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

During the autumn of 1918 many village communes called on both sides to end the civil war through negotiation. Many even declared themselves 'neutral republics' and formed brigades to keep the armies out of their 'independent territory'. There was a general feeling among the peasants that they had been at war for far too long, that in 1917 they had been promised peace, and that now they were being forced to go to war again. Whole provinces — Tambov, Riazan', Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, Vitebsk, Pskov, Novgorod, Mogilev and even parts of Moscow itself — were engulfed by peasant uprisings against the Red Army's conscriptions and its all too often coercive requisitioning of peasant food and horses. Os'kin, in Tula, had to deal with one of the largest revolts in November. Bands of peasants armed with harrows, spades and axes marched on the towns, where they ransacked and burned the Soviet's military offices. Many of the rebels had been called up. Others had lost their only horse to the army draft (a catastrophe for any peasant farm). Peasant recruits in the local barracks, disgruntled by the harsh conditions there, often joined the uprisings. Tula was surrounded by a band of 500 peasants. Os'kin and Kanatchikov mobilized the party and 2,000 factory workers, threatening shirkers with instant execution, and, with the help of a Red Army brigade from Moscow, pushed the rebels back to their villages, where they then carried out a series of brutal repressions. Os'kin calmly recalled that 'we shot several hundred peasants'. He sat as judge and jury on the ring-leaders of the uprisings, sentencing dozens of them to public hangings. Such were the powers and the responsibilities of a Bolshevik commissar.¹²

During the first months of 1919 the rate of peasant conscription improved markedly. The slack period of the farming season and the growing threat of a White advance from the Volga and the Don, leading to the loss of the land which the peasants had gained in the revolution, were crucial factors. But the general strengthening of Soviet power in the countryside also played its part. From 800,000 soldiers in January, the Red Army doubled in size by the end of April, the height of Kolchak's offensive in the east. Most of the new

recruits came from the Volga region, the Red frontier against Kolchak, where the peasants had most to fear from a White victory.¹³

'We had decided to have an army of one million men by the spring,' declared Lenin in October 1918, 'now we need an army of three million. We can have it. And we shall have it!' And have it they did. The Red Army grew to three million men in 1919, and to five million by the end of the following year. But ironically, the possession of an army on such a scale was a serious handicap to the regime's military potential. For the army grew much faster than the devastated Soviet economy was able to keep it supplied with the instruments of war: guns, clothing, transport, fuel, food and medicine. The soldiers' morale and discipline fell in step with the decline in supplies. They deserted in their thousands, taking with them their weapons and uniforms, so that new recruits had to be thrown into battle without proper training, so that they in turn were even more likely to desert. The Red Army was drawn into a vicious circle of mass conscription, blockages of supply and mass desertion. And this locked the whole economy into the draconian system of War Communism, whose main purpose was to channel all production towards the demands of the army (see pages 612-15, 721-32).

With hindsight, the Bolsheviks might have done better to opt for a smaller army, better disciplined, better trained and better supplied, and not such a burden on the economy. As one Red commander put it to Lenin in December 1918: 'It is a thousand times more expedient to have no more than a million Red Army men, but well-fed, clothed and shod ones, rather than three million half-starved, half-naked and half-shod ones.' Such an army, made up largely of workers, would have been more battle-worthy than the peasant conscripts who barely knew how to handle a gun and ran home at the start of the harvest. The Reds, in practice, had no real fighting chance against the Whites, whose troops were much better trained and disciplined, unless they outnumbered them by four and sometimes even ten to one. For every active Red on the battlefield there were eight others who for lack of training, clothing, health or ammunition could not be deployed.¹⁴ A smaller army, moreover, by placing less pressure on the economy, would not have led to the same excesses — the violent requisitionings, the imposition of labour duty, the militarization of the factories — which did so much to alienate the peasants and workers from the Soviet regime. Yet arguments from hindsight are the luxury of historians: when Lenin made his panic call for a mass army, the regime seemed on the brink of defeat; and it is easy to understand why he opted for safety in numbers.