Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (22 page)

May the Lord bless the coming year!
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PART III

Civil War

The path of history is beyond the understanding of those who have been consigned to the routine of capitalism, of those who have been deafened by the mighty crash of the old world, by the cracking, the noise, the “chaos” (or apparent chaos) of the collapse of the age-old structures of tsarism and the bourgeoisie, of those who have been cowed by class warfare taken to its most extreme, by its transformation into civil war, a true holy war—and not in some priestly sense of the word, but in its most humane understanding: a holy war of the oppressed against their oppressors, a holy war for the liberation of the workers from all oppression.

—Lenin, December 1917

Yes, long live civil war! Civil war for the sake of the children, the elderly, the workers and the Red Army, civil war in the name of direct and ruthless struggle against counterrevolution.

—Leon Trotsky, May 1918

We are heading for a total civil war, and it seems that the war will be a savage one . . . Oh, how hard it is to live in Russia! We are all so stupid—so fantastically stupid.

—Maxim Gorky, July 1918

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EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS

The Bolshevik coup plunged Russia into a civil war that would consume the country for the next three years and result in possibly as many as ten million deaths, nearly all of them civilians. As the historian Evan Mawdsley commented, “The Civil War unleashed by Lenin’s revolution was the greatest national catastrophe Europe had yet seen.” Russia descended into savage anarchy beyond imagination. “War and strife, famine and pestilence—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Mawdsley wrote, “devastated the largest country in Europe.”
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Almost immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, forces intent on undoing Lenin’s coup began to gather on the fringes of the former Russian Empire. Known generally as the White movement, it was a motley group of former tsarist officers and soldiers, Cossacks, nobles, bourgeois, and intellectuals whose political beliefs ran the spectrum from reactionary monarchists to radical socialists. In the lands of the Don Cossacks, in the forests of Siberia, and in the Baltic territories, armies formed to march on the great Russian heartland, the base of the Bolsheviks’ newborn state. They were led by men like Generals Anton Denikin in the south and Nikolai Yudenich in the west and Admiral Alexander Kolchak in the east. In the autumn of 1919, the White forces came close to toppling the new Bolshevik government. The White Volunteer Army marched deep into Russia, took
Orel, and appeared to be unstoppable on its drive to Moscow. The Northwestern Army came within twenty miles of Petrograd, the soldiers at its forward positions able to make out the golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in the city center. By the end of October, however, the White forces had been stopped, and the Red Army had gone on the offensive. Never again would the anti-Bolshevik forces come close to winning the war.
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The war of the Whites and the Reds was complicated by a number of factors. The revolution brought with it the breakup of the old empire as the non-Russian lands on the empire’s borders declared independence. The Transcaucasus, Finland, part of Ukraine, and the lands of the Don, Kuban, and Orenburg Cossacks freed themselves from Russian suzerainty and resisted Bolshevik control.
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Germany was still at war with Russia, and after the Bolsheviks initially rejected an insulting German peace offer, the kaiser’s armies renewed their offensive. With the mass of the Russian Army having abandoned the front for home, there was nothing to stop the German advance. To save the new government, Lenin agreed to peace with the Germans in March 1918. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave the Bolsheviks a chance at survival, but it came at a tremendous price: Russia ceded more than a quarter of its population and its arable land and a third of its average crops and its manufacturing industries and burdened itself with a punishing war indemnity.
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And there were other armed forces to contend with: the so-called Greens, bands of peasant partisans; Nestor Makhno and his anarchist Black Army of Ukraine; foreign intervention by the armies of Poland, Britain, France, Japan, and the United States; and a legion of riotous Czech soldiers. Never simply a war of Reds against Whites, the Russian civil war was a complex, titanic struggle that swept up in its vortex a variety of social and political movements, large professional armies and small bands of partisans, local grievances and world politics, shifting battle lines and unsteady alliances that shook Russia to its foundations and very nearly destroyed it.

In January 1918, the Third Congress of Soviets adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Laboring and Exploited People, according to which the main task of the new government was “the destruction of any human exploitation by another” and the “merciless repression of the
exploiters.”
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As an early step in this task, in late 1917 the Bolsheviks issued a decree requiring the obligatory registration of all “former landowners, capitalists, and persons who held positions of authority in the tsarist and bourgeois order.” The decree establishing the Cheka had called for the registration of all wealthy residents, and in December 1917 Lenin had also proposed obligatory registration for “all persons belonging to the rich classes” and “employees of banks, stock corporations, state and public institutions.” (The proposal was not realized until the autumn of 1919.) The approximate number of people who fitted in these categories was somewhere between four and five million, a large percentage of whom were members of the nobility. This social categorization became the basis for the notion of “former people,” also designated as “socially alien elements,” “remnants of the old bourgeois world,” or simply “class enemies.”
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With only a bit of exaggeration, Nicolas Nabokov wrote that the Bolsheviks had another name for former people: “the yet unslaughtered.”
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In
The State and Revolution
, from the late summer of 1917, Lenin wrote that the primary function of the proletarian state was the destruction of the bourgeoisie. “The state is a special organization of power, it is an organization of violence for the repression of one class or another. [. . .] The proletariat needs the state as a special form of organized violence
against
the bourgeoisie.”
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Lenin did not mean this in some theoretical way, but in concrete terms. He wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 had failed since it had not used adequate violence to crush the bourgeoisie. Even the Terror of the French Revolution eighty years earlier, Lenin argued, had been too limited in its use of violence. “The guillotine
only
frightened, it broke only
active
resistance. This is not enough for us.” Lenin insisted future revolutionaries would have to go further to achieve their goals. As early as January 1918, two months after seizing power, Lenin complained that they were being too easy on their class enemies. “If we are guilty of anything,” he wrote, “then it is of being too humane, too kind in regards to the monstrous, traitorous representatives of the bourgeois-imperialist order.”
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The bourgeoisie had to be controlled, put to work, monitored. After all their property had been expropriated, the bourgeoisie would be subjugated by being forced to live by ration cards; those who refused to work would starve.
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The control was to be total (although it never was since this was beyond the Bolsheviks’, indeed
any government’s, capabilities); the punishment for infractions, brutal. “These enemies must be placed under special monitoring by the entire populace, they must be dealt with in the most merciless fashion for the slightest infringement of the rules and laws of socialist society.”
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Class determined everything, except when it did not. Lenin ignored his own noble background, which should have placed him in the camp of the revolution’s enemies, and he was ready to use violence against the working class itself when it resisted Communist authority.
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On October 5, 1918, the Soviet of People’s Commissars passed a resolution making labor mandatory for the bourgeoisie. Every month these former people were required to record in special labor books proof of having performed specific labor on behalf of the community; persons who either failed to have a valid booklet or did not record the required amount of forced labor were denied ration cards and the right to move freely about the country. The following year these booklets became mandatory for all residents of Moscow and Petrograd over the age of sixteen.
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In Petrograd in 1918, residents in the fashionable parts of the city were forced out of their homes to dig graves for the victims of typhus. For his day’s labor, each person received one cup of tea.
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Princess Volkonsky recalled being made to shovel snow behind a railway station with others of her class. The work had no purpose other than as a form of public humiliation, and their guards took pleasure in laughing and mocking them as they labored. Another such work project was the compulsory cleaning of toilets in communal and government buildings.
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The laws of the new Communist state enshrined the idea of discrimination based on social class. The first Soviet Constitution adopted in July 1918 denied the right to vote or to hold elected office to anyone who had served the Romanov family or in the tsarist police, to anyone who hired workers to make a profit or lived off rents and investments, as well as to all traders, monks, and clergy. In May 1918, the Bolsheviks instituted the so-called class ration, linking the size of one’s food ration to one’s social class.
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Workers received the largest ration; the burzhui, the lowest, which, in the words of Grigory Zinoviev, was “just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it.”
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Preference for entrance to schools was given to children of the proletariat and the poorest peasants. Living space and rent were also based on class. The Petrograd Soviet, for example, passed a decree on March 1, 1918, limiting all
“bourgeois” adults to one room; the remaining space and its contents were to be handed over to “proletarians” for free. Failure to follow the decree would result in expulsion from one’s home and the confiscation of all property.
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Even the members of bourgeois families were subject to expropriation. In the spring of 1918 in Yekaterinodar, the Bolsheviks published a decree, On the Socialization of Girls and Women. According to the order, which was posted around the city, all unmarried women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five were to be “socialized.” Men wishing to participate were instructed to go to the appropriate revolutionary authority to see about acquiring up to ten females for their use. Red soldiers, acting on the decree, seized approximately sixty young women, chiefly from the local elite; some of them were grabbed from the main city park during a special raid. A few of the girls were taken to a nearby house and raped; two dozen were conducted to the local Bolshevik boss at his headquarters, and the rest were delivered to another party leader and a group of soldiers at the Hotel Bristol, where they were raped. Some of the victims were later freed, some were taken away and never seen again, and some were killed and their bodies dumped into the Kuban River. One of the girls, a fifth grader from the Yekaterinodar gymnasium, was repeatedly raped by a group of soldiers for twelve hours. When they had finished with her, they tied the girl to a tree, set her on fire, and then, mercifully, shot her.
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A similar socialization of women was carried out in Yekaterinburg in the spring of 1918.
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