II. Make up five questions covering the major information presented in the text. Let your partner answer them. Text 3 Russia’s Civil War

I. Look at the text. The topic sentences of each paragraph have been removed. Read the text and choose from the sentences (A-I) the one which fits each gap. Underline the words both in the text and the sentences which helped you to decide on your choices.

1. The Bolsheviks had plenty of their own troubles; it seems fair to say that in the turmoil of 1918, just as in 1917, the odds were stacked against any group, Bolsheviks included, remaining in power for long.

2. There is no specific date or single event that officially marks the beginning of the civil war, no clear opening salvo as occurred when Confederate guns fired the first shot of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter at 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1865.

3. Deprived of these basic necessities, many peasants, most of whom were not kulaks, struggled to survive.

4. Real power on the White side lay with former czarist military officers, who made no effort to appeal to the country’s masses, especially the peasantry.

5. The Bolsheviks seized control, or “nationalized,” all industry in Russia.

6. Lenin, of course, had plenty of help from colleagues.

7. The basic cause of the civil war was established the day the Bolsheviks set up their one-party regime.

8. Those fighting the Bolsheviks (the Reds) were known collectively as the “Whites.”

9. One of the many ways in which the Cheka served the regime between 1918 and 1921 was in the mobilization of resources for the war effort.

… (1) It did not matter that in December a splinter group from the SRs briefly joined the government; these Left SRs had no real power, and in any case they left the government in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Even before the end of 1917 some conservative generals and politicians began organizing to oppose the regime, and the first armed clashes began as early as February 1918. That opposition grew after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March. The treaty was unpopular in many circles across the political spectrum, as it cost Russia about a million square miles of the western part of the czar’s former empire (including all of the Ukraine) and approximately 60 million people (mainly non-Russians).

… (2) Instead, over several months skirmishes turned into battles that turned into full-scale, fratricidal war. By June many Mensheviks, SRs, Left SRs, Cadets, and others with varying beliefs had decided that only armed resistance could dislodge the Bolsheviks from power. The Bolshevik government announced the war to the country on June 29 when it proclaimed that “the socialist fatherland is in danger.” That turned out to be the death knell for Nicholas II, who had ended up in Bolshevik hands after the November revolution. The former czar and his family – Alexandra, four daughters, and one son, the former heir to the throne – were being held prisoner in the Urals region. To keep the royal family from falling into the hands of advancing anti-Bolshevik forces and becoming a symbol around which their opponents could rally, local Bolsheviks acting on Lenin’s orders executed them and burned their bodies.

… (3) Although at first glance the Whites appeared to have the advantage of broader public support than the increasingly dictatorial regime, they suffered from serious disadvantages. The Whites were not a single movement but an assortment of groups divided by divergent political beliefs, ranging from socialist to arch-conservative and monarchist. These groups often failed to cooperate with each other; at one point they were split into 18 governments and factions. When the fighting began, the Bolsheviks controlled the center of the country, including the main cities and industrial centers, while the Whites had to operate from the periphery, their armies separated by huge distances and unable to coordinate their campaigns.

… (4) In fact the White generals (and the one admiral among their top leaders) alienated the peasants by refusing to confirm that they could keep the land they had seized. The Whites received some help from the Allies, who in 1918 intervened with supplies and troops in the hope the Bolsheviks could be overthrown and Russia brought back into the war against Germany and the other Central Powers. That intervention continued after Germany’s defeat in November 1918, but its scope was always very limited and not nearly on a scale sufficient to overcome the Whites’ deficiencies.

… (5) That they did so is explained by more than the ineptitude or misfortune of their opponents. Between 1918 and 1921, when the civil war ended, the Bolsheviks demonstrated organizational skill, unity, unbreakable will, and utter ruthlessness, all of which they needed to defeat their opponents. The key to their success was Lenin, who during the civil war reached the summit of his political career as his party’s unquestioned leader and the embodiment of the qualities that enabled it to prevail.

… (6) Some of them were Leon Trotsky, a man without military experience who organized the Red Army that bested the White generals on the battlefield; Joseph Stalin, an efficient troubleshooter prepared to use any means necessary to achieve his ends; Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former czarist army second lieutenant who by virtue of his capabilities, which would not have counted for much in the class-bound old regime, rose to command the Red Army; and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Pole of noble blood who turned the Cheka into a massive instrument of political terror in the service of the Bolshevik regime. There were many others as well, from unheralded but skilled propagandists to merciless Cheka agents, but Lenin and the unchallenged leadership he provided still was the rock upon which the Bolsheviks built their victory.

… (7) The Red Army needed weapons, ammunition, fortifications, uniforms, means of transport, and much more. Nothing was more vital than food, and the Bolsheviks stopped at nothing to get what they needed. One tactic was to form “Committees of the Poor” whose job was to wage class war in the villages and seize food from prosperous peasants (called kulaks, the Russian word for “fists”). These groups were soon joined by “Food Requisition Detachments” armed with machine guns and ordered to take whatever the regime wanted from the peasantry – food, tools, farm animals, or anything else deemed necessary to the war effort.

… (8) Conditions were no better in the cities, where desperate people increasingly turned against one another in the struggle to survive. As historian William Henry Chamberlin reported:

The law of survival of the fittest found its cruelest, most naked application in the continued struggle for food. The weaker failed to get on the trains to the country districts, or fell off the roofs, or were pushed off the platform, or caught typhus and died, or had the precious gifts of the foraging taken by the . . . hated guards who had boarded the trains as they approached the cities and confiscated surplus food from the passengers.(Chamberlin 1965: 345)

… (9) This allowed the regime to direct all production to the war effort. Private trade was forbidden. Lenin’s government also made use of forced labor, often with the help of the Cheka, for construction projects, transport, and other difficult tasks. These policies were eventually given the name War Communism, which reflected both the military struggle that provided its context and the fact that some of the policies – such as nationalizing industry, suppressing private trade, and abolishing money – clearly matched Marxist concepts of a socialist society. Most of the policies associated with War Communism were emergency measures designed to win the civil war, but Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, as well as the party’s rank and file, strongly approved of them from an ideological perspective because they looked like the first steps toward the socialist society they were determined to construct.