There are
people who reckon that war brings out the best in human beings; no one claims
that for civil wars which unfailingly bring out the worst. Wars are orderly,
conducted with etiquettes which often hold up, and historically they have usually
been conducted intermittently as set-piece combats. Civil war is unremittingly present and at its
heart is always the fear and insecurity created by not being able to readily
identify who around you can still be trusted and how close is the danger.
Anna Reid’s A
Nasty Little War is a thoroughly researched, unsettling account of failed
Western (Allied) intervention on the side of White forces in the Russian Civil
War between 1917 and 1920 which ended in victory for the Red forces of the
Bolshevik regime. A cover comment from Anne Applebaum that the book is “Witty
and Elegant” seems misplaced; Reid quotes frequently from diaries and memoirs –
usually American or British - which try to make light of things or are
comically inept but they only add to the reader’s (or this reader’s) unease.
The war was unspeakably cruel and merciless; criminals and psychopaths,
fanatics and sadists, had more or less unrestricted opportunity to loot,
torture, rape (always including child rape) and murder – the victims casually and often mistakenly identified as enemies but
sometimes systematically chosen, most obviously the Jews whose separate residential
areas made it easy to conduct a pogrom.
The Romanovs
who ruled Russia for three centuries were constantly enlarging their Empire by
expanding the contiguous land mass they controlled; only Sakhalin and Alaska
(plus some scattered islands) were sea crossings away unless you add northern
California. To the west they expanded into what are now Finland, the three
Baltic states, and half of Poland. To the east they not only went in a straight
line to Vladivostok but occupied what are now the -stans (Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan Uzbekistan). In addition, they pushed into
Mongolia and northern China whenever possible and on the Pacific coast down to
the border with Korea at Port Arthur (later Dairen, now Dalian). To the south there was all of
what are now Ukraine and Moldova together with the Caucasus (Georgia,
Azerbaijan, Armenia) reaching the border with Persia. As territorial gain from
the First World War, Nicholas the Second’s governments had their hopes set on
Austrian Galicia, the northern coast of Turkey, and Constantinople. The Greek
isthmus of Mont Athos also featured in their thoughts as did Afghanistan and
the North West Frontier of British India. At the same time, and hardly
surprisingly, the government in far-away St Petersburg felt permanently
insecure about its borderlands but seems to have believed that by constantly
expanding the extraordinary length of its borders they would gain security
not lose it.
The relationship of St Petersburg to most of its Empire was essentially colonial ; ethnically and linguistically hugely diverse, the empire was ruled over by Russians who spoke Russian and would not contemplate any other language. In contrast, both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires accepted linguistic diversity; the early Soviet Union took the same approach. The Romanovs were intolerant of all religions other than the compliant Russian Orthodox and discrimination against Jews was legally enshrined long after it had been removed in other European countries. And, of course, serfdom was not abolished until 1861. As is usual with empires, the relation of centre to periphery was extractive; wealth was piled up at the centre.
The fabulously wealthy Tsarist
regime was harsh, incompetent and unfeeling; the lives of this Leviathan’s
oppressed native and colonial peoples nasty, brutish and short. But in the
end the awful Nicholas II was brought down not by the Bolsheviks but by a
coalition of his own army officers and powerful commercial and industrial
interests with a liberalising agenda. By the time of their downfall, the Romanovs
inspired no love or loyalty; even the White armies which fought against the
Bolsheviks did not propose the restoration of the Romanovs. They had to wait
for Tsar Putin and his puppet Rolex-wearing Orthodox church to rehabilitate them and their ambitions.
No sooner
had the Allies achieved victory in the First World War and divided the
territorial spoils, which their populations were supposed to regard as
compensation for all the dead young men, than they embarked on - albeit modest –
adventurous interventions in support of those forces seeking to bring down the
Bolsheviks. Only Finland did not deserve support: the victorious side in its
own civil war sided with Germany as it did its government in World War Two. But those who got support hardly had their
credentials checked, something which still happens whenever the West decides to
“intervene” and finds itself tied to some crook, psychopath or simple
incompetent who has no popular support. The dishonesty about who
they were dealing with (the reality of anti-Jewish pogroms routinely denied by all the intervention commanders) and why is recounted in disturbing detail by Anna Reid.
I shan’t try to summarise it; it’s worth reading in its own right.
Reading the
book, it occurred to me that in civil wars everyday life does go on in the
background of fighting and atrocities. Reid has something to say about this. In
Russia from 1917 to 1920 various local and regional governments did function
though only partially and never disinterestedly. If they received aid from
well-meaning foreign relief organisations you could be sure that very little of
it would reach the intended recipients; later, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief
Administration which operated in early Soviet Russia insisted on control over
distribution by its own representatives.
One
indicator of “everyday life” a hundred years ago is provided by the post: could
you send a letter and would it be received? This index produces a
startling result which indicates the weakness of the Bolshevik regime at the
height of the civil war. From 1 January
1919 to early June 1920, it was not possible to send a letter abroad from any
part of Bolshevik-controlled Russia. The Bolsheviks had no access to ports or only to
blockaded ports, had no official relations established with immediate or
distant neighbours, and probably had no foreign currency to pay third-party
costs. Going round the clock, they did not control Archangel, Vladivostok, the
Black Sea ports or any of the Baltic ports; Petrograd was at least partially
blockaded. In addition, since a lot of mail going abroad would probably be
written by hostile elements mail censorship would need to be in place and for
the Bolsheviks that meant a centralised organisation in Moscow or Petrograd.
When postal services were restored in June 1920, foreign mail was always
routed via the centre except in the Far East where there was still a
notionally independent government in Vladivostok (the Far Eastern Republic). A large
censorship office was created, its activity readily identified by special
cancellations with three triangles at the base. At the height of the civil war period, it
was in any case unrealistic to route mail through to Moscow or Petrograd since
the constantly shifting front line would mean that mail would be endlessly
delayed and subject to capture by White forces who might be able to glean
significant information from reading it.
The Whites
could get mail abroad thanks principally to the good offices of the warships of
Britain, France, USA and other intervention countries which did not charge for carrying it though they
might require that it be franked with whatever stamps were locally in use. At the time the most
popular indoor hobby in Western Europe and the USA was stamp collecting and
stamp dealers did a good trade in the ports of Archangel, Odessa, Riga,
Tallinn, and Vladivostok exporting whatever stamps were being locally produced
to replace Imperial Russian ones. In some cases, the dealers were involved in
the production of the stamps themselves and their names remain associated with
those stamps. In contrast, the Bolsheviks issued no stamps of their own until
1921; they used up old Imperial ones and reprinted them as necessary on
inferior paper and generally without perforations - the machines were out of use.
*
A few picky
points: The town of Valk /Walk which straddles
the Estonian/Latvian border is quite wrongly located on the Baltics map as
inside Russia; page 228 “Bermondt-Avalov” was at the time, I think, more often
referred to as “Avalov-Bermondt” though Wikipedia opts for the B-A order;
transliteration rules change – at the time it was “General Wrangel” in both the
UK and USA not the anachronistic “Vrangel” used by Reid; in the literature “Grigoriy
Semyonov” is usually referred to as “Ataman Semenov” though
Wikipedia uses Reid’s version. The “Ataman” is a Cossack title he awarded himself.
