The overwhelming majority of officers were mobilized and forced to serve the Soviet regime. Trotsky's policy of using military specialists ran into stubborn resistance from other Bolshevik leaders. He had to confront a coalition led by Lashevich, head of the military section of the Central Committee; Zinoviev, president of the Northern Commune and boss of Petrograd; and Stalin, representative of the Central Committee on the Southern Front. Trotsky's adversaries did not question the principle of using military specialists; they stressed that they should be employed only as "aides de camp" and, when they were no longer needed, "thrown away like a squeezed lemon."99 General Novitsky, who had volunteered to join the Red Army, protested in an open letter to Trotsky. Trotsky replied with assurances that officers "who work conscientiously in the present difficult conditions deserve respect."100 Lenin was leaning toward Trotsky's adversaries. In March 1919 he advised the commissar of war to purge the army of old officers and to name Lashevich commander-in-chief. He was extremely surprised to hear that over 30,000 officers were serving in the Red Army and that it would not be able to survive without them.101 A realist, Lenin at once grasped the correctness of Trotsky's policy and publicly expressed his enthusiasm for this original method of building socialism with bricks from the old regime. Even General Denikin praised the cleverness of the Soviet policy.102
Trotsky made massive use of military specialists, placing them under the constant surveillance of political commissars. "For the first time, the commissar came onto the scene in the role of Soviet enforcer."103 Every command by an officer had to bear the commissar's signature. The commissars had the right to demote the unit's "commander" (the officer in charge, in the vocabulary of 1918) or even to arrest him. With his characteristic pomposity Trotsky declared that the commissars were the "new Communist order of samurai, in which the members have no caste privileges, know how to die, and teach others how to die for the cause of the working class."104 The commissars might die and teach others to die, but their main task was to act as "the eyes of the proletariat," controlling the military specialists and, in a sense, "conquering the elements," riding the whirlwind of revolution. Like the samurai, however, the commissar must above all be loyal.
The German occupation of the Ukraine enabled the White generals to form major military units. By mid-1918 the most important anti-Bolshevik force was General Krasnov's Army of the Don. The White Cossacks took Novocherkassk and after that abandoned their interest in Moscow and Russia. Their main wish was to subdue the local non-Cossack population. By the summer of 1918 the Volunteer Army had between 8,000 and 9,000 soldiers. The two anti-Bolshevik armies were caught up in constant political and strategic disputes. While Krasnov launched an offensive against Tsar- itsyn, Denikin began a second campaign in the Kuban. In the fall of 1918 Denikin defeated the Eleventh Army of the Northern Caucasus, at the same time that the Red Army was victorious on the eastern front. In January 1919 the Don Cossacks abandoned their siege of Tsaritsyn. Denikin ordered a mobilization of all officers under forty in the territories occupied by the Volunteer Army. The White Army became stronger, but it was no longer a volunteer army, and it lost its homogeneity. On January 8, 1919, after an agreement with the atamans of the Don and Kuban Cossacks, General Denikin became commander-in-chief of all the armed forces in the south of Russia. For the first time an army with a national objective, liberating the country from Bolshevik power, was created.
The metaphor so widely used by Soviet historians (the counterrevolution as a "ring of fire") is not an accurate description of the civil war. The fire that broke out the day after the October revolution blazed everywhere in the country, to one degree or another. The universal dissatisfaction with Lenin's policies developed into major bonfires, however, only in the southern, northern, eastern, and western outlands, and these did not merge into one general anti-Bolshevik conflagration because they lacked a single leader and a single unifying idea.
The fact that the main centers of counterrevolutionary strength were on the periphery gave the Soviet government major strategical advantages. "Our central position," wrote Trotsky, "made it possible for us to act along internal operational lines and reduce our strategy to one simple idea: the consecutive liquidation of fronts depending on their relative importance."105 The course of military operations in 1919 was convincing proof of the advantages the Soviet government derived from its central position, controlling the main rail lines and junctions.
In the summer of 1919 several focal points of anti-Bolshevik strength appeared in the eastern part of Russia. In the Volga region a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (the Komuch) established its sway, the SRs being the moving spirit in this formation. After the taking of Ekaterinburg by the Czechs, a Urals Regional Government was formed. Likewise, a so-called Siberian Government made Omsk its capital. Orenburg Province was under the rule of the Cossack Ataman Dutov, who professed formal loyalty to the Komuch but in fact acted independently. Disputes and conflicts arose between these governments because of their differing, often diametrically opposed views on fundamental questions: what attitude to take toward the revolution and the changes it had made and toward the peasants and the workers, and what kind of structure to advocate for the future Russian state. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British agent in
Russia, recalled a letter he received from General Alekseev in the summer of 1918. The right-wing general stated that he would rather collaborate with Lenin and Trotsky than with Savinkov and Kerensky.106 Similar sentiments were expressed by members of the Siberian Government, who were obliged to collaborate with SRs from the Komuch. In September a conference at Ufa established a directorate whose aim was to provide overall leadership for all anti-Bolshevik forces in the east of Russia. A council of ministers was chosen, with the army and navy portfolios going to Admiral Kolchak. On November 18, 1918, the SR members of the directorate were arrested, and Admiral Kolchak was named "supreme ruler." He proclaimed himself "commander-in-chief of all the land and sea forces of Russia."
In March 1919 Kolchak launched a drive toward the Volga along a broad front. The Red Army, weakened by the transfer of its best units to the south, could not hold its ground. By the end of April, however, the commander of the Soviet eastern front, a former colonel of the tsarist General Staff, Sergei S. Kamenev, inflicted a stunning defeat on Kolchak's army, driving it back to the Urals and pursuing it into Siberia. No sooner had Kolchak's army begun to retreat than Denikin launched an offensive from the south. His troops took the Ukraine, then Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel, after which they directly threatened Moscow by way of Tula. At the same time, independently of Denikin, General Yudenich started a drive against Petrograd from the Baltic region. Trotsky was sent to Petrograd to cope with the emergency and in a few days organized a successful defense of the city. At the end of October Yudenich's army retreated in disorder. The commissar of war warned the Baltic republics that the Red Army would march on them if they did not disarm Yudenich. He threatened Finland in similar fashion, vowing to send his Bashkir divisions against Helsinki if necessary. Meanwhile the Red Army defeated Denikin north of Orel and soon drove him south to the Black Sea. At the end of 1919 the victory of the Red Army on all fronts was assured.