The Russian civil war, 1917-1922
DONALD J. RALEIGH
While the story of the Russian Revolution has often been retold, the historiography of the event's most decisive chapter, the civil war, remains remarkably underdeveloped. A generation ago, the nature of available sources as well as dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians of the civil war to focus on military operations, Allied intervention and politics at the top. This scholarship pinned the blame for the resulting Communist dictatorship on Marxist-Leninist ideology and/or Russia's backwardness and authoritarian political culture. In the 1980s, interest in social history and Bolshevik cultural experimentation stimulated publication of new academic and popular overviews of the civil war,[136] and also of a landmark collaborative volume that shifted the explanation for the Communist dictatorship from conscious political will and ideology to the circumstances of the ordeal.[137] The first full- scale investigations of the civil war in Petrograd and Moscow appeared as well.[138] Some studies issued at this time cast the period as a 'formative' one, emphasising that the Bolshevik behaviour, language, policies and appearance that emerged during 1917-21 served as models for policies later implemented under Joseph Stalin.[139]
Although Soviet historians writing on I9I7 often produced results that were not entirely invalidated by ideological content, this is less the case in regard to the civil war, whose history they patently falsified, undoubtedly owing to
mass discontent with Bolshevik practices after I9I8. Focusing on the political and military aspects of the civil war, Soviet historians published a 'canonical' five-volume survey of the subject between 1935 and 1960.[140] World war and the partial discrediting of Stalinist scholarship following the Soviet leader's death in I953 help to explain the delay in issuing the last volumes in the series. Like their Western counterparts, Soviet historians by the I980s had begun to devote more attention to the 1918-21 phase of the Russian Revolution, resulting in the release of a two-volume authoritative survey to replace the one begun during the Stalin years.[141] They debated periodisation of the civil war, acknowledged opposition parties and regional differences, examined party and state institutions and re-evaluated War Communism. However, they failed to engage deeper interpretive issues or to address the degree of popular opposition to Bolshevik policies.
The opening of the archives has allowed historians to revisit old questions and also to conceptualise the civil war in fresh ways. Lenin became the object of this first trajectory Underscoring his disregard for human life, new writing on the founder of the Soviet state draws on long-sealed documents to confirm his willingness to resort to terror and repression. Such literature breathed new life into the long-standing argument that Stalinism represented the inevitable consequence of Leninism.[142] An attempt to expose the 'revisionist' historians' intellectual dead end and to convict the Bolsheviks of crimes similar to those perpetrated under Stalin mars an otherwise valuable study of the civil war published in 1994.[143] More importantly, unprecedented archival access and changing intellectual paradigms encouraged historians to carry out local case studies informed by cultural approaches and by an interest in daily life. These works show how the experiential aspects of the civil war constrained and enabled later Soviet history, pointing out that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were not only practised, but also embedded during the 1914-22 period.[144] Shifting focus away from Lenin and Bolshevik ideology, these investigations interpret this outcome as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped, among other things, by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology and the dire political, economic and military crises starting with the First World War and strongly reinforced by the mythol- ogised experience of surviving the civil war. Some of these studies conclude that the 1920s contained few real alternatives to a Stalinist-like system. Herein lies the civil war's significance.
Overview
The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the desacralisation of the tsarist autocracy that took place in the years before the First World War; in the social polarisations that shaped politics before and during 1917; and in the Bolshevikleadership'sbeliefinthe efficacy of civil war, the imminence ofworld revolution and the value of applying coercion in setting up a dictatorship of the proletariat. When did the civil war begin? Historians have made compelling cases for a variety of starting points, yet dating the event to October 1917 makes the most sense, because that is how contemporaries saw things. Armed opposition to the new Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) arose immediately after the Second Congress of Soviets ratified the Bolshevik decree on land and declaration of peace, when officers of the imperial army formed the first counter-force known as the volunteer army, based in southern Russia. Ironically, the widespread belief among the population that Bolshevik power would soon crumble accompanied what Lenin, and subsequent generations of Soviet historians, called the 'triumphal march' of Soviet power as the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold in cities across central Russia.
During the civil war the Bolsheviks or Reds, renamed Communists in 1918, waged war against the Whites, a term used to refer to all factions that took up arms against the Bolsheviks. The Whites were a more diverse group than the Bolshevik label of 'counter-revolution' suggests. Those who represented the country's business and landowning elite often expressed monarchist sentiments. Historically guarding the empire's borders, Cossack military units enjoyed self-government and other privileges that likewise made them a conservative force. But many White officers had opposed the autocracy and some even harboured reformist beliefs. Much more complicated were the Bolsheviks' relations with Russia's moderate socialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and both parties' numerous offshoots, who wished to establish a government that would include all socialist parties. Frequently subsumed within the wider conflict between Reds and Whites, the internecine struggle within the socialist camp over rival views of the meaning of revolution prevailed during much of 1918, persisted throughout the civil war, and flared up once again after the Bolsheviks routed the Whites in 1920.[145]
136
The best of these is Evan Mawdsley,
1987).
137
Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg andRonaldG. Suny(eds.),
138
Mary McAuley,
139
Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'The Civil War as a Formative Experience', in Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (eds.),
140
M. Gor'kiietal.,
141
N. N. Azovtsev (ed.),
142
Dmitrii Volkogonov,
143
Vladimir N. Brovkin,
144
Igor' Narskii,
145
See Geoffrey Swain,