Characters

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

Lev Davidovich Bronstein — known to history as Leon Trotsky — was born on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, a small farm village in Ukraine, the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer. He was one of the most intellectually brilliant and operationally gifted revolutionaries of the twentieth century, the man who built the Red Army from scratch and led it to victory in the Civil War, and yet he ended his life as a hunted exile, assassinated by Stalin's agent in a Mexico City suburb. Trotsky came to Marxism through the revolutionary underground of southern Ukraine in the 1890s, was arrested, exiled to Siberia, and escaped abroad — the first of many times he would slip out of tsarist custody. He became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Party, coined the theory of 'permanent revolution' (which held that a socialist revolution in backward Russia could only survive if it spread to industrialized Western Europe), and earned fame as a writer and orator of exceptional power. He returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution, led the short-lived St. Petersburg Soviet, was arrested, escaped from exile in Siberia by sleigh, and spent the years until 1917 writing and agitating in Vienna, Paris, and New York. When he returned to Petrograd in May 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and immediately became Lenin's most indispensable lieutenant. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, he personally organized the October coup — it was Trotsky's operational planning that made the nearly bloodless seizure of power possible. As Commissar for War from March 1918, he performed perhaps the most extraordinary feat of organization in modern military history: building a 5-million-man fighting force in two years from virtually nothing. He recruited former Tsarist officers by guaranteeing their families' safety (as hostages), established political commissars to monitor their loyalty, restored traditional military discipline (including the death penalty), and made relentless use of his armored train — traveling 65,000 miles to crises across the vast front, personally rallying wavering troops. His military victories — recapturing Kazan in 1918, organizing the defense against Kolchak and Denikin in 1919, suppressing Kronstadt in 1921 — saved the Bolshevik regime. But his arrogance, his open contempt for Stalin, and his failure to fight for power after Lenin's death in 1924 cost him everything. Stalin outmaneuvered him in the succession struggle, expelled him from the party, and had him exiled to Central Asia, then Turkey, then Norway, and finally Mexico. On August 20, 1940, Stalin's agent Ramón Mercader drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull as he sat reading at his desk in Coyoacán. He died the next day. He was sixty years old.

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth. Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov — known to history as Lenin — was born on April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, a provincial city on the Volga River. His father was a school inspector who had risen to the hereditary nobility; his mother was the daughter of a doctor. The event that radicalized him beyond any possibility of return was the execution of his older brother Alexander in 1887 for his role in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. Lenin threw himself into revolutionary theory with the passionate intensity of a man with a personal score to settle against the system. He trained as a lawyer, was expelled from Kazan University for radical agitation, and devoted himself to Marxism — reading every socialist text he could obtain and corresponding with revolutionaries across Russia and Europe. Arrested, exiled to Siberia for three years, he used the time to write 'The Development of Capitalism in Russia.' After his release he moved to Western Europe, where he edited revolutionary newspapers, conducted exhausting theoretical debates with other socialist factions, and built the Bolshevik party as a disciplined vanguard organization of professional revolutionaries. His theory — that the working class needed an elite party to lead it because it could not develop revolutionary consciousness on its own — was the intellectual foundation of the Bolshevik state. Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917 in the famous sealed train provided by the German government, which correctly calculated that a Bolshevik revolution would knock Russia out of the war. His 'April Theses' — demanding an immediate end to the war and transfer of power to the soviets — radicalized the Bolsheviks and set the trajectory toward October. As head of the new Soviet government, Lenin made the brutal peace of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, surrendering vast territories to buy time for the regime. He unleashed the Red Terror after the attempt on his life in August 1918, personally signing orders for mass executions and hostage-taking. He centralized all authority in the Communist Party, banned rival socialist parties, and created the institutional structures of totalitarianism. Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1922 and died on January 21, 1924, at the age of 53. In his final lucid period he wrote a 'Testament' warning against Stalin's growing power and recommending his removal from the position of General Secretary — a document Stalin suppressed for decades. Lenin's embalmed body was placed in a mausoleum on Red Square, where it remains today. He created a system that would outlive him by sixty-seven years and kill tens of millions of people.

"I will not serve as an instrument of the restoration of the old order. I fight for a new free Russia."

Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak was born on November 16, 1874, in St. Petersburg, into a military family with roots in Turkish ancestry captured during eighteenth-century wars. He was one of Russia's greatest naval officers and Arctic explorers before politics and the revolution made him its most powerful White commander. Kolchak graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps with distinction and immediately distinguished himself in the scientific and exploratory expeditions that were a feature of the pre-war Russian Navy. He participated in the Russian Polar Expedition of 1900–1902, spending two winters in the Arctic and nearly dying of scurvy, and conducted extensive surveys of the Kara Sea and Baltic coasts. In the Russo-Japanese War he commanded a destroyer in Port Arthur and was wounded; in the First World War he rose to command the Black Sea Fleet and became famous for his aggressive mining campaigns that effectively sealed German and Turkish warships in port. By 1917 he was widely regarded as the most capable and dynamic officer in the Russian Navy. After the February Revolution Kolchak remained loyal to the Provisional Government and was offered command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet — an extraordinary honor for a foreign officer — but chose instead to travel east to continue fighting. When the Bolsheviks took power, he made his way to Omsk, Siberia, where in November 1918 he was proclaimed 'Supreme Ruler of Russia' by a coup of naval officers and Cossacks, with Allied backing. He commanded the largest White force — some 400,000 men at the peak — and held the entire Trans-Siberian Railway corridor. Kolchak was a brilliant naval officer and a genuinely decent man, but a poor politician and a worse army commander. He was unable to inspire his subordinates, tolerated corruption and brutality in his forces that alienated the Siberian peasantry, and failed to coordinate with Denikin's simultaneous offensive in the south. The great spring offensive of 1919 collapsed; by autumn his government was in full flight east along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Czechoslovak Legion, disgusted by his government's brutality and anxious to return home, handed Kolchak over to a Socialist-Revolutionary political committee in Irkutsk in January 1920. He was executed by Red Army firing squad on February 7, 1920, his body pushed under the ice of the Ushakovka River.

"The cause which I defend is not the cause of class or caste, not the cause of landlords or capitalists — it is the cause of Russia."

Anton Ivanovich Denikin was born on December 16, 1872, in Szpetal Dolny, near Warsaw, the son of a serf who had been conscripted into the Imperial Army, served for twenty-two years, and risen to the rank of major. The story of his father's rise from serfdom to officialhood shaped Denikin's own sense of what Russia could be: a meritocracy in which talent and service, not birth, determined a man's worth. Denikin entered the military through the Infantry Junker School and rose through the ranks by sheer ability. He distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War, and by 1914 was a brigadier general commanding with particular brilliance during the First World War, earning the St. George's Cross multiple times. He served as Chief of Staff to the Supreme Command under Kornilov and barely escaped Bolshevik arrest after the failed Kornilov Affair in September 1917. With Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alekseyev, he co-founded the Volunteer Army in Novocherkassk in December 1917 — the nucleus of the White movement in south Russia. Denikin commanded the First Kuban ('Ice') March in early 1918 — a desperate winter retreat with 4,000 men through the frozen steppes, fighting almost daily while temperatures dropped to minus forty degrees. Kornilov was killed during the march; Denikin took command and led the shrunken force back to the Don, where Cossack allies and new volunteers allowed it to rebuild. His great offensive of 1919 came agonizingly close to success: his Armed Forces of South Russia swept through Ukraine, capturing Kiev, Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel, and came within 250 miles of Moscow by October — the closest any White force came to the capital. But Denikin faced insuperable difficulties: the non-Russian peoples he needed as allies were alienated by his insistence on 'one indivisible Russia'; his forces' brutal anti-Semitic pogroms alienated potential Jewish support and outraged Allied opinion; Makhno's anarchist army cut his supply lines from the rear. When the Red counter-offensive came, his armies collapsed with terrifying speed. He resigned command to Wrangel in April 1920 and sailed to exile, eventually settling in France. During the Second World War he refused all collaboration with Nazi Germany and actually encouraged Russian POWs to fight for the Allies. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1947 while writing his memoirs.

"The best troops are useless without a commander who knows how to use them. And no commander is worth anything without troops who believe in him."

Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky was born on February 16, 1893, in Aleksandrovskoye, Smolensk Province, into a minor noble family. He was perhaps the most brilliant and modern-minded military mind produced by the Russian Civil War — a man who revolutionized Soviet military doctrine, built the Red Army into a formidable modern force, and was then shot by the regime he had served with such distinction. Tukhachevsky entered the Aleksandrovsky Military Academy in 1912 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Semyonovsky Guards — one of the most elite regiments in the Imperial Army. In 1914 he went to the front as a young officer, earned six decorations in five months of fighting, and was captured by the Germans in February 1915. He escaped five times from German prisoner-of-war camps — on the fifth attempt he succeeded, crossing Germany into Switzerland and returning to Russia. This background of elite tsarist service, intellectual brilliance, and personal courage made him an ideal recruit for the Red Army. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and immediately showed extraordinary military talent. At twenty-five years old he was commanding an army; at twenty-six he commanded the Eastern Front. His campaigns against Kolchak and the White forces in Siberia in 1919 were masterpieces of mobile warfare. His failure in the Polish-Soviet War — where his army was shattered at Warsaw — was the great stain on his record, but the defeat owed much to Budyonny's failure to support his flank, which Stalin later covered up. His suppression of the Tambov peasant uprising (1921) was militarily efficient but morally horrifying, using poison gas against Russian peasant villages. In the 1920s and early 1930s Tukhachevsky became the primary architect of Soviet military modernization, developing the doctrine of 'deep battle' — a theory of simultaneous strikes across the entire depth of an enemy's front, coordinating tanks, aircraft, artillery, and infantry in ways that anticipated Blitzkrieg. He was appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. Then in June 1937, Stalin had him arrested on fabricated charges of treason and espionage. He was tortured until he signed a confession, subjected to a one-day secret trial, and shot the same evening. He was forty-four years old. His 'deep battle' doctrine was later rediscovered and vindicated in the Second World War.

"There will be no government to give orders. We will create a free society from below."

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born on October 27, 1888, in Gulyaipole, a town in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region. He was the most remarkable and paradoxical figure of the Russian Civil War: a peasant anarchist who built a military force of 50,000 fighters, controlled a territory the size of France, fought both the Reds and the Whites with equal ferocity, and ended his days as a tubercular émigré in a Paris tenement — but who, at his peak, shaped the entire course of the war in southern Russia. Makhno came from the poorest stratum of Ukrainian peasant society. His father died when he was ten months old; his mother and four brothers scratched out a living from the steppe. As a teenager he was drawn to anarchism through the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin and joined an anarchist-communist group that carried out expropriations — armed robberies of landowners and government offices. Arrested in 1908 for an attempted murder charge stemming from these activities, he was sentenced to death; his age (he was nineteen) saved him from the gallows, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow. In prison he educated himself voraciously and became mentored by the veteran anarchist Pyotr Arshinov. Released by the February Revolution in 1917, he returned to Gulyaipole and began organizing peasants. After the Germans occupied Ukraine under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he led guerrilla resistance against the occupiers and the Ukrainian nationalist government (the Hetmanate). By 1919 his 'Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine' — the Black Army, named for the anarchist black flag — numbered tens of thousands of peasant fighters who were fanatically loyal to 'Batko' ('Father') Makhno. His territory, the 'Free Territory,' was a genuine attempt to implement anarchist communism: peasants controlled the land, workers ran factories, there were no taxes, no government bureaucracy. Makhno himself was a charismatic if erratic leader who drank heavily, was wounded repeatedly, and led from the front. He twice allied with the Red Army against the Whites — his raids on Denikin's supply lines in autumn 1919 were decisive in the White collapse — and twice was betrayed by the Bolsheviks who attempted to disarm or destroy his forces immediately after the common enemy was defeated. After the final defeat of Wrangel in 1920, the Red Army launched a full offensive against Makhno. Outnumbered and with nowhere to go, he crossed into Romania in August 1921 with a small band of followers. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris, working in a foundry and writing his memoirs. He died of tuberculosis on July 25, 1934.

"I believe in no political party. I believe only in Russia."

Lavr Georgievich Kornilov was born on August 18, 1870, in Ust-Kamenogorsk, a frontier town in Kazakhstan, to a Cossack father and a Kazakh mother. He was one of the most remarkable products of the Imperial Army: a man of genuinely humble origins in a military caste system that prized aristocratic birth, who rose to become Commander-in-Chief through sheer ability and legendary personal bravery. His failure — the 'Kornilov Affair' of September 1917 — and his death in 1918 made him the founding martyr of the White movement. Kornilov's early career was marked by his extraordinary aptitude for intelligence work and his personal toughness. He served as a military attaché in China, was nearly killed in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, and earned the St. George's Cross for personally leading a bayonet charge that broke through Japanese lines when his unit was surrounded. During the First World War he was captured by the Austrians in 1915 — and escaped in a spectacular fashion by disguising himself as an Austrian soldier and walking out of his prison camp. After the February Revolution, Kornilov was made commander of the Petrograd Military District and then Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army under the Provisional Government. In August 1917 he launched what became known as the 'Kornilov Affair' — an attempt, partly through miscommunication and partly through genuine counter-revolutionary intent, to send troops to Petrograd to restore order and establish a strong government. Prime Minister Kerensky panicked and branded it a coup; Kornilov was arrested. To defeat what he called the 'Kornilov revolt,' Kerensky released and armed the Bolsheviks — a catastrophic error that gave Lenin's forces the weapons they used to seize power two months later. Released by the Bolshevik Revolution, Kornilov joined Alekseyev and Denikin to form the Volunteer Army. He died on April 13, 1918, when a Red Army artillery shell struck his headquarters during the First Kuban ('Ice') March. He was 47 years old. The Bolsheviks dug up his body, dragged it through the streets of Ekaterinodar, and burned it — fearing it would become a rallying symbol for the Whites, which is precisely what it did.

"Armed to the teeth, we went forward not to destroy but to build."

Pyotr Nikolaevich Wrangel was born on August 27, 1878, in Novo-Aleksandrovsk, Lithuania, into a Baltic German noble family with a long military tradition. He was the last commander of the White forces in European Russia — the man who took over a demoralized, retreating army in April 1920, rebuilt it into a fighting force, and conducted the most disciplined and organized military evacuation in Russian history when the cause was finally lost. Wrangel was educated at the Institute of Mines in St. Petersburg and worked briefly as a mining engineer before choosing a military career. He served with distinction in the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, earning the St. George's Cross and rising to command a cavalry division. Under Denikin in the Civil War he was one of the most effective White commanders, winning notable victories in the Caucasus and on the Don. His blunt criticisms of Denikin's strategic decisions — he argued correctly that Denikin was overextending his forces — led to a bitter personal conflict and his dismissal in January 1920. Wrangel was recalled when Denikin's catastrophic retreat made his removal inevitable. Arriving in Crimea in April 1920 to take command of the remaining White forces, he found a demoralized army that had been retreating for months. With remarkable energy and intelligence, he reorganized the forces, issued land reform decrees designed to win peasant support (which Denikin had always refused to do), and launched offensive operations that briefly gave the Whites their last successes. He even implemented a degree of local self-government in Crimea that was the most democratic governance any part of Russia saw during the civil war. But the numbers were impossible. When the armistice with Poland freed Red Army forces for the southern front, Frunze's armies smashed through the Perekop defenses. Wrangel organized the evacuation with extraordinary efficiency: 145,693 people were loaded onto 126 ships in four days from multiple ports simultaneously. Not a single person who wanted to leave was left behind for lack of transport. He was the last to leave, boarding his vessel only after confirming that all ships had departed. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Brussels, writing his memoirs and commanding the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) — the organization of White émigré veterans. He died of tuberculosis on April 25, 1928, in Brussels, at the age of forty-nine.

"The history of the liberation of women is a part of the history of the liberation of the working class."

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai was born on March 31, 1872, in St. Petersburg, into the minor Russian nobility — her father was a general, her mother the daughter of a Finnish timber merchant. She was the most prominent feminist in the Bolshevik movement and the world's first female ambassador, a woman whose ideas about love, sex, and women's liberation were as radical as the revolution she served. Raised in comfort and educated by private tutors, Kollontai defied her family to marry an engineer of lower social standing, had a son, and then defied convention again by leaving her husband and child to pursue revolutionary politics abroad. She became a Marxist through reading and through encounters with the grinding poverty of St. Petersburg factory workers, and began writing and organizing among working-class women — a constituency that other socialist men largely ignored. Her pamphlets on women's economic dependence, the oppression of bourgeois marriage, and the need for socialized childcare were groundbreaking for their time. During the Civil War, Kollontai was appointed People's Commissar of Social Welfare — the first woman to hold cabinet rank in any major government in the world. She implemented sweeping legislation: divorce on demand, abortion legalized, civil (non-church) marriage recognized, and the beginning of state childcare. She also founded the Zhenotdel, the women's department of the Communist Party, which organized millions of women across Russia and the Soviet republics and worked to end practices like bride price and child marriage in Central Asia. Kollontai was also a dissident within the party. She led the 'Workers' Opposition' in 1921 — a faction that demanded more internal party democracy and worker control of industry, in direct opposition to Lenin's centralization. After the faction's defeat, Lenin effectively silenced her by appointing her to diplomatic posts abroad — a gilded exile that removed her from domestic politics while using her intellect and charm in service of Soviet diplomacy. She served as ambassador to Norway, Mexico, and Sweden, becoming the world's first female ambassador. In Stockholm during World War II she played a crucial back-channel role in negotiating the Finnish armistice with the Soviet Union. She survived Stalin's purges — one of very few Old Bolsheviks to do so — and died peacefully in Moscow in 1952.