The Red Army quickly became the pampered child of the new regime. As early as May 1918, soldiers were receiving higher pay and bread rations than industrial workers, who loudly protested.80 Trotsky reintroduced spit and polish along with traditional military discipline. The first parade of the Red Army, held on May 1 at Moscow’s Khodynka Field, was a dispirited affair, dominated by Latvians. But in 1919 and the years that followed, Trotsky staged on Red Square meticulously organized and ever more elaborate parades that brought tears to the eyes of the old generals.
The Czechoslovak revolt presented the Bolsheviks with not only a military challenge but also a political one. The cities of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia were crowded with liberal and socialist intellectuals who lacked the courage to stand up to the Bolsheviks but were prepared to exploit any opportunity provided by others. They concentrated in Samara and the Siberian city of Omsk. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly some seventy SR deputies traveled to Samara to proclaim themselves Russia’s rightful government. Omsk was the headquarters of more centrist elements, led by the Kadets: the politicians here were content to isolate Siberia from Bolshevism and the Civil War. As soon as the Czech Legion had cleared the Bolsheviks out of the principal towns along the central Volga and in Siberia, these intellectuals began to stir.
After the legion had taken Samara (June 8), the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, who under the Bolsheviks had led a conspiratorial existence, emerged into the open and formed a Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komitet Uchreditel’nogo Sobrania, or Komuch), headed by a five-person directorate. Its program called for “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” and the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In the weeks that followed, Komuch issued edicts that conformed to the program of Russian democratic socialism, including the abolition of limitations on individual liberty and the dissolution of Revolutionary Tribunals. Komuch reinstated, as organs of general self-government, the old zemstva and Municipal Councils, but it also retained the soviets, ordering them to hold new elections. It denationalized the banks and expressed a readiness to honor Russian state debts. The Bolshevik Land Decree, copied from the SR agrarian program, was kept in force.81
While Komuch saw itself as a replacement of the Bolshevik regime, the Siberian politicians in Omsk had more modest regional objectives. They organized in areas which the Czechoslovaks had cleared of Bolsheviks, and on June 1, 1918, proclaimed themselves the Government of Western Siberia.
The Czechoslovaks at first showed no sympathy for the Russian opponents of the Bolsheviks.82 When the SRs approached them for support, they refused, on the grounds that their sole mission was to ensure safe and prompt transit to Vladivostok. Wish it or not, however, they could not avoid becoming involved in Russian politics because to realize their objective they had to deal with the local authorities, which meant increased relations with Komuch and the Siberian Government.83
When the Czechoslovaks rebelled, Moscow believed that they were acting under instructions from Allied governments. Communist historians have adhered to this version, although there is no evidence to support it. On the French side, we have the word of a historian who had seen all the pertinent archival materials that “nothing indicates the French were the instigators of the [Czechoslovak] uprising.”84 This confirms the view of Sadoul, who tried at the time, without much success, to convince his friend Trotsky that the French Government bore no responsibility for the Czechoslovak armies.85 In fact, initially at least, the Czechoslovak rising was a disagreeable surprise for the French because it upset their plans to bring the legion to the Western Front.86 Nor is there evidence of British involvement. Communist historians later tried to pin the blame on Masaryk, who actually was the unhappiest of all, because the Czechoslovak entanglement in Russian affairs interfered with his plan to assemble in France a national Czech army.*
But whatever the historical truth, in the heat of events it was as natural for Moscow to see the Allied hand behind General Gajda as it was for the Czech Legion to see German pressure in the orders to have it disarmed. The Czechoslovak affair destroyed such chance as existed of Bolshevik economic and military cooperation with the Allies and pushed Moscow—not entirely unwillingly—into German arms.
Until June 1918, the generals were the only influential party in Germany that demanded a break with the Bolsheviks. They were overruled by the industrialists and bankers who worked hand in glove with the Foreign Office. But now the generals found an unexpected ally. After the Czechoslovak uprising, Mirbach and Riezler lost all faith in the viability of Lenin’s regime and urged Berlin still more strongly to seek an alternate base of support in Russia. Riezler’s recommendations were based not only on impressions; he had firsthand knowledge that the forces on which the Bolsheviks counted to stop the Czechoslovaks were about to desert them. On June 25, he advised Berlin that although the Moscow Embassy was doing all it could to help the Bolsheviks against the Czech Legion and domestic opponents, the effort seemed futile.87 What he had in mind became known only years later. To persuade Lieutenant Colonel M. A. Muraviev, the commander of the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the civil war to fight the Czechs, Riezler had to bribe him.† Even more troubling was the growing reluctance of the Latvians to continue fighting for the Bolsheviks. Sensing that the fortunes of their Bolshevik patrons were on the decline and afraid of being isolated, they contemplated switching sides. It took more of Riezler’s money to persuade them to help suppress Savinkov’s uprising in Iaroslavl in July.88
Meanwhile, the Czechs were capturing one city after another. On June 29 they seized Vladivostok and on July 6 Ufa. In Irkutsk, they ran into Bolshevik resistance, but they overcame it and on July 11 occupied the town. By this time, the entire length of the Trans-Siberian with its feeder lines in eastern Russia, from Penza to the Pacific, was in their hands.
The unimpeded Czechoslovak advance and the threat of defections from Bolshevik ranks filled Mirbach and Riezler with the gloomiest forebodings. Their fear was that the Allies would take advantage of the crisis to engineer an SR coup which would bring Russia back into the Allied fold. To prevent the catastrophe, Riezler urged Berlin to make approaches to the liberal and conservative Russians, represented by the Right Center, the Kadet Party, the Omsk Government, and the Don Cossacks.*
The alarming reports from the Moscow Embassy, added to the complaints of the military, moved the German Government to put the “Russian question” once again on the agenda. The question it faced can be formulated as follows: whether to stick with the Bolsheviks through thick and thin because (1) they devastated Russia so thoroughly as to remove her as a threat for a long time to come and (2) by acquiescing to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty they placed at Germany’s disposal the richest regions of Russia; or else to drop them in favor of a more conventional but also more viable regime that would keep Russia within the German orbit, even if this meant giving up some of the territories acquired at Brest-Litovsk. Advocates of these respective positions disagreed over the means. Their objectives were identical—namely, so to weaken Russia that she would never again help France and England “encircle” Germany and, at the same time, lay her wide open to economic penetration. But whereas the anti-Bolshevik party wanted to attain these objectives by carving Russia up into dependent political entities, the Foreign Office preferred to do so by using the Bolsheviks to drain the country from within. Settling this matter one way or another was a matter of some urgency in view of the unanimous opinion of the Moscow Embassy that the Bolsheviks were about to fall.