bboc/09_Interventions_in_Russia_1917-1921.tex

\chapter[Interventions in Russia (1917-1921)]{Counter-revolution and foreign interventions in Russia (1917-1921)}

\chapterauthor{Pierre DURAND}

On May 31, 1920, Marcel Cachin, accompanied by Frossard, left for Russia.
He will stay there seventy-one days, traveling thousands of kilometers through cities and countryside.
He is haunted by the memories of Year II. He will write:

\enquote{For three years, the workers and peasants were the masters of the country. In the aftermath of their seizure of power, they had intended to devote themselves to the work of reconstruction;
but they had been prevented by the counter-revolution and the civil and foreign wars that the Allied powers had been waging on Russian soil since the end of 1917.

The ruin of three years of civil war imposed on the revolutionary nation had been added to that of the imperialist war itself.
It was easy to imagine what state the nation's economy was in after six years of fighting.}\footnote{Marcel Cachin, \emph{Écrits et portraits} (Writings and portraits), collected by Marcelle Herzog-Cachin, E.F.R., 1964.}.

Marcel Cachin speaks elsewhere about the volunteer soldiers he saw and spoke to: \enquote{They were really the sons and brothers of those of Year II, Valmy and Marseillaise.}\footnote{Marcel Cachin, \emph{Écrits et portraits} (Writings and portraits), collected by Marcelle Herzog-Cachin, E.F.R., 1964.}
It is probably always arbitrary to compare situations that are very far apart by geography and history,
but the fact remains that the Russian revolutionaries knew Koblenz and the Vendées, which they had to confront, if not coalition kings, at least states set against the new order they wanted to establish.
To the white terror unleashed against them, they responded with red terror. And they did it in a country that Lenin said there was nowhere comparable in terms of cultural deficit in Europe.
This backwardness must of course be taken into account.

The First World War had cost Russia two and a half million deaths. Civil war and foreign intervention caused an additional million and a half casualties.
Nine million people have been killed, injured or disappeared as a result of famine and epidemics. Industrial production in 1921 was equivalent to 15\% of that of 1913. Half as much wheat was produced as on the eve of the war.

But who is to blame, if not capitalism?

Lenin believed in a peaceful development of the Revolution. He was wrong. A few days before the capture of the Winter Palace, on October 9, 1917, he declared:
\enquote{Once power is in their hands, the Soviets could now still — and this is probably their last chance — ensure the peaceful development of the revolution,
the peaceful election of the people's deputies, the peaceful struggle of the parties within the Soviets, the testing of a programme of the different parties by practice, the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another.}\footnote{Lenin, \emph{Œuvres} (Works), t. 26, pp. 61-62}

The capture of the Winter Palace will cause only six deaths and the salvos of the cruiser Aurore will be fired blank.
On 26 October (8 November), the Second Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty. Officer cadets who tried to seize the Petrograd telephone exchange from revolutionaries were released against a promise to stay quiet.
They didn't hold their end of the bargain and went to join the white insurgents in the south of the country. General Krasnov swore that he would no longer fight against the Bolsheviks.
He later led a counter-revolutionary Cossack army. By the end of November, the new power was established almost everywhere and generally accepted. Around mid-February 1918, the Revolution could move to
what Marcel Cachin called \enquote{the work of reconstitution}. But it was counting without the relentlessness of the dispossessed classes and without the support they were going to receive from abroad.

John Reed, \emph{in Ten Days That Shook the World}, reports what the Russian \enquote{Rockefeller} Rodzianko told him: 
\enquote{Revolution is a disease. Sooner or later, foreign powers will have to intervene, as one would intervene to heal a sick child and teach him to walk.}
Another Russian billionaire, Ryabushinsky, claimed that the only solution was \enquote{to take the false friends of the people, the Soviets and Democratic Committees, and hang them.}
The head of the British Intelligence Service, Sir Samuel Hoare, who had returned to London even before the capture of the Winter Palace, advocated the establishment of a military dictatorship in Russia, either under Admiral Kolchak or under General Kornilov. 
The choice of London fell on the latter and Paris followed.  On September 8, Kornilov marched on Petrograd, but he was defeated and the Bolsheviks won because the people, as a whole, supported them.

The simple chronology of the following events shows that the origin of what the Bolsheviks themselves called the Red Terror (in the same way as the French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century spoke of Terror) shows that it was a chain of events whose origin was the counter-revolution aided by the foreigner.

\section{1918}

On March 11, the Soviet government moved to Moscow.
At the same time, Anglo-Franco-American troops landed in the North. On April 4, Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok while Ataman Semyonov led an uprising in Transbaikalia.
On April 29, the Germans installed the Skoropansky dictatorship in Ukraine. In May, the Czechoslovak army corps rose up along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
On the Volga, the Urals, Siberia and the Don region, Denikin, Kornilov, Alexeiyev unleashed terrorist insurgencies while the British prepared in Iran to attack Baku with troops of White Cossacks.
Turkey is threatening in the same region. By the end of May, three-quarters of Soviet territory was in the hands of the counter-revolution and interventionists.

On August 3, new British troops landed at Vladivostok along with Japanese reinforcements. On 30 August, Lenin was seriously wounded in the attack perpetrated by F. Kaplan.
On September 2, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets proclaimed the Red Terror against the counter-revolution. In August and September the Soviet counter-offensive began on all fronts.
On September 20, the whites under the orders of the British executed the 26 commissioners of Baku. In October, the revolutionaries acquired a real army.

\section{1919}

March 2: French revolutionary Jeanne Labourbe is assassinated in Odessa by French interventionists and white guards.
On April 28, the offensive against Admiral Kolchak in the Urals began. On the same day, the French completed their evacuation from Odessa, but returned on August 23 to support Denikin. 
In the same month, Kolchak was definitively defeated. On October 24, Denikin was defeated at Voronezh and Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad).

\section{1920}

Between January and March, Soviet troops win everywhere. Kolchak was beaten in Siberia, fled, arrested in Irkustk and shot.
Denikin was forced to evacuate Odessa, where the French intervention ceased. The ports of Murmansk and Arkangelsk are liberated.

The Soviet power, which has just set up the Goelro plan for the electrification of Russia, believes it can finally breathe.
But on April 25, the Poles helped by the White armies of General Wrangel, supported in particular by France, rushed into the Red Army. General Boudionny's 1st Cavalry Army went on the counter-offensive on 5 June and prevailed in November.
Wrangel, cornered in Crimea, is definitively defeated. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan come to power from the revolutionaries. The struggle continued only in the Far East against the bands of Semionov and Baron Von Ungern, supported by the Japanese.
However, it was not until October 1922 that there were no more foreign interventionists in the territory of what became, on 30 December, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

It is probably not bad to remember these few historical and undisputed facts when we want to talk about crimes in this part of the world and at that time.

\rauthor{Pierre Durand}

Pierre Durand, chairman of the Buchenwald-Dora alumni committee, is a journalist and historian specializing in the Second World War.
He is the author of \emph{Les Sans-culottes du bout du monde, — 1917-1921 — Contre-révolution et intervention étrangère en Russie} (The sans culotte from the end of the world, 1917-1921, counter-revolution and foreign intervention in Russia), Éditions du Progrès, 1977 (NDLR) and at le Temps des Cerises, \emph{Jeunes pour la Liberté} (Youths for freedom); \emph{Louise Michel}; \emph{Joseph et les hommes de l'Ombre} (Joseph and the men from the Shadows).