Red Army - reasons for success and Terror Flashcards
Reasons for success - stand for revolution
propaganda portraying socialist future
deserters return
- June 1919 Whites threatened Orel and Moscow
- July-Sep 1919 almost 250,000 desrters returned from Orel and Moscow alone
- In Orel the amount of land in peasant use had increased by 28 per cent; while in the Moscow military district the increase was as much as 35 per cent.
Reasons for success - Role of Trotsky - reform
August 1918 authorized the formation of barrier troops stationed behind unreliable Red Army units, with orders to shoot anyone withdrawing from the battle-line without authorisation.[
Reasons for success - Role of Trotsky - insipiring leader
went from front to front in armoured train with printing press = travelled 70,00 miles
Reasons for success - Role of Trotsky - defence of Petrograd
- 19 october 1919 Yudenich advanced to Petrograd
- some Bols in Moscow willing to give it up
- trotsky refused - the city would “defend itself on its own ground”
- Trotsky armed all available workers, men and women, ordering the transfer of military forces from Moscow.
- Within a few weeks the Red Army defending Petrograd had tripled in size and outnumbered Yudenich three to one
- Yudenich called off siege, army fell apart
Reason for success - geography
70 million people in Soviet |Russia - 8-10 mil in White
held Petrograd + Moscow = ammunition supplies
european russia = trains = transfer of supplies and troops
Red Terror - arbitrary
Cheka in Omsk comcomplained in April that of the 1,000 cases of ‘counter-revolution’ so far brought before it, more than 200 had had to be thrown out because based on grudges
Red terror - where did it stem from
- sections of society were driving the Terror from below as a means of retribution against those whom they perceived as their own enemies
- As Dzerzhinsky himself wrote in 1922, all the Cheka did was to ‘give a wise direction’ to the ‘centuries-old hatred of the proletariat for its oppressors’
‘- ‘We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror,’ Lenin - The Soviets levied their own punitive taxes on the bourgeoisie. This was often the start of the Bolshevik Terror, since the local Chekas were inclined to enforce the payment of these levies by arresting hostages. In Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, the Soviet imposed a revolutionary levy of twenty-two million roubles, while the Cheka arrested 105 bourgeois citizens and held them hostage until the levy was paid
- he Cheka in Omsk complained in April that of the 1,000 cases of ‘counter-revolution’ so far brought before it, more than 200 had had to be thrown out because the only evidence against the accused had been the hearsay of some person or group of people who, it later turned out, had a private grudge.
Red terror - internal opposition
- Kamenev, Bukharin and Olminsky led the attack on the abuse of Cheka power.
in trying to subordinate the Cheka to the state. - November demand for the Cheka’s abolition and its replacement by a new terror organ directly under the control of the Soviet Executive
- 9 Jan 1919 Kamenev proposed abolition of Cheka, not supported; reforms in February not as radical as hoped, abolished at district level, elsewhere powers defined as investigation.. 22 Feb leading Mensheviks arrested
Red terror - growth and scale
Decree ‘On Red Terror’ 5 Sep 1918
- following 30 August 1918 assasination attempt on Lenin by Fanya Kaplan (SR)
- allowed creation of concentration camps
1923, 315 camps, 70,000 enemies of the state
1918-20 = 140,000 executions, Okhrana in 50 years = 14,000
Emergence of Terror - historiography
According to Figes, “The Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror” According to Richard Pipes, violence was implicit in Marxism itself. He argued that terror inevitably resulted from what he saw as a Marxist belief that human lives are expendable in the cause of building Communism.
Reasons why Reds won - CPSU
- The Red Army was victorious because the Soviet Government’s policy for which the Red Army was fighting was a right policy, one that corresponded to the interests of the people - - [White Army] lacked only one thing – the support and sympathy of the peoples of Russia;
- The Red Army was victorious because it was absolutely loyal and faithful to its people
Reasons why Reds won - Pipes
- They lost because they were outnumbered and outgunned.
- The Whites had no government; their several armies were widely separated and most of the time out of touch with each other.
Reasons why Reds won - Fitzpatrick
The peasants resented the Bolsheviks’ policy of grain requisitioning, but the Whites were no different in this respect The Whites, on the other hand, did not approve of land seizures and supported the former landowners’ claims. Thus on the crucial issue of land, the Bolsheviks were the lesser evil.
Reasons why Reds won - Figes
- Most people wanted nothing to do with the civil war: they kept their heads down and tried to remain neutral
- The peasants believed that a White victory would reverse their own revolution on the land
- At the root of the Whites’ defeat was a failure of politics. Their movement was based, in Wrangel’s phrase, on ‘the cruel sword of vengeance’; their only idea was to put the clock back to the ‘happy days’ before 1917
- The Whites’ failure to recognize the peasant revolution on the land and the national independence movements doomed them to defeat
- Rather than rallying the people to their side the Whites, in Wrangel’s words, ‘turned them into enemies’
Historiography - terror
“were subjected to a Red terror in retaliation for their White terror against the Bolsheviks,” CPSU
Smith: ‘The belief that the end justified the means served them well, blinding them to the way in which means corrupt ends.’
