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

Watching the parade on Red Square to mark the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin was shocked by the ragtag appearance of the troops. 'Look at them,' he exclaimed, 'they march like bags of sand.' In most of the units there were no standard uniforms, and the soldiers dressed in whatever

came to hand. Many wore the uniforms they took from the captured Whites (who in turn wore British Army surplus kit). As for leather boots, they were worn only by the Red Army commanders, the commissars and the cavalrymen. The peasant infantry marched in the crude bast shoes, or lapti, manufactured in the villages. But even these were in short supply and there were times when, for lack of adequate footwear, whole regiments had to be confined to barracks. The supply of weapons was not much better. It was largely a question of shells: whereas the army was firing between seventy and ninety million rounds a month, the main arsenal at Tula was producing only twenty million. 'There were times', as Trotsky put it, 'when every one of a soldiers stock of cartridges counted, and when delay in the arrival of a special train bringing ammunitions resulted in whole divisions retreating.'¹⁵

'Comrades!', a bad-tempered Trotsky warned an army conference in 1919, 'although we have not been brought down by Denikin or Kolchak, we may yet be brought down by overcoats or boots.' In fact, if anything, the Red Army was brought down — quite literally — by illness and disease. More soldiers died from disease than from fighting in the civil war. Typhus, influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and venereal diseases were the main killers, but many more men suffered from lice, stomach bugs, dysentery and toothache. On an average day in an average unit, 10 to 15 per cent of the men would be too ill to fight and had to be abandoned to fortune in the rear. But some units were taken out of action by rates of illness of up to 80 per cent. This was particularly true in 1920, when 30 per cent of the Red Army — that is, over a million men — contracted typhus. The unhygienic conditions of army life, where soap and bath water were not seen for weeks, were the root cause of the problem. But the situation was made much worse by the chronic shortages of doctors and nurses, surgical spirits, bandages and drugs. The rapid to-and-fro movements of the Fronts, so characteristic of the civil war, also made it difficult to set up proper field hospitals or to organize transport to the rear. The sick and wounded could thus be neither properly cared for at the Front, nor easily evacuated to the rear. The agony they must have gone through can only be imagined. Trotsky himself, touring the Southern Front in June 1919, was shocked to see the way the wounded men were treated:

Transports arrived by rail at Lisky station containing wounded men who were in a frightful condition. The trucks were without bedding. Many of the men lay, wounded and sick, without clothes, dressed only in their underwear, which had long remained unchanged: many of them were infectious. There were no medical personnel, no nurses and nobody in charge of the trains. One of the trains, containing over 400 wounded and sick Red Army men, stood in the station from early morning until evening,

without the men being given anything to eat. It is hard to imagine anything more criminal and shameful!¹⁶

Given such hellish conditions, no one could expect the soldiers to behave like saints. Heavy drinking, brawls and looting were the most common — and least serious — problems of indiscipline. But there were also daily reports of soldiers disobeying orders; refusing to take in new recruits because of the extra burden on supplies; demanding leave and better conditions; and threatening to or actually lynching their commanders. Full-scale mutinies were not uncommon, culminating in the occupation of the Front headquarters, the arrest or murder of the staff and the election of new officers. It was back to the chaos of 1917. Much of the violence was reserved for the well-dressed officers and commissars, especially if they were suspected of corruption in the distribution of supplies. This violence was given a revolutionary edge by the fact that the officers were often seen as burzhoois — and an ethnic one by the fact that many of the commissars were Jews. Although anti-Semitism was generally much less widespread than among the Whites or Ukrainian nationalists, it was a definite problem in the ranks of the Red Army. One can only wonder what Trotsky must have felt as he read the reports of his own soldiers' pogroms in the Jewish settlements of the Ukraine, where he himself had grown up as a boy and where some of his relatives still lived.¹⁷