Yet enough concessions were being made to the sensitivities of non-Russians to make the Civil War easier for the Reds than for the Whites in the non-Russian regions. Jews in particular were terrified by the anti-Semitic mayhem perpetrated by the Whites.39 Yet the advantage held by the Reds was helpful without being decisive. Invading troops misbehaved in all the armies. The Reds frequently committed butchery against religious leaders. Twenty-eight bishops and thousands of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were killed; and the other Christian sects as well as Islam and Judaism were also subjected to a campaign of terror. Lenin’s policy was to introduce atheism by persuasion; but he, too, instigated the mass murder of clerics.40 For most people, religious belief was entwined with their national or ethnic identity. The rampaging of the Red Army — and especially its cavalrymen — undid much of the good done for Sovnarkom’s cause by the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities.
Nevertheless the Whites had lost. The dispirited Denikin, as he retreated to Crimea, resigned his command to General Vrangel; Yudenich and his forces faded into inactivity. The Whites were in a hopeless position. Vrangel belatedly appreciated the damage done to their campaigns by their refusal to leave the peasants with the land taken by them since the October Revolution. Kolchak had given farms to landlords at the peasantry’s expense even in places where the landlords had not owned estates.41 By announcing their faith in ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, the Whites alienated those non-Russian nationalities who recognized the slogan as thinly disguised Russian imperialism. By hanging trade unionists, they made workers think twice before turning against the Russian Communist Party.
Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich had rested their hopes in a military knock-out blow, and refused to fight a ‘political’ war. They were contemptuous of the Kadets who organized the civilian administration for them.42 Lip service was given by the White commanders to the ultimate goal of re-convoking a representative assembly of some kind; but their officers were hostile to this: their fundamental aim was a right-wing military dictatorship. Kolchak and Denikin came within striking range of Moscow; Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss their calculations out of hand. But they had the odds stacked against them. The Reds always held an area with a hugely greater availability of conscripts and military equipment;43 they also were based at the heart of the country’s network of telegraph, railways and administration. The Reds had high morale and felt certain that they were making a new, better world and that science and social justice were on their side.
Indisputably, luck was with them. The Germans lost the Great War and stopped interfering in Russian affairs; the Allies donated money and guns to the Whites, but never seriously undertook the conquest of Russia themselves. The peoples of the West were in any event ill-disposed to fighting in eastern Europe once Germany had been defeated. Many Western socialists argued that the Bolshevik party should be given the chance to soften its dictatorial rule, and there were plenty of industrialists, especially in the United Kingdom, who wished to resume commercial links with Russia.44 In January 1920 the Supreme Allied Council lifted the economic blockade on the RSFSR. The Whites were left to fend for themselves.
The Bolsheviks had won, and felt that their ideas had helped them to this end. They had become comfortable with the one-party, one-ideology state as the basis of their power. They legalized and reinforced arbitrary rule and had no intention of holding free elections. Dictatorship and terror appealed to them as modes of solving problems. They were convinced that Bolshevism was the sole authentic form of socialism. This internal party consensus contained its own disagreements. A group known as the Democratic Centralists sprang up in 1919 and contended that too few officials were taking too many decisions at both central and local levels of the party, that the party was run inefficiently, that the central party bodies too rarely consulted opinion in the local committees. Another Bolshevik group, the Workers’ Opposition, emerged in 1920; its complaint was that the aspirations of the factory labourers were being flouted. Workers’ Oppositionist leader Alexander Shlyapnikov urged that power should be shared among the party, the soviets and the trade unions and that ordinary workers and peasants should have influence over decisions on economic affairs.
Neither the Democratic Centralists nor the Workers’ Opposition wished to stop the harassment of the other political parties or to end the requisitioning of grain. Their factional disagreements with the Central Committee took second place in their minds to the need for loyalty to the party. While they may have thought of themselves as the conscience of the Revolution, they, too, had given up part of the more idealistic heritage of 1917. At any rate their factions were numerically tiny: they could not hope to beat the Central Committee for votes at the yearly Party Congresses.
A military-style approach to party organization and to politics in general had become customary in the Civil War. Orders replaced consultation. Having served in the Red Army, most Bolshevik officials had acquired the habits of command. Another novelty was the ‘cleansing’ of the party. The Russian word for this, chistka, is usually translated as purge; and the first purge in May 1918 was confined to the expulsion of ‘idlers, hooligans, adventurers, drunkards and thieves’ from the party’s ranks. By mid-1919 there were 150,000 party members: half the total claimed twelve months previously. The willingness to exclude people in order to maintain purity of membership can be traced back to Lenin’s wrangles with the Mensheviks in 1903. But practicality as well as ideology was at work; for the one-party state was attracting recruits to the party who were not even committed socialists. Periodic cleansings of the ranks were vital to raise the degree of political dependability.
The political leadership at central and local levels distrusted the various state institutions, and repeatedly called for ‘the most severe discipline’. In 1920 a Central Control Commission was established to eradicate abuses in the party. But the party was not the only institution presenting problems of control. The People’s Commissariats gave even greater cause of concern to the Kremlin leadership, and a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was established in the same year to investigate the reliability and efficiency of the various civilian state bodies in their day-to-day work.
Of all bodies, it was the party that underwent the largest change. Yet the habit of criticizing the leadership remained; and, while the official who counted for most in local party committees was the committee secretary,45 discussion with other committee members was still the norm. Furthermore, the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat lacked the accurate, up-to-date information which would have enabled them to intervene with confidence in local disputes. The Red Army, too, was resistant at its lower levels to tight detailed control. Ill-discipline among soldiers was notorious. There are thought to have been a million deserters and conscription defaulters by the end of 1919.46 Indisputably the Soviet state as a whole increased its internal co-ordination in the Civil War; but chaos remained in all institutions. And the proliferation of bodies such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate had the effect of enlarging the bureaucracy without increasing its efficiency.
This sprawling state ruled a disgruntled society, and there was much to give rise to resentment. The food rations were poor. Disease and malnutrition killed eight million people in 1918–20.47 Political parties other than the Bolsheviks were persecuted or suppressed. ‘Barrier detachments’ were arresting persons carrying food for the black market.48 The workers were angry about such conditions and called for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly of political power. Strikes took place in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula and elsewhere during the Civil War; they became especially intense once the danger from the Whites had been eliminated. The women, girls, boys and residual skilled men in the Russian work-force had just enough energy left to make protest. Mutinies broke out in army garrisons, and by mid-1920 there were hints that the loyalty of the pro-Bolshevik sailors of the Kronstadt naval garrison might be fading.