Because the Whites were getting such meagre aid, Petliura’s Ukrainian nationalists were the first to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the German forces from the Ukraine. They were soon forced out of Kiev and pushed deep into the Western provinces by the Reds invading from the north. But the Reds in turn had only a weak hold over the Ukraine, which sank deeper and deeper into chaos. The Bolsheviks’ policies in the countryside met with widespread resistance from the peasantry, who rallied to the local nationalists, to the various Green armies that hid out in the woods and to Makhno’s anarchists. Meanwhile, the Whites were rallying their own forces. The withdrawal of the Germans had deprived Krasnov’s Don Army of its main protector and exposed its left flank to the Reds who were advancing from the Ukraine. The Don Army had already been stretched by its winter campaign against Tsaritsyn. It was falling apart, its Cossacks deserting in droves as the Reds advanced. Krasnov was forced to seek Denikin’s aid, knowing that the White leader would demand the subordination of the Don Army to his own command. With the Allies backing Denikin, there was little else that Krasnov could do. On 8 January the Don Army was finally merged with the Volunteers. They were now called the Allied Forces of South Russia — although in reality they were anything but a unified force.
The counter-revolutionary armies of the south were now under the command of men committed to a national campaign. During the following spring they were to break out of their Cossack homelands and occupy south Russia, most of the Ukraine and even threaten Moscow itself. In the process their forces were to grow and develop into a mass conscript army dependent on the recruitment of the peasantry. This was the root of their ultimate downfall: their neglect of politics had not prepared them for the tasks that now confronted them in ruling these newly conquered territories.
ii The Ghost of the Constituent Assembly
By comparison with the bread-starved cities of the Bolshevik north, the Volga city of Samara was a gourmand’s delight. Peasant carts laden down with bags of flour and carcasses of meat, milk and vegetables trundled daily into its busy market. Food was plentiful and it showed in the rosy cheeks of the city’s residents. Merchants grew fat on the booming trade: they dressed in the finery and jewels that had once belonged to the well-to-do of Petrograd and Moscow. Even the horses looked well fed.
Thousands of so-called ‘former people’ fled to the Volga city. Among the refugees were the remnants of the shattered Right SRs, seeking a new provincial base after their defeat in Petrograd and Moscow. The Volga region was a stronghold of their party. Its peasant population had voted overwhelmingly for it in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. The SR leaders naturally assumed the people of the Volga would rally behind their struggle against the Leninist dictatorship. If the Bolshevik drive to power had been based on the hunger of the urban masses, then the restoration of the democracy would depend on the well-fed peasantry. Bread and liberty went together.
But the Right SRs were soon to be disillusioned by their pilgrimage to the provinces. Their local party organizations were in total disarray. With the return of the peasant soldiers, many of them radicalized by the army, the Volga Soviets had swung to the far left. Soviet power had taken root in the villages as a system of local self-rule, the Constituent Assembly was now a remote parliament. The peasants had greeted its closure by the Bolsheviks with a deafening silence. It was hardly the outburst of popular indignation the SRs had expected. ‘Unless’, declared Klimushkin, one of the SR leaders in Samara, at the start of May, ‘there is a spur from the outside in the near future, we can give up all hopes of a coup d’étât.’27
