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

At this crucial moment, with the outcome of the struggle very finely balanced, hundreds of thousands of peasant deserters were returning to the Red Army. This return was a decisive factor, tipping the balance in favour of the Reds, and it says a great deal about why the Bolsheviks won the civil war. Right-wing accounts of the civil war have tended to present the victory of the Reds as something that was achieved without mass support. The Bolsheviks, so the argument goes, simply had a larger territorial base upon which to draw. They were more systematic than the Whites in their use of terror and coercion to extract the necessary military resources from a civilian population which was essentially hostile to both sides and indifferent to the outcome of their struggle. This is two-thirds right. But the fact that the Bolsheviks could at least claim to stand for 'the revolution' — and they had captured its most important symbols such as the Red Flag — also surely enabled them to mobilize a certain level of support, albeit only a conditional support and as the less bad of two options, from the peasantry, and indeed as we shall see from certain workers too, who feared that a victory of the Whites would reverse their own gains from the revolution.

This is clearly shown by the story of the return of the peasant deserters to the Red Army. Until June, the Reds' campaign against desertion had relied on violent repressive measures against the villages suspected of harbouring them. This had been largely counter-productive, resulting in a wave of peasant revolts behind the Red Front which had facilitated the White advance. But in June the Bolsheviks switched to the more conciliatory tactic of 'amnesty weeks'. During these weeks, which were much propagandized and often extended indefinitely, the deserters were invited to return to the ranks without punishment. In a sense, it was a sign of the Bolshevik belief in the need to reform the nature of the peasant and to make him conscious of his revolutionary duty — thus the Reds punished 'malicious' deserters but tried to reform the 'weak-willed' ones — as opposed to the practice of the Whites of executing all deserters equally. Between July and September, as the threat of a White victory grew, nearly a quarter of a million deserters returned to the Red Army from the two military districts of Orel and Moscow alone. Many of them called themselves 'volunteers', and said they were ready to fight against the Whites, whom they associated with the restoration of the gentry on the land. These were regions where the local peasantry had made substantial land gains in 1917. In Orel the amount of land in peasant use had increased by 28 per cent; while in the Moscow military district the increase was as much as 35 per cent. The threat of a White victory made the peasants fear for the loss of their new land — a fear that the Reds

encouraged through their propaganda — and they were prepared to send their sons back to the army to defend this land. However much the peasants might have disliked the Bolshevik regime, with its violent requisitionings and bossy commissars, they would continue to defend it as long — and only as long — as it stood between the Whites and their own revolution on the land.³⁰

By October, the Reds had nearly 200,000 troops ready for battle on the Southern Front. This gave them twice as many forces as the Whites. In preparation for a counter-offensive against the Whites, Alexander Egorov was given command of the Southern Front on II October. His career pattern was very similar to Os'kin's and indeed typical of the new Red military elite. He had risen to the rank of colonel during the First World War, had joined the Left SRs in 1917, and had defected to the Bolsheviks during the summer of 1918. Egorov was the principal architect of the Red Army victory in the south — although in fact there was very little planning, since the strategy had been changed at the final moment and was largely improvised as it went along.* Os'kin found nothing but panic and chaos at the headquarters of the Southern Front. Nobody even knew for sure 'where our troops were located'.³¹