BOLSHEVIK INHUMANITY

A number of historians have rightly emphasised the point that the February revolution in 1917 did not provoke a counter-revolution. The overthrow of the Tsarist regime prompted a wide variety of reactions among the former ruling class: a resignation to events, a bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the imperial court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back illustrated not so much apathy, as the feeling that there was little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending.

A determination to resist only began to develop during the summer, when the Bolshevik programme polarised opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the civil war itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12 million people, the utter impoverishment of the whole country and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Konstantin Paustovsky lamented the lost opportunity for democratic change. ‘The idyllic aspect of the first days of the Revolution was disappearing. Whole worlds were shaking and falling to the ground. Most of the intelligentsia lost its head, that great humanist Russian intelligentsia which had been the child of Pushkin and Herzen, of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

It had known how to create high spiritual values, but with only a few exceptions it proved helpless at creating the organisation of a state.’ Spiritual values never stood a chance against a fanatical determination to destroy all those of the past, both good and bad. No country can escape the ghosts of its past, least of all Russia. The writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky compared the Bolsheviks to the devil’s apprentice who, in an old Russian folk tale, boasted that he knew how to rejuvenate an old man. To restore his youth, he first needed to burn him up. So, the apprentice set him on fire, but then found that he could not revive him.

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of their lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions suspicions which they engender. The fighting right across the Eurasian land-mass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that arch-conservative politician V.V. Shulgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the Whites was a ‘moral collapse’—that they behaved as badly as their Bolshevik enemy. There was, nevertheless, one subtle yet important difference. All too often Whites represented the worst examples of humanity. For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.

Antony Beevor, Russia (501-502). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.