War there was a wide
gap between the policies agreed on by the central organs and what the
people actually experienced. While it is relatively easy to relate the
functioning of central institutions, such as Denikin's Special Council,
it is far more difficult to reconstruct the work of the administrative
organs closest to the people. For example, we can follow the development
of the thinking of the leaders on the issue of land reform and the work
of various commissions, but we have only a hazy picture of the effect
of Wrangel's land law on the peasants, and it is hard to establish how
much of the reform was in fact carried out. We arc forced to conjecture
on the basis of thin evidence. Since this book must describe the
defeat of an army, obviously much will have to be said about the changing
military situation. However, this book is not intended as military history.
I am more interested in the army as an institution, in the background
and behavior of the soldiers, and in questions of morale and indoctrination
than in the history of campaigns. Similarly, I devote relatively little
space to the issue of Allied intervention. I do so because I believe
that the Civil War was indeed a civil war in the sense that its outcome
was determined by local forces and circumstances. Also, foreign intervention
is the aspect of the Civil War which has been described best and in
most detail by other historians. Indeed, the many books on this subject
may actually have distorted our picture of the conflict by exaggerating
the role of foreigners. In the historical literature there
are far better works about the Bolsheviks than about their enemies.
However, from many otherwise valuable books the comparative perspective
is missing. It is a serious weakness. The Reds and the Whites were,
of course, quite conscious of competing against one another, and therefore
when the historian concentrates only on one group he cannot present
a fully accurate picture. For example, in order to understand Lenin's
agrarian policies it is important to know what the Whites were doing.
Recently some historians have stressed the heterogeneous nature of the
Bolshevik Party in the years of the Civil War. Those who study the White
movement w ill quickly see that, by comparison, the Bolsheviks were
firmly united. Although I recount the history only
of the South Russian anti-Bolshevik movement, I have tried to write
something broader than a regional history. I have concentrated on the
microcosm of the South because it seemed the best way to pay attention
to the enormous variety of forces which were at work, and thus to gain
a better
|