2022.10.07 重新审视俄罗斯的残酷内战

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普京为何与苏联的宿敌达成和平？
重新审视俄罗斯的残酷内战

作者：亚当-霍奇斯柴尔德
插图，左边是白色背景的俄罗斯士兵档案照片，右边是红色背景的俄罗斯骑兵档案照片，中间是士兵的剪影和重叠的面部轮廓。
插图：Vartika Sharma。资料来源：环球历史档案馆/盖蒂；贝特卡-沙马。环球历史档案馆/盖蒂；贝特曼/盖蒂。
2022年10月7日
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看着弗拉基米尔-普京对乌克兰的傲慢入侵，不可能不为其野蛮程度感到震惊。死去的男人和女人散落在布卡的街道上，双手被反绑。俄罗斯士兵强奸妇女，有时当着丈夫或孩子的面。俄罗斯人夺取各种大小的战利品，从手机到巨大的约翰迪尔小麦收割机。还有，一次又一次关于酷刑的证词：殴打、电击、用塑料袋几乎窒息。

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是的，所有的战争都是血腥的，但它们并不都是这样打的。例如，第一次世界大战造成数百万人死亡。然而，驻扎在乌克兰西部的俄罗斯帝国空军战斗机飞行员鲍里斯-谢尔盖夫斯基上尉（多年后作为移民与我的姨妈结婚）告诉我，如果你在俄罗斯领土上致命地击落了一名德国飞行员，你会以完整的军事荣誉将他埋葬；然后你用降落伞将他的个人物品和他的葬礼照片投到德国机场。那场战争，就像这场战争一样，是关于领土的。但在今天的战争中，即使普京坚持认为未来的征服者和被侵略者是 "一个民族"，俄罗斯人似乎还有一个目的：羞辱乌克兰人，使他们失去人性，看到他们受苦。

阅读。没有胜利的解放，采访沃洛季米尔-泽伦斯基

最常见的是，当人类因宗教或种族而分裂时，我们会发现这样的残忍。想想十字军东征、大屠杀、南方成千上万的美国黑人被处以私刑，以及最近俄罗斯对穆斯林车臣人的两场战争。但俄罗斯人和乌克兰人都是白人，是斯拉夫民族，如果有宗教信仰，通常是东正教基督徒。在乌克兰东部，俄罗斯暴行的许多受害者都是以俄语为母语的人--该国总统沃洛季米尔-泽伦斯基也是如此。

普京热衷于帝国，而不是共产主义，他很想恢复沙皇俄国和苏联的权力。
对入侵的残暴性进行的任何探索都必须包括普京在秘密警察中的背景，他的独裁统治，以及他扩大这种统治范围的动力。俄罗斯的过去对这一问题也至关重要。近年来，普京坚定地通过传播他自己的俄罗斯历史版本来证明他的扩张主义野心。学校课程和全国范围内的历史主题公园现在都在大肆宣扬一个又一个强大的统一国家的化身，从彼得大帝到斯大林，这些全能的领导人不畏外国干涉，使国家变得更加强大和庞大。然而，在这段历史中，有一个特别野蛮和暴露无遗的时刻，国家却不是单一的：一个世纪前的俄罗斯内战，当时被称为白军的各种势力在三年中试图将新的布尔什维克政权赶下台。


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在1991年美苏解体之前，其统治者对那场战争进行了鲜明的描述。白军是邪恶的反动分子，他们试图拖延苏联统治的辉煌胜利。但普京对帝国而非共产主义充满热情，他有不同的看法。他很想恢复沙皇俄国和苏联的力量，这两个国家的领土远比他今天缩水的俄国要大。去年11月，在克里米亚的塞瓦斯托波尔--内战中白军最后一次撤离的地点，普京为战争的结束献上了一座纪念碑，并宣布 "俄罗斯记得并爱着它所有忠诚的儿女，无论他们曾经站在街垒的哪一边。" 内战是一场体现了今天头条新闻中大部分内容的斗争：无情的暴力，俄罗斯对外国入侵的恐惧，受过教育的难民的人才流失，以及帝国梦想和想要独立的分离地区之间的紧张关系。

早在内战使俄罗斯四分五裂之前，面对外部威胁和内部离心力，将这样一个巨大的国家团结在一起的挑战，已经通过广泛的压迫和来自高层的严格控制得到了解决。曾在剑桥大学和伦敦大学任教的历史学家奥兰多-菲格斯（Orlando Figes）在《俄罗斯的故事》一书中进行了有益的、紧凑的调查，该书对过去和现在之间的连续性的认识尤为强烈。例如，他认为几个世纪前的大男爵家族--允许积累财富和权力，但只在沙皇高兴时才允许--与普京轨道上的寡头之间是平行的。他对沙皇对布里亚特人和西伯利亚其他民族的征服也很有启发，这个过程从1580年左右开始，历时200年，他指出，俄罗斯的历史书总是把它描述得--错误地--不如征服美国西部那样残酷和种族灭绝。

很难想象一个比沙皇俄国更不民主的政权。从17世纪开始，农奴制奴役了该国很大一部分公民--一种通过鞭子、锁链、分离家庭和将叛乱者流放到西伯利亚的威胁，以及对多年来发动数百次叛乱的数万名农奴进行屠杀来维持的制度。在18世纪，启蒙运动与这个国家擦肩而过，而在20世纪初，俄罗斯是欧洲最后一个绝对君主制国家。(在1905年的一次起义后成立的一个极不具代表性的议会被沙皇多次驳回）。

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正如所有专制国家一样，权力依赖于暴力。在该政权的眼中，俄罗斯公民要么是在沙皇经过时跪在地上的忠诚臣民，要么是最有可能被暗杀的致命敌人。介于两者之间的想法几乎不存在。几个世纪以来，确实有五位沙皇被刺杀、勒死、枪杀或以其他方式被暗杀，还有几位大公和其他高级官员。

这些都不是建立一个新政权的有希望的材料。这一努力始于1917年3月沙皇尼古拉二世的被推翻，在他越来越沮丧的臣民看来，他对数百万人的死伤和他的帝国在第一次世界大战中遭受的灾难性粮食短缺漠不关心。布尔什维克在那年11月夺取了政权，这是一次高层的迅速政变，而不是一次全国性的起义。但接下来发生的内战影响了这个巨大国家的每一个人，而且确实是其20世纪的基础性创伤。

没有人知道三年来在这片土地上来回扫荡的焦土战、行刑队和饥荒的总死亡人数。在俄罗斯。军事历史学家安东尼-比弗（Antony Beevor）在《革命与内战，1917-1921》中指出，死亡人数可能多达1200万。其他的估计范围还更高。而且这还不算成为孤儿的数百万人，他们几乎要饿死，或者作为难民逃离该国，使俄罗斯失去了大量受过训练的专业人员。比弗的新研究更受欢迎，因为大多数西方人很少关注俄国内战的自相残杀，认为它复杂得令人困惑（事实），并觉得它与我们没有真正的关系（不是事实）。

来自1917年7月号的报道。俄国三月的预言

贝弗尔的书是一部彻底的、传统的军事史，它的一些缺陷在这种类型的书中是很熟悉的。指挥官、军团和旅的层层叠叠可能让人不知所措。第二骑兵军又是在哪一边？虽然有几张地图，但它们并没有显示出文中提到的所有数百个地方；严肃的读者需要一本地图集。但是，叙事得益于他对有说服力的细节的关注。弗拉基米尔-纳博科夫的父亲是一位具有民主思想的政治家，被共产党的红卫兵逮捕，他设法逃脱并逃离了国家，但在此之前，家里的厨师为他做了鱼子酱三明治，以备旅途之需。更加黑暗的细节占了上风。例如，小说家维克多-塞尔日（Victor Serge）描述了饥饿的圣彼得堡（当时称为彼得堡）的 "史前黑暗"，在那里，"人们睡在冰冷的住宅里，每个可居住的角落都像......动物的巢穴。祖先的恶臭甚至粘附在他们从未脱下的毛皮大衣上"。

即使是一本地图集也不足以描绘这场战争的混乱起伏。1918年初，布尔什维克（他们很快就开始自称是共产党人）是一个破产国家的名义统治者，其军队被逃兵耗尽，经济一塌糊涂。他们迅速组成的红军占领了莫斯科、彼得格勒和俄国中部的大片土地，其中包含了该国的大部分工业。敌对的白军试图从几条战线向红军的领土推进，主要是在西伯利亚、北极、俄罗斯南部、乌克兰和现在的波兰。

少数白军希望有一个议会民主制，但大多数人希望有类似于旧政权的东西。在他们的部队中，绝大多数是俄罗斯的哥萨克，他们长期以来帮助执行沙皇帝国臭名昭著的大屠杀（贝弗尔评价其中一个哥萨克领导人 "可能是最不凶残的"）。白军还包括一系列不怀好意的地方和民族军阀，其中一人将狼作为家庭宠物。与这些可怕的人物一起的是各种各样的地主、商人、沙皇官员和军官--包括我的叔叔鲍里斯--他们知道在红色统治下他们会失去一切。分散开来的白军，头重脚轻的上校和将军，很快就在前沙皇指挥官的领导下，如海军上将亚历山大-科尔察克，贝弗尔形容他是一个 "表情像愤怒的鹰 "的人。他领导着设在西伯利亚的白色政权，与他26岁的情妇一起旅行，并自诩为 "最高统治者"。

来自2017年3月号。这就是普京的世界

双方不仅将对方视为对手，而且视为一个想象中的理想国家的叛徒，双方都在肆无忌惮地战斗着。在距离今天俄罗斯占领的乌克兰境内被蹂躏的马里乌波尔仅70英里的塔甘罗格，红军承诺，如果50名白军学员投降，就饶他们一命。然而，"他们的胳膊和腿被绑住，被一个一个地扔进高炉"。最受欢迎的红色酷刑方法包括在将人们的手插入沸水中使其松动后，再将其剥去皮肤。在波罗的海和伏尔加河，白军囚犯被绑上有刺的铁丝，装上驳船，然后被击沉。红军将一名年老的白军上校活活扔进铁路机车的火箱里。

共产党有一个口号，"偷已经被偷的东西！" (即被上层阶级)。
红色领导人被一种正义感所驱使，这种正义感与任何宗教裁判所的官员一样深。共产主义承诺了一个人间天堂，并看到了一个工人阶级的选民将实现它，对抗一个必须被击垮的极其邪恶的统治阶级。列宁、托洛茨基和其他许多共产党领导人都来自受过教育的中产阶级背景，因此他们更加坚定地要证明自己是狂热的革命者。列宁呼吁对 "阶级敌人 "实行 "大规模恐怖"，并赞扬内战本身是 "阶级斗争的最尖锐形式"。他和他的同志们崇敬法国大革命的激进分子，他们自由地使用断头台。


白军释放了他们自己的恐怖。"我们被禁止射杀囚犯，"一名白军士兵写道。"他们将被用马刀或刺刀杀死。弹药太珍贵了，必须为战斗保留。" 一些被俘的红军被活活烧死，而哥萨克会用鞭子抽死红军，"用金属拉杆把他们埋在地下，直到他们的脖子，然后用马刀砍掉他们的头，或者阉割他们，把他们几十个人挂在树上。" 白军有时暂停对红军的追击，进行大屠杀；在内战期间，估计有5万至6万犹太人被杀害。关于这些事情，我亲爱的叔叔鲍里斯没有说过（50多年前的我也不知道该问他什么），只是在他的回忆录中承认，在与共产党人的战斗中，他的白人同伴 "倾向于不抓囚犯"。

双方都强奸了对方的妇女，并自由地进行抢劫。共产党有一个口号："偷已经被偷走的东西！" (即被上层阶级)，而一位白军将军对其军队的状况感到绝望，抱怨说一些军团已经积累了多达200节铁路货运车厢的赃物。双方都公然展示他们敌人的尸体。白军把红军的尸体串在西伯利亚大铁路的电报杆上，一个红军机车上装饰着被杀的白军军官的尸体。当最高统治者科尔察克最终被抓获时，他被枪决了--这在当时是一个相对仁慈的命运，但没有被埋葬。他的尸体被推入覆盖在西伯利亚河流上的一个冰窟窿中。


当然，战争以红军的胜利和不允许有异议的列宁主义统治而告终；在十年内，它已演变成斯大林的独裁统治。然而，即使白军取得了胜利，他们的最高统治者也很可能实行了自己的独裁统治。无论如何，正如菲格斯所说，那三年不受约束的凶暴行为对后来的政权来说是 "一种成型的经验"。而且，人们可以补充说，对今天的政权来说也是如此。敌人是叛徒，不配拥有尊严。当普京的跟班（前俄罗斯总统）德米特里-梅德韦杰夫称他在乌克兰和国外的批评者为 "混蛋和人渣 "时，我们也许可以听到列宁反复谈到白军是 "虱子"、"跳蚤"、"害虫 "和应该被消灭的 "寄生虫 "的回声。

经常被遗忘的是，俄国内战中包括来自其他国家的部队。美国、英国、法国和他们的盟国担心革命会蔓延到他们自己的厌战、不满的人口中，因此急于帮助白人，当时英国的战争和航空部长温斯顿-丘吉尔最强烈地呼吁。"他后来说："如果我在1919年得到适当的支持，我想我们可能已经把布尔什维克主义扼杀在摇篮里了。" 干预主要是为白军提供武器和物资，如20万套英国军服。但士兵们也来打仗，包括13000名美国人--被派往北极海岸和俄罗斯远东地区。


总共有大约20万外国军队被派往俄国，还有几十艘海军舰艇被派往周边水域。其中一些人--最明显的是在黑海的法国海军水兵--在与红军作战时发生了屠杀。他们这样做是因为，就像当时数以百万计的西方人一样，他们相信俄国革命真的像它所宣称的那样：是一个工人控制的问题。我希望比弗尔能多说一些关于兵变所代表的理想的冲突--有大量的记录可供借鉴，以及关于干预在俄国留下的印记。在一个一开始就具有强烈排外性的国家，最终胜利的共产党人从未忘记那些曾试图将他们的孩子扼杀在摇篮里的外国军队。

俄罗斯内战的另一个方面与我们现在看到的冲突直接产生了回响。这场战争不仅仅是关于谁将统治俄罗斯，而是关于俄罗斯将由谁来统治。当战斗在数千英里的森林、山脉、麦田和苔原上肆虐时，战争中爆发了几场战争。旧俄罗斯帝国的外围地区利用红白之争争夺独立。波兰、芬兰和波罗的海国家成功地做到了这一点，乌克兰则没有成功。后者的战斗，在红军、白军和几个敌对的乌克兰部队之间进行，使今天的头条新闻中的城市受到惊扰。基辅、敖德萨、哈尔科夫、赫尔松、马里乌波尔。(在他的致谢中，贝弗尔感谢一位研究助理，他现在是乌克兰军队的一名步枪手和军医）。尽管是致命的、存在的敌人，红军和白军在一点上是一致的。他们希望他们希望控制的俄罗斯的边界越宽越好。双方都对这些非俄罗斯的独立运动恨之入骨，尤其是乌克兰的独立运动，这片土地上的粮食、铁和煤是如此丰富。


在俄罗斯内战之后，乌克兰成为苏联内部最终的15个名义上的自治共和国之一。普京宣称，这种结构是一个巨大的错误，但当然，近70年来，没有人真正预料到曾经强大的苏维埃王国会按照这种方式解体。普京长期以来一直梦想重建一个更广泛的帝国：他为苏联的帝国服务，直到其崩溃，而且与他的苏联前辈不同，他经常向沙皇的帝国致敬。最后一位沙皇和沙皇夫人被布尔什维克暗杀，现在已被正式宣布为政治压迫的受害者，2008年，普京为一部歌颂科尔察克上将的豪华传记故事片送上祝福。近年来，他的政府将当时最臭名昭著的部队之一--哥萨克人恢复到荣誉地位，在海外沙皇难民后代的支持下，在全国各地开办了几十所哥萨克军事学院。

摘自2018年1/2月刊。普京真正想要的东西

2005年，普京安排从美国带回了在流亡中去世的俄罗斯南部和乌克兰的白军指挥官安东-杰尼金将军的遗体。"俄罗斯一体，不可分割 "是杰尼金战斗的口号。普京在参观他在莫斯科的新墓时指出，这位将军是一个坚定的信念，即乌克兰是俄罗斯的一部分。这个梦想现在正与乌克兰对立，后者无论如何摇摇欲坠和不完善，都享有三十年的独立。在这场愿景的冲突中，俄罗斯历史上未解决的紧张局势仍然投下了漫长的阴影。

这篇文章出现在2022年11月的印刷版上，标题为 "俄罗斯暴行的漫长历史"。


Why Putin Made Peace With the Soviets’ Archenemies
Revisiting Russia’s brutal civil war

By Adam Hochschild
Illustration with archival photo of Russian soldiers on white background on left, archival photo of Russian cavalry on red background on right, with silhouette of soldier and overlapping profile of face in center
illustration by Vartika Sharma. Sources: Universal History Archive / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.
OCTOBER 7, 2022
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It is impossible to watch Vladimir Putin’s arrogant invasion of Ukraine without being appalled by its savagery. Dead men and women strewn on the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs. Russian soldiers raping women, sometimes in front of husbands or children. Russians seizing loot of every size, from cellphones to giant John Deere wheat-harvesting combines. And, again and again, testimony about torture: beatings, electric shocks, near suffocation with plastic bags.

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Yes, all wars are bloody, but they’re not all fought like this. The First World War, for example, killed millions. Yet Captain Boris Sergievsky, a fighter pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Service stationed in western Ukraine, who as an émigré years later married my aunt, told me that if you fatally shot down a German aviator over Russian territory, you buried him with full military honors; you then dropped by parachute onto the German airfield his personal effects and a photograph of his funeral. That war, like this one, was over territory. But in today’s war, even as Putin insists that the would-be conquerors and the invaded are “one people,” the Russians almost seem to have an additional aim: to humiliate the Ukrainians, to dehumanize them, to see them suffer.

Read: Liberation without victory, an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky

Most often, we find cruelty like this when human beings are divided by religion or ethnicity. Consider the Crusades, the Holocaust, the lynchings of thousands of Black Americans in the South, and, for that matter, the two recent Russian wars against the Muslim Chechens. But both Russians and Ukrainians are white, Slavic, and, if religious, usually Orthodox Christians. In eastern Ukraine, many victims of Russian atrocities are native Russian speakers—as is the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Putin, whose passion is for empire, not communism, would love to restore the power of both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union.
Any search for perspective on the invasion’s brutality must include Putin’s background in the secret police, his dictatorial rule, and his drive to extend the reach of that rule. Russia’s past is also crucial to the mix. In recent years, Putin has determinedly justified his expansionist ambition by spreading his own version of Russian history. School curricula and a nationwide array of historical theme parks now lavishly celebrate one incarnation after another of a strong unitary state made stronger and larger by all-powerful leaders—from Peter the Great to Stalin—who defied foreign meddling. One particularly savage and revealing slice of that history, however, is a moment when the state was anything but unitary: the Russian Civil War of a century ago, when assorted forces known as the Whites tried for three bloody years to dislodge the new Bolshevik regime from power.

The Story of RussiaORLANDO FIGES,METROPOLITAN BOOKS
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Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921ANTONY BEEVOR,VIKING
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Before the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, in 1991, its rulers portrayed that war starkly: The Whites were evil reactionaries who tried to delay the glorious triumph of Soviet rule. But Putin, whose passion is for empire, not communism, has a different view. He would love to restore the power of both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, which extended over territory far larger than his own shrunken Russia of today. Last November, in Sevastopol, Crimea, the site of one of the civil war’s last evacuations of White troops, Putin dedicated a monument to the war’s end and declared that “Russia remembers and loves all its devoted sons and daughters no matter what side of the barricades they once were on.” The civil war was a struggle that embodied much of what’s in the headlines today: ruthless violence, Russian fears of foreign intrusion, a brain drain of educated refugees, and the tension between dreams of empire and breakaway regions wanting independence.

Long before the civil war tore Russia apart, the challenges of holding such a huge country together, against threats without and centrifugal forces within, had been handled with widespread oppression as well as tight control from the top. Orlando Figes, a historian who taught at Cambridge and the University of London, gives a useful, compact survey in The Story of Russia, which is particularly strong in its sense of the continuities between past and present. For instance, he sees a parallel between the great boyar clans of several centuries ago—allowed to accumulate wealth and power but only at the czar’s pleasure—and the oligarchs in Putin’s orbit. He is also instructive on the czarist conquest of the Buryat and other peoples across Siberia, a 200-year process beginning around 1580, pointing out that Russian history books have always portrayed it—wrongly—as less brutal and genocidal than the conquest of the American West.

A less democratic regime than czarist Russia would be hard to imagine. Starting in the 17th century, serfdom enslaved a high proportion of the country’s citizens—a system maintained by whips, chains, the threat of separating families and exiling rebels to Siberia, and the massacre of tens of thousands of serfs who staged hundreds of revolts over the years. In the 18th century, the Enlightenment passed the country by, and in the early 20th, Russia was the last absolute monarchy in Europe. (A wildly unrepresentative parliament installed after a 1905 uprising was dismissed by the czar several times.)

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As in all despotisms, power rested upon violence. In the eyes of the regime, Russian citizens were either loyal subjects who knelt to the ground when the czar passed or deadly enemies most likely bent on assassination. The idea of a space in between barely existed. Over the centuries, five czars were indeed stabbed, strangled, shot, or otherwise assassinated, as were several grand dukes and other high officials.

None of this was promising material out of which to build a new regime. That effort began with the March 1917 overthrow of Czar Nicholas II, who seemed, to his ever more frustrated subjects, blithely unconcerned with the millions of dead and wounded and the catastrophic food shortages his empire was suffering in the First World War. The Bolshevik seizure of power followed that November, a swift coup at the top rather than a nationwide uprising. But what came next, the civil war, affected every person in that huge country, and was truly the foundational trauma of its 20th century.

No one knows the total death toll from the scorched-earth battles, firing squads, and famines that swept back and forth across the land for three years. In Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921, the military historian Antony Beevor suggests that it could be as many as 12 million people. Other estimates range higher still. And that’s not counting the millions more who were orphaned, who came close to starving, or who fled the country as refugees, depriving Russia of a large number of its trained professionals. Beevor’s new study is all the more welcome because most Westerners have paid little attention to the fratricidal fury of the Russian Civil War, finding it bewilderingly complicated (true), and feeling that it didn’t really involve us (not true).

From the July 1917 issue: The Russian ides of March

Beevor’s book is a thorough, traditional military history, and some of its flaws are familiar in that genre. The cascade of commanders, regiments, and brigades can be overwhelming. Which side, again, is the Second Cavalry Army on? Although there are a few maps, they don’t show all the hundreds of places mentioned in the text; the serious reader needs an atlas. But the narrative benefits from his eye for the telling detail. Vladimir Nabokov’s father, a democratically minded politician who had been arrested by a Communist Red Guard, managed to escape and flee the country, but not before the family’s cook made him caviar sandwiches for the journey. Darker particulars dominate. The novelist Victor Serge, for example, describes the “prehistoric gloom” of starving St. Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, where “people slept in frozen dwellings where each habitable corner was like … an animal’s lair. The ancestral stench clung even to their fur-lined cloaks which were never taken off.”

Even an atlas isn’t sufficient to map the chaotic ebb and flow of this war. At the beginning of 1918, the Bolsheviks, who soon began calling themselves Communists, were the nominal rulers of a bankrupt realm, its military drained by desertions and its economy in shambles. Their rapidly formed Red Army occupied Moscow, Petrograd, and a large swath of central Russia containing much of the country’s industry. The opposing Whites tried to advance into Red territory from several fronts, principally in Siberia, the Arctic, southern Russia, Ukraine, and what is now Poland.

A minority of Whites hoped for a parliamentary democracy, but most wanted something like the old regime. Among their forces were the great majority of Russia’s Cossacks, who had long helped carry out the czarist empire’s infamous pogroms (Beevor assesses one of them as “probably the least murderous” of the Cossack leaders). The Whites also included a panoply of unsavory local and ethnic warlords, one of whom kept wolves as house pets. Joining these fearsome figures was an assortment of landowners, businessmen, czarist officials, and military officers—including my uncle Boris—who knew they would lose everything under Red rule. The widely separated White armies, top-heavy with colonels and generals, quickly came under the leadership of former czarist commanders such as Admiral Alexander Kolchak, whom Beevor describes as a man with “the expression of an angry eagle.” He headed the White regime based in Siberia, traveled with his 26-year-old mistress, and styled himself “supreme ruler.”

From the March 2017 issue: It’s Putin’s world

Seeing each other not merely as opponents, but as traitors to an imagined ideal nation, both sides fought with an unbridled fury. In Taganrog, a mere 70 miles from ravaged Mariupol in today’s Russian-occupied Ukraine, Red forces promised to spare the lives of 50 White cadets if they surrendered. Instead, “their arms and legs were bound and they were thrown one at a time into a blast furnace.” Favorite Red torture methods included peeling the skin off people’s hands, after first loosening it by plunging the hands into boiling water. In the Baltic Sea and the Volga River, White prisoners were tied with barbed wire and loaded onto barges, which were then sunk. Reds tossed an elderly White colonel, alive, into a railroad locomotive’s firebox.

The Communists had a slogan, “Steal what’s already been stolen!” (that is, by the upper classes).
The Red leaders were driven by a righteousness that ran as deep as that of any Inquisition functionary. Communism promised an earthly paradise, and saw a working-class elect who would attain it up against a supremely evil ruling class that had to be crushed. Lenin, Trotsky, and many other Communist leaders came from educated, middle-class backgrounds and hence were all the more determined to prove they were fervent revolutionaries. Lenin called for “mass terror” against “class enemies,” and praised civil war itself as “the sharpest form of the class struggle.” He and his comrades venerated the radicals of the French Revolution, who had made free use of the guillotine.


The Whites unleashed their own terror. “We were forbidden to shoot prisoners,” wrote one White soldier. “They were to be killed with a sabre or the bayonet. Ammunition was too precious and had to be kept for combat.” Some captured Reds were burned alive, while Cossacks would whip Reds to death “with metal ramrods, bury them in the ground up to their neck and then cut off the head with their sabre, or castrate them, and hang them on trees in their dozens.” White forces sometimes paused their pursuit of the Reds to carry out pogroms; during the civil war, an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Jews were murdered. About such things my beloved uncle Boris did not speak (nor did I, more than 50 years ago, know what to ask him), except to acknowledge, in his memoirs, that in fighting the Communists his fellow Whites “tended not to take prisoners.”

Both sides raped the other’s women, and looted freely: The Communists had a slogan, “Steal what’s already been stolen!” (that is, by the upper classes), while a White general, despairing at the state of his army, complained that some regiments had accumulated up to 200 railway freight cars of stolen goods. Both sides brazenly displayed the corpses of their enemies. The Whites strung up Red bodies on telegraph poles of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and one Red locomotive was adorned with the bodies of slain White officers. When Supreme Ruler Kolchak was finally captured, he was shot—a relatively merciful fate for the time—but denied a burial. His corpse was pushed through a hole chopped in the ice covering a Siberian river.


The war ended, of course, with a Red victory and Leninist rule that brooked no dissent; within a decade it had evolved into Stalin’s dictatorship. Yet even if the Whites had won, their supreme ruler might well have imposed a dictatorship of his own. In any event, those three years of unrestrained ferocity were, as Figes remarks, “a formative experience” for the regime that followed. And, one might add, for the regime today. Enemies are traitors, deserving no dignity. When Putin’s sidekick (and the former Russian president) Dmitry Medvedev called his critics in Ukraine and abroad “bastards and scum,” we can perhaps hear an echo of Lenin repeatedly speaking of the White forces as “lice,” “fleas,” “vermin,” and “parasites” deserving extermination.

Often forgotten is that the Russian Civil War included troops from other countries. Terrified of revolution spreading to their own war-weary, discontented populations, the United States, Britain, France, and their allies were eager to help the Whites, urged on most vociferously by Winston Churchill, then Britain’s secretary for war and air. “If I had been properly supported in 1919,” he later said, “I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle.” The intervention was mostly a matter of arms and supplies for the Whites, such as 200,000 British army uniforms. But soldiers came to fight as well, including 13,000 Americans—dispatched to both the Arctic coast and the Russian far east.


Altogether, approximately 200,000 foreign troops were sent to Russia, as well as dozens of naval vessels to the surrounding waters. Some of them—most notably French-navy sailors in the Black Sea—mutinied when deployed against Red forces. They did so because, like millions of Westerners at the time, they believed that the Russian Revolution really was what it claimed to be: a matter of workers taking control. I wish Beevor had said more about the clash of ideals represented in the mutinies—there are considerable records to draw on—and about the mark the intervention left on Russia. In a nation so deeply xenophobic to begin with, the ultimately victorious Communists never forgot the foreign troops who had tried to strangle their baby in its cradle.

One more aspect of the Russian Civil War reverberates directly with the conflict we are now watching play out. The war was not just about who would rule Russia, but about whom Russia would rule. As the combat raged across thousands of miles of forest, mountains, wheat fields, and tundra, several wars erupted within the war. Outlying areas of the old Russian empire took advantage of the Red-White struggle to battle for independence. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states did so successfully, Ukraine unsuccessfully. The fighting in the latter, among Reds, Whites, and several rival Ukrainian forces, convulsed cities in the headlines today: Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol. (In his acknowledgments, Beevor thanks a research assistant who is now a rifleman and medic in the Ukrainian army.) Although mortal, existential enemies, both Reds and Whites were united on one point: They wanted the boundaries of the Russia they hoped to control to be as wide as possible. Both sides had little but hatred for these non-Russian independence movements, especially the one in Ukraine, a land so rich in grain, iron, and coal.


On the heels of the Russian Civil War, Ukraine became one of what would eventually be 15 nominally autonomous republics within the Soviet Union. That structure was a huge mistake, Putin has declared—but of course, for nearly 70 years no one really expected that the once-mighty Soviet realm might dissolve along those lines. Putin has long dreamed of reestablishing a wider empire: He served the Soviet one until its collapse and, unlike his Soviet predecessors, has often paid homage to the czarist one. The last czar and czarina, assassinated by the Bolsheviks, have now been officially declared victims of political repression, and in 2008, Putin gave his blessing to a lavish biographical feature film glorifying Admiral Kolchak. In recent years, his government has restored to a position of honor one of the most notorious forces of that time, the Cossacks, starting dozens of Cossack military academies around the country, with support from descendants of czarist refugees overseas.

From the January/February 2018 issue: What Putin really wants

In 2005, Putin arranged to bring back from the United States the remains of General Anton Denikin, the commander of the White armies in southern Russia and Ukraine, who had died in exile. “Russia One and Indivisible” was the slogan Denikin fought under. The general was a firm believer, Putin pointed out during a visit to his new grave, in Moscow, that Ukraine is part of Russia. That dream is now at loggerheads with a Ukraine that, however faltering and imperfect, has enjoyed three decades of independence. In this clash of visions, the unresolved tensions in Russia’s history still cast a long shadow.

This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the headline “The Long History of Russian Brutality.”