At the root of the Whites’ defeat was a failure of politics. They proved unable and unwilling to frame policies capable of getting the mass of the population on their side. 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; and they failed to see the need to adapt themselves to the realities of the revolution. The Whites’ failure to recognize the peasant revolution on the land and the national independence movements doomed them to defeat. As Denikin was the first to acknowledge, victory depended on a popular revolt against the Reds within central Russia. Yet that revolt never came. Rather than rallying the people to their side the Whites, in Wrangel’s words, ‘turned them into enemies’.48
This was partly a problem of image. Although Kolchak and Denikin both denied being monarchists, there were too many supporters of a tsarist restoration within their ranks, which created the popular image — and gave ammunition to the propaganda of their enemies — that they were associated with the old regime. The Whites made no real effort to overcome this problem with their image. Their propaganda was extremely primitive and, in any case, it is doubtful whether any propaganda could have overcome this mistrust. In the end, then, the defeat of the Whites comes down largely to their own dismal failure to break with the past and to regain the initiative within the agenda of 1917. The problem of the Russian counter-revolution was precisely that: it was too counter-revolutionary.
With the defeat of the Whites the Old Russia of Prince Lvov had finally been buried. ‘My heart bleeds’, he wrote to Rodichev in November 1920, ‘for my distant and unhappy native land. It pains me to think of the torments being suffered there by my friends and relatives — and indeed by all the people.’ In 1918 Lvov had insisted on the need to fight the Reds by military means. He had not believed in the possibility of a democratic movement within Russia. Yet by 1920 even he had come to see that this was wrong. ‘We were mistaken to think that the Bolsheviks could be defeated by physical force,’ he wrote to Bakhmetev in November. ‘They can only be defeated by the Russian people. And for that the Whites would need a democratic programme.’49
ii Comrades and Commissars
A shocking report landed on Lenin’s desk in September 1919. It showed that the Smolny, citadel of the October Revolution, was full of corruption. ‘Money flows freely from the coffers of the Petrograd Soviet into the pockets of the party leaders,’ the head of its Workers’ Section wrote to Lenin. For several months the Provisions Department had failed to release food to the workers’ districts, and yet meanwhile from the back of the Smolny foodstuffs were being sold by the lorry-load to black-marketeers. ‘The hungry workers see the well-dressed Tsarinas of the Soviet Tsars coming out with packets of food and being driven away in their cars. They say it’s just the same as it was in the old days with the Romanovs and their Fräulein, Madame Vyrubova. They are afraid to complain to Zinoviev [the party boss in Petrograd] since he is surrounded by henchmen with revolvers who threaten the workers when they ask too many questions.’ Shocked by this report, Lenin ordered Stalin, as the People’s Commissar for State Control, to carry out an ‘ultra-strict inspection of the Smolny offices’. He wanted it completed without the knowledge of Zinoviev or his officials. But Stalin refused to ‘spy on comrades’, claiming this would undermine the work of the party at a crucial moment of the civil war. It was typical of his attitude: the bonds of comradeship and the survival of the party were more important than any evidence of the abuse of power.50
