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

The closer the Whites moved towards central Russia the harder it became for them to mobilize the local peasantry. In the crucial Volga region, the furthest point of Kolchak's advance, the peasants had gained more of the gentry's land than anywhere else in Russia and so had most to fear from a counter-revolution. Here Kolchak dug his own grave by failing to sanction the peasant revolution on the land. Like Denikin's regime in the south, where the landowners were equally dominant, Kolchak's government was quite incapable of anything more than a carefully guarded bureaucratic response to what was the vital issue of the civil war. It was a classic example of the outdated methods of the Whites. Any future land law', Kolchak's land commission declared on 8 April, would 'have to be based on the rights of private property'. Only the 'unused land of the gentry' would be 'transferred to the toiling peasantry', which in the meantime could do no more than rent it from the government. As one critic put it, such a declaration was 'a marvellous propaganda tool for the Bolsheviks. All they have to do is to print it up and distribute it to the peasantry.'¹³

To mobilize the peasants Kolchak's army resorted increasingly to terror. There was no effective local administration to enforce the conscription in any other way, and in any case the Whites' world-view ruled out the need to persuade the peasants. It was taken for granted that it was the peasants place to serve in the White army, just as he had served in the ranks of the Tsar's, and that if

he refused it was the army's right to punish him, even executing him if necessary as a warning to the others. Peasants were flogged and tortured, hostages were taken and shot, and whole villages were burned to the ground to force the conscripts into the army. Kolchak's cavalry would ride into towns on market day, round up the young men at gunpoint and take them off to the Front. Much of this terror was concealed from the Allies so as not to jeopardize their aid. But General Graves, the commander of the US troops, was well informed and was horrified by it. As he realized, the mass conscription of the peasantry 'was a long step towards the end of Kolchak's regime'. It soon destroyed the discipline and fighting morale of his army. Of every five peasants forcibly conscripted, four would desert: many of them ran off to the Reds, taking with them their supplies. Knox was livid when he first saw the Red troops on the Eastern Front: they were wearing British uniforms.¹⁴

From the start of its campaign, Kolchak's army was forced to deal with numerous peasant revolts in the rear, notably in Slavgorod, south-east of Omsk, and in Minusinsk on the Yenisei. The White requisitioning and mobilizations were their principal cause. Without its own structures of local government in the rural areas, Kolchak's regime could do very little, other than send in the Cossacks with their whips, to stop the peasants from reforming their Soviets to defend the local village revolution. By the height of the Kolchak offensive, whole areas of the Siberian rear were engulfed by peasant revolts. This partisan movement could not really be described as Bolshevik, as it was later by Soviet historians, although Bolshevik activists, usually in a united front with the Anarchists and Left SRs, often played a major role in it. It was rather a vast peasant war against the Omsk regime. Sometimes the local peasant chieftains were somewhat confused as to what they were fighting for. Shchetinkin, for example, a partisan leader in Minusinsk, issued this comic proclamation:

It is time to finish with the destroyers of Russia, Kolchak and Denikin, who are continuing the work of the traitor Kerensky . . . The Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich has arrived in Vladivostok and taken power over Russia. He has commanded me to raise the people against Kolchak. Lenin and Trotsky in Moscow have subordinated themselves to the Grand Duke and have been appointed as his ministers. I call on the Orthodox people to take up arms for the Tsar and Soviet Power.

Generally, however, the partisan movement expressed the ideas of the peasant revolution in hostile opposition to the towns. A good example of its ideology is to be found at the First Peasant Congress of Insurgents from the districts of Kansk, Krasnoyarsk and Achinsk which convened in April 1919. It proposed a whole 'constitution of peasant power', with a 'peasant government', communal

taxes in accordance with norms set by Congress, and the 'distribution of the riches of the land among the toiling peasantry'. It even passed a 'peasant code' which set sentences of community service for those found guilty of drunken brawls, gambling, catching spawning fish and — an act evidently seen by the peasant delegates on a par with these — rape.¹⁵