Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

As the intervention of the Central Powers developed in 1918, it elicited a major reaction from those Russians who had adopted the opposite, “Allied orientation” with regard to how best to solve Russia’s problems. This might be defined as a belief that not only was it Russia’s duty to keep its promises to the Allies to fight the war until victory (entailing a complete rejection of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), but also that it was the duty of the Allies to help non-Bolshevik Russians rebuild the Russian Army (albeit on more democratic lines) and to reestablish the Eastern Front. However, this relationship was never going to be entirely harmonious. Many democratically minded Russians (and probably most socialists) were fearful of what price might have to be paid to induce the Allies to intervene, and even while inviting intervention they were demanding that there be no political interference in Russian affairs by London, Paris, or Washington.30 On the other hand, many Allied military and political leaders were not convinced that the socialists had the backbone for the fight; they had witnessed, often at firsthand, the shambles that the Russian Army had become in 1917 and feared a return to that. So some began to argue for supporting not the democrats, but forces of a more right-wing stamp.31 Others, somewhat surprisingly, placed their hopes on the new Red Army that was being organized by Leon Trotsky in the spring of 1918. British officers helped train Red soldiers, while the chief British representative in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, kept a line open to the Kremlin and in his dispatches home expressed the belief, for months after the treaty had been signed, that the Soviet government could be induced to abjure Brest-Litovsk and to rejoin the fray on the Allied side.32

Clearly the delivery of a democratic alternative to Bolshevism was going to be a problematic process. It initially found a very competent midwife, however, in the shape of the Czechoslovak Legion, in which, during the course of the world war, Czechs living within the Russian Empire had joined prisoners of war and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army to fight under Russian command for an independent homeland. Having secured the Soviet government’s agreement to leave Russia in February 1918—Lenin had no desire for what looked like an Allied fifth column to be stationed on his flank in Ukraine—some 35,000 of these men were stretched out along the Trans-Siberian Railway in May–June 1918, en route to Vladivostok (and thence the Western Front), when they clashed with local Soviet forces, revolted, and captured the railway from the Volga to the Pacific over the next few weeks.33

As the revolt flowed eastward, there emerged from the Volga–Urals–Siberian soils in which Bolshevism had never firmly taken root—the PSR, after all, had won huge majorities east of the Volga in the elections to the Constituent Assembly34—a string of challengers to Soviet authority. At Samara, on 8 June 1918, the rule was proclaimed of a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch); at Ekaterinburg, from 25 July 1918, there gathered a Provisional Oblast′ Government of the Urals; and at Omsk appeared a Western Siberian Commissariat (26 May 1918), which soon gave way to a rather more conservative (although it still initially contained socialists) Provisional Siberian Government (23 June 1918).35 Actually, both the WSC and the PSG were scions of a Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, the regional government long dreamed of by Siberian regionalists (oblastniki), which had been elected by delegates of the Siberian Regional Duma at Tomsk on 26–27 January 1918, before its dispersal by Red Guards. This “Democratic Counter-Revolution” in the east had significant local roots, symbolized by the presence in the PSG, in particular, of political and social activists of long standing who described themselves as adherents of the Siberian regionalist movement (oblastnichestvo), which dated back to the late 19th century. Equally important, however, was the part played in the organization of these regimes by delegates of underground anti-Bolshevik organizations dispatched to the peripheries in the spring of 1918—notably the Union for the Regeneration of Russia and the National Center.36