Lenin's Terror by James Ryan

Author:James Ryan [Ryan, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General
ISBN: 9780415673969
Google: xxGttzFXqaYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T02:37:39+00:00

Civil War, phase three: spring–winter 1919

If the first phase of the Civil War began in winter 1917–18, and the second phase began on the Volga with the Czech Legion and Komuch, then the third phase began with Kolchak’s offensive launched from Ufa in March 1919. This was soon followed by Denikin’s push for Moscow from the South and the threat to Petrograd from General Iudenich. Thus began the main phase of the ‘Red versus White’ Civil War, pitting the Reds against the forces opposed to socialism: an umbrella of conservatives, monarchists, liberals, landowners, Tsarist army officers and generals etc., supported by Western allied and Japanese forces.

It is worth analysing in some detail Lenin’s rhetoric in spring 1919. Referring to the fact that some Mensheviks, in defiance of their Central Committee, were actively supporting anti-Bolshevik forces, he acknowledged that ‘We, of course, persecute Mensheviks, even shoot them, when they wage war against us, fight our Red Army and shoot our Red commanders’.73 Responding to the spread of peasant revolts, he once again labelled these ‘kulak’ revolts and justified their suppression, for ‘The kulak is our implacable enemy.’ The middle peasant, however, ‘is a different case, he is not our enemy.’ The peasant revolts in fact involved entire villages but in public Lenin was largely incredulous, declaring that: ‘An individual village or volost does join the kulaks, but under Soviet power there have been no peasant revolts that involved all the peasants in Russia.’74 On 14 March the Central Committee agreed to strengthen the Vecheka’s forces in direct response to the peasant uprisings, which it described as ‘undoubtedly led by the Left and Right SRs’, by recalling its most ‘reliable workers’ who had been transferred to other posts,75 presumably to better enable the Chekas to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of poor and middle peasants. There was a distinct contrast in Lenin’s thought between the ideal of neutralizing the middle peasant and the perceived practical necessity of resorting to force to suppress risings; as Bertrand Patenaude notes, ‘The element of coercion directed against the entire peasantry was to become the hallmark of the razverstka.’76 Lenin did emphasize, though, that the requisition quotas were to be relaxed for the middle peasants.77

One of the principal reasons for the peasant revolts in 1919 was conscription to the Red Army and the consequent rise in desertion and formation of groups of deserter-‘bandits’.78 It is arguable that a more compact but better trained and supplied army rather than the mass conscript army of workers and (mainly) peasants would have resulted in a more effective force, and would have reduced state-peasant conflict. In a speech in May Lenin addressed the dissatisfaction of the narod that the Bolsheviks had not kept their promise to deliver peace having presented themselves in 1917 as the only party that could secure it. The Bolsheviks, he explained, had found that ‘the whole civilized world’ was attacking weak and ruined Russia. He also unapologetically acknowledged in eschatological terms Bolshevik dual responsibility for the Civil

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