Even foreign intervention could not save the Whites. With the end of the First World War the Allies had free access to Russia through the Black Sea and elsewhere, but the exhaustion of war meant that they could offer little in the way of actual troops. Japan sent some sixty thousand to Siberia as part of a scheme to take control of Russian territory (thereby antagonizing the United States), but the other powers sent fewer troops. A brief intervention in Odessa and other southern cities in 1919 ended after only a few months, although Britain, France, and the United States continued to send weapons. They were not of much use, for transportation bottlenecks (especially in Siberia) held up the supplies in the ports and massive corruption meant that arms and ammunition often ended up in the hands of the Reds. To make matters worse, the officers who formed the core of the White movement were intensely patriotic and many were offended by the need to rely on foreign armies. The intervention weakened morale as much as it strengthened it.
In the fall of 1919 the Reds pushed Kolchak’s forces back into Siberia, the first victories of the later Soviet marshal M. N. Tukhachevskii, an aristocratic guards officer turned revolutionary enthusiast. The Red Army finally defeated Kolchak, capturing and executing him in Siberian Irkutsk. There was another try at a White victory: General Iudenich, the victor of Erzerum in 1916, led an expedition from Estonia toward Petrograd. Zinoviev thought the city defenseless, and Lenin agreed with him. Trotsky and Stalin vehemently objected, and convinced Lenin to let them defend the city. They raced north to Petrograd, Trotsky personally jumping on a horse to rally the troops. In October of 1919, Iudenich began the retreat back to Estonia. In the south, Denikin gave up command early in 1920 and went into exile. The remains of the White Army retreated to the Crimea and set up a new army and government under Baron Peter Wrangel. At that point the new Polish state invaded the Ukraine. The aim of the Poles was to conquer the lands held by Poland before the partitions of the eighteenth century, and to do so they allied with Petliura, who thus further discredited himself with the Ukrainian peasantry for whom the Poles were only noble landlords, and as such, their enemies. The Red Army redeployed west to meet the new threat, mobilizing some half a million soldiers. Lenin was convinced that the Reds should go all the way to Warsaw, an attempt to help the spread of revolution in Europe as well as to defeat the Poles. Trotsky was skeptical. The Red Army, led before Warsaw by the brilliant but erratic Tukhachevskii, moved too far to the west in an attempt to encircle the city. A huge gap opened in the Red lines, but the Red troops farther south under Budennyi, with Stalin as political commander, delayed moving north to help close the gap. The Poles, with French advice and weapons, swept north in a maneuver of brilliant simplicity to encircle Tukhachevskii’s troops. The Reds retreated far to the east, their major defeat in the Civil War, and made peace with Poland. The treaty established a boundary that gave Poland large parts of western Belorussia and the Ukraine, but not the main cities, Kiev, Odessa, and Minsk.
At the critical moment of the Polish war Baron Wrangel had moved into the Red rear from Crimea. Now his was the only hostile force left in the field against the Bolsheviks. At the end of 1920 the Red Army stormed across the isthmus into Crimea with the help of Makhno’s irregulars, and the White cause was finished. The last refugees, soldiers and civilians evacuated the southern cities under the guns of the British navy, in a chaotic scene that marked the final end of the old Russia.
The revolution and civil war was largely a Russian event but it had profound effects for the various nationalities that made up the periphery of the Russian Empire. In Poland nationalism trumped class and socialism, and the transition to an independent government was (internally) fairly smooth. In Finland a vicious civil war in 1918 between the local Social Democrats and the Whites led to a White victory after the Kaiser sent an expeditionary force to aid Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former Imperial Russian general. In the Baltic provinces the collapse of the German occupation led to civil war as well, for Riga especially had a large and very radical working class. Britain, however, saw the Baltic as its sphere of influence and landed Freikorps soldiers, German right-wing nationalist paramilitaries, in 1919 to push out the Reds. The British then set up a nationalist government in their place, evicting the Freikorps as well. The Baltic Reds went into exile in Soviet Russia, providing in particular a major component in the Cheka and Red Army. In the Ukraine the task of the Reds was made easier by the fact that all of the cities were Russian-speaking. The largest urban minority was Jewish, not Ukrainian, and the local nationalist movement was a small layer of intellectuals trying to lead the peasantry. Their armies were totally disorganized, and in addition they were reluctant to be clear on the land question, the crucial issue to the peasants. The Reds easily swept them away.
In the Caucasus the Reds were also victorious. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had led to the German-Turkish occupation of the Caucasus, and the end of the war meant their withdrawal. The Reds tried to make a revolution in their wake, but local nationalist parties took power with British help. As Britain was busily occupying the nearby Middle East, it had few resources to spare, and the local governments were left to their own devices. In 1920 the Red Army came south under the command of Stalin’s fellow Georgian and close friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze and took Baku. The small Azeri army was largely led by Turkish officers, by now supporters of Kemal Ataturk’s resistance to the western powers in Anatolia, and greeted the Reds as allies. Furthermore, Baku itself was a city in its majority not Azeri but Russian, Georgian, and Armenian, a population drawn by oil to what was largely a European city. The Reds had plenty of allies. The Reds moved on quickly to eject the Armenian nationalists, and a few months later it was the turn of the Georgian Mensheviks. A new Soviet republic, the Transcaucasian Federation, came into existence, combining all of the area under one government. In Central Asia resistance to the Reds ended by 1922, and the Japanese were eventually persuaded to withdraw from eastern Siberia, so that everywhere but in the West the old boundaries were reestablished.
The new, Soviet, Russia that came into being was devastated by years of war and revolution, with its economy in pieces. Perhaps a million men had died on the many fronts of the Civil War and (estimates vary) five or six million civilians – the greatest number of these from typhus and other epidemic diseases, followed by hunger. Executions and massive reprisals by all sides made up the rest of the death toll. Some million or two Russians, including much of the old upper classes and the intelligentsia, left the country, never to return. Transport and production were at a standstill. For the time being, the Soviets continued the policy of War Communism and mobilized the Labor Armies under Trotsky to rebuild the damage. This was not a viable policy and resistance to the new order grew throughout the country. Lenin realized that some sort of compromise was needed, an economic policy that provided enough room for the population, particularly the peasantry, to work without state direction. This compromise would be named the New Economic Policy and it inaugurated a whole new era in the history of Soviet Russia and the other Soviet states under the rule of the Communist Party.
17 Compromise and Preparation