59 Metropolitan Nikon blesses the Women’s Battalion of Death on Red Square in Moscow before their departure for the Front in June. One of the women was too fat for standard issue trousers and had to go to battle in a skirt.
60 General Kornilov is greeted as a hero by the rightwing members of the Officers’ Union on his arrival in Moscow for the State Conference on 12 August.
61 Members of the Women’s Battalion of Death await the final assault on the Winter Palace, 25 October 1917. When the Aurora fired its first salvo the women became hysterical and had to be confined in a basement room.
62 More of Kerensky’s last defenders, barricaded inside the Winter Palace, await the assault of the Bolshevik forces on 25 October.
63 The Smolny Institute, seat of the Soviet and command centre of the Bolshevik Party, in early October.
64 The Red Guard of the Vulkan Factory in Petrograd. Note the ties and suits of many of the guards.
THE CIVIL WAR
65 General Alexeev – the last chief of staff in the imperial army and, along with Kornilov, the founder of the White movement in south Russia.
66 General Denikin – leader of the White armed forces in south Russia between 1918 and 1920.
67 Admiral Kolchak – the main White leader in east Russia and, thanks to his connections with the Allies, the nominal head of the whole White movement.
68 Baron Wrangel, who led the last White campaign in the Crimea during 1920.
69 The Red Army was no match for the Czech Legion, pictured here during the capture of Vladivostok in June 1918. The aim of the Czechs was to travel eastwards to the United States, and from there return to the European war.
70 The White armies were top-heavy – too many generals and not enough soldiers. A group of White officers await the arrival of Admiral Kolchak during a military parade in Omsk, December 1918.
71 By contrast the Red forces were bottom-heavy – too many infantry and not enough commanders with expertise. The ‘committee spirit’ of 1917 lived on in the ranks of the Red partisan units such as Makhno’s, pictured here in 1920, where tactics were decided by a show of soldiers’ hands.
72 Armoured trains like this played a vital role in the civil war.
73 Part of the Red Army, the Latvian Division, passing through a village near the South-Western Front, 1919.
74 Two Red Army soldiers take a break during the fighting on the South-Western Front, 1919.
75 The Red Army served as an important channel for the spread of literacy and propaganda.
Soldiers in Tula reading Red Army leaflets, spring 1919.
76 The Red Army brings its propaganda to the village. The mobile library of II Cavalry Corps, 1922.
77 Nestor Makhno in 1919. Facing annihilation by the Bolsheviks, Makhno and the remnants of his army left Russian territory in 1921. After brief periods of imprisonment in Romania and Poland, the anarchist leader lived in Paris until his death in 1935.
78 Terror was a weapon of all the armies in the civil war.
The Whites hang a peasant of Kursk province for the possession of an old hunting rifle, September 1919.
79 Just one Jewish victim of a pogrom by a band of Ukrainian nationalists in Poltava province, 1920.
80 The Reds kill a Polish officer during the war against Poland in 1920. The naked man was hanged upside-down, beaten, cut and tortured until he died.
EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER THE BOLSHEVIKS
81 The fuel crisis in the cities.
Muscovites dismantle a town house for firewood.
82 A priest is commandeered to help transport timber. Many horses died for lack of food so human draught was used.
83 Selling to eat.
Women of the ‘former classes’ sell their last possessions on the streets of Moscow.
84 A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhooi fallen on hard times.
85 Selling to eat.
A low-level party functionary haggles over a fur scarf with a female trader at the Smolensk market, Moscow, 1920. The woman on the left has the appearance of a burzhooika.
86 Traders at the Smolensk market, Moscow, 1920. The woman with the string bag and the loaf of bread is almost certainly a prostitute.
87 Putting the gentle classes to work. Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets under the inspection of a commissar with guards, the Apraksin market in Petrograd, 1918. The main purpose of this sort of forced labour was to humiliate and degrade the privileged classes of the old regime.
88 The Bolshevik war against the market. Cheka soldiers close down traders’ stalls on the Okhotnyi Riad (Hunters’ Row) in Moscow, May 1919.
89 Requisitioning the peasants’ grain.
90 ‘Bagmen’ travelled to and from the countryside exchanging food for manufactured goods. The result was chaos on the railways.
91 The 1 May subbotnik (‘volunteer’ labour on Saturday) on Red Square in Moscow, 1920.
92 By 1920 the state was feeding – or rather underfeeding – thirty million people in makeshift cafeterias like this one at the Kiev Station in Moscow.
93 The new ruling class: delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress, Moscow, 1920.
94 A typical example of the new bureaucracy: the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern Region. Note the portrait of Marx, the leathered commissar, and the bourgeois daughters who served in such large numbers as secretaries.
95 The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup. But it was fast becoming not so much a bastion of the Marxist revolution as one of the corruption of the party élite.
THE REVOLUTIONARY INHERITANCE
96 The people reject the Bolsheviks.
Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base, 16 March 1921.
97 Peasant rebels (‘Greens’) attack a train of requisitioned grain, February 1921.
98 The famine crisis of 1921–2.
Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region, 1921. The crisis was largely the result of Bolshevik over-requisitioning.
99 The victims of the crisis; an overcrowded cemetery in the Buzuluk district, 1921.
100 Cannibals with their victims, Samara province, 1921.
101 Orphans of the revolution.
Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food remains in a rubbish tip, 1921.
102 Orphans were ripe for political indoctrination. This young boy, seen here giving a speech from the agit-train October Revolution, was the Secretary of the Tula Komsomol. He was part of the generation which, a decade later, pioneered the Stalinist assault on old Russia.
103 Orphans also made good soldiers: a national unit of the Red Army in Turkestan, 1920.
104 The war against religion: Red Army soldiers confiscate valuable items from the Semenov Monastery in Moscow, 1923.
105 The revolution expands east.
The Red Army arrives in Bukhara and explains the meaning of Soviet power to the former subjects of the Emir, September 1920.
106 Two Bolshevik commissars of the Far East.
107 The dying Lenin, with one of his doctors and his younger sister Maria Ul’ianova, during the summer of 1923. By the time this photograph was taken, Stalin’s rise to power was virtually assured.
Notes
Full details of titles are given in the Bibliography, here.
1 The Dynasty
1 Novoe vremia, 17, 18, 20–8 Feb 1913; Romanov, V mramornom, 174–7; Taneeva, Stranitsy, 98–101; Buchanan, Dissolution, 36–7.
2 Novoe vremia, 18–28 May 1913; Niva, 24, 1913, 477–9; Mossolov, At the Court, 240–1; Romanov, V mramornom, 178; Kokovtsov, Out, 361.
3 Whelan, Alexander III, 32–3.
4 ‘Dnevnik A. A. Polovtsova’ (1902), 3, 1923: 136; Iswolsky, Memoirs, 264–5; Wortman, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, 253–4; Verner, Crisis, 79.
5 Wortman, Scenarios, 381–7; Wortman, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, 250–1; Spiridovitch, Les Dernières, 2: 253–62.
6 Wortman, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, 254–7, 260–2.
7 Rodzianko, Reign, 75–7.
8 Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 361; Miliukov, Political Memoirs, 236.