During the summer, the Komuch and Czech forces were able to conquer territory almost at will. The Reds were chronically weak, without food supplies or a proper army. Ufa fell to the Czechs on 6 July; Simbirsk, Lenin’s birthplace, on the 22nd; and Kazan, with its huge tsarist gold reserve, on 6 August. Two days later the munitions workers of Izhevsk, 150 miles to the north of Kazan, rose up against the Soviet and declared their sympathy for the Komuch. It was the biggest ever workers’ uprising against the Bolsheviks — and a major embarrassment for the regime. The revolt soon spread to the neighbouring countryside, where many of the workers’ families still lived. Volunteer detachments were formed to fight the Reds. This was the height of the Komuch’s fortunes. It now controlled an area the size of mainland Italy, with a population of fourteen million people.
But the Komuch’s military potential was always very fragile. The Czech Legion was unwilling to fight in Russia indefinitely. Its soldiers were tired and wanted to go home, and their morale declined further as the Reds became better organized. By the middle of August, the Czech units were falling apart. Some of the soldiers were socialists and they went over to the Reds, who barraged them with propaganda; others simply gave up fighting and sold off their supplies to the local population. The Czech Legion broke down into bands of petty profiteers.
It was all the more essential, then, that the Komuch should raise its own troops from the Volga population. One of its first acts had been to appeal for volunteers. In the towns some 8,000 people — most of them students and cadets, but also refugees and the unemployed without other means of support — responded to the call. But in the countryside the number of volunteers was tiny: the majority of the peasantry wanted nothing to do with the ‘fratricidal’ civil war. Whilst they were willing to defend the revolution in their own localities — and for this they formed their own peasant companies — most of them looked on the war as a remote struggle between the urban parties. ‘The mood of the peasants is indifferent,’ declared a recruiting officer of the People’s Army; ‘they just want to be left to themselves. The Bolsheviks were here — that’s good, they say; the Bolsheviks went away — that’s no shame, they say. As long as there is bread then let’s pray to God, and who needs the Guards? Let them fight it out by themselves, we will stand aside. It is well known that playing it by ear is the best side to be on.’ At the Samara peasant assembly, organized by the Komuch in September, the delegates declared that they would ‘not fight their own brothers, only enemies’. They ‘refused to support a war between the political parties’ and urged the Komuch ‘to come to an agreement with the Bolsheviks’. One delegate proposed that ‘the continuation of the civil war ought to be decided by a referendum, and until we know the opinion of the whole population we do not have a moral right to vote on this resolution [to support the war]’.33
To the mass of the peasants, whose political horizons were limited to the narrow confines of their villages, the national goals of the Komuch were quite alien. The restoration of the Constituent Assembly meant little to them when they already had the land and their freedom. The Komuch’s call for the renewal of the war against Germany, six months after the fighting had ceased, clashed with the peasantry’s parochial pacifism. ‘The war with Germany and all wars are bad,’ resolved the peasants of one village. ‘If we do not fight, then the German soldiers will not take our territory,’ reasoned the peasants of another. The district police chief of Samara concluded that ‘the population is poorly enlightened about the aims of the People’s Army … The idea has taken root that the “bourgeois” have started a new war because the “peace” signed by the Bolsheviks is unfavourable to them; but that the peasantry “has suffered no loss” and will not do so if it allows the bourgeoisie to fight by themselves.’34
