Wars After The Fall
Antony Beevor - Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921
National Review, February 2, 2023 (February 20, 2023 Issue)
Civil War Monument, Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford
Despite a subtitle that suggests that it covers Russia’s two revolutions and the subsequent civil war, Antony Beevor’s new book is best seen as a history of that war (or, more accurately, wars) prefaced by a lengthy prologue chronicling the events that triggered it. To anyone reasonably familiar with the story of the months that culminated in the Bolshevik coup, there is little that is new in that preamble, although Beevor tells the tale of that year, 1917, briskly, with brio and characteristically sharp insight. Thus, the liberal February revolution that overthrew the czar is generally seen as a relatively peaceful affair, which it was compared with what was to come, but, as Beevor shows, that still left room for lynchings, rapes, mutilations, drownings, shootings, burnings to death. “The people’s hatred has been brewing for too long,” wrote one cousin of the czar.
Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, knew how to manipulate that hatred. As he addressed crowds in Petrograd, Lenin “battered away with a blunt instrument at the darkest corner of people’s souls,” in the words of one writer. Lenin was attracted by violence (at a safe distance) but also recognized that, by persuading his listeners that it was a means to bring about justice, he could use its seductive and now supposedly legitimized power to turn a crowd into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into enforcers of the new order he began building immediately after the Bolshevik takeover toward the end of 1917.
Lenin was a mix of the irrational and the rational. He may have been a millenarian, but he was clear-eyed and rational in his view, however repulsive, of how to run the revolutionary state that he believed would lead to the creation of a new world. As Bolshevism’s early horrors came into sight, opposition started to mount, setting the stage for civil war. This would not have troubled Lenin, who correctly saw that his revolutionary vanguard was more likely to attract support in “the extra-parliamentary than in the parliamentary struggle,” and he anticipated “the strength” that the Bolsheviks could “develop in civil war,” Beevor writes. Lenin had long been aware that “the Bolsheviks’ only chance of seizing power across the Russian landmass and retaining it would be to achieve tabula rasa through violence, so that there could be no possibility of a return to the past.” As so often, Lenin was right.
In his discussion of the early phases of the civil war, Beevor ponders where “the extremes of sadism” came from — “the hacking with sabres, the cutting with knives, the boiling and burning, the scalping alive, the nailing of epaulettes to shoulders, the gouging of eyes, the soaking of victims in water to freeze them to death, castration, evisceration, amputation.” Was this a throwback to the mercilessness of earlier Russian revolts, or, Beevor asks, had “the frenzy of vengeance been intensified to another level by the rhetoric of political hatred”?
It had. Lenin had sanctified sadism, accusing the “bourgeoisie” of terrible crimes. His language dehumanizing those of the wrong social class as “lice,” “fleas,” and “vermin” was “tantamount to a call for class genocide.” It was a call that was answered again, again, and again. So much for claims that the Bolshevik revolution was a noble venture only betrayed by Stalin.
“The frenzy of vengeance” was real enough. And so was the brutalization brought about by continuous warfare since 1914, but the scale and the intensity of the savagery indicate that something else was at work. In Beevor’s opinion, “Europe had not seen such conspicuous cruelty used as a weapon of terror since the wars of religion.” Well, Bolshevism’s true believers, adherents of a millenarian creed, were fighting a religious war, however much they would have denied it.
For their part, the Whites, facing an enemy set not only on their defeat but also on the annihilation of their civilization, were capable of extraordinary barbarity — this was a conflict in which quarter was only rarely given by either side. In Siberia, where White warlords presided over vast stretches of territory, regimes emerged of “unbelievable cruelty.” When the social order is in a state of utter collapse, men can indulge in their worst instincts, and in the ruins of the Russian Empire they did. Hobbes would have understood.
And so, with the dissolution of the restraints that had (with horrific exceptions) stopped endemic antisemitism from degenerating into outright violence, a wave of pogroms erupted. Beevor quotes a 1920 Soviet report that “mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured” in modern-day Belarus and Ukraine, an estimate that is not unreasonable. Some of the killing was carried out by groups affiliated with no side, but both Red and White troops also participated in the slaughter. Of the two, the Whites were undoubtedly the worse offenders. The late-czarist antisemitism of much of their officer corps had been further inflamed by rage at a revolution many of them regarded as the work of “the Jews.” A considerable portion of the death toll can be attributed to pogroms carried out by nationalist forces in Ukraine — although quite how high official approval for, or indifference to, those massacres went remains controversial.
Beevor, the author of such books as Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945, is an accomplished military historian, well up to the task of describing what was not, as he recognizes, a single, all-encompassing Russian civil war. Instead, the fighting comprised a series of sometimes chaotically overlapping conflicts, depicted in this book in a manner that conjures up the grand sweep of those wars, their strangeness, horror, tragedy, and hellish grandeur.
The pivotal drama — the war of Romanov succession — was a battle between the Reds and the Whites for mastery of the former Russian empire, but alongside that contest was an attempt by two empires, at least for a while, to seize direct or indirect control of parts of a third that had vanished. For a rather longer period, numerous peoples — from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from Transcaucasia to Central Asia — fought to break free from rule by Russia. They wanted out, regardless of who was in charge.
This could have made for difficult reading. (At one point the author notes that the position in the Baltic in November 1918 was “fiendishly complex,” as indeed it was.) But Beevor manages a deft synthesis of many of the wars on the periphery, such as those that secured independence for Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states but failed to do so for Ukraine. He has comparatively little, however, to say on the re-establishment of Moscow’s sway over Transcaucasia or in Central Asia, where fighting continued long into the 1920s. Beevor’s narrative ends in 1921.
Critically, his focus on the principal struggle, that between Reds and Whites, provides the framework for a relatively straightforward narrative, which makes it easier to understand, for instance, the key role played by a Czechoslovak legion in that conflict. And it also helps him spell out why the Whites lost.
Militarily, the underlying explanation is simple enough. There was not enough coordination between the three main White armies. Located in Siberia, the south, and the northwest, they were dispersed, as Beevor recounts, “around the central core of Communist territory, while the Reds benefited enormously from interior lines of communication and a more centralised command structure.” (The Whites communicated via Paris.) The Red commanders may have been of a somewhat higher quality than many of their White counterparts, although they too had their share of the inept, but the Bolsheviks were by far the more set on victory and had a much clearer idea of what victory should look like.
By contrast, through the upper ranks of the Whites there ran a curious lack of seriousness, extending to the inability of their leaders to cooperate properly, and the absence of a coherent vision of Russia’s future. And what vision there was, was not to their advantage. They wanted to preserve too much of the ancien régime to win over the peasantry (until it was too late), one example of an attitude that, along with their corruption and administrative incompetence, led the Western powers to lend less assistance (and they lent quite a bit) than would otherwise have been the case.
Meanwhile, the Whites’ stubborn commitment to a unitary Russian state alienated those peoples who wanted no part of such a project but whose support — they were typically anti-Bolshevik — could have made a critical difference.
But something else was going on too. The czarist regime had rotted away, but that rot, rather than a determination to build on the promise of the February revolution, thrived in the White armies. All too often they behaved as if they had already lost. From Beevor’s depiction of the Whites, it’s impossible to avoid the signs of degeneracy, decay, and, on occasion, outright insanity. One (talented) general rode into battle with a pet crow in a cage attached to his saddle — appropriate enough, in a way, for an army that by that point knew it was doomed.
Beevor estimates that the wars accounted for “up to” 12 million lives. There are different figures, some higher, some lower, but as is the way of such things, all agree that the overwhelming majority of the dead were civilians. The Reds won, but not entirely. Their new state was smaller than the empire it succeeded, and its leaders’ plan to spread their revolution to the West had failed, wrecked, in part, by the need to see off the Whites.