(15) October Revolution: scope of the civil war

The Treaty of Breast-Litovsk in March 1918 was concluded at Lenin's insistence on peace. That insistence was partially political, because anger at the continuation of the war had been a major reason for the fall of the Czar's government in 1917 and then Kerensky's government later that year.

It was also plain realism. The Russian army had largely collapsed. They couldn't maintain the resistance against the German forces. It was a plain matter of national interest to cut their losses in a war that was clearly lost. The cost was high (Ralf Zerback, "Land in Blut and Feuer" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmach/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):

Die sowjetische Regierung schließt im März 1918 den erniedrigenden Frieden von Brest-Litowsk - mit dem Regime des kaiserlichen Deutschland. Es sind verfreundete Halbverbündete, ein Teil der Bolschewiki spricht von einem „unverschämten Frieden". Russland verzichtet auf Finnland, das Baltikum, Polen und die Ukraine - und damit auf ein Viertel der Bevölkerung, ein Drittel der Textilindustrie, drei Viertel der Eisen- und Kohleproduktion. Lenin will Frieden um jeden Preis, weil er ihn versprochen hat und weil die Armee auseinandergelaufen ist.

[The Soviet government concluded the humiliating Peace of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918 - with the regime of Imperial Germany. They are friendly half-allies, a portion of the Bolsheviks talk about a "shameless peace." Russia gave up Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and the Ukraine - and thereby a fourth of the population, a third of the textile industry, three quarters of the iron and coal production. Lenin wants peace at any price, because he had promised it and because the army has come apart.]

Zerback notes that 14 different foreign powers were intervening in the former Russian Empire during the civil war, including five thousand Americans along with some French and British troops. The opposition included 20 regional governments, who were unable to ever unite into a single command.

Given that the Russian population was exhausted by three years of war in 1917, it is remarkable that the Communist government was able to keep the war effort going to victory in the civil war. How they did it involved a combination of persuasion, inspiration and coercion. It included a Red Terror, which in that context meant giving a great deal of leeway for arrests and punishments to the government, on the model of the Terror during the French Revolution. "Terrorism" today generally refers to attacks on civilian noncombatants but the older meaning of state terror was much more familiar a century ago.

Trotsky, then the head of the Red Army, published a tract in 1920 called Terrorism and Communism, a polemic against a leading German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky, who was criticizing the Soviet government for dictatorial methods. Trotsky:

The man who repudiates terrorism in principle – i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism. ...

If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and continued for four years, in spite of democracy, brought about a degradation of morals and accustomed men to violent methods and action, and completely stripped the bourgeoisie of the last vestige of awkwardness in ordering the destruction of masses of humanity – here also he will be right.

All this is true on the face of it. But one has to struggle in real conditions. The contending forces are not proletarian and bourgeois manikins produced in the retort of Wagner-Kautsky, but a real proletariat against a real bourgeoisie, as they have emerged from the last imperialist slaughter.

Trotsky was engaging in a polemic within the socialist movement in the common vocabulary of that movement at the time. But he was making an argument that, in different terms, almost any governing party fighting for its government's survival in the middle of a civil war against both foreign and domestic enemies would make, that martial law or emergency measures would be justified. For that matter, any government in peacetime would use "suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed" opposition forces engaged in anti-government violence or imminent preparation for it.

That doesn't exhaust the very important question about the effect that the desperate circumstances and avowedly dictatorial measures to which the Communist government resorted immediately after the revolution and during the civil war had on the nature of the later peacetime government and, a decade and a half later, on the Great Purge. Such measures don't take place only in the abstract, but with very specific actions and decisions. The actions of the national police, the Cheka, during that time provide many specific targets for criticism. (The Cheka is usually referred to as the "secret police," though its existence was hardly secret.)