A people's tragedy

fn5 During the 1930s, when the party carried out a survey of the Red Guard veterans of October, 12 per cent of those responding claimed to have participated in the storming of the palace. On this calculation, 46,000 people would have been involved in the assault (Startsev, Ocherki, 275). It would be interesting to know the results of a similar survey of the Muscovite intelligentsia during the defence of the parliament building in August 1991. The number of people claiming to have been there, alongside Yeltsin on the tank, would probably run into the hundreds of thousands.

fn6 The Declaration of the Rights of the Nations of Russia, proclaimed on 2 November, granted the non-Russian peoples full rights of self-determination, including the freedom to separate from Russia and form an independent state. Finland was the first to take advantage of this, declaring itself independent on 23 November 1917. It was followed by Lithuania (28 November), Latvia (30 December), the Ukraine (9 January 1918), Estonia (24 February), Transcaucasia (22 April) and Poland (3 November).

fn7 The Right SRs had called a Second Congress of Peasant Soviets to rally support against the Bolshevik regime, but it was swamped by leftwing delegates from the soldiers’ committees and the lower-level Soviet organizations, causing the Right SRs to walk out in protest. The leftwing leaders then passed a resolution to merge this ‘Extraordinary’ Congress with the All-Russian Soviet Executive.

fn8 Its full name was the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

fn9 According to Lozovsky, the Bolshevik trade unionist who had resigned from Sovnarkom on 4 November, the ‘hero-worship’ of Lenin had become a basic expectation of party discipline. See his open letter of protest against the dictatorial methods of the Leninist wing in Novaia zhizn’, 4 November 1917.

fn10 To the Western mind, it may seem strange that the Bolsheviks should have chosen to call their main peasant newspaper The Peasant Poor (Krest’ianskaia Bednota). But in fact it was a brilliant example of their propaganda. The Russian peasant saw himself as poor, and, unlike the peasants of the Protestant West, saw nothing shameful in being poor.

fn11 Rightwing pamphleteers before the war used the image of the spider to depict the Jew ‘sucking the blood of the harmless flies (the Russian people) it has caught in its web’ (Engelstein, Keys, 322–3).

fn12 The ladies of the nobility.

fn13 The Kadet leaders, Shingarev and Kokoshkin, were arrested by the Bolsheviks and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress after the demonstrations of 28 November in defence of the Constituent Assembly. They were transferred to the Marinskaya Hospital on 6 January after becoming seriously ill, and were brutally murdered there on the following night by a group of Baltic sailors, who broke into the hospital. The Ministry of Justice later revealed that the murders had taken place with the connivance of the Bolshevik Red Guard and the Commandant of the Hospital, Stefan Basov, who justified the murder on the grounds that there would be ‘two less bourgeois mouths to feed’. Basov was brought to trial and convicted, but none of the murderers was ever caught and the Bolshevik leaders, who at first condemned the murders, later sought to justify them as an act of political terror.

fn14 The Soviet anti-nuclear propaganda of the 1970s and 1980s, which was applauded by the anti-nuclear movement in the West, was the last, and in some ways the most successful, example of this ‘demonstrative diplomacy’.

fn15 The refusal of the Allies to regard the situation in Russia from anything but the perspective of the war no doubt helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power at this critical moment. The decision of the French government to give the Bolsheviks military aid coincided with its cancellation of support for the Volunteer Army, which was formed to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The Allied governments were all badly informed of the true situation in Russia, and placed too much faith for far too long in the hope of getting revolutionary Russia to rejoin the war.

Chapter 12

fn1 A large flea-market in Moscow.

fn2 There was nothing to compare with it on the Red side — except perhaps the long march of the Taman Army, trapped by the White forces in the Taman Peninsula, during August and September 1918. This epic story formed the basis of Serafimovich’s famous novel The Iron Flood. The Taman Army had a heroic status under the Soviet regime. All the more ironic, then, that Yeltsin should have used it to bombard the parliament building in October 1993.

fn3 The Reds later claimed that they had been informed of the whereabouts of Kornilov’s headquarters by a defector from the Volunteers.

fn4 One Cossack delegate thought this was too kind and said it would be better simply to kill all the non-Cossacks.