La guerre civile russe, 1917-22

Jean-Jacques Marie, La guerre civile russe, 1917-1922. Editions Autrement, 2005.

Notice the dates: 1917-22. J-J Marie establishes that the conventional account, according to which the civil war was over by the start of 1921, and all the “emergency” measures by the Bolsheviks after that stemmed only from the Bolsheviks’ supposed lack of democratic understanding, is false.

In spring and summer 1921, the Bolsheviks faced huge peasant uprisings in Tambov and other areas, as well as the Kronstadt revolt. And this in a country exhausted by years of war, with a total of maybe 14 million deaths since the start of World War 1, over four million in the civil war alone, seven million abandoned children, and raging drought, famine, and disease.

The Bolsheviks used ruthless force. Marie glosses over none of the horrors. He also shows that, for the Bolsheviks, force was always the second resort, in cases where they had failed to convince, and accompanied by attempts to convince.

To try to “turn” the Tambov peasant rising in spring 1921, for example, the Bolsheviks printed 326,000 leaflets, 11 pamphlets, and 28 issues of a special magazine.

In that way they continued as they had started the civil war. On 31 October, only a few days after the Soviets took power, General Krasnov attempted to lead his Cossacks against the new government.

Two Bolsheviks smuggled themselves into the Cossack barracks at 3am, spent five hours talking and arguing with the Cossacks, and eventually won them over to a neutral position.

The next day, the Bolsheviks were able to arrest Krasnov. Not yet hardened by civil war, they released him when he gave his word of honour not to raise new counter-revolutionary risings. Krasnov immediately went south to raise new White forces to fight Soviet power.

The Soviet government at that time rested almost exclusively on the power of political agitation. The Russian army was officially demobilised by the Soviet government on 12 February 1917, but in any case could not possibly have been used by the Soviets as their instrument. Police, civil service, courts - all had disintegrated or were hostile.

As a military power, the Soviet government did not exist - not until such time as it managed to build up a Red Army, and a minimal apparatus of administration and supply, by convincing workers and peasants to join the Bolsheviks in that effort. The early months of the Civil War went badly for the Bolsheviks mostly because of successive triumphs won by the Czech Legion - some 35,000 to 40,000 troops from the Austro-Hungarian Imperial army, taken prisoner under the Tsar, who, freed after the Revolution, decided to back the Whites. Even such a small “regular” force could at first overwhelm the improvised Red Guards.

The civil war was won only by heroic efforts of agitation - as when, a bit later, Trotsky single-handedly convinced 15,000 deserters in Riazan to adhere to the Red Army - but, as the war went on, it was coupled with increased ruthlessness.

The end result was a ruined, exhausted country, and a Bolshevik Party with its nerves wrecked. But the Bolsheviks had no choice, about the war, about the invasions by no fewer than 14 countries, or about the defeats and delays of the revolutions in Western Europe to which they looked for a way out.

This is a book worth reading, even though the style is curiously distant, and you will have to draw “the lessons” yourself from facts presented in the manner of a “flat” narrative.

Marie, a well-known academic supporter of the “Lambertist” strand of would-be Trotskyism, scarcely “editorialises” at all, except in the last couple of pages, where he adds on, without explanation, an “interpretation” much at odds with the rest of the book.

The civil war, he says, was about “two opposed and irreconcilable systems of property: private property and collective property in the means of production”; and then he goes on to bemoan the collapse of Stalinism in 1991 as signifying the defeat of the good side in that civil war and the “liquidation” of “almost all the social gains which had been linked, despite the total absence of political and trade-union freedoms imposed by the bureaucracy, to the collective property in the means of production”.

Actually, as E H Carr notes in his big History, the Bolshevik government in its early days rarely described itself as socialist. It called itself a “soviet” government, a “workers’ and peasants’ government”, and justified its decrees in terms of “workers’ and peasants’ power” or “democracy”. It did not nationalise industry until forced to, from below, in late 1918.

The Bolsheviks believed that any substantial advances in the way of socialism would depend on the victory of workers’ revolution in Western Europe, way beyond the narrow bridgehead they had established so heroically and so precariously in Russia. They would have rejected as nonsense any idea that “collective property in the means of production” - formally “collective”, but actually, as Marie well knows, ownership by a privileged bureaucracy at least as walled off from the workers and peasants as is the corps of big shareholders in Western capitalist corporations - could in itself, in abstract, in abstraction from any form of working-class political power, guarantee “social gains”.