It was on the political rather than the military front that the further descent into civil war was most indelibly marked, however. On 5–6 January 1918, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly gathered at the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. The PSR and its national allies in Ukraine and elsewhere had won a clear majority (almost 60 percent) of the vote in the elections (which had been held in mid-November). The new Soviet government argued (with some justification) that these results failed to take account of the new political configuration in the country—in particular the fact that in December 1917 the left wing of the PSR had declared itself to be a separate party and had joined the Bolsheviks in government—and demanded that the assembly endorse a Lenin-penned “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples,” according to which the assembly should recognize Soviet power and Sovnarkom’s post-October decrees. When the SR majority refused to sign its own suicide note, Bolshevik and Left-SR delegates walked out of the meeting. Subsequently, Bolshevik sailors who were policing the event ordered the delegates to leave the Tauride Palace. When they attempted to return on the following day, they found the building locked and sealed off by Red Guards. This may not have been the start of the civil wars—as we have seen, many earlier dates suggest themselves—but it was certainly the end of the February Revolution and the hopes for a democratic solution to Russia’s problems that it had engendered.26 It also sowed the seeds of the armed conflict between the Bolsheviks and their more moderate socialist opponents that was the primary feature of the civil wars in 1918.
1918: Intervention and the Democratic Counter-Revolution
With the Volunteer Army fleeing from the exposed Don region into the North Caucasus for refuge in early 1918 (the First Kuban “Ice” March) and not returning north until later in the year, and with other embryonic White armies operating only far to the east, the year following the October Revolution was dominated by two interrelated phenomena: the beginnings of extensive foreign intervention in the “Russian” Civil Wars and the rise and fall of democratic (mostly moderate socialist) opposition to the new Bolshevik dictatorship in areas closer to the Russian heartland. The latter would probably have ignited at some point without the former, but foreign intervention certainly accelerated opposition to the Soviet government by the Russian SRs and their allies in non-Russian regions of the former empire.
It is first important to note, however—although it is a story that has largely been forgotten in the West—that Austro-German intervention in the Baltic, and especially Ukraine (as well as Ottoman incursions into Transcaucasia) had a greater influence on the course of the civil wars than did the intervention of the Allies. Indeed, much of the Allied intervention (if not all) can be read as a response to Austro-German and Turkish moves to secure Russian territory and resources at a critical juncture of the world war.27 Their opportunity came when, in a series of debates that almost split the Bolshevik Party, Lenin was eventually successful in securing a majority in favor of signing a separate peace with the Central Powers at the fortress town of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).28 The treaty detached all Russia’s territorial gains in Eastern Europe dating back to the 17th century (including Finland, the Baltic provinces, Belorussia, Poland, and Ukraine), as well as more recent gains (in 1878 and since 1914) in eastern Anatolia—including Kars, Ardahan, and Batumi (known to the Turks as Elviye-i Selâse, the “three provinces”)—and forced demobilization on the Soviet government, as well as demanding that all Russian naval vessels be confined to port. More than one-third of the old empire’s population (56,000,000 people), one-third of its railway network, half its industry, three-quarters of its supplies of iron ore, and nine-tenths of its coal were thereby immediately transferred to the control of Germany and its allies, while all Russian claims to privileges within Persia and Afghanistan were also forfeited.29
This was the most draconian peace settlement that any European power had ever imposed upon another. Soon after it was signed, Austro-German forces moved into Ukraine and on to Crimea and the Don, while Turkish forces moved into Armenia and pushed on toward Baku. Although there were pockets of resistance (by the anarchist partisans led by Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, for example), the forces were able to advance with relative ease because some Russians and many non-Russian nationalists had opted for what became known as the “German orientation” in 1918: that is, seeking the assistance of the Central Powers to quarantine and eventually crush the Bolshevik contagion in Moscow (whence Sovnarkom had relocated in March 1918). This was true of forces as diverse as the Kadet leader Miliukov; initially, the mostly socialist leaders of the Ukrainian National Republic, who signed their own treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk on 27 January 1918; certainly the former tsarist general P. P. Skoropadsky, who with German aid and encouragement overthrew the UNR on 29 April 1918 and established a conservative, hyper-nationalist Hetmanate; and the Menshevik leaders of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (proclaimed on 28 May 1918).
So, with the connivance of nationalist leaderships, the Central Powers were able to seek to exploit the agricultural and industrial wealth of Ukraine and the oil of Baku. At the same time, putative nationalist leaderships found some protection from Soviet attacks on them (both from Soviet Russia and from enclaves of pro-Bolsheviks within their home territories). This was equally true in the Baltic, where German forces had fully occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia by January 1918. In the three putative Baltic States, nationalist leaders found the occupying Germans far less willing to offer them any meaningful autonomy. Indeed, many nationalist leaders were arrested there in 1918. Nevertheless, the German presence again meant that the Bolsheviks could not overrun the region, leaving Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian national governments to emerge in the aftermath of the Central Powers’ collapse in November 1918.
As the intervention of the Central Powers developed in 1918, it elicited a major reaction from those Russians who had adopted the opposite, “Allied orientation” with regard to how best to solve Russia’s problems. This might be defined as a belief that not only was it Russia’s duty to keep its promises to the Allies to fight the war until victory (entailing a complete rejection of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), but also that it was the duty of the Allies to help non-Bolshevik Russians rebuild the Russian Army (albeit on more democratic lines) and to reestablish the Eastern Front. However, this relationship was never going to be entirely harmonious. Many democratically minded Russians (and probably most socialists) were fearful of what price might have to be paid to induce the Allies to intervene, and even while inviting intervention they were demanding that there be no political interference in Russian affairs by London, Paris, or Washington.30 On the other hand, many Allied military and political leaders were not convinced that the socialists had the backbone for the fight; they had witnessed, often at firsthand, the shambles that the Russian Army had become in 1917 and feared a return to that. So some began to argue for supporting not the democrats, but forces of a more right-wing stamp.31 Others, somewhat surprisingly, placed their hopes on the new Red Army that was being organized by Leon Trotsky in the spring of 1918. British officers helped train Red soldiers, while the chief British representative in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, kept a line open to the Kremlin and in his dispatches home expressed the belief, for months after the treaty had been signed, that the Soviet government could be induced to abjure Brest-Litovsk and to rejoin the fray on the Allied side.32