The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov
and Nerchensky regions, sending them to the police.
IV. To bring to court, impose harsh sentences, and apply death-penalties to local authorities who did not show adequate resistance to bandits, who executed their orders and did not take steps for the liquidation of the Reds using their own means and capabilities.
V. To demolish villages where repetitive rebellions have been organized with redoubled severity, up to their complete liquidation.»
«White» armies acquired deplorable habits under General Denikin. Robberies, brigandism and other crimes against property were not prosecuted, so they became an ordinary phenomenon. An honest soldier became a prowler. Mean motives and rough arbitrariness replaced political correctness and mere human decency.
The negative influence of these battlefield morals on the rear was particularly felt in the Crimea after the retaking of Novorossiysk. Here are prince Obolensky’s reminiscences: «One morning on their way to school, children saw dead people with protruded tongues who had been hung from lamp posts in the streets of Simferopol. Never before had Simferopol seen anything like that. Even the Bolsheviks tempered their bloody business without such demonstrations.» It turned out that it was General Kutepov’s order, his way of terrorizing Simferopol Bolsheviks. The local Duma passed an official objection, and the Mayor went to Kutepov to persuade him to immediately remove the corpses from the street lamps. Kutepov gave the following answer to the the petition to cease public executions: «I have never abused public executions, but the current situation forced me to fall back upon such measures.»
In his memoirs Denikin called this and other similar incidents «black chapters» in the history of his Army. He did not hide the fact that most of the counterintelligence offices, particularly in Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa and Rostov, represented hotbeds of provocation and organized plundering. A two-way struggle was organized against this kind of offence; on the one hand they fought the agencies themselves, and on the other hand they fought individuals. In the long run the General had to admit the inefficiency and tardiness of the struggle.
Baron Wrangell tried as well to put an end to the ills of the epoch of «voluntarism.» This is demonstrated by his orders from April 1920 to June 1920, which mandated the end to violence against people. On April 27, the Department of Justice was detached from the civil government to fight against criminality. A peculiar judicial measure was Wrangell’s decree dated May 11, which ordered administrative deportation to Soviet Russia. Governors and fortress commandants were authorized to resort to such measures under a prosecutor’s supervision. The counterintelligence agencies, which were brought under control, almost stopped brigandage and acts of outrage. Criminals were subject to harsh sentencing. In his order of September 14, 1920 Wrangell expressed the following opinion about the military court commissions formed for civil protection against robbery and plunder: «The whole population living on the territories occupied by the troops of the Russian Army respects and trusts these commissions and their activity; in the immediate battle area, where a civil governing machinery is not yet properly formed, people believe these commissions to be their only protectors and address them with all their complains and problems.»
However, there was another opinion. Ivan Kalinin, former chairman of the Don Army military court commission, related that «Wrangell’s commissions never did any good,» that «the leader’s intention to establish a kind of «White Cheka» for the eradication of the lawlessness went down in flames». Later on, Wrangell himself had to admit the inadequacy of the counterintelligence agencies’ activities and criminal investigation actions, whose operations, in his opinion, were lagging. He wrote that «the population was tired of the Bolsheviks; at first, people waiting for peace greeted and welcomed enthusiastically the progress of the Army, but toward November 1919, little by little they began to feel again the atrocities of robberies, violence and arbitrariness. As a result the front collapsed and the rear rose in revolt.»
Thus, the Civil War has added new chapters to the history of the emergency regime that plagued Russia for long decades of the 19th and 20th centuries. An estimated 8 to 13 million people died on the battlefield, and of diseases, starvation, and terror. By the end of the war, about 2 million people had left the country. The damage to the national economy amounted to about 50 billion gold imperial rubles, industrial production dropped to between 4 and 20 percent of its 1913 level, and agricultural productivity decreased by almost fifty percent.
Despite the assurances of the Bolsheviks and the Provisional Government and its allies to permanently eliminate a system of governance based on the tsarist Statute on Measures to Protect State Order and Public Peace, their regimes added new dimensions to those rules. The extreme emergency regime introduced by the «Reds» and the «Whites» left traces across the whole battleground of the Civil War. In General Denikin’s words, this regime «caused the people’s cup of sorrow to overflow with new tears and blood, and it blurred the colors of the politico-military spectrum in the minds of the population, erasing the differences between the Savior and the Enemy.» To tell the truth, from time to time the Bolsheviks managed to restrain the war and regularize activity in the rear, which helped the Army and assisted in repulsing the attacks of the enemy. In the long run, it affected the outcome of the Civil War in the Bolsheviks’ favor. Nevertheless, extraordinary bodies that were once considered interim proliferated to a huge degree and became a state within a state. It was becoming more and more difficult to keep them within strict bounds and to put them under the supervision of regular state bodies. The end of the Civil War and the transition to the New Economic Policy provided hope that there would be dramatic changes in the structure of state administration.
Theme 5
FROM «WAR COMMUNISM» TO THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY: CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEP
The disturbances that struck Russia in 1914 reached their peak in early 1920s. Devastation of the industrial and transport sectors, fuel crises, strikes, demobilization, the revolt of the sailors of the Baltic fleet and Kronstadt: these are well-known manifestations of the general crisis. There are two phenomena, however, that more than others influenced the crisis situation. The first was the largest peasant rebellion since the times of Yemelian Pugachev. The second was the terrible famine that struck many regions of the country, mostly the Volga region.
Understanding the essence of the transition from the Civil War to peace requires analyzing the interconnection and correlation of the following phenomena: Soviet government policy, the peasant movement and the famine.
A new stage of the Civil War began in the summer of 1920. A peasant movement against the Bolsheviks, who did not want to change the policy of «War Communism» and its food rationing system (the system of surplus appropriation), spread to almost all provinces of Russia and Ukraine (the most notable rebellions were conducted by Makhno and Antonov). The struggle between peasants and Soviet troops was extremely severe. The struggle began in the context of the 1920 harvest failure and the surplus appropriation system that led to confiscation of more food from peasants than in 1918 and 1919.
So what could end such a vast peasant rebellion? Could it be the change of ration policy by the Bolsheviks, i.e. the replacement of the surplus appropriation system with an agricultural tax in kind? Or perhaps the military suppression of mass rebellions? Or simply famine?
Until recently, historians have regarded the adoption of the agricultural tax in kind as a political decision that made peasants immediately shift their alignment towards the Bolsheviks. But analysis of related documents does not provide any proof for this theory. It was only in central industrial provinces that most of peasants gladly accepted the adoption of agricultural tax in kind. People in other regions regarded it as a new form of surplus appropriation. The strongest resistance to efforts to collect the tax was manifested in Western Russia. Due to a severe crop failures in the South of Russia, the Soviet government made a decision to collect the bulk of the agricultural tax in kind from Siberia. Peasants’ resistance toward the tax collection was followed by punitive actions.
The agricultural tax in kind was perceived as another form of surplus appropriation in many Russian and Ukrainian provinces besides Siberia. This is a report of the State Political Directorate (GPU) made in October 1922: «Over two thirds of the crops will be gathered as the agricultural tax in kind in Pskov province. Peasants of Riazan and Tver provinces will starve if they are forced to pay 100 percent of the agricultural tax in