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

85-6 Selling to eat. Above: a low-level party functionary haggles over a fur scarf with a female trader at the Smolensk market, Moscow, 1920. The woman on the left has the appearance of a burzhooika. Below: traders at the Smolensk market, Moscow, 1920. The woman with the string bag and the loaf of bread is almost certainly a prostitute.

87 Putting the gentle classes to work. Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets under the inspection of a commissar with guards, the Apraksin market in Petrograd, 1918. The main purpose of this sort of forced labour was to humiliate and degrade the privileged classes of the old regime.

88 The Bolshevik war against the market. Cheka soldiers close down traders' stalls on the Okhotnyi Riad (Hunters' Row) in Moscow, May 1919.

89 Requisitioning the peasants' grain.

90 'Bagmen' travelled to and from the countryside exchanging food for manufactured goods. The result was chaos on the railways.

91 The 1 May subbotnik ('volunteer' labour on Saturday) on Red Square in Moscow, 1920.

92 By 1920 the state was feeding - or rather underfeeding - thirty million people in makeshift cafeterias like this one at the Kiev Station in Moscow.

93 The new ruling class: delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress, Moscow, 1920.

94 A typical example of the new bureaucracy: the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern Region. Note the portrait of Marx, the leathered commissar, and the bourgeois daughters who served in such large numbers as secretaries.

95 The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup. But it was fast becoming not so much a bastion of the Marxist revolution as one of the corruption of the party elite.

status of a hero.* Gatchina, where much of the fighting had taken place, was renamed Trotsk. It was the first Soviet town to be named after a living Communist.

* * * As Denikin's forces fled southwards they lost all semblance of discipline and began to break up in panic. Napoleon had once remarked about his own retreat from Moscow: 'from the sublime to the ridiculous it is only one step'. Much the same could be said for Denikin's.

It was not just the Reds who had caused, the Whites to panic. Makhno's partisans, Petliura's Ukrainian nationalists and various other partisan bands ambushed the White units from all sides as they retreated towards the Black Sea. Denikin's forces were passing through terrain where the local population, in Wrangel's words, 'had learned to hate us'. Then, in late November, came the shocking news that the British were ending their support for the Whites. Coupled with the news of Kolchak's defeat, this had a devastating effect on morale. 'In a couple of days the whole atmosphere in South Russia was changed,' remarked one eye-witness. 'Whatever firmness of purpose there had previously been was now so undermined that the worst became possible. [Lloyd] George's opinion that the Volunteer cause was doomed helped to make that doom almost certain.' The optimism that had so far maintained the White movement — Sokolov compared it to the gambler's desperate belief that his winning card would somehow turn up — now collapsed completely. Soldiers and officers deserted en masse. The Cossacks became disenchanted with the Whites. Many of the Kuban Cossacks refused to go on fighting unless Denikin satisfied their demands for a separate state.³⁷

There was similar disenchantment within the huge White civilian camp. People no longer believed in victory, and thought only of how to flee abroad. Shops and cafes closed. There was a mad rush to exchange the Don roubles issued by Denikin for foreign currency. In a repeat of the panic scenes in Omsk, thousands of officers and civilians struggled to get aboard trains for the Black Sea ports. The wounded and the sick, whose numbers were swollen by a raging typhus epidemic, were simply abandoned. This could no longer be called a 'bourgeoisie on the run'. Most of the refugees were now penniless, whatever their former fortunes. It was a poor mass of naked humanity fleeing for its life. One witness saw this in the flight from Kharkov:

As the last Russian hospital train was preparing to leave one evening, in the dim light of the station lamps strange figures were seen crawling along the platform. They were grey and shapeless, like big wolves. They

* And his opponents, notably Stalin, warned for the first time of the dangers of Bonapartism.

came nearer, and with horror it was recognized that they were eight Russian officers ill with typhus, dressed in their grey hospital dressing-gowns, who, rather than be left behind to be tortured and murdered by the Bolshevists, as was likely to be their fate, had crawled along on all fours through the snow from the hospital to the station, hoping to be taken away on a train.³⁸