The emerging Soviet state was also a party-state, for the Bolshevik party expanded in size, to over three hundred thousand in early 1919. These men and women were the cadre for the new state. The remaining Mensheviks and SRs were pushed out of political life by the end of 1918 and the new institutions required loyal officials to run them. The party itself became more centralized, especially with the establishment of the Politburo (Political Bureau) over the Central Committee in 1919. The new Politburo included only Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, and Nikolai Krestinskii as full members; Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin were included as candidates. Here was the core of the Bolshevik leadership. Zinoviev was the son of Jewish dairy farmers in the Ukraine and had been close to Lenin during his years of European exile. After the government moved to Moscow in 1918, Zinoviev headed the Petrograd party organization, effectively running the city until 1926, at the same time leading the new Communist International. Lev Kamenev was the son of a Jewish railroad worker, but had acquired some university education and was married to Trotsky’s sister. After 1917, he functioned as Lenin’s deputy and ran the Moscow party organization. Bukharin, the best educated of the Bolsheviks after Lenin, was something of a Marxist theorist and had spent time both in Western Europe and briefly in the United States. He was a bit younger than the others, and personally popular in the party. Like Lenin he was also actually Russian, as were Krestinskii and Kalinin, both minor figures. Krestinskii served as Commissar of Finance, while Kalinin, the only worker in the group and even born into a peasant family, headed the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets – in other words, he was the technical head of government. All of them shared, with Stalin, solid credentials of unwavering Bolshevism. Trotsky, in contrast, was a flamboyant ex-Menshevik who fit poorly into the group.
The crucial person in the whole party and government was Lenin. Until 1917 he had spent his life as a revolutionary organizer and journalist, turning out masses of articles explaining his position and denouncing his opponents. He was also more intellectual than the others, as his writings on philosophy and the economics of imperialism demonstrated. In such matters only Bukharin came close to him. As an orator he was clear and capable of moving an audience, but not on the level of Trotsky or Zinoviev. On taking power in 1917, he proved to have political and administrative skills far in excess of most of his comrades, as well as a powerful will and the ability to make decisions. He rapidly absorbed himself in the details of government, including the myriad economic problems that arose when the Bolsheviks nationalized the economy. He tried and largely succeeded in imposing a spirit of teamwork on the party leadership, getting contentious and often arrogant comrades to work together. When he argued his position in person, he could convince his opponents without belittling them (although his published polemics were another matter). Even if all of the other leaders disagreed with him on occasion, he remained the unchallenged leader of the party and hence of the state.
This highly effective leadership controlled a very imperfect state apparatus, but it had, besides the party, other instruments of power. The Red Army was five million strong by the end of the Civil War but “labor armies” made up much of its theoretical strength and it took on many economic functions, providing horses for plowing and restoring railroad service. The Cheka provided internal security, eliminated active and potential opponents, and tried to suppress the growing number of criminal bands in the cities. There were some twenty-five thousand people in the Cheka by the end of the Civil War, but it also controlled over a hundred thousand internal security troops, infantry, and cavalry. The party, the army, and the Cheka made possible the Red victory, but they could not stop the deepening economic crisis and accompanying anarchy. The near collapse of rail transport meant that the northern cities could be supplied only with great difficulty. Petrograd suffered in particular, losing some three quarters of its population by 1920. With the move of the government to Moscow the Reds evacuated a number of key factories with their workers and equipment, and hundreds of thousands of workers came to work in Moscow, joined the party apparatus, the Cheka, or the Red Army. Many simply went home to their native villages in search of food, heat, and work. As order collapsed, disease began to spread. Typhus, influenza, and other diseases were epidemic.
The spring of 1919 brought new life to the White movements. The end of the war in Europe in November 1918 meant the withdrawal of German troops from the western territories. In the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, local nationalists declared independence from the Bolsheviks, but the Red Army quickly returned power to the Soviets. The Reds drove out the nationalist Ukrainian Directory in Kiev. At the approach of the Red forces, the Directory’s peasant army simply melted away. Under their military leader Semyon Petliura the Ukrainian nationalists moved west, carrying out a ferocious massacre of the Jews in Proskurov on the way. Kolchak held Siberia and the Urals and Denikin moved north through the spring, taking the Donbass, most of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Denikin was able to advance as far as Orel, raiding far behind the Red lines with substantial groups of cavalry. The mobility of the Civil War put a premium on cavalry, and the Cossacks and the cavalry officers of the old army were a formidable challenge. The Reds answered with Semen Budennyi’s First Cavalry Army, formed in the middle of the battles against Denikin, at first a ragtag band of poorly disciplined men whipped into shape by Budennyi’s charisma. In July mass mobilization by the Reds allowed them to send substantial armies against Denikin and stopped him. Behind his lines in the southern Ukraine a new army appeared seemingly out of nothing, the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno, an ex-sergeant of the Russian Imperial Army and an instinctive guerilla leader. Makhno shredded Denikin’s communications, and with the Reds driving him from the north, he had to retreat.
Denikin was an accomplished general but this was a political war. The White governments were military dictatorships with civilian ministers recruited from former liberals to give them some minimal credibility. Their social policy was bound to antagonize the masses, as they opposed not only the Reds but also anything the workers saw as conquests of the revolution. In the cities, only the middle and upper classes supported them. Massacres of Jews were frequent. In the countryside their policy inevitably supported the noble landowners against the peasants and could not exploit rural antagonism to Bolshevik measures. To make matters worse, the White governments financed their operations by printing money and the peasants were reluctant to sell grain for worthless currency. Like the Reds, the Whites turned to confiscation of grain. As in the Red-held areas, the peasants reduced their farming to subsistence, creating food shortages in the richest agricultural areas in the country, western Siberia and the south. As resistance to them grew, the Whites could only answer with repression, and the cities that the Whites occupied saw mass executions. Behind the White lines in Siberia and the Ukraine the peasants formed armed bands to confront the Whites. Not only Makhno but also hundreds of peasant bands bent only on preserving their own territory kept the Whites from effective control of the countryside.