A People's Tragedy (125 page)

Desertion was the simplest solution to the soldier's woes. Over a million men deserted from the Red Army in 1918, and nearly four million by 1921. Trotsky said the Red defeats of 1919 — in the east in the spring and in the south in the summer — were a

'crisis of reinforcements', and that is precisely what they were. The Red Army was losing deserters faster than it could replace them with men trained and equipped for battle; and as the quality of the reinforcements fell, so the rate of desertion increased.

The commissars stopped at nothing in their desperate effort to stem the flood of peasant desertions. They sent detachments into the villages behind the Front and punished peasant households suspected of harbouring deserters. Punitive fines were imposed, livestock and property were confiscated, hostages were taken, village leaders were shot, whole villages were burned in an effort to persuade the deserters to return. Os'kin, not to be outdone in this zealotry, even formed a special brigade of Chinese Communists to help him combat the Tula deserters. He assumed that the Chinese would be 'more merciless' than the 'soft-hearted Russians' in taking reprisals against the villagers. Such measures were rarely effective, often merely strengthening the opposition of not only the deserters, but also the entire local peasantry, already embittered by the requisitioning and conscriptions of the Reds. Some deserters formed themselves into guerrilla bands.

These were called the Greens partly because

they hid out in the woods and were supplied by the local peasants; sometimes these peasant armies called themselves Greens to distinguish themselves from both Reds and Whites. They even had their own Green propaganda and ideology based on the defence of the local peasant revolution. During the spring of 1919 virtually the whole of the Red Army rear, both on the Eastern and the Southern Fronts, was engulfed by these Green armies. In Tambov, Voronezh, Saratov, Penza, Tula, Orel, Nizhnyi Novgorod, Kaluga, Tver and Riazan' provinces peasant bands, sometimes several thousand strong, destroyed the railways, the telegraphs and bridges, ransacked the Soviet military depots and ambushed passing Red Army units. The destruction and chaos which the Greens brought about was to be a crucial factor in weakening the Red Front at a vital moment in the civil war and would lead to the breakthrough of the Whites.18

* * * It may seem odd that a peasant boy like Os'kin should have been so ruthless in putting down the peasants of his native province. But in fact it was not unusual. The Red Army was full of peasant NCOs and commissars like him. It was their School of Communism — transforming them from peasants into comrades — and it was a vital part of their education to learn how to use violence against 'their own'. There was nothing new in this. Military service has always been a form of upward mobility and psychological transformation for the peasantry. The army broadens the peasant's horizons, acquaints him with new technologies and methods of organization, and often teaches him how to read and write. The Russian experience of the First World War was a revolutionizing one in this respect. Most of the peasants called up by the army had, like Os'kin, been educated during the boom in rural schooling between 1900 and 1914.

Three out of four peasant recruits into the army in 1914 were registered as literate. They formed a huge pool from which a new class of officers and military technicians would come, replacing the old elite as it was destroyed by the war with the Central Powers. Six out of ten of the military students educated in the officer schools between 1914 and 1917 came from peasant families.19 These were the radical ensigns, the Os'kins of 1917, who led the revolution in the army and were elected to the soldiers' committees. By educating them, the old regime had sown the seeds of its own destruction.

It also created the foot soldiers of the new regime. Having risen so far through the ranks, it was hard for these peasant sons to return from the war to the dull routines of village life. Their new skills and prestige, not to speak of their own self-esteem, gave them the ambition to aim for something better. For Os'kin, as for so many peasants of that war generation, this could only mean serving the new regime. Joining the party offered them a welcome escape from the narrow village world of their peasant fathers and grandfathers, the old Russia of icons and cockroaches. It gave them entry into the new and urban-centred

world of the ruling elite. Most of the Soviet bureaucracy, the provincial commissars and comrades of the 1920s, was drawn from these sons of the peasantry; and for most of them, as for Os'kin, the Red Army was the route to glory.

The Bolsheviks were quick to realize the potential of the Red Army as a school for their future bureaucrats. Compulsory lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic were introduced for all ranks from as early as April 1918. More people learned to read in the barracks and bivouacs of the Red Army than the rest of the country put together during the first years of the Soviet regime. By the end of 1920, there were 3,000 Red Army schools, with over two million books. The first emblem of the Red Army showed a hammer and a sickle with a rifle and a book.20

Much of the teaching was inevitably the crudest sort of political indoctrination. It was a marriage between the old socialist and intelligentsia ideals of mass enlightenment and the doctrinal demands of the Bolshevik regime. Primers and textbooks were filled with scenes from everyday life, familiar to the peasants, from which moral and political lessons would then be drawn. These were ABCs of Communism. Dora Elkina recalls how she came to write the first Soviet primer. In 1919 she was sent to the Southern Front to teach the soldiers how to read and write. Having got hold of some old school textbooks, she wrote out the first sentence on the blackboard: 'Masha ate the kasha'. But the soldiers only laughed and heckled. Close to tears, she hit upon the idea of turning the lesson into a political discussion and explained to the soldiers why they could not go home to their Mashas, and why the country was short of kasha. Then she turned to the blackboard and wrote: 'We are not slaves, slaves we are not!' It was a great success among the soldiers, for whom the idea of not being slaves had always been a vital aspect of the revolution. This simple expression of human dignity later became famous as the opening line of her reading book. It was used in primary schools throughout the 1920s and 1930s. For millions of Russians, many of them still alive, it was the first sentence they ever learned to read.21

The poet Mayakovsky also wrote and illustrated one of several primers put out by the Commissariat of Enlightenment in the civil war. Clearly rooted in the Lubok tradition

— simple picture tales which had sold in their millions in the nineteenth century — it was a brilliant piece of popular satire, with offbeat couplets in the style of a peasant
chastushka,
or rhyming song, and a rude iconoclastic humour that would appeal to the soldiers in the trenches:

B

The Bolsheviks hunt the
burzboois

The burzhoois run a mile

K

It's hard for cows
(korovy)
to run fast Kerensky was Prime Minister M

The Mensheviks are people

Who run off to their mothers

Ts

Flowers
(tsvety)
smell sweet in the evening

Tsar Nicholas loved them very much22

The Red Army was the principal arena of Bolshevik propaganda in the civil war. It aimed to school its soldiers in the principles of Bolshevism — to transform them from peasants into proletarians. 'The main aim of our propaganda in the Red Army', declared one of its pioneers, 'is to fight against the petty-bourgeois, proprietorial psychology of the peasant, and to turn him into a conscious revolutionary fighter.'23 There were army reading clubs and discussion groups, where the latest newspapers were reviewed; evening concerts and lecture meetings, where various Bolshevik dignitaries appeared; propaganda trains furnished with libraries, printing presses and even cinemas, which toured the Fronts; and Red Army drama groups which entertained the troops with cabarets and plays to drive home the meaning of Soviet power and highlight the evil of its foes.

Half a million Red Army soldiers joined the Bolshevik Party during the civil war. These were the missionaries of the revolution. They carried Bolshevism, its ideas and its methods, back to their towns and villages, where they flooded into the Soviet institutions during the early 1920s. The whole of the Soviet apparatus was thus militarized. Certain Fronts and armies would colonize certain commissariats. Party factions were formed on the basis of the links between veterans of the civil war. The Red Army as a whole, with its centralized command, was seen as a model for the Soviet apparatus. Trotsky often compared the two, likening the need for discipline in industry and society at large to the need for discipline in the ranks. The success of the Red Army increasingly led to the application of military methods throughout the Soviet system.

Nothing did more to shape the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks than the experience of the civil war. The image and the self-identity of the Soviet regime was based on the mythology of a new order born out of armed struggle against the old; and, rather as in Franco's Spain, this foundation cult of the civil war became a vital mythological propaganda weapon of the Stalinist regime, with its constant demands on the Soviet people to display the same heroic spirit,

the same discipline and self-sacrifice, as they had shown in the civil war. Even the language of the Bolshevik regime, with its constant talk of 'campaigns', 'battles' and

'Fronts', of its 'vanguards' and 'fighters' for Socialism, bore the traces of this militarism.

The Bolshevism that emerged from the civil war viewed itself as a crusading brotherhood of comrades in arms, conquering Russia and the world with a red pencil in one hand and a gun in the other.

ii 'Kulaks', Bagmen and Cigarette Lighters

In January 1920 Emma Goldman returned to the Petrograd she had known as a teenager in the 1880s. For over thirty years, while the Anarchist had lived in the United States, the 'gaiety of the city, its vivacity and brilliancy' had remained fresh in her memory. But the Petrograd she found in 1920 was a very different place: It was almost in ruins, as if a hurricane had swept over it. The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries. The streets were dirty and deserted; all life had gone from them. The population of Petrograd before the war was almost two million; in 1920 it had dwindled to five hundred thousand. The people walked about like living corpses; the shortage of food and fuel was slowly sapping the city; grim death was clutching at its heart. Emaciated and frost-bitten men, women, and children were being whipped by the common lash, the search for a piece of bread or a stick of wood. It was a heart-rending sight by day, an oppressive weight by night. The utter stillness of the large city was paralysing. It fairly haunted me, this awful oppressive silence broken only by occasional shots.24

The great cities of the north were the major casualties of the revolution and civil war.

They suffered most from its physical destruction, becoming little more than ghost towns. Petrograd was one of the principal victims: the evacuation of the capital to Moscow seemed to deprive it of all life. Gorky, a
Peterburzhets
to the end, saw its decay as a sign of Russia's fall from civilization, its descent from Europe into Asia.

'Petrograd is dying as a city,' he wrote to Ekaterina in 1918. 'Everyone is leaving it —

by foot, by horse, by train. Dead horses lie in the streets. The dogs eat them. The city is unbelievably dirty. The Moika and Fontanka are full of rubbish. This is the death of Russia.'25 Zamyatin, in his story
The Cave
(1922), depicted civil-war Petrograd as an ice-age settlement, peopled by troglodytes who worshipped their 'cave-god', the primus stove, and burned their books to keep themselves alive. The hero of the story, Martin Martinych, a lover of Scriabin's Opus 74, is reduced to stealing logs from his neighbour.

To the city survivors of these years, it must indeed have seemed as if the urban life of Russia was returning to the prehistoric age. The once bustling city centres were now pervaded by an eerie silence. Shops and restaurants were boarded up; factories were closed. There was so little traffic that weeds began to grow in the deserted streets.

'Petrograd is becoming a cemetery,' Vasilii Vodovozov, an aged professor and liberal activist, noted in his diary during the spring of 1919. 'But the air is as clean as in a village cemetery.' Horses vanished from the city streets, as their owners could no longer feed them, only to reappear as stinking meat in soups and goulashes. 'Civil war sausage'

was a euphemism for horsemeat — or even worse (for it was not just horses that disappeared: hunger also wiped out the urban populations of dogs, cats and birds, along with the animals in the zoos). One of the sights of the cities in these years was the emaciated figures of children pulling carts and taxis as human draught animals. Even the Kremlin could not feed its horses — twenty of them died from hunger — so its officials had to travel around in private taxis.26

Rats and cockroaches were the only species to thrive. The decay of the housing stock and the sanitation system produced a breeding ground for vermin. Wooden fences disappeared as people ripped them up for firewood. A three-storey house that had been abandoned would be stripped down to its brick foundations within a couple of nights.

Three thousand wooden houses were stripped apart in Petrograd alone during 1919—

20. People walked away with window-frames, floorboards, doors and wall panels.

Whole urban tree populations disappeared as people chopped them down for firewood.

In the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev the central boulevards lost all their trees during the two days of January 1920 between the departure of the Whites and the arrival of the Reds. In the freezing winters of the civil war the most valuable gift one could give a friend was a piece of firewood. People were literally prepared to kill for it. They burned their own furniture, their books and letters, just in order to keep the cold away.27