A People's Tragedy (139 page)

* The original Red strategy, set in July, had been to attack from the Volga to the Don; but this was changed on 15 October, the day after Orel fell, when the Politburo resolved to concentrate all the Red forces around Tula. Kamenev, the Commander-in-Chief, was not even consulted on the change.

pushed back beyond Orel. At this point the second key element of the counter-offensive was deployed. On 19 October the Red Cavalry suddenly attacked the Cossacks on the left flank of the Whites, eventually chasing them back towards Voronezh. The Cossacks must have been astonished by the Red horsemen, since they had hardly ever been deployed before. Trotsky had always underestimated the strategic advantages of the cavalry in a war of movement like the civil war. It was only the Mamontov Raid that had taught him the slogan 'Proletarians to Horse!'32

To build up their cavalry the Reds had turned in 1918 to Semen Budenny. This tall and imposing cavalry officer, complete with a handlebar moustache, was the son of a non-Cossack peasant from the Don region. He had been drafted into the tsarist army in 1903, and after the war against Japan, when his horsemanship had first been spotted, had been enrolled in the Imperial Cavalry Riding School in St Petersburg. By 1914, Budenny had risen to become a sergeant-major in the elite Imperial Dragoons. He was one of the many NCOs to join the Bolsheviks in 1917; and like many of them soon fell in with Stalin and the Military Opposition. In 1918 Voroshilov placed him at the head of a small cavalry force fighting against Krasnov's Cossacks near Tsaritsyn. This First Red Cavalry Corps was largely made up of poor Cossacks and non-Cossack peasants from the northern Don. It was reinforced from these same elements in preparation for the counter-offensive against Denikin. This was the nucleus of Budenny's celebrated Cavalry Army, the one immortalized through Babel's stories, which recounted its adventures in the war against Poland during 1920. Many of Stalin's most honoured commanders, if not the most talented, won their spurs in the 'Konarmiia'. Apart from Marshal Budenny, who was buried in Red Square in 1970, there were Marshal Timoshenko (who led the Red Army into the Second World War) and Marshal Zhukov (who led it to victory in 1945).

Pursued by the Red Cavalry, the White Cossacks fled south to the Don, abandoning Voronezh to the Bolsheviks on 24 October. From this strategic city, Budenny's horsemen advanced towards Kastornoe, a crucial railway junction between Moscow and the Don. They finally captured it on 15 November after several days of bloody fighting against Shkuro's Cossacks. This effectively sealed the fate of Denikin's offensive. The Whites were now threatened with the prospect of complete encirclement by the Reds, and they were forced to beat a hasty retreat south. Never again did they threaten to break through into central Russia.

* * * October was a double opportunity missed by the Whites. At the height of the fighting at Orel a second major White force, the North-Western Army, advanced to the outskirts of Petrograd.

Given its shortcomings, it is amazing that the North-Western Army ever got so far. It had been formed in Pskov with the help of the German army during 1918. After the defeat of Germany, as the Red Army had advanced westwards, it had retreated into Estonia, then a newly independent state in the grips of its own civil war.

There it had been able to build up its forces behind the natural barrier of Lake Peipus.

By May 1919, when it re-entered Russia and launched its attack on Petrograd, the army had some 16,000 men, most of them Russian prisoners of war handed over by the Germans and deserters from the Reds.

The army was led by General Yudenich, a small-time hero of the First World War whom Kolchak had recognized as his commander in the Baltic. Aged fifty-seven and weighing eighteen stone, Nikolai Yudenich was both too old and fat to inspire anyone as a leader. With his flabby cheeks, his bald head and his twirling moustache, he looked every bit the unreconstructed Russian aristocrat that he was. Yudenich had never really reconciled himself to the downfall of the Tsarist Empire — and this was to be the cause of his own downfall.

Like all the White generals, Yudenich's instinct was to bury politics in the interests of his military campaign. Against the Bolsheviks without Politics' was his slogan. The North-Western Government was a piece of democratic window-dressing to appease the Allies. It had no real intention of governing Russia. Yudenich dismissed the need for a reform programme, and did not count on a popular uprising to pave his army's way to Petrograd: this was to be a military conquest not a winning of the people's hearts and minds. In fact quite the contrary occurred. As soon as his army entered Soviet soil, it met the opposition of the population and its mainly Russian conscripts began to desert.

This lack of support within Russia meant that Yudenich was obliged to call on foreign troops. The Allies were luke-warm towards his mission — they were looking to withdraw from the civil war — and only sent him minimal supplies. True, British warships blockaded Petrograd and even attacked Kronstadt; but no Allied land troops were sent to Yudenich. Even if they had been willing to support the Whites in an offensive against Petrograd, Yudenich's connections with the Germans would have been enough to prevent the Allies from supporting him.

Without the support of the Allies the success of Yudenich's offensive against Petrograd would rest on the willingness of Finland to act as a springboard and supply base for his army. The Finnish border was only twenty miles from Petrograd — nearly ten times shorter than the march through Russia via Pskov. Yet even here — with the prize of Petrograd so close to their grasp — the White generals allowed their obstinate commitment to the Russian Empire to get in the way of an accord with the Finns.

The Finnish Defence Corps under General Mannerheim had grown into a major national army since its defeat of the Reds at Helsingfors during

the spring of 1918. It was the Finns rather than the Whites whom the Bolsheviks feared most in Petrograd. By June 1919, it was reckoned that there were up to 100,000 Finnish troops around Lake Lagoda. One quarter of them were facing Petrograd. The price of Finland's support for Yudenich was simple: a guarantee of its independence. This should have been a formality: Finland was already, to all intents and purposes, an independent state and was recognized as such by most of the Western powers. Yet the Whites thought that even this small price was still too much to pay. Their simple-minded nostalgia for the Russian Empire, which they were committed to restore, prevented them from making deals with nationalists. 'History will never forgive me if I surrender what Peter the Great won,' Kolchak had declared with typical bombast when urged, as the supreme leader of the Whites, to yield to the Finnish demand. Prince Lvov and the Political Conference in Paris were adamantly opposed to the idea of granting Finland recognition until its status had been finally resolved by the Constituent Assembly in Russia. This was also typical of the Whites' fixation with the legal framework of the past — a fixation which prevented them from engaging with the political realities of the present. Mannerheim was well disposed to the anti-Bolshevik cause. But not even he could persuade the war-weary Finns to support the Whites without a guarantee of recognition. The Reds, on the other hand, had granted Finland recognition eighteen months before. They were now offering a peace accord with the Finns if they remained neutral in the civil war, while threatening them with 'merciless extermination if they joined the Whites. The Allies urged Yudenich to recognize Finland, realizing that without its support his offensive was doomed to fail. But the White general refused to budge. This gave Mannerheim, facing an election in July, no choice but to wash his hands of the Whites. He refused to give Yudenich troops or to let his army operate from Finnish soil. It was a crucial setback for the Whites, forcing them to advance on Petrograd by the longer and more hostile route through Yamburg and Gatchina.

Yudenich made a last desperate effort to enlist the support of the Estonians. But they were a small nation, and a young and fragile one, and they were unwilling to give the Whites many troops, especially when the latter would not even recognize Estonian independence in return. The Reds were quick to exploit the situation — just as they had been in the Finnish case — offering Estonia a peace accord if it remained neutral in the civil war. The natural inclination of the Estonians to avoid involvement in the civil war thus coincided with their best interests as an independent state forced to live next door to the Soviets.

Left to his own devices, Yudenich ordered a dash for Petrograd on 10 October. He was banking on the Reds being caught short by the fighting on the Southern Front. To begin with, the gamble paid off. The Bolsheviks had

indeed transferred units to the south. The 25,000 troops of the Seventh Red Army, left to defend Petrograd, were utterly demoralized and beginning to desert. Aided by Colonel Liundkvist, the Chief of Staff of the Seventh Army who defected to the Whites and supplied them with details of the Red positions, Yudenich's 18,000 troops advanced rapidly. By the 20th they had reached the Pulkovo Heights, overlooking the Petrograd suburbs. 'There was the dome of St Isaac's and the gilt spire of the Admiralty,' one his officers recalled, 'one could even see trains pulling out of the Nikolai Station.' So confident were they of victory on that day that one of their generals even refused the offer of field-glasses to survey the city because, as he put it, they would in any case be walking down the Nevsky Prospekt the next day.33

News of the White advance created panic among the Reds. Lenin wanted to abandon Petrograd and concentrate on the Southern Front. But Trotsky was adamant that the birth-place of the revolution should be defended at all costs, even if that meant fighting in the streets, and he persuaded Lenin to change his mind. On 16 October Trotsky was despatched to the old capital to take charge of its defence. Zinoviev, the Petrograd party boss, had completely lost his nerve and could do nothing but lie down on a sofa in the Smolny. This was one of the few occasions in the civil war — much fewer than claimed by his acolytes — when Trotsky's presence at the Front helped to decide the outcome of the battle. At one point he even mounted a horse, rounded up the retreating troops and led them back into battle.

Trotsky's first task was to boost morale — and this he did with his brilliant talent for mass oratory. He urged the soldiers not to give up and made fun of the enemy's British tanks, from which the Reds had run away, describing them as nothing more than boxes

'made of painted wood'. He even ordered the Putilov plant to knock up a few vehicles resembling tanks to give the troops reassurance that they too had these machines on their side. Trotsky's next task was to transform Petrograd into a fortress and prepare its population for a battle in the streets. Martial law was declared in the city and a night-time curfew was imposed. Thousands of workers and bourgeois residents were mobilized to erect barricades on the streets and squares. Lenin urged Trotsky to raise 30,000 people, to 'set up machine-guns behind them and to shoot several hundred of them in order to assure a real mass assault on Yudenich'. The city's sewage system was pulled up and used to build the barricades. Trenches were dug in the southern suburbs and machine-guns were posted on top of all the buildings along the main roads into the centre. Military trucks and motorcycles hurtled around Petrograd by day and night; Bolsheviks in leather jackets stood around at road blocks with guns around their shoulders; and all the major buildings were guarded by teams of worker volunteers.34

Although Petrograd, like every other city, had been troubled by frequent strikes, the threat of a White breakthrough seemed to galvanize many workers into defending the Soviet regime. As one of the Whites' spies in Petrograd put it: The worker elements, at least a large section of them, are still Bolshevik inclined. Like some other democratic elements, they see the regime, although bad, as their own.

Propaganda about the cruelty of the Whites has a strong effect on them . . .

Psychologically, they identify the present with equality and Soviet power and the Whites with the old regime and its scorn for the masses.

Hundreds of workers armed themselves with rifles and turned out to defend the Smolny.

Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the Soviet headquarters, a dozen motorcars were kept ready to whisk away the party leaders should Petrograd fall. Viktor Serge and his pregnant wife abandoned their room in the Astoria Hotel and spent the night in an ambulance parked in the suburbs. With a little case and two false passports, they were ready to flee at a moment's notice.35

In their rush to get to Petrograd, the Whites had failed to cut the railway link to Moscow. This crucial blunder allowed the Reds to bring up reinforcements in time for a counter-offensive on 21 October. It was a sign of their desperation that even at the height of the battle against Denikin the Reds were prepared to transfer vital reserves

from Tula to Petrograd. Lenin made the crucial decision, directly telephoning Os'kin himself. 'I was literally caught for breath when a voice on the telephone said "Lenin here",' Os'kin later wrote. He promised Lenin a whole brigade of highly disciplined Communist reserves who were to play a vital role in the counter-offensive. Kamenev, the Red Commander-in-Chief, called them 'our Queen of Spades' — the last trump card needed to win the game. Against Yudenich's 15,000 troops, the Reds now had almost 100,000 — enough even by their own wasteful standards to turn the tables against the Whites. After three days of brave and bloody fighting for the Pulkovo Heights — the Reds courageously held off Yudenich's tanks with nothing but their rifles — the Whites were pushed back towards Estonia. Without reserves, their retreat was just as quick as their advance had been. In mid-November the Estonians allowed Yudenich's forces to enter their country, although only after disarming them. Trotsky wanted to pursue the Whites into Estonia ('the kennel for the guard dogs of the counter-revolution'). But this proved unnecessary. Yudenich resigned and his army was disbanded. On New Year's Eve Estonia signed an armistice with Soviet Russia, followed by a peace treaty —