The fiasco at Brest-Litovsk encouraged opposition to the Reds in the south. The southern Cossack areas rose in revolt again, this time allied with the Volunteer Army of General Mikhail Alekseev formed from officers of the old army. On the Don the new Red Army managed to suppress the Whites, who fled south to the Kuban River area, but other troubles soon arose. Serious fighting began in May 1918, in a wholly different part of the country, after the actions of the Czechoslovak Corps. The Czechoslovak Corps had been formed under the tsar from prisoners of war, former Austro-Hungarian soldiers of Czech and Slovak nationality, to assist the Allies against Austria and Germany. After the Soviet peace with Germany, they wanted to continue to fight and the new government allowed them to exit the country through Siberia to Japan and the United States so as to be able to continue the war in France. A series of clashes with local Soviet authorities led them to seize control of the rail lines from European Russia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In Samara in June, guarded by the Czechs, some SR deputies of the dispersed Constituent Assembly formed a government that attempted to continue the practices of parliamentary democracy. It also managed to get together a “People’s Army” that moved toward Moscow against the Reds.
Figure 18. Trotsky, Lenin, and Lev Kamenev 1918–1920.
For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, this was a real crisis, aggravated by the revolt of their recent allies, the Left SRs. Enraged by the peace with Germany and out of power the Left SRs attempted a revolt in Moscow, assassinating the German ambassador in the process. Similar revolts took place in other Russian towns, all quickly suppressed but indicative of serious opposition to the new government. The main threat, however, was the Czechoslovak Corps and its Russian allies moving from the east, and the ramshackle Red Army, formed of poorly trained militias with inexperienced officers, fell back in retreat. This was the moment that Trotsky first showed his mettle as a military commander, as well as his ruthlessness in imposing order and discipline. He made full use of officers from the old army of the tsar, holding their families hostage to guarantee their loyalty. In addition the political commissars assigned to each military unit were to maintain and inspire its reliability. He had officers who failed, commissars, and simple soldiers shot in the hundreds. With this new organization, the Red Army recaptured the Volga towns and pushed the rapidly disintegrating People’s Army back to the Urals.
These crises sealed the fate of the former Tsar Nicholas and his family. Their presence in Siberian Tobolsk, where the Provisional Government had sent them, was too close to the emerging centers of resistance, and so the Reds brought them to Ekaterinburg in the Urals. In July 1918, as the Whites approached, the Soviets ordered the imperial family executed, the final end of the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries. The house where they lived and where they were killed remained unnoticed for decades until 1977, when an overzealous Communist party boss, Boris Yeltsin, had it razed to the ground. Back in Moscow, Lenin himself was the target of an assassin’s bullet at the end of August. The response of the Cheka was to declare Red Terror, arresting thousands from the middle and upper classes. Some were executed immediately, others kept as hostages against future attempts.
By the autumn of 1918, the new Red Army had retaken most of the Volga and the Urals, and the People’s Army melted away. Farther east in Siberian Omsk another White army had come into being, Siberian Cossacks and units formed by ex-imperial officers determined to fight the Reds. In November, Admiral Alexander Kolchak seized power as Supreme Ruler of Russia, and dissolved the remnants of the SR leadership from the Constituent Assembly. Kolchak also shot many of the SRs as well as any other Bolshevik or left-wing activists whom he could find. Kolchak was a military dictator, and there were to be no more games with democracy. In addition there was a new element coming into play, for the First World War ended on November 11, and allied commissioners, British, French, American, and Japanese, arrived in Omsk. The allies, too, were for dictatorship, and quickly moved to support Kolchak as the leader of the opposition to Bolshevism.
If Kolchak was the titular supreme leader, his was not the only White army in the field. After the Reds had retaken the Don early in 1918, the Volunteer Army had moved south through the winter to establish themselves on the Kuban. The death of Alekseev and his replacement Kornilov (of the 1917 putsch attempt) in rapid succession led to the emergence of General Anton Denikin as the supreme commander of the Volunteer Army in the south. While Trotsky was preoccupied on the Volga, Denikin had held on, and on the Don the Cossacks rose again later in 1918. With covert German support, they tried to move north and east. As yet they were too weak to break the Red resistance, though they did cut off much of the crucial grain producing areas, and if they crossed the Volga, they had a distant chance of linking with Kolchak. On the Volga at Tsaritsyn, the Cossacks and the Whites confronted Joseph Stalin, sent originally just to organize grain deliveries, but Stalin quickly moved to take control of the military apparatus and shore up resistance. His ally among the soldiers was Kliment Voroshilov, who had fled east with a ragtag workers’ militia from the Donbass ahead of the advancing Germans. Stalin and Voroshilov were also unhappy with Trotsky’s policy of extensive use of professional officers from the tsar’s army, but Lenin supported Trotsky on this issue and they had to back down. Red units commanded by professional officers were decisive in holding the line, but at Tsaritsyn the Commissar of Nationalities had his first taste of warfare. The Cossacks did not cross the river, and Kolchak was thousands of miles to the east, unable to join them.
Behind all these front lines the Reds proceeded to build utopia. While Marxism provided a detailed analysis of capitalism and the projected path to proletarian revolution, it provided almost nothing beyond generalities about socialism. The worsening crisis in food supplies caused by increasing chaos and the German seizure of the Ukraine had led to the proclamation of the “food dictatorship” in May 1918. Under the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies armed detachments went out into the countryside to seize “surplus” grain at fixed, pre-revolutionary prices or simply to confiscate it. The idea was to get at grain allegedly held back by kulaks and traders with the help of the poor peasants organized in committees, but in fact the distinctions among the peasants were hard to make, and the measures affected all of rural society. Continued hyperinflation and the disappearance of money worsened the ongoing economic collapse, and the Reds instituted rationing and a system of cooperatives to distribute food and consumer goods.
Early in 1919 the Soviet authorities formalized the system of obligatory grain deliveries, to be accompanied by a centralized allocation of consumer goods to the peasants. Some sixty thousand men were now mobilized into a “food army” to extract grain from the countryside. The peasants responded by reducing the size of their crops, further plunging the cities into crisis. These new measures, in part the product of ideology and in part the necessity of war, lasted throughout the civil war. The Bolsheviks had always been hostile to markets, and the collapse of transport and general chaos broke down normal market ties. This situation gave them an opportunity to institute utopian schemes of distribution through the central allocation of goods. Virtually all factories and all trade were nationalized. Small retail shops disappeared, while the Soviet municipalities tried to set up large city-owned bread factories instead of small neighborhood bakeries, worsening the food situation. This was the system that came to be known as “War Communism.” Reality soon intervened, for local Soviet authorities regularly violated the rules, and the impossibility of full central control led the major factories and even the Red Army to set up their own procurement systems for food, including substantial numbers of farms operated by the factories and the army. The only remaining markets were the flea markets and the black market, both of which made simple survival easier for much of the urban population. The new central economic institutions were incapable of implementing their schemes, for they were not grand bureaucratic structures, but rather small offices staffed by former revolutionary activists with no relevant experience, assisted by a few engineers or economists and the more qualified workers.