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

the need to pass a land reform capable of winning peasant support. 'The question had to be settled for an important psychological reason: we had to tear the enemy's principal weapon of propaganda from him,' the Baron recalled in his memoirs. 'We had to allay the peasants' suspicion that our object in fighting the Reds was no other than to restore the rights of the great landed proprietors and to take reprisals against those who had infringed these rights.' But the committee which Wrangel appointed to draw up the land reform was dominated by such landed interests. The result was a Land Law, passed on 25 May, that still fell far short of the peasant demands. Its basic aim was to create a class of peasant proprietors by giving them a small plot of land as private property. It was another 'wager on the strong'. Like Stolypin's land reforms, it was to be linked to the establishment of a volost-level zemstvo in which the peasants would be dominant. But the law was full of complex regulations which would have taken years to implement; and there were far too many bureaucratic loopholes which allowed the squires to hold on to their land. The district zemstvos, for example, which set the amount of land to be transferred to the peasants, would still be dominated by them. There was also the problem of compensation: the peasants were to pay for the gentry's land by giving them one-fifth of its harvest (in the three-field system this was equivalent to 30 per cent of the annual harvest). After the revolution and the civil war, when the peasant farms had been severely weakened, this would have been a heavy burden, and would have kept the peasant farmers economically dependent on the squires for perhaps a generation — and that had probably been its aim.¹⁰¹

Wrangel's Land Law was a paternalist solution to the peasant question, not a revolutionary one. In the nineteenth century it would have been considered progressive; but after 1917 it was reactionary. It proved that Wrangel's regime was just as caught up as Denikin's in the bureaucratic methods of the past. Nothing better symbolized this than the decision to sell the Land Law for 100 roubles in booklet form (it was assumed that if the peasants had to pay for it, they would value the law more). Compared with the Bolsheviks' simple land decree, which they publicized in millions of leaflets and gave away free to the peasantry, it betrayed a dismal failure to comprehend the propaganda purpose of such laws. Wrangel's regime, like Denikin's, failed to understand that to win the civil war it had to adopt revolutionary methods.¹⁰²

The price the Whites paid was widespread peasant indifference to their cause and, in the districts nearest the Front, where the burden of food and transport requisitioning was at its heaviest, even outright hostility. It meant they could never recruit enough troops to break out from their Crimean base. Even the wealthy farmers of the Tauride region, the first area the Whites would have to cross on entering the mainland, looked upon us', in the words of one of their officers, 'as an army of old Olympians, titled generals and their cronies,

puffed up with pride and arrogance'. The problem was made all the more acute by the fact that the Cossacks, the mainstay of the Whites, were showing growing signs of disaffection, looting the villages and demanding to return to their homelands. According to one officer, the Don Army had become no more than 'a mob of people, who thought only of their own salvation and material welfare, but certainly not of a struggle with the Reds'. The left wing of the Don Krug, now dominated by younger Cossacks from the front-line units, was actively campaigning for a break with the 'reactionary' Wrangel and for peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks, in the naive hope of securing from them a promise of autonomy for the Don.¹⁰³