The middle ground between the Reds and the Whites was thus eroded and eventually disappeared. The whole of the country was now engulfed in the civil war. There was no place in it for the fragile democracy whose roots had been laid down in 1917. Russia was too polarized, and the mass of its people too poorly educated, to sustain democratic institutions against enemies on both extremes. The antiBolshevik movement would not reassume a democratic form until the autumn of 1920, by which time it was too late to unseat the new autocracy. The tragedy of the Russian Revolution was that the people were too weak politically to determine its outcome.
13 The Revolution Goes to War
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i Arming the Revolution
It was five years since Dmitry Os’kin had last been in Tula. Then, in 1913, he had been a simple peasant boy fresh from the countryside to sign up as a soldier of the Tsar. Now, in the spring of 1918, he was returning to the same town, a commissar in Trotsky’s army, to put steel into the revolution.
The years of war and revolution had been kind to Os’kin. He had risen through the ranks, winning four St George’s Crosses on the way, as the old caste of officers was destroyed. During 1917 his fortunes rose as his politics moved to the Left: he rode on the tide of the soldiers’ revolution. His SR credentials won him command of a regiment, followed by election to the Central Committee of the Soldiers’ Soviet on the South-Western Front. In October he went as an SR delegate to the Second Soviet Congress — one of that ‘grey mass’ of unwashed soldiers in the Smolny Hall whom Sukhanov had blamed for the Bolshevik triumph. In early 1918, when Trotsky began to build the officer corps of the new Red Army, he turned first to the NCOs, like Os’kin, who had learned their trade in the tsarist army. It was a marriage of convenience between the ambitions of the peasant sons and the military needs of the regime. As Napoleon had once said, every soldier carried in his knapsack the baton of a field-marshaclass="underline" that was the making of an armée revolutionnaire.
One hundred miles south of Moscow, Tula was the arsenal of the revolution. After the evacuation of Petrograd it became the hub of the Soviet Republic’s munitions industry. At the height of the First World War its factories employed over 60,000 workers, although by the time of Os’kin’s arrival, with the general flight to the countryside, only 15,000 were left. The new military commissar took up his office in the Soviet building, housed in the former Peasant Bank, which, as if to symbolize the new social order, was surrounded by metal factories.1
The local Red Guards, which Os’kin had come to reorganize, had been mostly set up by the workers during 1917 to defend their factories against the threat of a ‘counter-revolution’. After the Bolshevik seizure of power there had been a great deal of talk about using them to form a new type of ‘proletarian army’ rather than retaining the remnants of the old (and mainly peasant) one. The Bolsheviks did not like the idea of a standing army. They thought of the army as a tool of oppression wielded by the old regime against the revolution. A workers’ militia would be more egalitarian, and the Red Guards were to be the basis of such a force. They made up the units of the new Red Army, whose establishment was decreed on 15 January. Apart from their ideological objections to the idea of a standing army, the Bolsheviks also had practical reasons for favouring the volunteer principle at this stage: the disintegration of the old army and the complete absence of any apparatus to carry out conscription left them no choice. The only real troops they could rely on were the three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, which stood alone between them and disaster during the first months of their regime.
At this time, when the workers were fleeing the cities, the new Red recruits were largely made up of unemployed former soldiers, and all those ‘vagabond, unstable elements that’, in Trotsky’s words, ‘were so numerous at the time’. Some of them had no doubt come to like the army way of life, or at least preferred it to postwar civilian hardships. But most of them had nowhere else to go — the war left them without home or family. They were stranded in towns like Tula, half-way between the Front and their long-abandoned homes. Many of these migrants signed up with the Red Guards simply to receive a standard-issue coat, or a pair of boots, before running off to sell them and start the whole process over again in some other town. The new Proletarian Militia was a rag-and-bone trade for the down and out.2
Naturally, such an army was virtually useless on the battlefield. The image of the Red Guards as disciplined crack troops is the stuff of Soviet mythology. The Red Guards were irregular detachments, motley-clothed and armed, poorly disciplined and very heavy-drinking. The ‘committee spirit’ of 1917 lived on in their ranks. Officers were elected and their primitive operational plans were usually voted on by a show of soldiers’ hands. The military consequences were disastrous. Attacks were launched without proper scouting, often using no more than a school atlas. The soldiers fought in a wild and undisciplined manner, all too frequently breaking up in panic at the first sight of the enemy. Crushing defeats by the Germans in February and March, followed by the Czechs in May and June, made it clear to Trotsky that such methods would not do. With the Soviet regime on the brink of defeat, the Red Army would have to be reformed on the model of the old imperial army, with regular units replacing the detachments, proper discipline in the ranks, professional officers and a centralized hierarchy of command. That reformation was to be Os’kin’s task in Tula.
One of Trotsky’s first measures was to call on the services of ex-tsarist officers. They were called ‘military specialists’ rather than officers to dissociate them from the old regime (for the same reason soldiers were now called ‘Red Army servicemen’). Some 8,000 ex-tsarist officers had volunteered to fight for the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power. The soldiers and their committees, for whom the revolution meant above all the ending of officers’ authority, greeted them with much hostility. But the shortage of NCOs, as well as the so-called Red Commanders, whose training had only just begun, ensured that brute military needs won the day over revolutionary zeal. Now Trotsky sought to extend the principle with the mass conscription of the ex-tsarist officers, brushing aside the soldiers’ objections by simply abolishing their committees. On 29 July he issued his famous Order Number 228, calling up all officers. By the end of the year, 22,000 ex-tsarist officers had been recruited; and in the course of the civil war the number rose to 75,000, not including doctors, vets and other officials. By the end, three-quarters of the senior commanders in the Red Army were drawn from the tsarist officer corps.3
What motivated these officers? Some, like Brusilov, who was to join the Red Army in 1920, were moved by a sense of patriotic duty: the country, for better or worse, had chosen the Reds, or so it seemed to them, and their duty was to serve it. Many were also driven by an inbred sense of military duty: these were ‘army men’ who would serve that institution regardless of its politics. Perhaps some junior officers were also attracted by the prospect of a more senior command in the new army than they might have expected in the old one. But the most common motivation was the simple need to find a job: it was survival, not self-advancement, which drew the officers to the Soviet cause. Most of them had lost their military pension, often their only means of livelihood, and were thus much worse off than the other ruined classes of Old Russia. Amidst the terror of 1918, moreover, they were well advised to make themselves useful to the regime. For as Trotsky was to put it in a memo to Lenin, by employing the ex-tsarist officers ‘we shall lighten the load on the prisons’.fn1 The officers who joined were closely supervised by the commissars, like Os’kin, and warned that any acts of betrayal of the Red Army would lead to the arrest of their families. ‘Let the turncoats realize’, read Trotsky’s special order of 30 September, ‘that they are at the same time betraying their own families — their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.’4