Lec 21 (or 22) THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR: the emergence of fascism

The Russian Civil War

■ The Russian Civil War, which broke out in 1918 shortly after the October Revolution, was
fought mainly between the “Reds,” led by the Bolsheviks, and the “Whites,” a politically-diverse
coalition of anti-Bolsheviks.
■ The Russian Civil War, which broke out in 1918 shortly after the revolution, brought death and
suffering to millions of people regardless of their political orientation.
■ The war was fought mainly between the “Reds,” consisting of the uprising majority led by the
Bolshevik minority, and the “Whites,” army officers and cossacks, the “bourgeoisie,” and
political groups ranging from the far right to the Socialist revolutionaries who opposed the
drastic restructuring championed by the Bolsheviks following the collapse of the Russian
Provisional Government to the soviets (under clear Bolshevik dominance).
■ The Whites had backing from Great Britain, France, the U.S., and Japan, while the Reds
possessed internal support which proved to be much more effective.
■ Though the Allied nations, using external interference, provided substantial military aid to the
loosely knit anti-Bolshevik forces, they were ultimately defeated.
■ By 1921, the Reds defeated their internal enemies and brought most of the newly independent
states under their control, with the exception of Finland, the Baltic States, the Moldavian
Democratic Republic (which joined Romania), and Poland (with whom they had fought the
Polish–Soviet War).
■ Red Army: The army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and
after 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after
the 1917 October Revolution.
■ White Army: A loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces that fought the Bolsheviks, also
known as the Reds, in the Russian Civil War (1917–1923) and, to a lesser extent, continued
operating as militarized associations both outside and within Russian borders until roughly
World War II.
■ Cheka: The first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created on
December 20, 1917, after a decree issued by Vladimir Lenin, and was subsequently led by Felix
Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat turned communist. These troops policed labor camps; ran the
Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to secret arrest,
detention, torture, and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or
peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.
The Russian Civil War: Aftermath
■ At the end of the Civil War the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was exhausted and
near ruin. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921 famine, worsened the disaster
still further. Disease had reached pandemic proportions, with 3 million dying of typhus alone in
1920. Millions more also died of widespread starvation, wholesale massacres by both sides,
and pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. By 1922 there were at least 7
million street children in Russia as a result of nearly ten years of devastation from the Great
War and the civil war.
■ Another one to two million people, known as the White émigrés, fled Russia, many with Gen.
Wrangel—some through the Far East, others west into the newly independent Baltic countries.
These émigrés included a large percentage of the educated and skilled population of Russia.
■ The Russian economy was devastated by the war, with factories and bridges destroyed, cattle
and raw materials pillaged, mines flooded, and machines damaged. The industrial production
value descended to one-seventh of the value of 1913 and agriculture to one-third.
■ War Communism saved the Soviet government during the Civil War, but much of the Russian
economy had ground to a standstill. The peasants responded to requisitions by refusing to till
the land. By 1921 cultivated land had shrunk to 62% of the pre-war area, and the harvest yield
was only about 37% of normal.
The NEP (New Economic Policy) Period
 ■ In response to the political and economic difficulties, the Bolsheviks abandoned war
communism and in March 1921 embarked on a radically different course known as the New
Economic Policy (NEP).
■ The NEP reverted to the state capitalism that had been tried immediately after the revolution.
The state continued to own all major industry and financial concerns, while individuals were
allowed to own private property, trade freely within limits, and—most important—farm their
land for their own benefit.
■ Fixed taxes on the peasantry replaced grain requisitioning; what peasants grew beyond the tax
requirements was theirs to do with as they saw fit.
■ The Bolshevik most identified with the NEP was Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), a young and
brilliant Marxist theoretician who argued that the Bolsheviks could best industrialize the
Soviet Union by taxing private peasant economic activity. Lenin himself described the NEP as
“one step backward in order to take two steps forward.”
■ The NEP was undeniably successful in allowing Soviet agriculture to recover from the civil war;
by 1924 agricultural harvests had returned to prewar levels. Peasants were largely left alone to
do as they pleased, and they responded by re-dividing noble lands among themselves to level
wealth discrepancies between rich and poor, by reinforcing traditional social structures in the
countryside (especially the peasant commune), and by producing enough grain to feed the
country, though they continued to use very primitive farming methods to do so.
■ The NEP was less successful, however, in encouraging peasants to participate in markets to
benefit urban areas. The result was a series of shortages in grain deliveries to cities, a situation
that prompted many Bolsheviks to call for revival of the radical economic practices of war
communism.
Joseph Stalin and the Revolution from Above
■ His political success was rooted in intraparty conflicts in the 1920s, but it was also closely tied
to the abrupt end of the NEP period in the late 1920s and to the beginning of a massive
program of social and economic modernization. This “revolution from above,” as many call it,
was the most rapid social and economic transformation any nation has seen in modern history.
■ In 1927 a poor harvest caused yet another crisis in the grain-collection system. Low prices for
agricultural goods and high prices for scarce industrial goods led peasants to hoard grain,
resulting in food shortages in cities and difficulties in collecting taxes from the peasantry.
■ In early 1928 Stalin ordered local officials in the distant Urals and Siberian areas to begin
requisitioning grain. He soon applied this revival of war communism to the entire country. In
1929 the upper echelons of the party abruptly reversed the course set by NEP and embarked
on the complete collectivization of agriculture, beginning in the major grain-growing areas.
Peasants there were to be convinced, by force if necessary, to give up private farmlands. They
would either join collective farms, pooling resources and giving a set portion of the harvest to
the state, or work on state farms, where they were paid as laborers.
Collectivization and Five-Year Plan
■ Collectivization was initially expected to be a gradual process, but in late 1929 Stalin embarked
on collectivization of agriculture by force.
■ In Stalin’s view, collectivization provided the resources for the other major aspect of his
revolution from above: a rapid campaign of forced industrialization. The road map for this
industrialization process was the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), an ambitious set of goals
that Stalin and his cohorts drew up in 1927 and continued to revise upward. The plan called for
truly herculean industrialization efforts, and its results rank as one of the most stunning
periods of economic growth the modern world has ever seen.
■ This rapid industrialization came, however, at enormous human cost. Many large-scale projects
were carried out with prison labor, especially in the timber and mining industries. The labor
camp system, known as the gulag, became a central part of the Stalinist economic system.
■ The economic system created during this revolution from above was also fraught with
structural problems that would plague the Soviet Union for its entire history. The consumer
would be left with useless goods, but the producer would fulfill the plan. Stalin’s
industrialization drive did transform the country from an agrarian nation to a world industrial
 power in the space of a few short years, but in the longer run, the system would become an
economic disaster.
■ At the same time, Stalin promoted a sharply conservative shift in all areas of culture and
society. Early Bolshevik activists had promoted a utopian attempt to rebuild one of the basic
structures of prerevolutionary society—the family—and to create a genuinely new proletarian
social structure. The Bolsheviks in the 1920s legalized divorce, expelled the Orthodox Church
from marriage ceremonies, and legalized abortion. Stalin abandoned these ideas of communist
familial relations in favor of efforts to strengthen traditional family ties: divorce became more
difficult, abortion was outlawed in 1936 except in cases that threatened the life of the mother,
and homosexuality was declared a criminal offense.
Fascism: A Definition
■ Fascism is a far-right authoritarian political ideology that emerged in the early 20th century
and rose to prominence after World War I in several nations, notably Italy, Germany, and
Japan.
■ Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of
society under a totalitarian one-party state, led by a dictator, as necessary to prepare a nation
for armed conflict and respond effectively to economic difficulties.
■ Fascist regimes are often preoccupied “with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood
and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity,” culminating in nationalistic and racist
ideologies and practices, such as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
■ The term originated in Italy and is derived from fascio, meaning a bundle of rods, and is used to
symbolize strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to
break.
■ After the end of the World War I, fascism rose out of relative obscurity into international
prominence, with fascist regimes forming most notably in Italy, Germany, and Japan, the three
of which would be allied in World War II.
■ Fascist Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922 and Adolf Hitler had successfully
consolidated his power in Germany by 1933.
■ March on Rome: Benito Mussolini with three of the four quadrumvirs during the March on
Rome
The Emergence of Fascism in Italy
■ The rise of fascism in Italy began during World War I, when Benito Mussolini and other
radicals formed a political group (called a fasci) supporting the war against Germany and
Austria-Hungary.
■ The first meeting of Mussolini’s Fasci of Revolutionary Action was held on January 24, 1915.
■ For the next several years, the small group of fascists took part in political actions, taking
advantage of worker strikes to incite violence.
■ Around 1921, the fascists began to align themselves with mainstream conservatives, increasing
membership exponentially.
■ Beginning in 1922, Fascist paramilitaries escalated their strategy from attacking socialist
offices and homes of socialist leadership figures to violent occupation of cities, eventually
setting their sites on Rome.
■ During the so-called “March on Rome,” Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy.
■ From 1925 to 1929, Fascism steadily became entrenched in power. Opposition deputies were
denied access to parliament, censorship was introduced, and a December 1925 decree made
Mussolini solely responsible to the King.
■ Italian Fascism, also known simply as Fascism, is the original fascist ideology as developed in
Italy. The ideology is associated with the Fascist Revolutionary Party (PFR), founded in 1915;
the succeeding National Fascist Party (PNF) in 1921, which under Benito Mussolini ruled the
Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943; the Republican Fascist Party that ruled the Italian
Social Republic from 1943 to 1945; and the post-war Italian Social Movement and subsequent
Italian neo-fascist movements.
■ Italian Fascism was rooted in Italian nationalism and the desire to restore and expand Italian
territories, deemed necessary for a nation to assert its superiority and strength and avoid
 succumbing to decay. Italian Fascists claimed that modern Italy is the heir to ancient Rome and
its legacy, and historically supported the creation of an Italian Empire to provide spazio vitale
(“living space”) for colonization by Italian settlers and to establish control over the
Mediterranean Sea.
■ Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee
syndicates were linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation’s economic
producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy. This economic system
intended to resolve class conflict through collaboration between the classes
Italian Fascism
■ The doctrines of Italian fascism had three components. The first was statism. The state was
declared to incorporate every interest and every loyalty of its members. There was to be
“nothing above the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” The second was
nationalism. Nationhood was the highest form of society, with a life and a soul of its own,
transcending the individuals who composed it. The third was militarism. Nations that did not
expand would eventually wither and die. Fascists believed that war ennobled man and
regenerated sluggish and decadent peoples.
■ Mussolini began to rebuild Italy in accordance with these principles. The first step was to
change electoral laws so they granted his party solid parliamentary majorities and to
intimidate the opposition. He then moved to close down parliamentary government and other
parties entirely. He abolished the cabinet system and all but extinguished the powers of the
Parliament. He made the Fascist party an integral part of the Italian constitution. Mussolini
assumed the dual position of prime minister and party leader (duce), and he used the party’s
militia to eliminate his enemies by intimidation and violence. Mussolini’s government also
controlled the police, muzzled the press, and censored academic activity.
■ Meanwhile, Mussolini preached the end of class conflict and its replacement by national unity.
He began to re-organize the economy and labor, taking away the power of the country’s labor
movement. The Italian economy was placed under the management of twenty-two
corporations, each responsible for a major industrial enterprise. In each corporation were
representatives of trade unions, whose members were organized by the Fascist party, the
employers, and the government.