Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book (8 of 12): Historical and Geopolitical context
Civil War - and the world revolution stalls out
The Bolshevik Revolution took control in Moscow in November 1917. Their main slogan in the immediate drive to power was “land, bread, and peace,” with the goal of ending Russia’s participation in the First World War, stabilizing the economy to end wartime shortages, and land reform to benefit the peasants. It’s an endlessly discussed feature of the Soviet experience that the Russian Empire of 1917 had far more peasants than factory workers, the latter being the core of the working class that was the main agent for change in Marxist and socialist theory.
The new Communist government of Russia (it did not formally become the Soviet Union until 1922) did withdraw from the war.1 Which provoked so much displeasure from its former Entente allies that they organized a massive effort to get Russia back into the war and to overthrow the Communist government of which they also very much did not approve. US President Woodrow Wilson, who found Lenin’s government particularly repulsive, even sent American troops to Siberia which was part of an aid action for the Allied powers, and had limited military action against Soviet/Russian forces.2
Lenin’s government did withdraw from the war upon agreeing to the draconian terms demanded by Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918). In that treaty, “Russia lost territories inhabited by more than one-quarter of its citizens and providing more than one-third of its grain harvest.” However, “the treaty saved the Bolshevik regime: for the next eight months it received critical diplomatic and financial support from Germany that enabled it to beat back political opponents.”3 This began a collaboration with Germany which continued into postwar Weimar Republic
This is one of a series of posts about some of the issues raised by Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine (2017) on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 in the context of competing national narratives in present-day eastern Europe. The first post can be found at this link.
The “bread” of the Bolsheviks winning 1917 slogan of course had to be provided mainly by Russia’s own capabilities, which produced in practice a great deal of conflict with peasants rich and poor. The task was not made easier by the not-inconsiderable foreign intervention against the new government, which was a major factor in the Civil War of 1918-20: “various “White” armies formed on the periphery of Soviet Russia for the purpose of overthrowing the communists.”4 [3]
The Civil War in the military sense was fought on several fronts. The first White force, known as the Volunteer Army, formed in the winter of 1917–18 in the southern areas inhabited by the Cossacks. Organized by Generals Mikhail Alekseyev and Kornilov, after their death it was taken over by General Anton Denikin. Another army was created in western Siberia; in November 1918 Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak assumed command of this army and became the dictator of the territories where it was deployed. Several smaller White armies came into being in the northwest, the north, and the Far East. All were in varying measures supported by Great Britain with money and war matériel. The Allied intervention was initially inspired by the desire to reactivate the Eastern Front, but after the Armistice [of 1918] it lost its clear purpose, and it was continued on the insistence of Winston Churchill, who saw in Bolshevism a permanent threat to democracy and world peace. Neither the American nor the French contingents on Russian soil engaged in combat, and they were withdrawn after the Armistice. The British stayed on until the autumn of 1919, doing occasional fighting but mainly providing aid to the White armies. [my emphasis]
Millions died during the Civil War. And a considerable portion of the fighting as well as civic unrest by peasants was in Ukraine.
The decisive battles of the Civil War took place in the summer and fall of 1919. Kolchak launched in the spring a drive on Moscow and approached the shores of the Volga when he was stopped by a numerically superior Red force and thrown back. His army disintegrated later in the year, and he himself was captured and shot without a trial, possibly on Lenin’s orders (February 1920).
Of all the White generals, Denikin came closest to victory. In October 1919 his Volunteer Army, augmented by conscripts, reached Oryol (Orel), 150 miles (250 kilometres) south of Moscow. In their advance, Cossacks in White service carried out frightful pogroms in Ukraine in which an estimated 100,000 Jews lost their lives. Denikin’s lines were stretched thin, and he lacked reserves. He advanced recklessly because he had been told by Britain that unless he took the new capital before the onset of winter he would receive no more assistance. In battles waged in October and November the Red Army decisively crushed the Whites and sent them fleeing pell-mell to the ports of the Black Sea. A remnant under the command of General Pyotr Wrangel held on for a while in the Crimean peninsula, from where it was dislodged in November 1920. [my emphasis]
And, as Applebaum writes, there was considerable conflict over the control of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. “The Bolsheviks were expelled from Kyiv for the second time in August 1919. In their wake, the largest and most violent peasant uprising in modern European history exploded across the countryside.” (p. 40)
Poland, which had been divided since the 18th century among the German, Russian, and Habsburg empires, also re-established itself as an independent nation and also waged a war against Communist Russia, the Russo-Polish War of 1919-20, in which territories that had belonged to Imperial Russia became part of the newly-independent Poland.
This intense period of conflict led to an early round of farm collectivization and stiff quotas of agricultural products being requisitioned by the national government, as well as aggressive nationalization of private industry nationwide and strict economic planning. This is known as the period of War Communism (1918-1921). It was followed by the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921-28, a relaxation of centralism as the allowance of more capitalist-style practices in both urban and rural settings.
Here it’s important to note that political and economic views, nationalistic conceptions, ethnic identifications all played a role, along with the factors emphasized by foreign-policy “realist” thinkers, those features of the international state system that create strong incentives to leaders to act to maximize national advantage.
The particulars of Soviet ideology and how it evolved are critical to the story of this period. But the Red government’s territorial goals and the need to produce maximum food supplies for war needs would have been similar for any government in power in Moscow, as indeed they were for the Czarist regime and the Kerensky government of 1917.
In the initial years of the Bolshevik government, the leaders hoped for socialist revolutions to occur in other Western capitalist countries, Germany in particular. The Communist International (Comintern), the world organization of pro-Soviet Communist parties headed by Soviet one, encouraged a revolutionary uprising in Germany in 1923. It quickly fizzled.5[4]
After that, the Soviet leaders gave up the expectation of any massive near-term assistance from any new socialist republic in another major country.
Kennan, George (1956): Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920: Russia Leaves the War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Trickey, Eric (2019): The Forgotten Story of the American Troops Who Got Caught Up in the Russian Civil War. Smithsonian Magazine 02/12/2019. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-doughboys-who-died-fighting-russian-civil-war-180971470/> (Accessed: 09-07-2023).
Long, John (1982): American Intervention in Russia: The North Russian Expedition, 1918–19. Diplomatic History 6:1, 45-67, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24911301> (Accessed: 09-07-2023).
Conquest, Robert, Pipes, Richard E. , McCauley, Martin & Dewdney, John C.. Soviet Union. Encyclopedia Britannica. <https://www.britannica.com/place/Soviet-Union> (Accessed: 2023-09-07).
Ibid.
Ullrich, Volker (2022): Deutschland 1923. Das Jahr am Abgrund, 140-170. Munich: C.H. Beck.