Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Over the course of the summer, however, the Democratic Counter-Revolution in the east crumbled and collapsed, to be replaced by forces more conservative and more militaristic in their outlook (the Whites). A number of reasons can be adduced to explain this. For one thing, the PSR had divided hopelessly in 1917. By 1918, as we have seen, its left wing had become a separate party and was in collaboration with the Bolsheviks (although the coalition would collapse during March–July 1918 over Brest-Litovsk and Bolshevik policies in the countryside); meanwhile, its right wing, led by N. D. Avksentev and V. M. Zenzinov, founded the URR and sought collaboration with the Kadets; in the center the nominal party leader, V. M. Chernov, castigated both its errant wings. Second, the PSR-dominated regimes found it difficult to organize effective military forces, partly because they lacked experience; partly because recruits failed to come forward in sufficient numbers (in the SR’s peasant heartlands the villagers had been granted the land by the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Land of October 1917 and wondered why they should now be asked to fight their benefactors for the sake of democratic institutions that remained abstract to them); partly because they were not trusted by most of the anti-Bolshevik Russian military establishment and the increasingly rightist PSG (who deliberately poached officers from Komuch, for example); and partly because they were not trusted by the Allies.37

Although, as a consequence of all this, Komuch’s People’s Army never mustered more than 30,000 men (even after mobilization had been resorted to in the absence of volunteers), it was energetically commanded (not least by the SR Colonel V. I. Lebedev) and enjoyed support from the Czechoslovaks. Consequently, following negotiations with Major Stanislav čeček, commander of the legion’s 1st Division, a joint Czech–Komuch Volga Front was soon established, centered on Samara, which in a series of lightning operations succeeded in driving Red forces from the important regional centers of Ufa (5 July 1918), Simbirsk (22 July 1918), and Kazan′ (7 August 1918). The last of these victories was of particular significance: on the one hand, at Kazan′ had been stored about half of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve, a treasure trove that now fell into the hands of the anti-Bolsheviks in the east;38 on the other, as Trotsky recognized from his vantage point at Sviiazsk (on the opposite bank of the Volga), with Kazan′ in their hands and with Red forces in such disarray—actually in “a state of psychological collapse,” as the war commissar put it, dodging bullets while threatening left and right to execute commissars and commanders who failed to rally their troops—the road to Moscow lay wide open before the People’s Army, and “the fate of the revolution was hanging by a thread.”39

The causes of Trotsky’s discomfort are not difficult to fathom. The collapse of Red efforts in the east since May–June 1918 had been hastened by the revolt at Simbirsk against Soviet power (in the name of continuing the war against Germany) that had been staged on 10–11 July 1918, by none other than the commander of the Reds’ recently organized Eastern Front, the Left-SR M. A. Murav′ev.40 This had been accompanied by a disastrous collapse in morale among key units, particularly the exhausted 4th Regiment of the Latvian Riflemen, hitherto among the most effective of Red forces, which in mid-July simply abandoned Syzran′ and refused to advance on Simbirsk.41 Troublingly for the Soviet command, all this coincided not only with the uprising against the creeping authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks, staged in Moscow on 6 July 1918 by their former partners in Sovnarkom, the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (who were also strongly opposed to the treaty with Germany), but also with a series of revolts organized at Iaroslavl′ and surrounding towns engineered by B. V. Savinkov—the enigmatic former SR terrorist and (in 1917) champion of Kornilov, who was now in command of an extensive network of (partly Allied-financed) anti-Bolshevik officer organizations across Russia, which he called the Union for Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom.42 Farther east again, the workers of the armory towns of Izhevsk and Votkinsk, in the Urals, turned on and expelled their Bolshevik overlords.43 That these widespread revolts were followed by Allied landings at ports as disparate as Vladivostok, Krasnovodsk, and Arkhangel′sk in early August and by the arrival of representatives of Norperforce at Ashkhabad (10 August 1918) and of Dunsterforce at Baku (14 August 1918), then by the assassination of Cheka boss Moisei Uritskii by SR terrorists at Petrograd on 30 August 1918 and the attempted assassination of Lenin that same day in Moscow, could hardly have calmed any Bolshevik’s nerves.