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

Despite this confusion, which was characteristic of the whole of the civil war, these large-scale battles of October were very different from the sort of fighting that had typified the earlier stages of the civil war. The battles of 1918 had really been no more than small-scale skirmishes and artillery duels. The small and motley forces had been mostly concerned with self-preservation, there had been no fixed positions or Fronts, and towns and territories had frequently changed hands. It had been like a minor nineteenth-century war. But the battles of October were much heavier and resembled more the fighting of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved, millions of cartridges were fired every day, there were tanks and aeroplanes, and armoured cars, and the battles went on through the night. With better command structures in both armies, and their officers under stricter orders not to retreat, thousands of soldiers' lives were expended over insignificant bits of land. Neither side took prisoners.

The Red counter-offensive on the Southern Front had two key strategic elements. The first was a surprise attack by the Striking Group of Latvian Rifles, some 12,000 crack troops situated to the west of Orel, on the left flank of the Volunteer Army as it pushed north towards Tula. After a fierce and bloody battle, in which nearly half the Latvians were slaughtered, the Whites were

* The original Red strategy, set in July, had been to attack from the Volga to the Don; but this was changed on 15 October, the day after Orel fell, when the Politburo resolved to concentrate all the Red forces around Tula. Kamenev, the Commander-in-Chief, was not even consulted on the change.

pushed back beyond Orel. At this point the second key element of the counter-offensive was deployed. On 19 October the Red Cavalry suddenly attacked the Cossacks on the left flank of the Whites, eventually chasing them back towards Voronezh. The Cossacks must have been astonished by the Red horsemen, since they had hardly ever been deployed before. Trotsky had always underestimated the strategic advantages of the cavalry in a war of movement like the civil war. It was only the Mamontov Raid that had taught him the slogan 'Proletarians to Horse!'³²

To build up their cavalry the Reds had turned in 1918 to Semen Budenny. This tall and imposing cavalry officer, complete with a handlebar moustache, was the son of a non-Cossack peasant from the Don region. He had been drafted into the tsarist army in 1903, and after the war against Japan, when his horsemanship had first been spotted, had been enrolled in the Imperial Cavalry Riding School in St Petersburg. By 1914, Budenny had risen to become a sergeant-major in the elite Imperial Dragoons. He was one of the many NCOs to join the Bolsheviks in 1917; and like many of them soon fell in with Stalin and the Military Opposition. In 1918 Voroshilov placed him at the head of a small cavalry force fighting against Krasnov's Cossacks near Tsaritsyn. This First Red Cavalry Corps was largely made up of poor Cossacks and non-Cossack peasants from the northern Don. It was reinforced from these same elements in preparation for the counter-offensive against Denikin. This was the nucleus of Budenny's celebrated Cavalry Army, the one immortalized through Babel's stories, which recounted its adventures in the war against Poland during 1920. Many of Stalin's most honoured commanders, if not the most talented, won their spurs in the 'Konarmiia'. Apart from Marshal Budenny, who was buried in Red Square in 1970, there were Marshal Timoshenko (who led the Red Army into the Second World War) and Marshal Zhukov (who led it to victory in 1945).

Pursued by the Red Cavalry, the White Cossacks fled south to the Don, abandoning Voronezh to the Bolsheviks on 24 October. From this strategic city, Budenny's horsemen advanced towards Kastornoe, a crucial railway junction between Moscow and the Don. They finally captured it on 15 November after several days of bloody fighting against Shkuro's Cossacks. This effectively sealed the fate of Denikin's offensive. The Whites were now threatened with the prospect of complete encirclement by the Reds, and they were forced to beat a hasty retreat south. Never again did they threaten to break through into central Russia.

* * * October was a double opportunity missed by the Whites. At the height of the fighting at Orel a second major White force, the North-Western Army, advanced to the outskirts of Petrograd.

Given its shortcomings, it is amazing that the North-Western Army