The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (64 page)

In November 1918, Admiral Kolchak seized power in Omsk by coup d’etat.
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For the next year, he was regarded internationally as Russia’s official head of state; however, after his offensive against the Bolsheviks collapsed in November 1919, Kolchak abandoned Omsk. By January 1920, the Whites had retreated out the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Irkutsk, where they were trapped when the local government switched hands. The Czech Legion turned Kolchak over to the new authorities in exchange for safe passage home, and the Reds shot him and dumped his body into the nearest river.
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Allies (Far East)

Another Allied expeditionary force of French, British, and Americans occupied the Pacific port of Vladivostok and its Siberian hinterland. The first engineering units had arrived during the First World War to help operate the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and more arrived later. Seventy thousand Japanese soldiers also came along to help. Japan was spending the first half of the twentieth century trying to conquer the Pacific coast of Asia. The Japanese had already taken Korea and Taiwan and would soon go after China. In the meantime, they took advantage of the chaos by invading Siberia. The Japanese finally had to abandon this foothold in 1922, a year after the other Allies had pulled out.

Komuch (Southeast)

For a while, the city of Samara hosted a socialist government, called Komuch, which is compressed Russian for the
Com
mittee of something that begins with
uch
.
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The Komuch collected enough refugee members of the Petrograd legislature to claim to be the legitimate government of all Russia. Although it took over most of the Volga river basin, it was too moderate to fire up mass support. After the Bolsheviks broke up this Samara government, the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia in Omsk swallowed up the retreating remnants.
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Turkestan (Far Southeast)

The Central Asian lands of the Russian Empire had their own civil war for a few months in late 1917 and early 1918, as Muslim nationalists and Communists fought over which direction to take to get away from their imperial Russian past. When the Reds emerged victorious from that struggle, White and British forces attacked out of Iran without success. A temporarily independent Communist state was set up in Bukhara until it was absorbed back into Russia.

Blacks (South)

As if the metaphorical anarchy ripping apart Russia wasn’t enough, one faction tried to establish a true anarchist society, a stateless state of absolute equality among the peasants of east-central Ukraine. Between autumn 1918 and summer 1919, the anarchist Black Army under Nestor Makhno carved the Free Territory out of a chaotic Ukraine. Forced to pick sides, the Blacks eventually tossed in with the Reds against the Whites, but once the Whites were out of the way, the Reds turned against the Blacks. Luckily, anarchist agents intercepted the secret orders from Moscow, and forewarned, Makhno fled to the West.
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Greens (South)

Ukrainian peasants fed up with both the Whites (too many former landlords) and the Reds (who were shooting priests and confiscating property) formed into the Green Army under a Cossack named Nikifor Grigoriev. After the Greens spent about a year fighting both the Reds and the Whites, the Bolsheviks drove the Greens into the territory of the Blacks. The anarchists captured Grigoriev, and Makhno’s wife personally executed him.

Whites (South)

Generals Lavr Kornilov and Anton Denikin, the two chief commanders of the Russian front, were arrested in August 1917 for scheming to seize control in Petrograd. After the Bolsheviks took over, however, the generals escaped and fled to southern Russia to organize the White Army. When Kornilov was killed in April 1918, Denikin assumed command.

From May to October 1919, Denikin was on the offensive, but a Red victory at Orel sent him reeling back, leaking deserters the whole way. By March 1920, the remnants of his army were cooped up in the Crimea, so in April, Denikin turned his army over to his assistant, Pyotr Wrangel, and retired to France. Finally admitting defeat, Wrangel and the last of the Whites scrambled out of Crimea in November 1920 aboard French and British ships.

Pogroms (South)

Ideology aside, most Russians at this time hated the Jews, so the armies of the Whites, Reds, Greens, and Blacks abused Jews wherever they found them. The persecution was worst in the Ukraine. Rumors circulated widely among the Whites that the Bolshevik Revolution was, at its heart, a Jewish plot, so throughout 1919, Whites, Cossacks, and Ukrainian nationalists destroyed around five hundred Jewish communities in their path. Between 60,000 and 150,000 Jews were shot down, burned alive, drowned, beaten to death, or hacked apart in one massacre after another, the deadliest outbreak of anti-Semitism that occurred between Bar Kokhba (see “Roman-Jewish Wars”) and the Holocaust (see “Second World War”).
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Poles (West)

After the White armies in Ukraine collapsed, the Poles surged forward to take their place. They captured Kiev in May 1920, but a Bolshevik counteroffensive quickly drove them back. For a while, it looked like Poland was going to be taken back into the Russian Empire, but this counteroffensive was finally stopped just short of Warsaw in August 1920. To hear the Poles tell it, this battle at the gates of Warsaw is one of the most important turning points in modern history. Had it not been for the valor of the Polish army, then the Communist hordes would have rolled over the whole continent of Europe. Another way of describing it would be that the Red Army was so worn out that
even the Poles
could beat them.

As it was, the Polish counter-counterattack cleared the Reds entirely out of Polish territory and got halfway back to Kiev before the Russians stopped it again. It was here that the new border between Russia and Poland was drawn, putting a few million Ukrainians and Byelorussians into Poland as difficult minorities.
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Reds (Center)

Faced with a crumbling nation, Lenin’s answer to all his problems was to shoot someone. In January 1918 he ordered “shooting on the spot one of every ten found guilty of idling.” Later he decreed “the arrest and shooting of takers of bribes, swindlers, etc.”
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For our purposes, the most important single event of this chapter happened in December 1917, shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power, when Lenin set up a commission inside the interior ministry to fight sabotage and counterrevolutionary activities. The full nine words of its official name were too much trouble to say, write, or even remember, so most of the time the name was whittled down to the innocuously vague Extraordinary Commission, and more commonly reduced even further to its two-letter Russian initials: Che Ka.

The name of this organization would change over the years, but the terror it instilled would remain constant. Surviving records show that the Cheka executed almost 13,000 counterrevolutionaries over the course of the civil war—and those are just the killings we can prove. They shot many more spontaneously, without leaving a paper trail. In all, the Cheka killed anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 citizens during the civil war.
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At first, the Bolshevik government shared power with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (a cooperative splinter group from the original Socialist Revolutionaries), who had strong support among the peasantry, but the LSRs were infuriated by the surrender terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. In July 1918, the LSR assassinated the German ambassador, making it look like a Cheka hit in the hopes of driving a wedge between Lenin and Germany. Lenin smoothed things over with Germany, and then set out to arrest members of the LSR. The LSR took the leader of the Cheka hostage.
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Lenin called out the troops, who freed the leader and broke the LSR, removing the last outsiders from the Bolshevik government.

While cleaning house in Moscow, the Bolsheviks addressed another pressing problem. The royal family had been imprisoned in various rural estates since the revolution, and was now stashed in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. As advancing Whites eroded the encircled territory of the Reds, something had to be done. Tsar Nicholas, his wife, five children, and their loyal servants were taken into a small room, where they were sloppily shot, bayoneted, beaten with rifle butts, and shot until they were clearly dead. Then the bodies were carted out to the woods, disfigured with acid, and buried in an unmarked grave.
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In August 1918, an assassin previously affiliated with the Socialist Revolutionaries wounded Lenin, which sparked the Red Terror and intensified mass executions. As orders went out to clamp down on dissent and antisocial behavior, Lenin instructed one local soviet, “You must . . . instantly introduce mass terror, shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes who get soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted.” The same month, he instructed the leaders of another town, “Hang no fewer than a hundred well-known kulaks [prosperous peasants], rich-bags and blood-suckers (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people).”
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In late 1919, Leon Trotsky, another Communist intellectual who had originally been exiled to the West by the tsar, turned the tide of battle in favor of the Bolsheviks. With the revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia, and Lenin assigned to him the job of negotiating peace with Germany. Now he was given command of the army. He cranked the Red Army up to a million men via a massive conscription of peasants in Soviet territory. Political commissars who were assigned to bully or rally the troops as necessary hardened these uncertain new recruits. Behind his frontline troops, Trotsky positioned special political units to shoot down fleeing soldiers just in case someone tried retreating. As he explained in his autobiography:

An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.
*
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Unlike many other Bolshevik leaders, Trotsky was willing to use former tsarist officers as advisers and occasionally as commanders—as long as he had political commissars to keep an eye on them.

The Russian Revolution led to one of the largest redistributions of wealth ever seen, but for the most part the Communists didn’t go door to door seizing property. They simply refused to enforce the laws of property when ordinary people stole it from the wealthy. Peasants farmed whatever land they wanted, knowing that the government wouldn’t drive them off. Workers took control of factories, and the police would not chase them out. People would take livestock or move into abandoned buildings, and there was nothing the owners could do about it. Anyone who objected would be lynched by the mob, or summarily executed by the Cheka.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Soviet republics also sprang up in Bavaria and Hungary, and for a brief moment Lenin hoped—and the rest of the world feared—that this would lead to a cataclysmic wave of revolution all across the world. Then Bavaria collapsed in May 1919 and Hungary in August 1919, and the epidemic of Marxism was quarantined inside of Russia.

By the time the smoke cleared, five new countries around the shores of the Baltic Sea had managed to establish their independence from a weakened Russia. Elsewhere, Bolshevik forces pushed outward to absorb the other little republics that had been staked out in the tsar’s former domain. In December 1922, all of the local Communist governments that had taken root across the old Russian Empire were officially bundled together into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR.

Legacy

A generation ago the Russian Revolution stood out as the most important geopolitical event of the twentieth century. All of the great dictators had fallen. The two world wars were over and fading in importance. History’s more recent wars had been long and fruitless, but the Soviet Union still loomed inescapably over the whole century, threatening, struggling, growing, and evolving. The upheaval that brought the USSR into being was central to modern history.

Nowadays the Russian Revolution is an elective course in ancient history. It’s an excellent example of how changes in the present echo backward and change the past. With the Soviet Union gone, all of the ins and outs of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Reds, and Whites have become mere trivia.

On the other hand, a lesser event that was largely ignored in history classes when I went to school has grown more important. The 1922 decision to organize the former Russian Empire into a federation of theoretically autonomous ethnic republics used to look like window dressing. No one seriously believed that those “republics” were anything other than provinces of a Russian empire, so their names and borders didn’t matter. We always called citizens of the USSR “Russians,” rarely “Soviets.” Everyone knew who really ran the show.