Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

To say that the Whites were unpopular is not, however, to imply that the Reds were popular. Clearly they were not in nationalist-held territories stretching from Finland, through the Baltic, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia to Central Asia.142 And even in the Russian lands, what really counted was that the Soviet government was less—sometimes only marginally less—unpopular than its opponents. In fact, Lenin’s regime faced persistent internal challenges—armed and unarmed, martial and ideological, as well as economic—to its governance, in principle and in practice. However, these challenges remained largely isolated from one another; importantly, they were never so extensive as to replicate the no-go, partisan-infested regions that spread like a typhus rash across the White rear in Ukraine, South Russia, and especially Siberia. Moreover, attacks on the internal fronts only reached dangerous proportions for the Soviet government from late 1920 onward. By that time, the major external threats had been dealt with: the White forces were on their last legs; Allied forces (with a few exceptions in the Far East) had left the country; the Allied economic blockade of the RSFSR had been officially lifted (in January 1920); and pens across the globe were poised to sign a series of mutually profitable agreements between Moscow and its former interventionist enemies, of which the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 16 March 1921 was only the first.

Initially, it is important to note, the Bolsheviks had been popular: their promises of “peace, bread and land” and of workers’ control of industry in the wake of the October Revolution were in tune with the mood of the masses. This was vital, as it had facilitated the “Triumphal March of Soviet Power” over the winter and early spring of 1917–1918 and gave the Bolsheviks mastery of the populous and relatively well-stocked central Russian heartland, from which no enemy was able to dislodge them. But workers’ control proved a disaster for the industrial economy and the railways and was rapidly replaced by one-man management in 1918.143 Meanwhile, having granted all land to the peasants in October 1917, by May–June 1918, as the fighting on the Volga deepened the civil wars and important grain-producing regions were detached from the Soviet heartland (including Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Western Siberia), the Soviet government was proclaiming a “food dictatorship,” reserving the right to extract from the villages as much grain and other resources as it required (prodrazverstka), and was dispatching armed detachments (prodotriady) into the countryside to do just that. The truth was that although Lenin only came up with a collective term (“War Communism”) for these policies in 1921, implying that it was a policy forced on the party by emergency circumstances, such dirigisme and such distrust of the peasantry as petite-bourgeois class enemies chimed much more closely with the Bolsheviks’ ideological tenets from the beginning, and much of the party pursued them energetically.144

As unemployment rose in the spring of 1918, as a consequence of economic confusion and the demobilization of the old army, and food supplies dwindled as a consequence of the break-up of formerly market-oriented estates and chaos on the railroads, instances of strikes and protests soared in the Soviet zone—especially in the cold and hungry north and especially in Petrograd.145 This then had immediate knock-on effects politically, as the Mensheviks enjoyed a sudden electoral revival in elections for local soviets in the spring of 1918; in fact, they won the elections for city soviets in all the major cities of the Central Industrial Region and most of the smaller cities. This, in turn, induced widespread falsification of the results by the Bolshevik authorities, the effective exclusion of the Mensheviks from future elections, and no little violence on the part of the Soviet government against opposition parties and organizations deemed to be influenced by them.146 Meanwhile, in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the escalation of the blatantly anti-peasant policies of War Communism, the Bolsheviks’ former coalition partners, the Left-SRs, resigned from Sovnarkom in March 1918 and staged an uprising in Moscow in early July. The latter was all the more worrying for the Soviet government as it coincided with a major uprising organized by Boris Savinkov at Iaroslavl′ and the mutiny on the Volga staged by the commander of that front, Colonel Murav′ev. This was succeeded by a series of assassinations of leading Bolsheviks (including Petrograd Cheka boss Moisei Uritskii) and, on 30 August 1918, an attempted assassination of Lenin.