Complaints about the Bolshevik élite were also heard in the party itself. There was a groundswell of feeling in the lower party ranks that the leadership had become too distant from the rank and file. Many of these criticisms would come to be expressed by the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition, the two great factions which rocked the party leadership in 1920–1 (see here). As one Old Bolshevik from Tula wrote to Lenin in July 1919: ‘We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them. The old comradely spirit of the party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one-man rule in which the party boss runs everything. Bribe-taking has become universal: without it our Communist comrades would simply not survive.’ Writing to Trotsky the following May, Yoffe expressed similar fears about the degeneration of the party:
There is enormous inequality and one’s material position largely depends on one’s post in the party; you’ll agree this is a dangerous situation. I have been told, for example, that before the last purge the Old Bolsheviks were terrified of being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this. The old party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion! Today’s youth is being brought up in these new conditions: that is what makes one fear most for our Party and the Revolution!71
iii A Socialist Fatherland
At the age of sixty-six, when most men are planning to play with their grandchildren, Brusilov made the most dramatic change of his entire military career and volunteered to serve in the Red Army. It was no ordinary defection from the old corps of tsarist generals. Brusilov was Russia’s most famous soldier, its only hero from the First World War, and as such the last living symbol of a winning aristocratic past. News of his appointment in May 1920 to a Special Conference of Trotsky’s Revolutionary Military Council came as a rude shock to all those who looked back with nostalgia to the days before 1917. ‘Brusilov has betrayed Russia,’ one ex-colonel wrote. ‘How can it be that he prefers to defend the Bolsheviks and the Jews rather than his fatherland?’ added the wife of an old Guards officer. False rumours circulated that Brusilov had received lavish bribes (two million roubles, a Kremlin apartment) for his services to the Reds. The General collected a drawerful of hate-mail. How, asked one, could a nobleman like him choose to serve the Reds at a time when ‘the Cheka jails are full of Russian officers’? It was ‘nothing less than a betrayal’. All this weighed heavily on Brusilov’s conscience.fn9 ‘It was the hardest moment of my life,’ he wrote five years later. ‘All the time there was a deathly silence in the house. The family walked about on tiptoes and talked in whispers. My wife and sister had tears in their eyes.’72 It was as if they were mourning for their past.
Brusilov’s conversion to the Reds was a case of putting country before class. He had every reason to hate the Bolsheviks, and often called them the Antichrist. They had not only imprisoned him but had also virtually murdered his sick brother and arrested several of his closest friends during the Red Terror. Yet Brusilov refused to join the Whites. Two wounds — his wounded leg and his wounded pride at the White adulation for his old rival Kornilov — stopped him from going to the Don. He was also still convinced that it was his duty to remain in Russia, standing by the people even if they chose the Reds. Bolshevism, in the old general’s view, was bound to be a ‘temporary sickness’ since ‘its philosophy of internationalism is fundamentally alien to the Russian people’. By working with the Bolsheviks, patriots like him could redirect the revolution towards national ends. It was, as he saw it, a question of diluting Red with White — of ‘turning the Red Star into a Cross’ — and thus reconciling the revolution with the continuities of Russian history. ‘My sense of duty to the nation has often obliged me to disobey my natural social inclinations,’ Brusilov said in 1918. Although as an aristocrat he clearly sympathized with the Whites and rejoiced when their armies advanced towards Moscow, he always thought that their cause was both doomed and flawed by its dependence upon the intervention of the Allies. The fate of Russia, for better or worse, had to be decided by its own people.73
