1916–1917: The Origins of the “Russian” Civil Wars
A long-term view of the origins of the “Russian” Civil Wars would cite a combination of the unique nature of the growth of the Russian Empire and the pressures placed on it by the challenges of modernity in the half century or so prior to their outbreak. The Russian Empire was unusual in that it was a contiguous, land-based empire in which, although by far the largest ethnic group, Russians were in a minority, accounting for about 44 percent of the population by the time of the first census in 1897. Although efforts to cooperate with and co-opt non-Russian elites were almost as common as attempts to suppress them for much of the empire’s history, this was never going to be an equal partnership, and relations between Russians and non-Russians became increasingly strained in the late 19th century, as the last tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, reacted to the first stirrings of nationalism among the “minorities” with the promotion of Russian nationalism (and its broader ally, Pan-Slavism) and ill-considered attempts at forced Russification, imposing the Russian language, Russian laws, and Russian governmental structures on peoples from Finland through Poland, the Baltic, and Ukraine to Transcaucasia and thereby withdrawing from the compact whereby these peoples had enjoyed varying degrees of (albeit limited) autonomy in culture, religion, and government.
This period, particularly after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, also featured radical changes in Russian society, as industrialization was fostered so that Russia might compete on the world stage with its Great Power rivals. Indeed, from the 1890s onward, the Russian Empire was in the midst of the most dynamic and rapid industrial revolution the world had ever seen. Although there were Russian centers of industrial growth and the concomitant proletarization of the population (around St. Petersburg and Moscow, for example), it is of interest that most of the industrializing regions were to be found in the non-Russian periphery: the Baltic (especially Riga), Poland, eastern Ukraine, and Baku (the world’s leading oil-producing region by the turn of the century). As the population boomed (the empire’s populace more than doubled, from 60 million to over 120 million between 1861 and the outbreak of war in 1914), the pressures and stresses of urbanization placed great strains on the political structures of the state, which had been only partially modernized by Alexander II’s “Great Reforms” to local government, the courts, education, and the army in the 1860s. Moreover, many of those reforms had been undone by his Canute-like conservative successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II. Although in the last years of the autocracy social advancement by merit was more common than the patrimonial system of yore, many young men found their careers and ambitions blocked by the carapace of tradition and elitism in which the regime still enveloped itself. This applied as much to those liberals and conservatives who might have wished a reformed tsarism to endure as it did to those revolutionary socialists who fundamentally opposed it. The regime’s struggle to contain such ambitions, particularly those directed at the field of politics, was at the core of the narrative of late tsarism.8 In 1905, tensions reached their zenith with the failed revolution of that year, in which peasants (who felt themselves cheated by the settlement of 1861, which had granted them insufficient lands, who felt overtaxed by the government, and who were now increasingly subject to the whims of the world market into which Russia was integrated) combined with impoverished workers, the emergent educated and frustrated professional classes, and non-Russian nationalists to bring tsarism to its knees. Nicholas II rallied and saved the regime by dividing liberals from radicals through the foundation of an advisory State Duma (parliament), but then proceeded to re-exacerbate tensions by clawing back the limited powers he had granted it, ignoring it and frequently dispersing it, and driving some liberals back into the revolutionary camp.
A final key feature of late tsarism that fed into the civil wars was migration. One chief purpose of serfdom had been to maintain a static population that was easy to control, tax, and recruit to the armed forces. After the emancipation of 1861, barriers to movement withered. Indeed, pressure on land in Russia, combined with the need for labor in the booming industrial centers of the peripheries, witnessed a flood of Russians emigrating to towns in the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia. By the 1890s, the government itself was sponsoring migration through a Resettlement Administration attached to the Ministry of the Interior (subsequently it was taken over by the Ministry of Agriculture). Around five million peasants left European Russia for Siberia during the period (although only around two-thirds of them settled there permanently). Their story was largely a happy one, with prosperous centers of dairy farming springing up east of the Urals (although the life lessons these families learned—that socialism, in the form of the powerful Siberian cooperative movement, offered them greater protection and profit than had the tsarist system—would come back to haunt the Siberian Whites during the civil wars). Part of the Siberian farmers’ success can be attributed to the fact that they were moving into a nearly empty space, populated only by scattered and small native communities. Far less comfortable were Russian settlers who went to Russian Turkestan, where they came up against the nomadic traditions of much of the native population in the north of the region and the highly sophisticated Muslim culture of the populous valleys of the south. This, as we shall see, was the recipe for the conflict that sparked the “Russian” Civil Wars, even as the tsarist regime was fighting for its survival in the world war that broke out in 1914.
As one leading British historian of the post-1905 “constitutional” period of tsarism once explained, Russia’s experience of the First World War exacerbated a number of these preexisting tensions in Russian society.9 Bob McKean mentioned problems caused by the refugee crisis (which added to the migrations of previous decades), increased urbanization (to man arms factories), the mobilization of 15 million men into the army, the strains placed on transport and the economy, the decimation at the front of much of the officer corps who had provided a bulwark to tsarism, and—because of defeat and the scandals surrounding the royal family (notably the Rasputin episode)—the discrediting of Nicholas II in particular and autocracy in general. Added to this were the revived ambitions of political and social leaders of a liberal or even socialist bent who were drafted in to assist the regime by the government (notably Zemgor, the Union of Zemstvos and Town Councils).10 Together, McKean concluded, these tensions were sufficient to ensure that when the food riots that broke out in Petrograd in February 1917 inspired a mutiny of the city’s garrison and the instigation of a revolution, almost nobody came to the defense of Nicholas; even most of the high command advised him to abdicate. This he duly did, on behalf of himself and (illegally) on behalf of his sickly son, Alexis.11