Year 12 History: The Russian Revolution Name: ______
The Russian Civil War & War Communism
Waste-deep in blood, the malicious horde, Is knitting brows and looking at Free-labour land, the land of free. Entente’s evil thoughts conceal The dreams to let the Soviet land Be tortured by the group of dogs. To please the clique of fat who trampled The flag of freedom, flag of free Yudenich growls, Denikin growls And whines the hungry dog Kolchak. The smell of gold, the scent of gold, Pricks up the ears of the dogs. They all come on, just to protect The bourgeois horde, the world of hordes. But hands of workers, hands of power, Raised high the red flag, flag of freedom With every battle, every hour, They squander dogs, they make them flee. Entente’s plans – apart at seams, The battle sharpens every day. Down the drain the empty pockets Of modern masters, of allied, of rich. No hope for dogs – the path of win Is not as easy as may seem. The Urals hurt the dog Kolchak – The poor fellow’s tail got stuck. The mangy dog Kolchak was made to whine – He got squeezed paws, he got a black eye. The allied horde can only look At the precious flag, red flag of free. With pile of duties, pile of rents, The League of Nations solves by three Dejected cases in its guild, The guild of dogs, the guild of ‘free’.
The successful Bolshevik rising of October 1917 marked the beginning rather than the end of the Russian Revolution. The big test was whether the Bolsheviks could retain their power and build upon it.
Key Dates for 1917
1917 November Bolsheviks issued the Decrees on Land and Workers Control
Elections for Constituent Assembly
December Armistice signed at Brest-Litvosk
Cheka created
1918 – 1920 Russian Civil War and foreign interventions
1918 – 1921 War Communism
1918 January Bolsheviks forcibly dissolved the Constituent Assembly
Red Army established
March Treaty of Brest-Litvosk
June Decree on Nationalization
July Forced grain requestions begun
Murder of tsar and his family
September Red terror officially introduced
1919 March Comintern established
Bolshevik Party renamed the Communist Party
1920 April Invading Red Army driven from Poland
1921 March The Kronstadt Rising
The Introduction of the NEP
Use the power point, your textbook and your teacher to complete the following:
1. The Bolsheviks in Power
In power the Bolsheviks under Lenin faced huge difficulties in trying to consolidate their hold over what had been the tsarist empire. These can be identified as four basic questions:
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From the beginning the Bolshevik regime was engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. In their government of Russia, the Bolsheviks were working form hand to mouth. They had few plans to help them. This was because before 1917 they had spent their time in preparing for revolution. They had given little thought to the details of how affairs would be organized once this had been achieved.
2. The Distribution of Power
Lenin claimed that the October Revolution had been a taking of power by the Soviets. In fact, it had been a seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party. Never the less, Lenin persisted with the notion that SOVNARKOM had been appointed to govern by the Congress of Soviets. According to this view, the distribution of power in revolutionary Russia took the form of a pyramid, with SOVNARKOM at the top, drawing its authority from the Russian people who expressed their will through the Soviets at the base. Illustrate this distribution of power below:
The reality was altogether different. Traditional forms of government had broken down in 1917 with the fall of tsardom and the overthrow of the Provisional Government. This meant that the Bolsheviks rule was de facto. And since not all the Soviets were dominated by the Bolsheviks, who in any case were a minority party, Lenin had no intention of letting true democracy get in the way.
3. What were the Bolsheviks’ early measures?
In Bolshevik theory, the October Revolution had marked the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, officials over capitalism. But theory was a little immediate assistance in the circumstances of late 1917. A hard slog lay ahead if the Bolsheviks were truly to transform the Russian economy. Before the October Revolution, Lenin had written powerfully against landlords and grasping capitalists, but he had produced little by way of a coherent plan for their replacement. It is understandable, therefore, that his policy after taking power in 1917 was a pragmatic one.
Immediate Problems
Lenin was aware that there were many Bolsheviks who wanted the immediate introduction of a sweeping revolutionary policy, but he pointed out that the new regime simply did not possess the power to impose this. Its authority did not run much Petrograd and Moscow. Until the Bolsheviks could exercise a much wider political and military control, their policies would have to fit the prevailing circumstances. The war against Germany and Austria had brought Russia to the point of economic collapse.
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Immediately after coming to power, the view government introduced two measures that are usually regarded as having initiated Bolshevik economic policy. These were the ‘Decree on Land’ and the ‘Decree on Workers’.
The Decree on Land
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The Decree gave Bolshevik approval to what had happened in the countryside since the February Revolution: in many areas the peasants had overthrown their landlords and occupied their property. Lenin had earlier accepted this when he had adopted the slogan “Land to the Peasants”.
The Decree on Workers Control
This measure was also largely concerned with authorising what had already occurred. During 1917 a large number of factories had been taken over by the workers. However, the workers’ committees that were then formed seldom ran the factories efficiently. The result was a serious fall in industrial output. The decree accepted the workers’ takeover, but at the same time it instructed the workers’ committees to maintain ‘the strictest order and discipline’ in the workplace. Passing a decree was one thing, enforcing them was another: A particular problem for the government was that not all the workers’ committees were dominated by Bolsheviks. Until the party gained greater control at shop floor level it would be difficult for the central government to impose itself on the factories. Nevertheless, the government pressed on with its plans for establishing the framework of state direction of the economy, even if effective central control was some way off. In December Vesenkha was set up to take charge of all existing institutions for the regulation of economic life.
Initially Vesenkha was unable to exercise the full authority granted to it. However, it did preside over a number of important developments:
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Creation of the Cheka, 1917
While some Bolsheviks may have found the initial pace of revolutionary change too slow for their liking, there was no doubting that Lenin was determined to impose absolute Bolshevik rule by suppressing of all political opposition. A development that gave the Bolsheviks muscle in dealing with their opponents was the creation in the weeks following the October Coup of the CHEKA. In essentials, the Cheka was a better organized more efficient form of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, at whose hands nearly every Bolshevik activist had suffered. Its express purpose was to destroy ‘counter-revolution and sabotage’; in terms that were so elastic they could be stretched to cover anything of which the Bolsheviks disapproved.
The Cheka
This state police force, often likened historically to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, had been created in December 1917 under the direction of Felix Dzerzhinsky, an intellectual of Polish aristocratic background, who sought to atone for his privileged origins by absolute dedication to the Bolshevik cause. Lenin found him the ideal choice to lead the fight against the enemies of the Revolution. Dzerzhinsky never allowed finer feeling or compassion to deter him from the task of destroying the enemies of Bolshevism. His remorseless attitude was shown in the various directives that issued from the Cheka headquarters in Moscow:
“ Our Revolution is in danger. Do not concern yourselves with the forms of revolutionary justice. We have no need for justice now. Now we have need of a battle to the death! I propose, I demand the use of the revolutionary sword, which will put an end to all counter-revolutionaries”
The Cheka operated as a law unto itself, and answerable only to Lenin, it was granted unlimited powers of arrest, detention and torture, which it used in the most arbitrary and brutal way. It was the main instrument by which Lenin and his successors terrorized the Russian people into subservience and conformity.
4. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly & Lenin’s motives for destroying the Assembly
As a revolutionary, Lenin had never worried much about how many people supported the Bolsheviks. Mere numbers did not concern him. He had no faith in democratic elections, which he dismissed as tricks by which the bourgeoisie kept itself in power. His primary objective was not to win mass support, but to create a party capable of seizing power when the opportune moment came. This was why he had refused to join a broad-front opposition movement before 1917 and why he had consistently opposed any form of co-operation with the Provisional Government. After the successful coup in 1917, Lenin was even more determined not to allow elections to undermine the Bolsheviks’ newly won power. However there was an immediate problem. The October Revolution had come too late to prevent the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly from going ahead in November as planned When the results came through by the end of the year they did not make pleasant reading form the Bolsheviks:
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Party / Votes / SeatsSR’s / 17,490,000 / 370
Bolsheviks / 9,844,000 / 175
National Minority Groups / 8,257,000 / 99
Left SR’s (Pro Bolsheviks) / 2,861,000 / 40
Kadets / 1,986,000 / 17
Mensheviks / 1,248,000 / 16
TOTAL / 41,686,000 / 717
One possibility is that Lenin could have tried to work with the new Assembly. But that was not how Lenin operated. He was not a democrat: he did not deal in compromise. He was a revolutionary who believed that the only way to govern was not by compromise but by totally crushing the opposition. Hence his response to the Constituent Assembly, when it gathered in January 1918, was simple and ruthless. After only one day’s session, it was dissolved at gunpoint by the Red Guards. A few members tried to protest, but, with rifles trained on their heads, their resistance soon evaporated. It was a bitter end to the dreams of the liberals and reformers. There would not be another democratic body in Russia until after the collapse of Soviet communis over 70 years later. Lenin’s justification for the Bolshevik action was the self government and a representative body had already been achieved by the October Revolution, and that the elections were corrupted and rigged by the SRs and the Kadets, consequently the result did not truly reflect the wishes of the Russian people.
5. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 1918
Lenin and Trotsky were united in their suppression of the Constituent Assembly. However, there was a marked difference of attitude between them over the issue of the war with Germany. Both wanted it to end but they disagreed on how this could be achieved. Lenin wanted an immediate peace; Trotsky wanted a delay. The outcomes of signing the treaty where:
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The Russian Civil War was fought between the "Reds" (communists and revolutionaries) and the "Whites" (a variety of groups that opposed the Bolshevik Revolution). There were about 800,000 combat deaths, plus over 8 million civilian deaths. The civilian deaths are attributed mostly to famine (5 million) and epidemics (over 2 million).
The Civil War directly and indirectly led to 9 million deaths
6. The Russian Civil War
The Bolsheviks’ crushing of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, followed by their outlawing of all other parties, showed that they were not prepared to share power. This bid for absolute authority made civil war highly likely, given that the Bolsheviks had only a limited grip on Russia in the early years after the October Revolution. They were bound to face military opposition from their wide range of opponents who were not prepared to accept being subjected to the absolute rule of a minority party. Modern research strongly suggests that Lenin truly wanted a destructive civil war. Although it involved obvious dangers to the Bolshevik, Lenin was convinced that his forces could win and that in winning that would wipe out all their opponents, military and political. Better to have a short, brutal struggle than face many years of being harassed and challenged by the anti-Bolsheviks who were a large majority in Russia, as the Constituent Assembly election results had shown all too clearly.
Lenin knew that had the Bolsheviks chosen to co-operate in a coalition of all the revolutionary parties in 1918, it would have had two consequences: