The Remains of the Red Day I - The Long Shadow of the Russian Civil War
(Photo: Michael Kötter, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Creative Commons)
2021 is a year of tragic anniversaries for the Russian-speaking world. The years 1921, 1941, and 1991 mark the bloody beginning, catastrophic climax, and surreal end of the Soviet story. Anatoly Grablevsky’s column ‘The Remains of the Red Day’ combines historical perspectives with contemporary cultural and political ones as he studies these three seismic events. He aims to explore how the past, by informing and determining the present, lives on in the Russian national consciousness to this day.
«Мне за державу обидно», says the gloriously moustached, gruff customs officer Pavel Vereschagin, as he rejects the generous bribes offered to him and proceeds to single-handedly take out a whole cohort of outlaws. The phrase, from the film White Sun of the Desert (Vladimir Motyl, 1970) means “I’m saddened for the Great Power” and has become a common expression of resignation at the state of things throughout the Russian-speaking world. The sentiment perfectly encapsulates the tragic chaos of the Russian Civil War, which raged between 1918 and 1921 (though some hostilities continued in east Asia into 1922). Now, as we near the 100th anniversary of the end of the war and the subsequent proclamation of the Soviet Union in 1922, it’s worth exploring just how those first post-revolutionary years shaped generations of Soviet and post-Soviet people’s view of their past and present.
Before considering the multifaceted legacy of Russian Civil War, it’s important to remember just how complex the conflict itself was. The war began in November 1917, when many groups and regions refused to recognize the Bolshevik coup, especially after the Bolsheviks simply dissolved the democratically elected Constituent Assembly, and instead installed a one-party dictatorship. The ensuing conflict pitted the Red Army against their anti-communist opponents, the disjointed and divided White forces, across the entirety of the former Russian Empire, from the Caucuses to the far east. Foreign countries such as Poland, the US, the UK and Japan joined in as well in a bid to crush the revolutionary state in its cradle. The war was defined by its brutality: the “White Terror” featured the massacre of tens of thousands of proven or suspected leftists, as well as the worst pogroms against Jews in Russian history. The Bolsheviks, not to be outdone, organised their own Red Terror against political opponents of all stripes, while the implementation of “war communism” resulted in horrific famines and peasant revolts, which were put down with mass executions and chemical weapons. These extreme policies paid off for the Reds, as by the end of 1921, the anti-Bolshevik forces had all but collapsed, and the USSR was born the next year.
It is difficult to understate just how revolutionary the war turned out to be for subsequent world history, not only defining the 20th century but extending into the present day. In the years following the conflict, the civil war would for decades feed Soviet state propaganda, which claimed that the anti-Bolshevik Western expeditionary forces of 1918-1920 were proof of an ongoing vast Capitalist worldwide conspiracy directed against the new regime. To this day, many Russians, fed a similar media diet of Western plots to ruin Russia, share a paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, as Covid-19 once again demonstrated.
Even after the USSR collapsed, the subject of the Civil War continues to be an intensely political one. The Putin government, which is rather ambivalent towards the Soviet past, prefers to align itself more with the former imperial era. Consequently, and controversially, the government has pursued a policy of rehabilitation of the tsarist Whites. In May 2009, Vladimir Putin attended a memorial service in honor of the Whites, visiting the recently repatriated remains of prominent White general – and particularly murderous anti-Semite – Anton Denikin at Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. While paying his respects, Putin had time to expound on the significance of Denikin, who, he claimed, was a patriot interested in preserving “Great and little Russia”. For Putin, Denikin’s experience in the Civil War shows that “no one is allowed to interfere in relations between [Russia and Ukraine], this has always been Russia’s right”. This clear politicisation of history is quasi-programmatic: the war between Ukraine and Russia today is territorial in nature but also an ideological one, with both sides, but especially the Russian government, using and abusing history. For Putin and many historical and current Russian nationalists such as Denikin, Ukraine is, and always has been, a “little Russia”, a satellite state which cannot be independent. For Ukrainians, however, the Civil War was a defining period in the emergence of a national sentiment, with the rise of an independent Ukrainian state (though the Cossack Hetmanate of the 17th century was an important precursor). The state was short-lived, as it was bloodily reconquered by the Red Army in 1920-1, and then brutally terrorised and starved in the ensuing decade. With the conflict in Donbas today, that double-sided history of the original Civil War lives on.
Apart from the incendiary politics, the Russian Civil War has quite a different, more personal meaning to the average Russian-speaking person in the innumerable ways that it has been depicted in culture. And there is perhaps no more widely-known work of art that depicts those chaotic years than the film White Sun of the Desert. Sukhov, the protagonist of this cult “Eastern” film (a genre similar aesthetically to American Westerns), personifies the particular brand of Soviet, much-enduring idealism; the romantic, laid-back, and happy-go-lucky Red Army veteran repeatedly postpones his long awaited return to his beloved Katerina in order to dutifully continue the class struggle in Central Asia against counter-revolutionary Basmachi and White Army bandits. For all the ubiquitous Orientalist tropes, the film clearly reflects the genuine messianic mission that animated generations of utopian Soviet citizens. In this way, the film stresses in particular the liberation of women: in a memorable scene, Sukhov installs the newly captured former harem of the bandit leader in a “liberated women’s” dormitory, with placards that say, “down with prejudice, a woman is human too!”
The movie can be more nuanced, however, in its portrayal of the transition from the old, and (in its view) corrupt tsarist order to enlightened Soviet rule; one of the film’s most memorable characters is Vereschagin, who, although a disgruntled traditionalist representative of the old Tsarist order, is portrayed sympathetically throughout the movie as the stoic and (ever so slightly) alcoholic Russian everyman. Wherever there is civil strife within Vereschagin’s beloved former держава (power), monuments to him can be found today, including in the Russian separatist-controlled cities Luhansk and Donetsk in war-torn Donbas. The prophetic refrain in his guitar song, “I may be unlucky in death, perhaps I'll be lucky in love” (Не везёт мне в смерти, повезёт в любви), is a sentiment that haunts the cinematic representation of the other great war of the Russian 20th century – the Nazi invasion of 1941 (more about that next time). But the line, combining suffering and Romanticism, is also one of the purest summations of that oh-so-elusive “Russian soul”, now about to be re-forged in the Soviet crucible.