Russia, 1918

Germans and Russians to July

In January 1918, the long awaited Constituent Assembly convened. Those supporting Lenin and the Bolsheviks were a minority in the Assembly, and, after the Assembly's first day, Soviet militiamen with bayonets dispersed the gathering. Lenin defended the move by saying that "the people" would soon realize that the Constituent Assembly opposed their interests and that by abolishing the Assembly the Bolsheviks were fulfilling their goal of "All power to the Soviets."

The Bolsheviks were still extending their rule to areas distant from the capital. In February, the Bolsheviks won a majority of the votes in the provincial capital of Archangel, where Allied ships were docked, while elsewhere in the province they won only 22 percent of the vote against 63 percent for the moderate SRs. Bolshevik control spread to small cities and towns east of the Urals Mountains, across Siberia - an area without large farming estates and class tensions. And the Bolsheviks won in the city of Vladivostok, on the Pacific Coast, where railway or dock workers resided.

Through January and February, armed detachments of workers and poor peasants continued to confiscate food that farmers had stored, with armed clashes occurring between resisting farmers and the requisition teams. The Bolsheviks distributed food only to those who supported the Soviets, while, in some areas, hungry gangs were making forays into neighboring villages and waylaying people who were carrying bread.

Meanwhile, the hostility of the Eastern Orthodox Church toward the Bolshevik regime festered. The patriarch of the Russia Orthodox Church anathematized the Bolsheviks, and four days later the Soviet regime decreed the separation of church and state.

And a problem with nationalities festered. Finland had been recognized as independent, but the Bolsheviks disliked the government there. Russian Red Guards drove the recognized Finnish government from Finland's capital, Helsinki, and they helped Finnish revolutionary socialists take power. In Estonia, where Bolsheviks had won only 35 percent of the vote, Russia's Bolsheviks were supporting their fellow Bolsheviks trying to establish rule by force. And in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, a force of Bolsheviks from Petrograd (St. Petersburg) arrived by train and drove an anti-Bolshevik regime from power.

In the Cossack region, along the Don River, anti-Bolshevik forces declared a united government of the Don and appealed for aid from the Allies. Britain and France sent a little money but little else, neither having much money nor access to the Don region, and they were still busy warring against Germany. With the Cossacks was Kornilov, now a symbol of resistance to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks sent an army against the Cossacks, and they entered Rostov on February 25.

Much of what had been the tsarist empire was now in the hands of the Bolsheviks - except for Poland, western Latvia, and Lithuania, three areas that were occupied by the Germans. Lenin and Trotsky were exultant over the spread of Bolshevik power. But they were still waiting for the rising to take place in Germany in response to Russia's example and withdrawal from the war.

Germany and the Soviet regime were still negotiating at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans demanding Poland, Lithuania, part of Belarus, Estonia, and Finland, and for their ally, the Ottoman Empire, the Germans were demanding Batum, Ardahan, and Kars - all parts of what had been the tsar's empire. The Russian delegation, led by Trotsky, walked out of the conference, declaring "no peace, no war." The Bolsheviks disgusted King Wilhelm of Germany, who saw them as members of a worldwide Jewish and Freemason conspiracy. With his generals he decided to push eastward against the Bolsheviks, and following Trotsky's walkout Germany's armies began taking one Russia town after another.

Lenin's exultation turned to fright. He saw Germany as intent upon destroying his revolution, and with others he feared that the Germans would overrun Petrograd. Lenin called for labor battalions made up of "all able bodied members of the bourgeois class" to dig trenches in front of the city, and anyone resisting this draft was to be shot. Seeing his revolution threatened, Lenin ordered his security force, the CHEKA, to execute on the spot all who were "enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, [or] German spies." And fleeing from Petrograd, Bolshevik leaders moved their base of operations from Petrograd to the Kremlin in Moscow - making Moscow Russia's new capital.

The advance of the Germans gave encouragement to Petrograd's upper middle class, patriotically hostile to Germany before but now hoping for deliverance from the Bolsheviks. In front of the German advance in the Ukraine, peasants were returning land, furniture and silver to farming estates, and they were calling the owners of estates "My Lord" again. And believing that the Germans would shoot on sight any Red Guards, Red Guards were transforming themselves into docile peasants.

Responding to the advance of the Germans, 170 British marines landed at Murmansk (on the coast in the far north, about 20 miles east of the Finnish border), a small settlement of mostly railway workers. This was in agreement with the Soviet government, the purported purpose being to prevent Germany from taking control of the huge stores of ammunition that the Entente powers had sent to Russia. The London Times, meanwhile, described Lenin and his confederates as "adventures of German-Jewish blood whose sole object is to exploit the ignorant masses in the interest of their employers in Berlin."

The German were not interested in taking Russian territory but they were interested in taking control of the Ukraine and shipping food and raw materials from there back to Germany, to help offset the British blockade. The German and Austrian force in the Ukraine was not large enough to take control of the entire Ukraine, but it did occupy Kiev, and there the Germans supported a new anti-Bolshevik government.

The Germans wished to bring their advance in the East to a halt so they could withdraw troops to the Western Front for their offensive that was to begin in late March. And they were ready to negotiate with the Bolsheviks again. The Bolsheviks were ready for a settlement, Lenin wanting peace at any price. At Brest-Litovsk they agreed to give up control over Poland, Finland, the Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, western Latvia, Estonia, and the Caucasus region - areas that the Germans and Bolsheviks agreed were to be independent but occupied by German and other troops of the Central Powers.

This treaty with Germany had to be ratified by the All Russian Congress of Soviets, and many of the Bolshevik's Left-SR allies were outraged over the surrender of territory. Lenin consulted with an amateur American diplomat in Moscow, Raymond Robins, who was trying to get Britain and U.S. backing to keep Russia in the war, and Lenin considered dropping ratification of the treaty and staying in the war - a return, in part at least, to the policy of Kerensky. He considered withdrawing his government to the Ural Mountains. But Robins showed Lenin no evidence that the Allies would agree, and Lenin doubted that the capitalist powers - Britain and the United States - would support a socialist revolution.

Lenin went ahead with ratification of the treaty made at Brest-Litovsk. He argued with his supporters that Russia's soldiers had voted against the war with their feet and that their revolution needed to buy time. When the agreement between the Soviet regime and Germany was concluded and publicized, Lenin's standing in the world among those seeking peace diminished in favor of President Wilson's approach to peace by continuing the war. The Allied powers expressed outrage at Germany's gains at Brest-Litovsk and asked the world to take note of what it was like to negotiate with the Germans.

Nicholas and Alexandra were outraged with both Wilhelm and the Bolsheviks. At Tobolsk, just east of the Ural Mountains, where the tsar his family were being held at an estate, Nicholas described the agreement at Brest-Litovsk as a disgrace and "suicide for Russia." He saw the agreement as treason and expressed bitterness over support for the Bolsheviks by Russians while his wife, Alexandra, had been thought of as a traitor. Hearing rumors that the Germans were planning to rescue Nicholas and their family, Alexandra announced that she would rather die in Russia.

Alexandra was looking forward to being rescued by "good Russian" friends. And many Russians were scheming and contributing money to support an escape, while contacts with the royal family were being organized by a con artist, Boris Soloviev. Alexandra trusted him, while effective plans failed to develop and Soloviev delivered a little of the donated money to her and kept the rest for himself.

The Anarchists

Anarchists continued to roam the countryside, and in large cities they were expropriating buildings and homes of the well-to-do, rationalizing their moves with the slogan "loot the looters." In Moscow, the anarchist fighting organization, the Black Guard, occupied twenty-five palaces, one of which they made their headquarters, calling it the House of Anarchy. And they had begun publishing their own newspapers.

The philosophy of anarchism had roots in Russia, with some Russians influenced by the anarchism of Prince Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin had superseded the French anarchist, Proudhon. The tsarist government had confiscated Bakunin's estates and had driven Bakunin into exile. And there he had become a critic of Karl Marx. Unlike Marx, Bakunin opposed political action. For Bakunin, Marx's withering away of the state was too slow. Bakunin believed that the state was an organ of oppression, and he believed that eventually the great military states would devour each other and benefit humanity by elevating anarchy. With the breakdown of the state, he believed, an anarchistic communism would arise through spontaneous insurrection.

Bakunin had died in 1876, and replacing him as anarchism's foremost theoretician, was the Russian Peter Kropotkin. When war erupted in 1914, Kropotkin and other anarchists opposed supporting any of the nation-states that had gone to war. Living in exile, and seventy-three years old, Kropotkin proclaimed that rather than the enemy being Germany the enemy was the landowner who exploits the peasant and the manufacturer who exploits his wage slaves. The enemy, he said, was the state, whether it was monarchical or democratic. Kropotkin returned to Russia with other exiles in 1917 - one month after Lenin - but, unlike Lenin, he took no part in politics.

The anarchists had felt compatible with the old Bolshevik notion that with revolution everything would be turned over to the masses, and at first the Bolsheviks pretended collaboration with the anarchists in overthrowing capitalists and the old state. The breakdown of authority in Russia was an anarchist's dream, but they realized that someone might try to fill a vacuum of authority - as were the Bolsheviks. And they hoped that all claims of authority would be ignored or spontaneously crushed by the masses.

By April 1918, the Bolsheviks no longer wished to tolerate rival, irresponsible armies roaming the land. Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted and needed order. Already in early March the Soviet government had made banditry a capital offense. In April, government forces moved to dissolve the anarchist's military organization: the Black Guard - if one can call it an organization. Government soldiers surrounded twenty-six anarchist houses and the anarchist's palace-headquarters. From the roof of their headquarters the anarchists fired machine guns and lesser weapons against the government forces. The government force brought up artillery, and the fighting ended with thirty anarchists and twelve government men - Chekists - dead and the anarchists defeated.

Whatever ideals came with the anarchist philosophy, it was crude impulses that left their mark on the palaces and fine homes that the anarchists had confiscated. A British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, taken on a tour by the Bolsheviks, found these places mired in filth. Ceilings, no matter how wondrous, were riddled with bullet holes. Excrement and wine stains covered floors and fine carpets, and priceless paintings were slashed to ribbons.

The Bolsheviks did not arrest the aged Kropotkin, but they planned to keep him isolated. Kropotkin, meanwhile, had become disillusioned and depressed, and he was to die in February 1921, still considered a friend of the revolution. The procession to his burial place, near Moscow, would be a mile long, with the deported American anarchist Emma Goldman among those who would speak. Others speakers according to Goldman were of "many political tendencies [and] had paid the last tribute to their great teacher and comrade."

The prestige of anarchism outside of Russia hardly suffered a decline, and in the thirties in Spain the anarchist philosophy would be tested again.

Encroachments against Bolshevik Control

Since March 21, 1918, the world's attention was focused on the Western Front, where Germany was advancing against the French and British, and this overshadowed Japan landing 500 Japanese marines at Vladivostok in April. Japan's pretext was that they were protecting Japanese persons living in Vladivostok, following a report that some Russians in Bolshevik uniforms had robbed a Japanese store and killed a clerk. The British followed suit and landed fifty marines at Vladivostok, to guard, they said, the British consulate and save British property. The Japanese and British marines met no resistance, there being no substantial Bolshevik force there.

Lenin believed that the forces from the United States would soon join the Japanese and British in Vladivostok. He spoke of policy in the United States being controlled by "finance capital," and finance capital, he said, wanted "control of Siberia."

Nevertheless, Lenin hoped for good relations with the United States. The amateur diplomat, Robins, was returning there, and Lenin sent a message with him in which he expressed hope for trade with the United States, and he wrote of the Soviet Union as a good opportunity for American investors. He offered the same for Britain. He was hoping that competition from the United States and Britain would put a check on Japanese expansion from Vladivostok.

In Finland, meanwhile, a civil war was raging between the pro-Bolshevik regime and an army of conservatives. Obliged to stay out of Finnish affairs by the Brest-Litovsk agreement, Moscow sent no help to their comrades in Finland, while the Germans were aiding the conservatives, German units having landed in Finland early April. The conservative Finns were better organized and better led that the Finnish Red Army, and, on April 6, the army of conservatives crushed the Red Army. And German units overran the Finnish capital, Helsinki, on April 13.

In April, about 150 miles south of Rostov, near the Black Sea, anti-Bolshevik forces tried to take the town of Ekaterinodar, recently conquered by the Bolsheviks. There, Kornilov was killed by Bolshevik artillery. His friends buried him. Then the jubilant and victorious Bolshevik soldiers dug up his body, dragged it to the town square and burned it on a heap of rubbish. And with Kornilov dead and his forces defeated, Lenin expressed his belief that the civil war was ended.

The civil war seemed ended, but Russia's former empire was still disintegrating. In April, Bessarabia declared its independence. And in April, the Germans pushed from the Ukraine into the Crimea. With the withdrawal of the Germans from the Ukraine, bands of Ukrainian nationalists and various outlaws began a campaign of terror in the Ukraine, seeking plunder and extorting money. These were largely Eastern Orthodox Christians attacking Jews, and they left the Jewish population destitute, while the Eastern Orthodox Church, with some few exceptions, remained silent about the attacks against the Jews.

The Ottoman Empire did not accept the treaty that its ally, Germany, had made with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, the empire planning to takeover all territories that it had lost to Russia in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman leader, Enver Pasha, began the drive eastward that he had long been looking forward to. His forces seized the city of Batum, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea - while other Turk forces, under a German commander, Liman von Sanders, were trying to hold off British advances northward in Palestine.

Matters looked dim for the Bolsheviks in Ottoman lands that had once been a part of the Russian Empire. The Islamic Tatar people looked forward to the coming of the Ottomans. The Kirghiz, a Turkish people, were in the midst of a revolt against the Russians and were outraged by Bolshevik intrusions. The Armenians who had been ruled by the tsar were left to look out for themselves, and they declared their independence in May. Also in the Caucasus, the Tatars of Azerbaijan declared their independence. The Georgians, under a moderate socialist government, declared their independence. Bessarabia, populated largely by Romanians, left the Soviet camp and became a part of Romania. And troops from the Central Powers reached Rostov on May 8.

And in May the Bolsheviks lost control of Siberia. This had origins with the presence of Czechs and Slovaks in Russia - most of them former soldiers for Austria-Hungary who had been taken as prisoners of war. These Czechs and Slovaks were eager to defeat Austria-Hungary in order to win independence from Habsburg rule, and in an agreement with the Allied powers, 6,000 of them were being shipped across the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, on their way to join the fighting against Austria and Germany. On May 14, at the rail town of Cheliabinsk, in the Urals, Austrian or Hungarian prisoners of war being transported in the opposite direction called the Czechs and Slovaks traitors and threw stones at them. A Czech was killed. A brawl followed between the two sides and Czechs grabbed their weapons and sought the man who had killed the Czech.

The Bolsheviks saw the majority of the Czechs and Slovaks as bourgeois nationalists and hostile to their revolution. Trotsky was now War Commissar in charge of the Red Army, and his commissariat was alarmed by Czechs and Slovaks taking command with rifles. Rather than just leave the Czechs and Slovaks alone, they issued an order to disarm them and force them into Red Army units or labor battalions. It proved to be a mistake - an overreaction. The Czechs resisted and decided to force their way east to their destination: Vladivostok. The Bolsheviks saw their position in Siberia threatened, and on May 25, Trotsky ordered that any Czech or Slovak found armed was to be shot on the spot." Because the Bolshevik hold on Serbia was weak, the Czechoslovakians were able to take over several towns along the Trans-Siberian railway. Those Czechoslovakians already in Vladivostok were disturbed by their fellow countrymen having to fight their way east, and they took over Vladivostok. Anti-Bolshevik Russians, who had been outnumbered by what few forces the Bolsheviks had in Siberia, were now encouraged, and, led by former army officers, they rose against the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky put one of his able commanders, Muraviev, in charge of the eastern front, and Muraviev deserted, taking his pay chest and a thousand men with him, fleeing to Simbirsk, on the Volga River, where Muraviev announced the suspension of fighting against the Czechoslovakians and a renewal of hostilities against Germany.

Forces in Siberia loyal to the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw westward. By late June, the Soviets regime was worried about the Japanese advancing along the Trans-Siberian railway, and the Bolsheviks were worried about the arrival of 600 British reinforcements landing at Murmansk, where some French troops had also landed. The Soviet attitude toward the Allied powers passed from distrust to hostility. Trotsky sent armed detachments toward Murmansk, and Allied troops moved south to intercept them. The two sides fought skirmishes, and the Allied troops established a defensive line about 300 miles down the rail line from Murmansk.

Preparing itself for more warfare, the Soviet government on June 28 instituted what became known as War Communism. All major branches of industry were nationalized, and industry came under military discipline. The distribution of materials and all trade were to be centrally organized. Trade union independence was ended, the Bolsheviks arguing that the working class was the government and therefore not in need of independent unions. And the Bolsheviks continued their attempt to crush whatever moves against their regime they could. They arrested anyone they suspected of counter-revolution, including some grand dukes, and they expelled all Mensheviks and moderate Socialist Revolutionaries from the Soviets.

In July, Wilson sent an American force to Vladivostok to help with the withdrawal of Czechs and Slovaks from Russia. And in July, a conspiracy began among former allies of the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs, who were unhappy about the Brest-Litovsk treaty and wanted to renew Russia's war against Germany. To these leftists the German ambassador to Moscow, Mirbach, was a symbol of German imperialism and oppression. Two Left SRs entered Mirbach's office posing as Chekists and murdered him. The conspirators had a force of 1,500 men, three armored cars and sixty machine guns, and they seized the Moscow telephone exchange and announced that they had taken power. A few anarchists and sailors from the Black Sea joined the rising. Some armed detachments in Moscow went over to the side of the insurgents. Some others remained neutral. The Kremlin was vulnerable, and there Lenin placed hope for the life of his regime in the commander of ten Latvian regiments - 18,000 men. The insurgents gave the commander of the Latvian regiments time to gather his forces. The Latvians defeated the insurgents, and within a week of their victory the Latvians began executing those insurgents that had been taken prisoner.

The Death of the Tsar and His Family

In mid-July, the Bolsheviks feared that advancing Czechs and Slovaks would soon overrun the town of Tobolsk, where the tsar and his family were being held. So the Bolsheviks moved the royal family westward into the Ural Mountains, near the town of Ekaterinburg. They decided to execute the tsar and his family without delay in order to prevent the tsar from being liberated, which they feared would encourage counter-revolution. The tsar and his entire family were taken downstairs and shot, their bodies burned and their ashes buried in a swamp. Grand dukes were shot the following night, their bodies flung down a mine shaft. Lenin, told his comrades that they could not allow themselves to be softhearted and magnanimous while Europe was hostile toward them. Counter revolution, he said, is rising against us on every side. "No! Excuse me," he said. "We are not imbeciles." Pointing to children at play, he said that their lives would be happier than their fathers. "Circumstances have compelled us to be cruel," he added, "but later ages will justify us. Then everything will be understood."

Recommended Books

The Russian Revolution, by Richard Pipes, Knopf, 1990.

The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (Annals of Communism),
by Richard Pipes, Yale University Press, 1999. (Lenin's letter writing, gathered from Russian archives.)

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