A people's tragedy

86 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 élite.

THE REVOLUTIONARY INHERITANCE

96 The people reject the Bolsheviks.

Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base, 16 March 1921.

97 Peasant rebels (‘Greens’) attack a train of requisitioned grain, February 1921.

98 The famine crisis of 1921–2.

Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region, 1921. The crisis was largely the result of Bolshevik over-requisitioning.

99 The victims of the crisis; an overcrowded cemetery in the Buzuluk district, 1921.

100 Cannibals with their victims, Samara province, 1921.

101 Orphans of the revolution.

Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food remains in a rubbish tip, 1921.

102 Orphans were ripe for political indoctrination. This young boy, seen here giving a speech from the agit-train October Revolution, was the Secretary of the Tula Komsomol. He was part of the generation which, a decade later, pioneered the Stalinist assault on old Russia.

103 Orphans also made good soldiers: a national unit of the Red Army in Turkestan, 1920.

104 The war against religion: Red Army soldiers confiscate valuable items from the Semenov Monastery in Moscow, 1923.

105 The revolution expands east.

The Red Army arrives in Bukhara and explains the meaning of Soviet power to the former subjects of the Emir, September 1920.

106 Two Bolshevik commissars of the Far East.

107 The dying Lenin, with one of his doctors and his younger sister Maria Ul’ianova, during the summer of 1923. By the time this photograph was taken, Stalin’s rise to power was virtually assured.

Notes

Full details of titles are given in the Bibliography, here.

1 The Dynasty

1 Novoe vremia, 17, 18, 20–8 Feb 1913; Romanov, V mramornom, 174–7; Taneeva, Stranitsy, 98–101; Buchanan, Dissolution, 36–7.

2 Novoe vremia, 18–28 May 1913; Niva, 24, 1913, 477–9; Mossolov, At the Court, 240–1; Romanov, V mramornom, 178; Kokovtsov, Out, 361.

3 Whelan, Alexander III, 32–3.

4 ‘Dnevnik A. A. Polovtsova’ (1902), 3, 1923: 136; Iswolsky, Memoirs, 264–5; Wortman, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, 253–4; Verner, Crisis, 79.

5 Wortman, Scenarios, 381–7; Wortman, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, 250–1; Spiridovitch, Les Dernières, 2: 253–62.

6 Wortman, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, 254–7, 260–2.

7 Rodzianko, Reign, 75–7.

8 Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 361; Miliukov, Political Memoirs, 236.

9 Wortman, ‘Invisible Threads’, 397–8.

10 Elchaninov, Tsar, 148; Wortman, ‘Invisible Threads’, 392–3.

11 Elchaninov, Tsar, 2–3, 121.

12 Massie, Nicholas, 227; The Times, 22 Feb, 6 March 1913; British Documents on Foreign Affairs, 1, A, 6: 323.

13 Memoirs of Count Witte, 201, 710–13; Serge, Ville en danger, 37.

14 Pasternak Slater (ed.), Vanished Present, 185–7.

15 Romanov, Once a Grand Duke, 168; Memoirs of Count Witte, 95; Zaionchkovsky, Russian Autocracy, 18–19.

16 Gurko, Tsar, 8; Wolfe, ‘Autocracy’, 68; Essad-Bey, Nicholas, 26.

17 Iswolsky, Memoirs, 248–50; Romanov, Once a Grand Duke, 178; Ferro, Nicholas, 16.

18 Wolfe, ‘Autocracy’, 66–7; Romanov, Once a Grand Duke, 168–9.

19 Salisbury, Black Night, 50–8; Iswolsky, Memoirs, 259–60.

20 Massie, Nicholas, ix; Pares, The Fall, 57.

21 Pares (ed.), Letters of the Tsaritsa, 409; Chernov, Great Russian, 1; Trotsky, History, 73–4; Gurko, Tsar, 23–4.

22 Rogger, Russia, 20; Verner, Crisis, 64–7; Lieven, Nicholas, 113; Wolfe, ‘Autocracy’, 72.

23 Pares, The Fall, 157; Verner, Crisis, 45–59; Lieven, Russia’s Rulers, 287–9; Lieven, Nicholas, 105–6, 115–16.

24 Buchanan, Dissolution, 36.