A people's tragedy

55 Waiters and waitresses of Petrograd on strike. The main banner reads: ‘We insist on respect for waiters as human beings.’ The three other banners call for an end to the degrading practice of tipping service staff. This stress on respect for workers as citizens was a prominent feature of many strikes. Note in this context that the strikers are well dressed – they could be mistaken for bourgeois citizens – since this was a demonstration of their dignity.

56 The All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies in the People’s House in Petrograd, 4 May. A soldiers’ delegation (standing in the hall) greets the deputies (on the balconies). In the second balcony on the left are (from left to right) the four veteran SR leaders: Viktor Chernov, Vera Figner, Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and N. D. Avksentiev.

57 Fedor Linde leads the Finland Regiment to the Marinsky Palace on 20 April to protest against the continuation of the war for imperial ends.

58 Kerensky cuts a Bonapartist figure during a speech in mid-May to the soldiers of the Front.

59 Metropolitan Nikon blesses the Women’s Battalion of Death on Red Square in Moscow before their departure for the Front in June. One of the women was too fat for standard issue trousers and had to go to battle in a skirt.

60 General Kornilov is greeted as a hero by the rightwing members of the Officers’ Union on his arrival in Moscow for the State Conference on 12 August.

61 Members of the Women’s Battalion of Death await the final assault on the Winter Palace, 25 October 1917. When the Aurora fired its first salvo the women became hysterical and had to be confined in a basement room.

62 More of Kerensky’s last defenders, barricaded inside the Winter Palace, await the assault of the Bolshevik forces on 25 October.

63 The Smolny Institute, seat of the Soviet and command centre of the Bolshevik Party, in early October.

64 The Red Guard of the Vulkan Factory in Petrograd. Note the ties and suits of many of the guards.

THE CIVIL WAR

65 General Alexeev – the last chief of staff in the imperial army and, along with Kornilov, the founder of the White movement in south Russia.

66 General Denikin – leader of the White armed forces in south Russia between 1918 and 1920.

67 Admiral Kolchak – the main White leader in east Russia and, thanks to his connections with the Allies, the nominal head of the whole White movement.

68 Baron Wrangel, who led the last White campaign in the Crimea during 1920.

69 The Red Army was no match for the Czech Legion, pictured here during the capture of Vladivostok in June 1918. The aim of the Czechs was to travel eastwards to the United States, and from there return to the European war.

70 The White armies were top-heavy – too many generals and not enough soldiers. A group of White officers await the arrival of Admiral Kolchak during a military parade in Omsk, December 1918.

71 By contrast the Red forces were bottom-heavy – too many infantry and not enough commanders with expertise. The ‘committee spirit’ of 1917 lived on in the ranks of the Red partisan units such as Makhno’s, pictured here in 1920, where tactics were decided by a show of soldiers’ hands.

72 Armoured trains like this played a vital role in the civil war.

73 Part of the Red Army, the Latvian Division, passing through a village near the South-Western Front, 1919.

74 Two Red Army soldiers take a break during the fighting on the South-Western Front, 1919.

75 The Red Army served as an important channel for the spread of literacy and propaganda.

Soldiers in Tula reading Red Army leaflets, spring 1919.

76 The Red Army brings its propaganda to the village. The mobile library of II Cavalry Corps, 1922.

77 Nestor Makhno in 1919. Facing annihilation by the Bolsheviks, Makhno and the remnants of his army left Russian territory in 1921. After brief periods of imprisonment in Romania and Poland, the anarchist leader lived in Paris until his death in 1935.

78 Terror was a weapon of all the armies in the civil war.

The Whites hang a peasant of Kursk province for the possession of an old hunting rifle, September 1919.

79 Just one Jewish victim of a pogrom by a band of Ukrainian nationalists in Poltava province, 1920.

80 The Reds kill a Polish officer during the war against Poland in 1920. The naked man was hanged upside-down, beaten, cut and tortured until he died.

EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER THE BOLSHEVIKS

81 The fuel crisis in the cities.

Muscovites dismantle a town house for firewood.

82 A priest is commandeered to help transport timber. Many horses died for lack of food so human draught was used.

83 Selling to eat.

Women of the ‘former classes’ sell their last possessions on the streets of Moscow.

84 A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhooi fallen on hard times.

85 Selling to eat.

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.