33. A Month at Sviyazhsk¶
Core Argument¶
In the spring and summer of 1918, the Soviet republic teetered on the edge of annihilation. Food supplies had collapsed, the army had disintegrated, and the railways were paralysed. Counter-revolutionary conspiracies flourished. German forces held the west, while the French and British engineered a Czechoslovak rebellion on the Volga, occupied Murmansk and Archangel, and instigated a White Guard uprising in Yaroslavl. White forces advanced from the Urals and the Don. After the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Trotsky was dispatched to the Volga. He arrived at Sviyazhsk on 7 August, where the fate of the revolution hung in the balance for a month.
The Red Army at Sviyazhsk was demoralised, prone to retreat, and infected with panic. Trotsky argues that this situation proved history is not fatalistically determined: the revolution was saved by the courage of small units and individual commissars. He imposed harsh discipline, ordering that commissars and commanders be shot if units retreated without orders. When a fresh regiment deserted and seized a steamer, Trotsky’s aide Markin forced its surrender at gunpoint; a field tribunal executed the commander, commissar, and several privates. Trotsky organised an air squadron and repelled a White outflanking move by Colonel Kappel, mobilising his own train crew. The army was rebuilt through propaganda, reinforcements of communists, and ruthless enforcement of order.
At Sviyazhsk, Trotsky overheard Blagonravov, a former Tsarist lieutenant and Bolshevik commissar he had previously praised, undermining him and suggesting the military specialists desert. Confronted, Blagonravov begged not to be sent to a tribunal and was demoted. Trotsky reflects that revolution devours character; Blagonravov later became a GPU official, presumably learning to hate permanent revolution.
Trotsky then moved to a torpedo boat to avoid restricting the army command. The flotilla raided Kazan at night, passing enemy headlands. A shell set an oil barge alight, illuminating the river. The torpedo boat’s steering broke, but it drifted onto a barge and escaped. The raid destroyed the enemy flotilla and silenced batteries, causing panic among the Whites and boosting Red morale. Trotsky notes this small war of 25,000–30,000 men was a concentrated school.
The army transformed: detachments became regular units, commissars became revolutionary leaders, and tribunals enforced discipline. On 1 September, Trotsky was recalled to Moscow after Lenin was wounded, but returned when Lenin’s recovery was assured. Kazan fell on 10 September; Simbirsk on 12 September, as promised by Tukhachevsky. The Fifth Army was then led by Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, a model revolutionary of firmness and bravery without cruelty. His example created a distinct political family of ‘Fifth-army men’, many later joining the opposition. Smirnov himself was eventually broken and preached surrender. Larissa Reisner, a writer and warrior who reconnoitred behind White lines, died of typhus before thirty. The Whites captured the gold reserves but were later defeated. Trotsky notes that by then, the German army was in a hopeless position.