Brutalization Revisited: The Case of Russia

George Mosse’s thesis about the brutalization of politics as a result of the First World War is inseparably intertwined with the notion of a German special path. Like any universal hypothesis it has attracted criticism over the years. ¹ The Russian case, meanwhile, offers a more clear-cut example of the brutalization of a society by the Great War than either the German or Italian cases. Yet in the Russian case, analogous questions have not been asked, or have been asked in a different way. Historians of Russia are primarily interested in the war as a catalyst for the continuing violence in the revolution and subsequent civil war. ² Hence, the First World War has played a comparatively smaller role in historical research, and is often seen as the ‘forgotten war’ in the shadow of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–21. This neglect might be explained by the fact that the majority of civilian victims of the First World War came from the western and southern borderlands of the Tsarist Empire, not from its Russian core which defined historical memory in subsequent decades. For the mass of the Russian population, in particular the civilians, Revolution and Civil War were more drastic discontinuities than the war. 1917–21 was defined by internal polarization, universalized violence, criminality, and not least, by hunger and cold. In the Soviet ‘master narrative’, as it established itself in the 1930s, the catastrophes of the Civil War were stylized into a ‘heroic period’ for the communists. This reinterpretation of catastrophes into trials would then also structure the memory about the ‘Great Patriotic War’. This renewed transformation of the past had the advantage that previous experiences of Civil War, collectivization, and the terror of the Stalin years could be forgotten. ³

What follows is an interpretive article synthesizing a growing literature on the war and civil war years: to what extent does this new research shed light on Mosse’s brutalization thesis? While I also draw on archival evidence, the main goal is not to provide new data for specialists, but to sketch the contours of a history of brutalization of the Russian polity. I argue that despite the apparently obvious connections between lost war, revolution, and civil war in the Russian case, direct linkages between the fronts of an industrialized war and the violence of revolution and civil war are hard to establish. The picture gets muddied even further when we consider the ‘path dependency’ of enduring traditions, which were transferred, transformed and radicalized. Here we can point in particular to styles of rule and the results of a lacking political and patriotic consensus between the heterogeneous and often unconnected communities of communication fragmenting this society. But we also need to account for the enduring dispositions to violence among decisive sectors of the population: the soldiers and revolutionaries, but also the peasants and workers longing for an egalitarian and just economy. These cultures of violence were transformed by the crumbling of the old regime, a process which can be demonstrated in particular clarity with the example of the army.

Nevertheless, the First World War was central to the subsequent brutalization of politics, but not in a way Mosse’s thesis would predict. Violence did not originate at the frontline, but had a much longer genealogy: the institutional weakness of the Tsarist state had allowed cultures of violence to exist before 1914. But it took the complete breakdown of state authority to set these free and allow the evolution of biotopes of violence, quickly feeding upon each other. The First World War, then, made its contribution to the brutalization of politics in the former Russian empire insofar as it caused the breakdown of the state; and it is this very breakdown which marks the essential difference between the institutionalized violence of the First World War and the de-institutionalized spaces of the civil war. In these spaces, something new emerged, which can indeed be described well as a ‘brutalization’ of politics in Mosse’s sense: in the end the Bolsheviks opposed the anarchist violence, which had emerged in the wake of the breakdown of state and society during war and revolution, with an institutionalized violence organized in the military and the police, and legitimated by the project of socialism and the connected claim to total power. ⁴ White, Green, criminal and mob violence had much in common, were largely destructive and employed at best tactically. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, used force and the threat thereof to transform society and build a new state. While this strategic use of force helped them to win the civil war, it also ensured that violence was institutionalized in the new state.

The Great War overwhelmed the organizational capacities of the Tsarist Empire, revealing its structural weaknesses and initiated an unparalleled breakdown of civilization, a brutalization and, at the same time, a ‘barbarization’ of both domestic conflicts and external warfare. This descent into violence can be quantified. By 1917, out of a population of approximately 167 million, up to 18 million men were recruited, 15 million of them into the armed forces, and others into various forms of militarized labour. More than 600,000 soldiers died at the frontline, while over one million perished from wounds and illness. Roughly three million soldiers were wounded and over two million fell ill. The number of war invalids is estimated at over one million, including about 30,000 former POWs. ⁵ Between four and five million soldiers were captured by the enemy. ⁶

In the ethnically Russian areas of the empire, these numbers meant above all the replacement of men by women and children (and to a lesser extent by POWs) in all sectors of the economy. ⁷ More dramatic were the consequences for the border regions of the empire. In the frontline zones and their hinterland, more than six million people fled, were evacuated, or were expelled (such as Germans and a proportion of the Jews). Riga lost more than half of its inhabitants through evacuation and flight, with Courland and Livonia losing about 30 per cent of its population. Some front regions remained deserted, even after the war. ⁸ Of the territory that was to become the Republic of Poland, the population dwindled from about 30 million in 1914 to just over 26 million. The war-related destruction and the harsh occupation policies of the Central Powers had devastated the economy of the young republic. ⁹

Meanwhile, Russia itself suffered relatively less. In ranking order, the German and Russian Empires, France, and Austria-Hungary counted the highest tally of dead and wounded. However, relative to the number of mobilized soldiers, to the size of the male working-age population, and to the population as a whole, Russia occupied one of the last places among the warring states. ¹⁰ After all, Russia (in the borders of the 1930s Soviet Union) experienced a demographic growth from 139 million (1914) to about 142 million (1917). ¹¹

The balance of losses for the Soviet territories and peoples was much more dramatic for the period 1918–23. Both in the Russian centre and at the non-Russian periphery, the main victims were civilians. The central Russian territories with their industrial cities were almost constantly under Bolshevik control. Here, the main reasons for population losses were malnutrition, starvation and epidemics. ¹² At the periphery, population losses were caused by the highly mobile frontlines and the constant changes of government. Overall, the population in the territories which would become the Soviet Union declined from about 142 million in 1917 to 132 million in 1922. ¹³ The losses caused by the Civil War and the ensuing famine are estimated at 2.5 to 3 million in Russia and 1 to 1.5 million in Ukraine. ¹⁴

Up to five million people were recruited into the Red Army (at least on paper), and roughly one million into the White Armies. Of these, more than 700,000 died in the Red Army and perhaps 225,000 White soldiers. Between 300,000 and 600,000 Jews fell victim to pogroms, up to 1.3 million people perished as a result of Bolshevik repression and pacification measures, and between 20,000 and 100,000 in consequence of the White terror. Disease wiped out up to an estimated two million, including 280,000 Red Army soldiers. In the Polish POW camps, according to Soviet estimates, tens of thousands of Red soldiers died. ¹⁵ At the end of 1921, Soviet concentration camps held about 50,000 inmates. ¹⁶

The famine of 1921–2 affected between 22 and 30 million people. Famine deaths in the Volga region and the Ukraine are estimated at about one million each. Some authors even claim a total of five million. ¹⁷ Homeless children and waifs totalled between 800,000 and four million, ¹⁸ and the level of criminality was impossible to quantify since the end of 1917. ¹⁹ Finally, Russia lost between 1.5 and 2.5 million people due to emigration. ²⁰

Such destruction began to feed upon itself. In the First World War, it was not a lack of resources which led to Russia’s defeat, but poor organizational capacities. The Civil War, by contrast, was shaped by struggles about constantly diminishing resources. Many of the coercive acts and the actual fighting on all sides, including rebelling peasants, were caused by struggles to keep a modicum of industrial production, to maintain and control transportation networks, and to access increasingly scarce raw materials and food. The resulting war of all against all accelerated the breakdown of the economy, the processes of de-urbanization and de-industrialization, the destruction of the relations between city and countryside, the demolition of infrastructure, and the de-differentiation of rural space. By 1920, industrial production had fallen to about 20 per cent of its 1914 level, while only 60 per cent of pre-war agricultural land remained cultivated. ²¹ Together, these processes amounted to an unparalleled breakdown of civilization. Contemporaries spoke of a relapse into the seventeenth century, or likened it to the aftermath of a barbarian invasion. ²²

That war, revolution and civil war combined into a major discontinuity in Russian history does not mean that there were no enduring traditions in the techniques of rule between Tsarist and Soviet Russia. ²³ The clearest continuity were population policies, which before the twentieth century had not yet been practiced elsewhere in Europe. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, however, they were tried out in those regions where the Russian and the Ottoman Empires vied for influence and direct rule, from the Caucasus to the Balkans. The subjugation of the Northern Caucasus and the evolution of the Balkan states were connected to forced migration movements, in the case of the former it was Russian-Cossack immigration and the pushing out of indigenous peoples, particularly the Circassians. There does not seem to have been a conscious recourse to these practices in the First World War and after, but such policies remained part of the repertoire of the Empire and the emerging nation states. In the Russian case, such practices firstly targeted Germans and Jews in the western borderlands, and later targeted ‘classes’ and nationalities perceived as hostile, bourgeois, or petty bourgeois. ²⁴

There were other continuities as well. The weakness of the state and its inability to integrate the heterogeneous segments of its population made violence part of everyday politics by the turn of the century. The escalation of force reached its highpoint in the revolution of 1905–6. Conflict was not limited to that between ‘above and below’. Rather, a multitude of ‘fronts’ intersected and culminated in an orgy of violence: strikes, unrest, uprisings, growing criminality in city and countryside alike, political militancy in Poland, the Baltic provinces and Russia, inter-ethnic struggle particularly in the Baltics and the Caucasus, anti-Jewish pogroms in the western borderlands. We can distinguish between ‘civilian forms of struggle’ (such as strikes, demonstrations, and police action) and ‘wild’ pogrom-like forms of violence, particularly in the cities but also against country estates. There were also armed, terrorist acts of revolutionary groups, which could not always easily be distinguished from criminal violence (‘expropriations’), and the state’s pacifications using police or military troops, which were accompanied by a variety of excesses, particularly in the countryside. ²⁵ After 1907 things calmed down somewhat, but both in the factories and in the countryside the participants had not forgotten their own ability to act and threaten. Popular mobilization proved uncontrollable time and again: from the strike in the Lena goldfields (1912) to the situation approaching civil war in the working class suburbs on the eve of the war, and further unrest among recruits thereafter. ²⁶

The relationship of revolutionary groups to violence was central for the further development of conflicts since 1917. Here we refer less to their overt ideological doctrines than to the norms and models of behaviour, as well as images of the enemy, which both legitimized and encouraged political and revolutionary acts, but also police action. Before 1914, Russia was still well within the transformation from a world of estates to a modern mass society, resulting in partially old, partially new, and partially hybrid communities of communication: the countryside, the factory population, itinerant labourers, the intelligentsia and its public sphere, the bureaucratic service class, the rural nobility, the non-Russian nationalities with their own inter-ethnic differences, and many more besides. In the context of the breakdown of state and economy post-1917, the separation of, and sometimes antagonism between these communities created the conditions for the success of mobilizations around slogans of ‘class war’, ‘class hatred’, and ‘class instinct’, but also on the basis of antisemitism and inter-ethnic conflicts at the periphery of the empire. ²⁷ Again, the world war was crucial in this transformation. Before 1914, popular violence had been defensive, manifesting itself usually in unrests or upheavals against the state authority, including the destruction of estate property. Only the collapse of state institutions allowed the development of lawless spaces. In the West and the South, these coincided with the regions where the fronts of the First World War had been. Here, as well as in the rest of the periphery, White and Red forces competed not only with national troops, but also with Cossack and other formations. These sometimes had a political agenda, but frequently also a criminal one.

The breakdown of state authority triggered by the exertions of the war years was also crucial in the process which transformed the army from a disciplined agent of industrialized warfare into a destabilizing and de-organizing factor. The disintegration of the army from 1916, in turn, accelerated the downfall of the Old Regime and weakened the Provisional Government. By the end of 1917, the number of deserters had grown to perhaps as many as 370,000 at a time when the field army amounted to just over seven million men. ²⁸ More problematic for the Provisional Government than the deserters was the fact that more than one million soldiers were dislocated in the hinterland and the garrisons. Since the spring, these troops increasingly refused to be thrown at the front. Garrisons in large cities now became a political factor in themselves. As a rule, they sided with the Soviets and increasingly with the Bolsheviks or left SRs, while refusing to support the local representatives of the government. The tone was set by the Petrograd garrison, which saw itself as the guardian of the revolution and could only be convinced with great difficulty to send troops to the front. From the autumn of 1917, ‘colonies of deserters’ emerged everywhere. Together with the high-handedness of the garrison troops, these were responsible for much of the chaos and the criminality in cities and the countryside well into 1918. Near garrisons (and from autumn in the front regions too), squatting on agricultural land, the destruction of estates, requisitioning, plunder, and criminality were barely distinguishable from each other. ²⁹ Committees of various description emerged in the garrisons, which adapted the peasants’ demands for land redistribution as their own. They sent emissaries and agitators to the villages, attacked and expropriated gentry estates and distributed their land, together with holdings of single farmers, church and state land to the village commune. ³⁰ After 1918, the Red Army built on this tradition of mobilizing peasants: emissaries and plenipotentiaries agitated among the peasants, encouraged class struggle in the village and established ‘Committees of the Poor’ (kombedy) and other institutions, which combined class war with the requisition and re-distribution of land and property, sometimes abusing or shooting ‘kulaks’. ³¹

After October 1917 the garrison troops, particularly in the non-Russian regions, by and large supported the Bolsheviks or left SRs, which allowed the former to replace uncooperative soviets with dictatorial Military-revolutionary Committees (MRCs) or similar institutions. ³² This was part of a wider evolution of the Bolshevik dictatorship. During the Civil War, the Communist Party transformed from a revolutionary vanguard into the party of the civilian, police and military apparatus. About 60 per cent of members worked in bureaucracies and military staffs. The share of uniformed comrades was 30 per cent in Moscow, 42 per cent in Ukraine, and as high as 52 per cent in Belorussia. ³³ Hence, the Party has to be seen as one of the actors of violence; within an emerging division of labour it was a moving force for administrative, redistributive enforcement and physical violence.

As military commissars and Political Leaders (politruki), and as rank and file members in party cells, the comrades served as the Party's eyes and ears within the Red Army. Party members and sympathizers took over central positions within the MRC as well as within the Revolutionary (military) Tribunals. Already during the Civil War, a functional division of labour evolved between the higher Party institutions in Moscow, their plenipotentiaries in the localities, the MRC, the Revolutionary Tribunals, the Cheka, and, not least, the requisitioning squads sent to the countryside to extract grain and other produce from the peasantry (prodotrjady). In this way, Party members ‘learned’ to violently deal with a defiant population.

The uniforms of the old elites were now replaced by leather coats or leather jackets. The functional Mauser was substituted for the rather decorative sabres and bayonets of Old Regime vintage. The Red Star supplanted epaulettes and the multitude of signs of rank. The Red Army rank and file, meanwhile, could first not be supplied with uniforms, and wore what could be organized or stolen. ³⁴

Thus, the first combat units on both the Bolshevik side, and the side of their heterogeneous opponents, emerged from the debris of the old army in 1917–18. The emerging Red Workers- and Peasant-Army (hereafter RA) was composed until the summer of 1918 of scattered troops of the old army, workers’ militias (Red Guards), ‘international’ troops (that is, POWs of the Central Powers in Soviet Russia), Latvian riflemen, and more or less disorganized, roving and plundering bands. Even before the treaty of Brest-Litovsk individual units of the old army had united into national forces. Others formed pro- or anti-bolshevik units and roamed the country in something of an anabasis. Until the summer and fall of 1918, these forces operated largely autonomously, joined the one or the other side in the emerging civil war, but were not really controlled by either. In the south and in Ukraine the main groups were Cossack and peasant units, which could not be assigned to either side. The units of V.I. Kikvidze, V. Chapaev, S.I. Kotovskii, and F.K. Mironov (to name only the most famous leaders) joined the Bolshevik side. The former officer Mironov had a political agenda, ³⁵ others acted as autocratic warlords with rather criminal goals, like Kotovskii, who simply profited from the chaos and fashioned himself as a Robin Hood. ³⁶ In Ukraine, Cossack troops, led by the pogromist A.G. Volynec or N.I. Grigorev, were sometimes incorrectly seen as part of the White movement. This even applies to Nestor Makhno. Siberia and the Far East were haunted by the atamans G.M. Semenov and I.M. Kalmykov, among others, who were also known for their unrestrained brutality. ³⁷ Such units operated along train-lines and rivers, using trains and river-boats not only for transportation, but also as moving fortresses serving as bases for raids. In the 1930s, the Bolsheviks stylized adventurers like Kikvidze or Chapaev as heroes of the civil war, using a combination of proletarian-populist romanticism and leadership cult. The military leadership around Trotsky did indeed use the rebelliousness of these units, but also feared the ‘partisan ethos’ (partizanshchina), which the Bolsheviks construed in negative terms and tried to struggle against. Even Budennyi’s cavalry proved resistant to communist discipline. ³⁸

How the campaigns of such ‘heroes’ looked in practice can even be gauged from the materials the Bolsheviks published to celebrate their heroism. Consider Kikvidze as an example. His forces were extremely heterogeneous: White deserters fought side by side with Hungarian and Austrian prisoners of war, Cossacks, peasants, and soldiers of the old army. Even a Chinese unit is documented. The high death rates led to constant changes in the combination of troops within units, and new forces constantly joined, partially ordered by Moscow, partially spontaneously. The troops were followed by a large group of civilian hangers-on, who formed enormous baggage trains hindering the mobility of the forces and crowding the railway carriages of the moving fortresses. White officers were routinely shot if they refused to supply information about their own side; the troops drank excessively, plundered, and even mutinied; uprisings ensued in regions they marched through, such as Tambov. ³⁹

The control of such military units required a major effort by the new regime, but ultimately the Bolsheviks were successful in this quest, using a combination of strategically employed violence, the threat thereof, and positive incentives. The transformation of the armed gangs into a more unified fighting force began in earnest in the second half of 1918. The Soviet Republic was officially declared an ‘armed camp’ on 2 September, a reaction to the first conflicts with the Czech Legion, the establishment of the rival Samara-based and SR-supported government of the Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), and international intervention. Now, Bolshevik Russia was officially in a state of war and emergency, which also meant that a regular army was to be formed, after the cobbled together volunteer forces had proven themselves incompetent. The new army was drafted, at first with locally restricted, then later with increasingly universally-forced recruitments, both of rank and file soldiers and of NCOs and officers of the old army. Already at the end of 1918, volunteers made up only 18 per cent of the Red troops. ⁴⁰

The transition from the nomadic formations to a professional army of cadres and draftees was overseen by Lev Trotsky, Chairman of the Supreme Military Council (since March 1918), supported by ‘bourgeois’ generals and officers, designated since October 1917 as ‘military specialists’. On a lower level, two groups cooperated and sometimes clashed in the establishment of this professionally and politically loyal army: professional military men, and the newly established military commissars (the political watchdogs of the Party). M.D. Bonch-Bruevich expressed the perspective of the former when he wrote: ‘The entire development from a battalion of tramps to an orderly military unit was possible only because of the work of the military specialists.’ ⁴¹ This conformed with Lenin’s 1918 policy of ‘exploiting’ bourgeois specialists of all kinds, while subjecting them to strict political control through the Party. This policy would allow the communists to use the military specialists and ‘cook them soft’ (perevarit): communism was to be built with non-communist hands, as he again proclaimed on the XI Party Congress in 1922. ⁴²

Finding qualified military leaders remained a challenge. In as much as officers held out in what remained of the old army, they had been ‘toys in the hands of mass meetings’ (mitingueshchie massy). ⁴³ The majority of the 270,000 officers serving in the old army by October 1917 had been trained during the war. Pre-war cadres were the majority only among the staff officers. By early 1921, the RA had 217,000 commanders (as officers were now called) in their ranks, 34 per cent of whom had held leadership positions in the old army. Meanwhile, about 100,000 officers of the old army fought with White forces, probably a large share of the old cadre officers trained before 1914 among them. ⁴⁴ The higher command positions were to a large extent taken over by former generals and officers: 85 per cent of the commanders of fronts (that is, army groups), 82 per cent of army leaders, and 70 per cent of divisional commanders. ⁴⁵ There was a concerted effort to train ‘red commanders’ from the ranks, nearly 13,000 in August 1920. ⁴⁶ But during the Civil War the Red Army could not do without the officers of the old army.

The higher up in the hierarchy one looked, the more old cadres served the new masters. Most military headquarters and institutions, which tended to be dislocated on Bolshevik territory, were more or less completely taken over by the Red Army. The new general staff, called Revolutionary Military Council, concentrated on the maintenance or re-establishment of infrastructure and chains of command in case the war against the Central Powers was to resume. This secret activity was an important legitimization for generals and staff officers of the old army, who made themselves available to the Bolsheviks. ⁴⁷ As a result, quite similar numbers of the old top ranks served on both sides: 639 in the Red Army, 750 in White forces. Both the Supreme Military Council and its successor organization from September 1919, the Revolutionary Military Council (Revvoensovet), were composed almost exclusively of personnel from their pre-revolutionary equivalent.

Despite the reaffirmation of the military specialists in the Red Army, their position, in particular that of troop commanders, remained precarious. Neither volunteers nor conscripts had forgotten the new rights and freedoms of 1917. Many of them, including those born as far back as 1890, had already served in the old army during the revolutionary year. Even former POWs were re-enlisted. ⁴⁸ The former officers, in turn, could well remember the humiliations of 1917 and 1918, when during the ‘epaulette-revolution’ troops ripped off their superiors’ signs of distinction and military decorations, if they refused to do so themselves. Yesterday’s gentlemen were suddenly addressed as ‘citizen’ (grazhdanin) and lost their authority and power of command. ⁴⁹ Hence, conflict was rife between commanders and men, and managing it was part of the job of political commissars in headquarters and political leaders (politruki) in the troops. Officers and generals, meanwhile, were supposed to concentrate on their function as ‘military specialists’. They had to subordinate themselves to the commissars and politruki, sometimes at the price of self-sacrifice. Alternatively, they needed to ensure protection from the Party grandees. ⁵⁰ Party members saw the old officers as ‘hirelings’ with a comparatively high remuneration, which at the time was even higher than that which commissars received. ⁵¹ The draft of former officers often went hand in hand with taking family members hostage, or at least the threat of such action. If the officer deserted or engaged in sabotage, their family members were to be shot. ⁵² The generalized poverty and the will to survive added further incentives. Moreover, officers, like other members of the educated classes, perceived the Bolsheviks despite their revolutionary fury, as agents of order against the chaos in the country and the sometimes open hatred of the soldiers. Therefore, desertions to the enemy were relatively rare, particularly after 1918, when, according to Soviet historians, ‘conspiracies’ and sabotage became less frequent. ⁵³

The political apparatus within the army not only controlled the officers, but also protected them against their soldiers. And this bureaucracy continued to grow. In early 1919, the commissars were supplemented by 700 positions of the new Political Administration within the Revolutionary Military Council (Politicheskoe Upravlenie Respubliki). ⁵⁴ To quote contemporary decrees, their job was to ‘purge the army mercilessly’ of agitators who might be stirring up hatred against the military specialists. ⁵⁵

‘Party workers’ (politrabotniki) and commissars pretended to constitute not only the political, but also the military backbone of the Red Army. The Party's organizational form as well as its militant ethos – embodied especially in the commissars – dovetailed well with military culture. In their reports, commissars typically stressed the combination of militancy and tactical finesse in dealing with the ‘class enemy’. In 1920, at the first All-Russian Congress of Political Workers, participants celebrated themselves with the words: ‘Doubtlessly, the commissar embodied the will to fight and to win. He was the living bearer of the revolutionary idea.’ ⁵⁶ As others wrote, he embodied not only the ‘pathos of the revolution’, ⁵⁷ but also its violence. Seen from the perspective of the officers or other bystanders, the image was probably less flattering. Here he was, the constantly suspicious Party comrade, waving his revolver about, and attempting to establish authority by screaming abuse at subordinates. ⁵⁸ By the end of 1919 (according to not entirely reliable sources), about 6000 commissars were deployed in the army, among them 72 in territorial administrations of military regions, about 2000 in headquarters and military institutions, and well over 3000 in the army itself, all the way down to regiments, battalions, and batteries. ⁵⁹

In addition to political workers, most garrisons and troop units as far down the hierarchy as company level included Party cells, which also mobilized sympathisers. Reportedly, they sometimes even ‘filtered’ commissars. ⁶⁰ Communists serving in the ranks should not simply be soldiers, decreed Trotsky, but were to supply the example of the ‘soldier-hero’ (soldat-geroi). ⁶¹ The circulating hero stories typically focused on self-sacrifice. Communists defended others and fell under no circumstances into the hands of the enemy. ⁶²

Regulations of June 1918 defined the commissar as an ‘inviolable person’ (litso neprikosvennoe). He was construed as a ‘direct organ of political power’. ⁶³ Trotsky even granted him the right to shoot former officers, if they were caught in counter-revolutionary acts. The factual division of competences between commissar and commander were the subject of negotiation between the two, as the regulations were largely unknown within the army. ⁶⁴ The commissar had to share responsibility for operative and economic questions. In practice, all orders of the ‘military leadership’, chiefs of staff, and the territorial commissariats had to be counter-signed by military commissars; a rule also mentioned in the same set of regulations, but observed widely in practice, also within the troops. Throughout the Civil War, a certain normalization of the relationship between commissars and former officers took place. At least, this is what a wide range of reports imply. For example, one internal document of 1920 states: ‘The chronicle of heroic deeds reports more and more often that the corpses of commanders and commissars lie next to each other at the frontline.’ ⁶⁵ More prosaically, the two arms of command often passed out together after sharing a bottle. This kind of comradeship was criticized, because such drinking bouts threatened to activate class conflict with the rank and file. ⁶⁶

The Bolsheviks, much like the Old Regime, tended to swell up their armed forces, ranks and staff alike, replacing quality by quantity. Hence, the army grew from 800,000 in January 1919 to over five million by the start of 1921. However, probably no more than 20–30 per cent were part of the active troops at the mobile fronts at any one moment. On some occasions, as few as 10 per cent were actually fighting. ⁶⁷ The regular troops were supplemented by a plethora of special forces, united under the rubric ‘Internal Guards of the Republic’ (Vnutrennie okhrany Respubliki, or VOKhR), numbering about 262,000 men in June 1919, including 18,000 armed forces of the Cheka, 102,000 railway troops, 13,000 border guards, and 26,000 grain requisitioning squads (prodarmiia). ⁶⁸

The Red Army was meant to become a disciplined instrument able to enforce the monopoly of violence of the new party-state against the roaming units and criminal gangs. In the context of the civil war the simple threat of force was not enough to reach this goal. Rather, enemies had to be actively subdued or exterminated. Moreover, violence and administrative coercion were also used to actively transform society and re-educate the population. This combination led to a very specific accumulation of acts of violence: more or less organized violence against military opponents, violence against rebelling social groups, against the hard to contain criminal violence caused by the struggle for always scarce resources and as a result of the loss of state control. These factors were responsible for the brutalization of Bolshevik war-making and the reason for all kinds of acts of coercion against the population. At the same time, however, they became part of what Orlando Figes has called ‘an exercise in mass mobilization and state building.’ ⁶⁹ On the side of the Whites, by contrast, the terror was used more as a tool to politically subjugate the population and to maintain the status quo, and sometimes the status quo ante insofar as the social order in the village was concerned. ⁷⁰

The misery of the everyday life of soldiers, returnees, invalids, widows and orphans was covered by a loud propaganda effort, particularly intensive in the army, which agitated for the defence of Soviet power. Under the slogan of ‘political literacy’ (politgramota), soldiers, sergeants and emerging ‘red commanders’ were, depending on their personal needs, taught to read and write, trained and educated further, and above all indoctrinated. Politgramota was part of a larger set of practices of domination which the Bolsheviks used to cement their rule: rhetorical overpowering, administrative coercion through control of the distribution of food and jobs, the threat of violence and its application. In the process, the Bolsheviks both represented and transformed an endemic culture of violence, which by the end of the Civil War had become the norm. The evolving ‘spaces of violence’ were the biotope of Soviet state formation. Threatening and using violence in pursuit of their goals had become second nature to Party leaders and Party cadres. ⁷¹

‘The Bolsheviki know how to capture a city,’ the writer V.G. Korolenko claims to have said to the Commissar of Enlightenment, V.I. Lunacharskii.

Every time when they come, the robberies and outrages of the bandits come to a stop … But once the Bolshevik regime gets active with its Cheka, its arrests and extra-legal executions, this positive impression quickly transforms into hatred, and the population hopes for another change of regime… ⁷²

Whatever the popular sentiments involved, however, the combination of threat and use of violence, and of administrative coercion enforced by the ‘hunger weapon’, proved relatively successful in establishing the new state. This stood in contrast to the White side, where the destructive aspects of violence were predominant, largely because the enemies of Bolshevism never controlled a given territory long enough to build institutions. They also did not have a convincing message, either for the population of the mostly non-Russian periphery in which they operated, or for the majority of Russian workers and peasants. The units of the Atamans often deteriorated into communities of looters. In a similar vein to the peasant insurrections, they lacked the necessary material resources and organizational capacities to counter the systematic violence of the Bolsheviks.

The population was physically exhausted and remained unwilling to serve in the armed forces. This reluctance should not be confused with an opposition to violence, just as the anti-war movement of 1917 cannot be understood as an expression of pacifism. The population was actively involved in a spiral of violence. In the context of the universal impoverishment and chaos of public life, violence was also part of the process of redistribution of wealth. Linguistically, this found its expression in class-war slogans, which were accepted by large sectors of both the urban and rural population. Their inherently violent quality was tolerated or supported as part of a just economy. ⁷³ Referring to the October Revolution, Marc Ferro had already written decades ago:

The terror was not solely the doing of the Bolshevik leaders … and it came up from the depth; at the same time and in a way that their political rivals had foreseen, the Bolshevik leaders showed their predisposition to take it over and encourage it, since it reinforced their control of the state. ⁷⁴

The mechanisms of internal and external dissolution of the old army re-emerged both within the Red Army and its Civil War opponents, particularly in the form of widespread desertion, which included relatively few cases defecting to the enemy. But in the Red Army, the most widespread motives for avoiding military service were not ideological or political, but existential: extreme hardship, poverty, sickness, lack of food, problems with transport, or, not least, agricultural work necessary for survival. This fact did not make desertion less destructive, as it was accompanied with theft, all kinds of criminal behaviour, and often the emergence of bandit groups. The numbers involved were staggering. By mid-1920 the authorities counted more than 2.6 million Red Army soldiers and recruits who had gone AWOL. Ten per cent of these were viewed as ‘malicious’ (zlostny); a term denoting political or criminal motives. Nearly 60 per cent gave themselves up of their own volition, while the rest were caught. ⁷⁵ If only 15 per cent of recruits did not present themselves for enlistment, that was seen as a good result. Mostly, the share of shirkers was considerably higher. ⁷⁶ Mass searches for soldiers and recruits were organized in order to test the local infrastructure of military commissions or local MRCs, or at times to build it in the first place. They showed the sorry state of the men who tried to avoid service. ⁷⁷ The Bolshevik authorities hence knew that avoiding or escaping service was mostly caused by a ‘weakness of will’ (po slabosti voli), that is, that hardship and external circumstances were to blame. The death sentence was used sparingly for this reason, and was most of the time suspended. Particularly grave cases were sent to concentration camps, less serious ones sentenced to service in penal battalions. In 1920, the threat of confiscation of property and collective responsibility of family members were also used. In cases of mass avoidance of service, entire villages could be held responsible and punished with different measures – from confiscation to deportation into camps. ⁷⁸

Apart from the threat of punishment the Bolsheviks invested comparatively large sums and energy into the ‘enlightenment’ (prosveshchenie) of their soldiers, which coexisted with violence or the threat thereof. The will to ‘enlighten’ remained as much a part of the Bolshevik regime after the end of the Civil War as the hatred towards the ‘kulaks’, and the ‘petty bourgeoisie’. ⁷⁹ This duality was combined with the self-conditioning of the cadres, who frequently hailed from exactly these despised strata. They grew together into institutionalized communities of violence. Since the civil war, the symbolic integration of these groups was the cult of the leader, in a way an institutionalized variant of the atamanshchina, or ‘warlordism’. Stalin and others would soon speak of the Party as an ‘order’ or later, as an army with generals, officers, and NCOs. ⁸⁰

During the last few decades, the exploration of violence as a historical phenomenon has undergone important changes. Recently, an interest in the short and long-term origins, as well as the goals of violence, has been replaced by a focus on violence as a form of communication. Historians no longer simply ask for motives of perpetrators and the behaviour of the victims. This search for the ‘why’ has been supplemented by an inquiry about the ‘how’: forms, expressions, and audiences of violence have to be understood as well. ⁸¹ How did violence find its expressive forms in the case under review here? To answer this question, we must once again return to the First World War.

Although the eastern front was far more mobile than its western equivalent, lethal violence was still concentrated and more or less controlled as technical violence against the enemy on the other side of the frontline. However, in the combat regions of the Trans-Caucasus as well as the western borderlands, forced migration was also part of this war: occupation was followed by evacuations, expulsions and deportations of large segments of the indigenous population. The influx of troops and their often suspicious, sometimes openly hostile and violent relationship to an ethno-national ‘other’, created situations which were very often hard to distinguish from an occupation by an enemy force. In the west the victims were, first and foremost, Germans and Jews. ⁸²

The February Revolution eroded authority and the power of the state, first in the hinterland, then also at the frontline, releasing a substantial reservoir of violence by soldiers and particularly deserters, directed in the first instance against estate owners and traders. The winter of 1917–18 was the time of anarchic violence, fuelled by excessive alcohol consumption. But heavy drinking was also part of the symbolic attack on authority itself, as it broke with wartime prohibition of drinking among soldiers as well as slighting the attempts of state and voluntary associations to promote ‘sobriety’. ⁸³ During this time anarchic forms of violence coexisted with increasingly organized, administrative, police and military violence. The latter won out on Bolshevik territory since the autumn of 1918, challenged one last time by the uprising of the sailors of Kronstadt (March 1921) and the many peasant uprisings in the grain producing regions of the Russian south and east, as well as in Ukraine and Siberia. ⁸⁴

The actual combat zones of the Civil War were on the peripheries of the Empire: from Finland and the Baltic countries in the north, via the Ukraine in the west, the Caucasus and Central Asia in the south, and Siberia in the east. These regions were repeatedly criss-crossed by constantly changing armed units. The occupational forces changed just as frequently. White, Red, and national units, as well as the troops of the atamans, vented their rage in the Cossack regions, Siberia and Ukraine. The border regions of the periphery had to endure not only warfare between Bolsheviks and Whites, but also inter-ethnic struggle: in Central Asia indigenous peoples fought each other and the Russian colonists and units – White or Red; in the Caucasus, indigenous peoples encountered each other, in particular the Turkish Azeri and the Armenians; in the Don territory Cossacks confronted the subservient (inogorodnie) population in city and countryside; in the west, serious aggression against Jews intermingled with Ukrainian–Polish and Polish–Lithuanian conflicts. Coalitions changed constantly. One warlord replaced the next and every change of ruler triggered booty-making and punitive expeditions. These units were poorly integrated and weakly organized. In the long run, they were no serious opponents to White units, and particularly not to the Red Army, but they tormented the population not unlike these more regular combatants. ⁸⁵

During the Civil War, we cannot simply assign the status of victim to certain ethnicities or classes, and the label of perpetrator to others. Jews, for example, can be found as Bolshevik perpetrators and as victims of pogroms. ⁸⁶ Peasants perpetrated acts of revenge and were active in uprisings, but also fell victim to White and Red marauding; as Red Guards – or later as commissars – workers perpetrated Bolshevik violence but also fell victim to it and, to an even larger extent, to the wrath of the Whites; the propertied and educated elites of the Old Regime can be found among the perpetrators and the victims of both sides. Educated professionals, in principle targets of ‘class war’, also had a good chance of privileged survival under the Bolsheviks if their profession made them valuable as ‘bourgeois specialists’. It was the arbitrary nature of Bolshevik rule rather than an explicit policy if they were subjected to repression. Meanwhile, the members of the propertied classes – entrepreneurs, bankers, estate owners – as well as the higher clergy, were more or less completely on the side of the victims of Bolshevism. On the other side of the frontline, activist workers and Communists (both functionaries and ordinary members) became victims of the Whites.

Given its extent and consistent presence since autumn of 1917, we can list many instances of ‘meaningless violence’. According to the Bolshevik charge against ministers of Kolchak in May 1920, the general's troops were particularly brutal during the retreat. Prisoners were shot in prisons, victims were tortured, strung up, or buried alive. In the Yekaterinburg region alone ‘the Kolchak regime shot at least 25,000 people. 8000 people were shot or buried alive in the mines of Kizelov; in the regions of Tagil and Nadezhdinka about 10,000 were tormented and shot’. ⁸⁷ Reports from Arkhangelsk region mention the furies of red partisans. During grain requisitioning in one village forty people were massacred, eyes gouged out, faces cut up, genitals chopped off, and people thrown into icy water. A priest was literally hacked to pieces. ⁸⁸ Although atrocities of this kind did take place, we should not take individual reports and stories, and in particular the numbers involved, as true representations of reality. They were also reflections of the nightmares and fears, the trauma and hatred of both sides.

Besides ‘senseless violence’ we can observe expressive acts conveying messages, which became meaningful for the opposing sides, but also for bystanders. Such acts recurred often. They were either perpetrated in the open or at least announced publicly. The arsenal of ‘professed terror’ included, on the Bolshevik side, the threat and announcement of executions and of hostage taking, mass arrests, mass executions, and the establishment of concentration camps. Notorious cases include the Bolshevik massacres of strikers and soldiers in Astrakhan (March 1919), deportations and mass killings of Cossacks on the Don and the Kuban (1919 and 1920) and, after the retreat of Wrangel’s Whites from the Crimea, mass shootings and deportations of ‘White’ officers and civilians (late 1920). ⁸⁹

Symbolic violence supplemented physical force: public shaming was part of this Bolshevik repertoire as were coerced public denunciations of ‘enemies of the regime’. Similar methods were used against striking factory populations: the presumed ringleaders were arrested or shot, and the rest of the workers had to openly denounce them and swear allegiance to the regime. It is easy to imagine the ensuing (and intentional) polarisation of such measures. This tactic of divide by enforced betrayal and rule by coerced shaming was used almost systematically in the fight against peasant uprisings and desertion. It flanked the serious propaganda efforts to win over the population.

Forms of redistributive violence – requisitions, confiscations, plunder – were practiced by all sides, an example of the central role of looting in most wars up to the present time. ⁹⁰ There were two main reasons for Whites, atamans, and peasant insurrectionists to forcibly collect food and other supplies from the population: they needed them for their own consumption, and confiscating them from enemies was a form of punishment. For the Bolsheviks, such practices always had a strategic, ideological, and political meaning: they stigmatized the class enemy, weakened or even exterminated the bourgeois or kulak foe. ⁹¹ The policy of requisitioning, then, was already part of engineering the socialist project. In the words of the Chairman of the Cheka of the Fifth Army of the Eastern Front, M.I. Lacis, in the summer of 1918, the ‘Red Terror’ was not ‘war against individual persons.’ Rather, ‘we exterminate (my istrebliaem) the bourgeoisie as a class’. ⁹²

The Red Terror thus had several functions: it allowed redistribution within the parameters of class warfare, permitted ‘surgical operations’ with population and class-oriented political goals, and served as a deterrent to potential enemies. Finally, it also helped in disciplining its own clientele, the fight against corruption or excesses among Party functionaries. Hence, the Terror was also already part of state formation à la bolchevique, supported by arguments of a breathtaking dialectic: The Bolshevik dictatorship realised itself, it was claimed, in coercion against itself as against all others. In the process, ‘proletarian compulsion in all its forms, from executions by shooting to the duty to work’ was seen as ‘the method to create a communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist epoch’. ⁹³

While not subscribing to similar world historical strategies, the White armies were as violent as their Red counterpart. Their behaviour confirmed to peasants and workers that they represented the old masters. Miners were thrown into mine shafts or locked up below ground. Sometimes their families were murdered. Old fashioned lordly ways presented themselves, particularly in the publicly performed floggings and the execution by hanging of ‘Reds’ and rebelling peasants. These were all old regime punishments, although the Bolsheviks also practised them. ⁹⁴ White units, the troops of the atamans, the Ukrainian nationalists (‘Haidamaks’), and the Cossacks were even more prone to excesses. In the south and west of the Empire these were initially directed against Jews. The anti-Jewish pogroms in the towns and shtetls had neither a political nor an economic goal. They served more to demoralize than to support politics with military violence. ⁹⁵ They remained a symptom of the missing control over the troops and the lacking authority of the political leadership. ⁹⁶ While for the Bolsheviks violence had state building goals and consequences, for their enemies it remained an expression of the loss of authority and of state breakdown, which transformed whole areas into spaces of violence dominated by local as well as mobile warlords. ⁹⁷ The danger that troops would become nomadic, marauding communities of violence, also existed on the side of the Bolsheviks. Particularly prone to such deterioration were the special troops and grain requisitioning squads. ⁹⁸ Such behaviour was denounced as ‘partisan ethos’ (partizanshchina), which had to be feared ‘like fire’ (kak ognia) also within its own ranks. ⁹⁹

In their fight against requisitions and repressive measures, peasant insurrectionists often used very expressive forms of violence. Members of grain requisitioning squads, for example, were disembowelled and their stomachs filled with grain or straw. Commissars or Party members had stars, hammer and sickle, or ‘100 %’ (of the norm) cut or burned into their bodies. Older forms of execution were revived: quartering, stretching or cutting off of limbs and heads, drowning under the ice of frozen streams or lakes. Sometimes victims were crucified with their heads down, or only with one arm. As peasants were poorly armed, they often used hunting weapons; the result being that their victims were literally slaughtered. At the highpoint of the struggle, peasant insurrectionists also borrowed from the Bolshevik rule book: they took Communists and their families hostage. ¹⁰⁰

The crumbling of state authority and collapse of civilization which was triggered by the institutional over-reach of the First World War led to the proliferation of the uncontrolled violence of the subsequent civil war. As we have illustrated above, all participants in the civil war were extremely violent. The Bolsheviks were just the most successful of the violent actors in this struggle. The origin of the carnage, then, lies neither simply in Bolshevik ideology nor solely in long-term traditions. Rather, it was the interaction of these traditions of violent behaviour with the breakdown of civilization, caused, ultimately, by the war, in which the origins of civil war violence can be located. Within this generally violent ecosystem, the Bolsheviks' relationship to force stands out. Compared to their opponents, they used violence more intelligently, more purposefully, and above all more institutionally, which partially explains their ultimate victory over the other violent actors they were confronted with. The Bolsheviks opposed the often completely anarchic violence of their opponents with a better organized and stronger disciplined use of force. For them, violence included an element of social engineering, of bringing about the socialist society of the future. In the context of a demonetarized economy the Bolsheviks used, often quite drastically, their strategic control of production and distribution to enforce cooperation of non or anti-Bolshevik groups: bourgeois specialists, as well as the mass of the unwilling soldiers. A specific organizational technique which emerged within the structure of the Bolshevik Party, and an ethos of militancy and a barely suppressed willingness to use violence, allowed the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to assert itself within a mostly opposing, if exhausted, environment. At the same time, however, the violent origins of the Soviet state had an afterlife which can indeed be described in terms of Mosse’s ‘brutalization thesis’: Once the Bolsheviks had won through the use of force, violence remained a constitutive part of their project for the further transformation of society.