By far the biggest weakness of Kolchak’s army was its failure to mobilize the local population. Its offensive came to a halt for want of adequate reinforcements, while far too many conscripts deserted. This was mainly a question of the peasants. True, the White advance was critically weakened by the desertion of the Bashkirs and the Cossacks on the southern flank, which allowed Frunze’s army to break through. But the vast majority of the population in Western Siberia and the Volga-Kama region, where the offensive would be made or broken, were either Russian or Ukrainian peasants. On the face of it, there was no reason why the Siberian peasants should be hostile to the Whites. There was no real landownership by the gentry to the east of the Urals, so the major factor binding the peasants to the revolution in central Russia did not come into play here. Most of the older settlers were relatively wealthy mixed and dairy farmers, who, one would have thought, should have had a stake in the Whites’ post bellum status quo based on private property. Yet the peasants to the east of the Urals proved just as reluctant to join Kolchak’s army as those to the west.
It was partly a question of image. Kolchak’s regime, rightly or wrongly, was associated with a restoration of the tsarist system. This was communicated by the epaulettes of his officers; and by the tsarist and feudal methods employed by his local officials, who often whipped the peasants when they disobeyed their orders. This was bound to bring them into head-on conflict with the Siberian peasantry, whose ancestors had run away from serfdom in Russia and the Ukraine and whose love of freedom and independence was thus very strong. The whole ethos of the Kolchak regime was alien to the peasants — a feeling expressed in the peasant chastushka, or rhyming song:
English tunics, Russian epaulettes;
Japanese tobacco, Omsk despots.
The closer the Whites moved towards central Russia the harder it became for them to mobilize the local peasantry. In the crucial Volga region, the furthest point of Kolchak’s advance, the peasants had gained more of the gentry’s land than anywhere else in Russia and so had most to fear from a counter-revolution. Here Kolchak dug his own grave by failing to sanction the peasant revolution on the land. Like Denikin’s regime in the south, where the landowners were equally dominant, Kolchak’s government was quite incapable of anything more than a carefully guarded bureaucratic response to what was the vital issue of the civil war. It was a classic example of the outdated methods of the Whites. ‘Any future land law’, Kolchak’s land commission declared on 8 April, would ‘have to be based on the rights of private property’. Only the ‘unused land of the gentry’ would be ‘transferred to the toiling peasantry’, which in the meantime could do no more than rent it from the government. As one critic put it, such a declaration was ‘a marvellous propaganda tool for the Bolsheviks. All they have to do is to print it up and distribute it to the peasantry.’13
To mobilize the peasants Kolchak’s army resorted increasingly to terror. There was no effective local administration to enforce the conscription in any other way, and in any case the Whites’ world-view ruled out the need to persuade the peasants. It was taken for granted that it was the peasant’s place to serve in the White army, just as he had served in the ranks of the Tsar’s, and that if he refused it was the army’s right to punish him, even executing him if necessary as a warning to the others. Peasants were flogged and tortured, hostages were taken and shot, and whole villages were burned to the ground to force the conscripts into the army. Kolchak’s cavalry would ride into towns on market day, round up the young men at gunpoint and take them off to the Front. Much of this terror was concealed from the Allies so as not to jeopardize their aid. But General Graves, the commander of the US troops, was well informed and was horrified by it. As he realized, the mass conscription of the peasantry ‘was a long step towards the end of Kolchak’s regime’. It soon destroyed the discipline and fighting morale of his army. Of every five peasants forcibly conscripted, four would desert: many of them ran off to the Reds, taking with them their supplies. Knox was livid when he first saw the Red troops on the Eastern Front: they were wearing British uniforms.14
