A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

The effect of repression was merely to strengthen the peasantry's resistance and drive many of them into the arms of the Reds. Villagers formed brigades, often organized by the Soviet, in order to resist the People's Army and its punitive detachments. These village 'armies' went to war with rusty guns, pitchforks and axes, and odd pieces of artillery mounted on peasant carts. Some fought as partisan units alongside the Red Army and later became regular detachments of it. The Domashki village brigade was a classic example. It fought against the Cossacks on the southern steppelands of Samara before becoming the nucleus of the 219th Domashki Rifle Division, a regular detachment of the Fourth Red Army. The Pugachev, Novouzensk, Krasnokutsk and Kurilovo Regiments had similar origins. The soldiers in these regiments were relatives and neighbours. In the Kurilovo Regiment there was a father and six sons. This cohesion was unmatched by any other fighting force in the civil war, with the exception of the Cossack detachments, which were similar in many ways.³⁶ This was the stuff of the legend of Chapaev, the main Red commander of these partisans, upon which three generations of Soviet children were to be brought up.

* * * Without an effective army, it was only a matter of time before the Komuch lost its hold on the Volga region. During the summer the Reds had gradually built up their forces for a Volga campaign: it was here that the Red Army took shape as a regular conscript army. Worker detachments were raised in Moscow and the other towns of the central Soviet zone and despatched to the Eastern Army Group on the right bank of the Volga. On Lenin's orders, 30,000 troops were transferred from the anti-German screens in the west. He gambled (correctly, as

it turned out) that the Central Powers were too stretched in Europe to exploit the gap. By the beginning of September 1918, the Reds had amassed 70,000 troops on the Eastern Front — an advantage of two to one over the forces of the Komuch. This was the start of the real fighting of the civil war. Up to now only minor units, none numbering more than 10,000 men, had been involved. Kazan was taken by the Reds on 10 September. Colonel Vatsetis, who led the attack, was rewarded by being made the main Commander-in-Chief of the whole Red Army. Defeat would have brought its own kind of reward — Lenin had ordered him to be shot if the crucial city was not taken. Two days later the First Red Army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky broke through to Simbirsk. From this point, the resistance of the People's Army was effectively broken; the Czech forces fell apart. Samara fell on 7 October.

The SRs dissolved the Komuch and fled to Ufa. There they found themselves at the mercy of the White counter-revolution sweeping in from the east. Under the protection of the Czechs several rival power centres had emerged in Siberia: the Eurasian land mass was a patchwork of regional regimes. A Urals Government was based in Ekaterinburg and claimed jurisdiction over Perm. The various Cossack voiskos, Orenburg and Ural'sk the most westerly of them, formally recognized the Komuch but conducted themselves as independent 'powers'. The Bashkirs and Kirghiz also had their own 'states', while within the Komuch territory there was also a national government of the Turko-Tatar Tribes. Of all these rival power centres, by far the most important was the Siberian Government based in Omsk. It had been formed by Kadet and SR politicians in the Tomsk Duma before the coming of Soviet power; and reformed by them in Omsk in the wake of the Czech revolt. P. V Vologodsky, the jurist and advocate of Siberian autonomy, became its head of government on 23 June. Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who passed through Omsk in early July, took a dim view of its new leaders:

Omsk is dusty and dirty. The government leaders have neither intellect nor any conscience. There is nothing positive or hopeful in the composition of the 'Siberian Government'. Its so-called 'ministers' are nothing but question marks. Talking with them it is clear that they neither believe in themselves nor in the success of their own undertaking.''⁷

The Omsk government soon fell under the domination of the Rightist and monarchist officers in the Siberian Army. Lacking a close relationship with the Czechs, it none the less relied on them for military support. By September, the Siberian Army had 38,000 mainly peasant conscripts. Under the flag of Siberia — green for its forests and white for its snows — it had the support of those older Siberian settlers who favoured independence from the rest

of Russia. Rightist officers from the Volga also flocked to it as an alternative to the 'socialist' Komuch. The domination of these Rightist elements in Omsk was enough to prevent the Siberian Government from reconvening the Duma. The Rightists wanted nothing less than a dictatorship.