Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

If the Bolsheviks looked weak and nervous, however, their democratic opponents were in a worse state. Having unwisely attacked on too many fronts, the People’s Army of Komuch began to fall back in September: on 10–12 September, Red forces, under the personal direction of Trotsky, recaptured Kazan′, Vol′sk, and Simbirsk. Meanwhile its political leaders were being strong-armed into a compromise with the more right-wing PSG in a so-called state conference held that same month in Ufa. A PSR–Kadet coalition, the Directory, emerged from this, but the Kadet party leadership felt that it strayed too far from the model proposed by the URR, and in any case, real power by now lay in the hands of the Siberian Army, which had long since set about abducting and assassinating socialists in the east (notably the author A. E. Novoselov). As the Red Army advanced toward the Urals, and seeing no alternative, the Ufa Directors quit Ufa for Omsk, the headquarters of the PSG and the Siberian Army, placing themselves in the lion’s mouth, as Avksentev acknowledged. They lasted only a few weeks there before being arrested by Siberian Cossacks in the coup of 18 November 1918, which brought to power, as the putative supreme ruler of Russia, Admiral A. V. Kolchak—a darling of the political Right in Russia and close friend of powerful British interventionist forces in the region.44

Meanwhile, a markedly similar course of events was being played out in anti-Bolshevik camps elsewhere, albeit at different tempos. In isolated Central Asia, for example, the process extended over the greater part of a year, as the SR–Menshevik Transcaspian Provisional Government that had been established following an anti-Bolshevik Ashkhabad uprising on 11–12 July 1918 (sponsored by British forces across the Persian border at Meshed) gave way to a far more conservative Committee of Social Salvation in January 1919, which in July 1919 then accepted its subordination to the White forces in South Russia’s orbit.45

In Northern Russia, meanwhile, the Democratic Counter-Revolution had adopted the countenance of a regime rather more Leftist than had been the case in Siberia—the Supreme Administration of North Russia, led by the veteran Populist N. D. Chaikovskii—but one that, oddly, was even more a creation of the Allies than the PSG: Chaikovskii’s cabinet had assumed power at Arkhangel′sk on 2 August 1918, on the basis of a program inspired by the URR, but unashamedly with the connivance and intervention of British forces that had landed at the port on that day to support a military coup against the local soviet. Within weeks, on 6 September 1918, tiring of the socialist ministers’ schemes, the local military, led by Colonel G. E. Chaplin, had toppled the Supreme Administration. Members of the Allied military missions seem to have initially encouraged this act, but then had second thoughts: Chaikovskii was freed from his incarceration in the island monastery of Solovetskii and was permitted to establish a new government, the Provisional Government of the Northern Region. Nevertheless, it was thereafter the Northern Army that had control of events in the Northern region, and Chaikovskii, one of the totemic individuals among Russian democrats for the past half century, was obliged to retire. Eventually, Chaikovskii took his leave of the anti-Bolshevik North and went instead to Paris (to join the Russian Political Conference there, in its forlorn and frustrating endeavors to gain admission for Russian representatives to the deliberations of the Allies). On the day of Chaikovskii’s departure, 1 January 1919, there duly arrived at Arkhangel′sk General E. K. Miller, who was to become military governor of the region for the remainder of the civil war in the North.46 They must have passed each other in the harbor; socialist democracy was departing Russia as White militarism disembarked from an Allied vessel.

Ironically, in those areas of the former empire that had been under the control of the Central Powers, in late 1918 and early 1919 forces of a far more moderate socialist, liberal, and nationalist hue were gaining a foothold as the occupying forces withdrew. In effect, as the Bolsheviks had promised under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk not to encroach upon the occupied territories in the Baltic, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, the presence of the Central Powers’ forces acted as a buffer, preventing the Red Army and Red Guards from crushing democratic and nationalist opposition to Soviet rule along the western and southern peripheries of the former empire in the same manner that they had crushed such forces along the Volga and (initially) the Don.47